Keltham: Okay but what do the survey studies show about the causal structure of -

Rephrase.

Were they crazy before they became alchemists, and if they die and come back are they suddenly less crazy?  More importantly, does anybody in Golarion actually have any reliable knowledge about anything in this subject area?

lintamande: .....no? You just kind of hear, you know, stories about crazy alchemists. It's not like anyone went and talked to all the alchemists about their craziness histories. The first one would melt you with an acid bomb when you knocked on their door.

Keltham: Why is his life like this.

All right, you know what, what Keltham is actually going to do here, is file an actual request for this query to get routed to actually knowledgeable people ASAP, because it is possible that definite knowledge exists, here, even if nobody on this Project is specialized for it.

Thermometers that won't irrevocably poison you and drive you mad are in fact an important requisite of chemistry.

Keltham: Not to mention, with all of magic and all of physics to work with, you'd really think there'd be something with a measurable linear dependence on temperature that was not 'the density of mercury'.  Like seriously.  Maybe he can build a resistance thermometer and calibrate it off a mercury one?  Though resistance thermometers probably don't work at, like, another ten times the temperature distance between frozen water and boiling water, such as you need for metallurgy... actually, Keltham would be sort of surprised if the Element-80 thermometers worked for that either.

Keltham: Anyways!  This was in fact an encouraging day and an encouraging set of results, full of detailed surprises to make hypotheses about!

Good afternoon, everyone!  Enjoy whatever it is you do when Keltham isn't watching!

Keltham: Maybe an hour or so later, Keltham shall summon his Carissa to his cuddleroom.

Carissa Sevar: ....aww man she wanted to work on her Glibness swords. This is slightly visible on her face when she's fetched and Elias Abarco smirks at her, which it'd probably be unprofessional to light him on fire for. ...not unprofessional to arrange for someone else to do it, though.

Anyway. Carissa comes to the cuddleroom.

Keltham: She'll be promptly stripped and chained to the bed, and only then, of course, will Keltham explain.

Keltham is planning to start his Golarion martial arts practice, you see, and Keltham keeps forgetting to ask how wizards end up more resilient to damage, or for the six major theories thereof, which seems like an important sort of fact to know.

It was established rather some time earlier that Keltham is only permitted to obtain this information by tickling it out of Carissa.

He's just finally gotten around to remembering the question on some occasion when it is actually a good time to do that.

Carissa Sevar: She pouts. It's not meant to be convincing distress even to Keltham. "Begging for mercy - allowed, or the same sort of thing as saying 'no' and not allowed?"

Keltham: "Not allowed.  I don't want you trying to figure out exactly what doesn't sound like a request, while being tickled, and I don't want to fight my own brain around any edge cases that slip through..."

"Whoops, scuse me.  My internal Abrogail is telling me that was not the correct answer, and she kinda has a point."

"Ahem."

"Don't be ridiculous.  You can obtain mercy by telling me about the six theories.  Why would I want to hear anything else out of you?"

Carissa Sevar: "Oh no. You have an inner Abrogail. I should just surrender now. ...I won't, though."

Keltham: "Well, allow me to help align your actual behavior more closely with your sense of what it should be."

Keltham will then actually output that behavior!  His own sense of what he should do is not usually far off from what he does.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will hold out for a respectable bit of time just out of principle. 

Keltham: Right, but what are the actual theories here?

(Keltham has a sort of wordless sense that only tickle-torturing people for information you're genuinely curious about would be a sexual-epistemic virtue, if dath ilan had already invented virtues about that sort of thing.)

Carissa Sevar: Yeah, yeah, okay. 

Theory one: Magic healing makes people tougher, over time. This explains why combat veterans tend to get much tougher. The idea is that the healing does more than just fix you. This would imply that rich nobles are much tougher than normal people because they can get frivolous magic healing, and indeed they do tend to be. 

Theory two: People are directly tougher in proportion to how powerful/important they are because the universe thinks that powerful people should be harder to hurt and kill. This one is out of favor because of how it - treats the universe as something that decides that? Why would that be the case?

Theory three: In a normal person, the relationship between the soul and the body is of a particular character, like the soul is a cloak worn by the body. Some kinds of uses of magic or spells cast on the person or exercises of power draw the soul closer to the body, and make the person tougher. 

Theory four: God-treaties have most people weak and easy to kill, but people who are particularly important harder to kill because this makes the future less noisy and more predictable, which is no longer relevant because of Foresight.

Theory five: There's an underlying factor of Selfhood that affects the strength of your alignment aura, how hard you are to kill, and how hard it is to affect you with certain magics; this is technically compatible with the 'soul' theory but the proponents hate each other. 

Theory six: This is actually just one powerful wizard she put up with once in order to get some spells off him, but he thought that just as combat and adrenaline make you able to channel more magic, they make you internally channel more vital essence which is what makes people healthy.

Keltham: ...okay, if this is the actual state of speculation, either Keltham is really missing something, or people in Golarion really don't Science, or the correct answer is an infohazard getting buried.

Theory one seems like it would be incredibly easy to test in opposition to the others, by just taking a normal unimportant kid and healing them once a day... well, maybe you need to get hurt for the healing to count, but that test could at least rule out the version where regular healing does it without injury being needed first?

And if the pilot experiment returned NO on the added toughness, get one of the higher-grade masochists, or just use anesthesia, and test it with actual injuries on someone, starting after they were adults at age 13, and could sign up for an experiment?

Do clerics who use five bursts of positive energy per day, somewhere that needs the healing, end up some of the toughest people around?  If not, are any of those clerics masochists who could injure themselves first or have their sadists do that before each healing?

Does being incredibly rich make you tougher, as it would if it was just importance?  Are there any famous cases of people losing all their money and then immediately losing the extra toughness?  Did the girls on Project Lawful suddenly get much tougher once they were much more important?  Should they get a dagger right now and test whether Keltham is important enough to have the extra toughness?

Have they quantified strength of aura, quantified how hard it is to do a standard amount of damage to a paid volunteer, and checked whether aura strength looks directly proportional to extra toughness?

How can people possibly not already know whether some of these theories are true or false?

Keltham won't explicitly mention his suspicion about the correct answer being a buried infohazard, but will ask Carissa about the obvious tests or checks on the other theories, flexing his tickling-fingers in a threatening way as he does.

Carissa Sevar: "If anyone has done most of those experiments they haven't advertised the results. Clerics are tougher than average but not five times tougher than other people with similar careers, but they mostly do not self-injure before doing a healing surge and I don't know anyone who has tried it. If it goes by importance it's not in a 'you immediately become tougher when you get a promotion' way."

Notably it's at least a little tricky to tell how tough people are and it does vary a lot even among wizards of the same circle, unlike strength of aura which goes directly by caster circle. Keltham probably is hard to injure, she'd expect.

She agrees that none of this is how Civilization would explore the question. It's - pretty normal, for questions here.

Keltham: Right.  He lets Carissa out of the chains.

They're going to go test right now how difficult Keltham is to injure.  He's had practically no healing that involved injuries, has probably had a relatively very small amount of healing compared to other clerics just from channeling like seven or eight total energy bursts, and is incredibly important to multiple gods crowded around his Project like enormous light-drawn moths.

Some of these theories die today.  As in the next five minutes.  Golarion is presumably just bad at disseminating information [or is deliberately keeping a secret] because native INT 20s with +6 Intelligence headbands cannot possibly be this silly.

Carissa Sevar: "It's not impossible someone knows but really, everything is like this, it's not confusing that it's like this!"

Keltham: "I'm only not updating to Conspiracy immediately because I can't see why the Conspiracy would be hiding that, and why they wouldn't have made up a more plausible state of confusion, and why their unfalsified theory set would be theories I could personally test within five minutes.  What is wrong with this planet?  If it even existed before I materialized here."

"How we gonna apply a standard amount of attempted injury?  I'm thinking using standard weights to apply a measurable amount of force to a blade laid across my arm, but maybe you've got better ideas."

Carissa Sevar: "I - have no idea how much a 'standard weight' amount of force does to a blade laid across someone's arm but...sure? Or you could get the heating stone off Subirachs again?"

Keltham: "Nah, heating stone is too optimized for higher pain per unit injury.  Though I'm going to be really amused in the case where the relative difference in our apparent pain tolerance was off by four bits because you were sixteen times less damageable by the heating stone - to be clear, I'm not under the impression I'd have otherwise been able to compete."

"Man, I can visualize exactly the mechanism I want to set up here, to put a weight on top of a vertically held knife and push it downwards.  But there's no snaptogether pieces I could use to make it quickly... oh hey, that spell you use to feed yourself grapes.  Unseen Servant.  Have you got one of those around or prepped, that you're willing to use on this, and does it have a stable constant max power output that would be enough to injure yourself using a knife?"

Carissa Sevar: "You can use an Unseen Servant to carry something that weighs less than 20 pounds, or shove along the ground something that weighs 100. It moves much slower than you'd want for a knife fight but maybe that'd be fine for this?"

Keltham: "What's an example of something that weighs '20 pounds'... that I know about... or around how much do I weigh in 20-pound units... or if you've got the Servant running, you could just push on my hand that hard... I'm not actually totally clear on some of these precise units..."

Carissa Sevar: Sure, she will push on Keltham with all the force the Unseen Servant can muster.

Keltham: Around a hundred newtons maybe, or a bit less?  That ought to injure an ordinary dath ilani if you put that much weight behind the edge of a kitchen knife, never mind the point.  Let's go grab a kitchen knife and try that, first on Keltham, then on Carissa, then maybe on Pilar if she's around, she's also a masochist, right...

dath ilan: (Being around an important hypothesis that would be incredibly cheap to test, and hasn't been tested yet, for a while, for no visible reason he understands, is making Keltham feel indignant.  Or as close to 'indignant' as most dath ilani ever get to that emotion?  Neurotypical dath ilani don't usually feel that emotion as Golarion knows it, but what they'd feel around a long-untested cheaply-testable hypothesis might come close.  This is not how society is supposed to work!  Not how people are supposed to act!)

Carissa Sevar: There's just so many of those!! If you spent a while trying to stab yourself about all of them you'd never do anything else!

"I have a dagger, you don't need to get one from the kitchens." It's in her Bag of Holding.

Keltham: "Right, let's find Pilar, if she's willing, so that we can try this all at once and all get healed with one channeled surge -"

Pilar : "Already here."

Keltham: "Great!  Can I try stabbing you with a dagger for SCIENCE?  Healing will be provided afterwards, though I might ask you to wait for a half-minute while Carissa and myself get stabbed too."

Pilar : "That sounds like something you could try, yes."

Keltham: "Great.  Carissa, you're up, let's try Pilar, you, myself in that order and see how much damage gets done before I heal it.  Thigh seems like a relatively safer target?  Edge first, then try the point if the edge doesn't penetrate."

Carissa Sevar: If Keltham ever gets curious about the wrong thing they're so doomed.

lintamande: Keltham (cleric 7, 32hp), Carissa (wizard 7, cleric 1, 26hp), and Pilar (wizard 4, oracle 4, 27hp) seem to - all be about as difficult to injure with a knife, which is notably a lot harder to injure than Keltham was a month ago.

Keltham: Healing surge...

Keltham: "Okay, that argues against toughness-from-healing, and shoots down my first metahypothesis about how the confused epistemic state was persisting, which was that the extra toughness came from healing, and this truth was considered socially infohazardous because rich people who wanted to be tougher would outbid poor actually injured people for cleric exposure."

"But then why are rich people ending up harder to injure?  Possibly the reason for the persistent confusion is that we've got multiple things going on?  And if one of those things is still toughness via healing exposure, part of the confusion persistence could be infohazard control too.  Um.  So I guess I was actually jumping the gun on thinking that part out loud."

"Who do I check with about social-infohazards, Broom, Aspexia, Lrilatha...?"

Carissa Sevar: "....prediction: whether or not Broom knows he'll tell you you don't need to. I'd ask Maillol to write Egorian and then it can get escalated as needed by the Most High or Contessa Lrilatha's secretaries? I - expect it's not an infohazard, I think you're assuming it is because it should be easy to tell but high-level people who haven't had lots of magic healing are rare."

Keltham: "...All right, I'll tell Maillol."

"Shit, Carissa, I'm sorry.  If I'd known, I would have stabbed myself before I prayed to my deity, and then stabbed myself again before I tried my first healing surge.  I didn't realize it was a kind of data that would be so hard to obtain."

Keltham seems genuinely sad about this!

dath ilan: (Of course he does!  He had no way of knowing, but he accidentally wasted an irreplaceable scientific opportunity that could have contributed to settling a long-standing confusion in Golarion!  What dath ilani wouldn't apologize?  He's not that selfish, nor blind to normal social norms.)

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa has literally no idea what to say to this! "It's - okay? I'm not nearly as invested in this as you, honestly."

Pilar : "If I continue to stand around here, is anybody going to stab me again?"

Keltham: "Wasn't currently planning to."

Pilar : Pilar will head off, then.

Seems like their Heretical Safety Officer ought to hear about this?  Or, to be more precise, Ione should hear about it from Pilar, so that Pilar can see any interesting expressions Ione makes.

Keltham: "Actually, this is now causing me to wonder if I would've otherwise been a lot more injured, even with the Resist Energy (Acid), by that exploding explosion of boiling liquid I was standing right next to... might owe Ione a reluctant nod, there.  On the plus side, less caution needed in future SCIENCE! experiments!"

"Anyways.  I wasn't expecting that result.  I thought I was going to have to do something more elaborate before I started being slightly injury-resistant.  But since I got the unexpectedly more convenient result, I'm going to go see about getting retaught martial arts by Security, until I've used up my three healing surges left on the day.  Not private if you want to watch... though, what's your own martial arts level?"

Carissa Sevar: " - I'm a wizard. If I get into a hand to hand fight something has already gone horribly wrong. In a fight I -" 

They've made some progress on planning the hypothetical escape. She snap-casts Gaseous Form.

Keltham: He'll take a sudden unplanned step back!  And hold his breath, inconveniently on an exhale!  His mind goes to spells he could use as counters, if Carissa is about to make a point by subduing him; but Keltham has stopped prepping spells like Sanctuary, so he's basically got nothing.

Carissa Sevar: - rematerial Carissa. "And then I'd leave. Best combat strategy is running away. You'll recall that when I couldn't run away because you were in danger, I did a destructive cancellation of my Fly spell over the guy's head so I would break his neck when I fell on him."

Keltham: "Yeah, I remember."

"...the Security wizards probably have unarmed combat skills, though, right?"

Carissa Sevar: "Yes definitely. They're not supposed to run away, and they're supposed to be competent to do their job even if someone does an antimagic field or something."

Keltham: "Kay.  Dath ilani get, like, asymmetrical unarmed combat training for emergencies only.  Sequence one, how to defend yourself from a single attacker, hopefully without injuring them, trained in a way that does as little as possible to increase the combat potential of somebody misusing that skill for assault.  Sequence two, how to coordinate with at least five other people with the same training, to immobilize somebody without them hurting themselves or you."

"I'm off to see Security about retraining in that.  Don't mind if you want to watch, doubt you'll see much interesting or impressive on day one though."

Carissa Sevar: "I might go stab Pilar, I think you disappointed her."

Keltham: "Yeah, I got that vibe off her incredibly straight expression, somehow.  I don't even know how, but I did."

"Problem is, I don't have the kind of relationship with her that I have with you.  I'd feel really odd about stabbing her if it wasn't in a scientific context.  I don't think I'm ready to initiate a relationship with Pilar, anyways.  But even if I were, it sounds like I might need unarmed combat retraining to start one off correctly?"

Carissa Sevar: " - you know, yes, I think you might. All right. Good luck with your unarmed combat training."

Keltham: Right, well, let's go get a bit more psychologically acclimated to Golarion, then.  Where do Security wizards do martial arts practice around here?

lintamande: They have their own barracks and a training yard beyond them.

Keltham: Welp, Keltham's here for retraining.  He's got three healing surges he can use on the day, don't blow through them all at once.

Specifics of required training lean towards 'physically subduing Carissa Sevar after disabling her magic in a surprise attack'.  They're not to mention this to Carissa.  If anybody's wondering what's up with that or if it's really okay, he's got a letter from Abrogail Thrune about it.

lintamande: That's terrifying.

Awww, how romantic. Yes, they can absolutely teach that. If he's going to be mostly fighting with boosted Strength he should mostly train with boosted Strength; it does change some tactics.

Also, specialized non-combat clerics can convert unused spell slots to healing if they just untie the spell instead of casting it, discharging all that positive energy.

Keltham: Oh, interesting.  That'll potentially get him through more rounds that require healing at the end, if he can do that.  He's got a lot of truthspells just lying around.  Also, is that kind of conversion less expensive to his god than if he does the whole channeled healing surge thing?

He didn't actually queue up Bull's Strength for today, or Cat's Grace.  Seems worth doing some training even if he doesn't.

Current pain tolerance level: managed to keep up Detect Magic for one minute with the heating stone, took it off his arm maybe eighteen seconds after that.

lintamande: They've put some thought into the face Chelish security should show him. Obviously, they want him when he decides to escape to find it plausible he could overpower them if he got the jump on them. Probably they want to be substantially better than random civilians at hand-to-hand combat, but not actually all that scary when they can't spellcast, and probably lots of their combat skill is aimed at disrupting spellcasting, which they'll teach Keltham even if he plans to otherwise suppress his girlfriend's magic. 

They're happy to do this for as long as he wants to or has healing, and can call in a cleric for more healing, after that, if he wants.

Keltham: Keltham's going to have weirdly overoptimized defensive skills if nobody puts a little effort into blowing through those.  Conversely, his form is going to go hugely bad as soon as he tries to go on the offensive or grab anybody, leaving openings somebody could drive a truck-sized fist through.

He's not going to find it particularly plausible if Security wizards can't take him.  Anybody with Governance-level combat training should be able to take him.  Anybody with the nearly-mythical quality of having Been In A Real Fight should be able to take him, which is why Keltham's so concerned about Carissa being able to take him even with her magic disabled.

lintamande: Yeah, they didn't figure they could get away with "Security are complete amateurs", just "Security are possible to beat once you have some real combat training". Carissa probably could take him, in their professional assessment, just because she seems like the kind of person who's scary when cornered and who has been in some real fights. But that's fixable!! It is the foundation of much of romance, that men are stronger than women and can beat them in a fight.

Keltham: ...if men get the drop on women, disable their magic with a magic item used in a sneak attack, and have already cast physical enhancement spells on themselves?  He's pretty sure a symmetrical attack by Carissa would work on Keltham, if everything about their relationship were completely different.

The point of this isn't that he can beat Carissa in a fair fight, it's that he could and would do whatever it took to beat her unfairly.  Beating her in a contest of physical strength is something that any physically specialized male could do, and that doesn't qualify random muscular guys to own her.

Keltham: Anyways, Keltham will go on trying to upgrade to Having Been In A Real Fight...

Keltham: ...until he's out of healing except for one unconverted truthspell, which seems like a natural time to stop.

Keltham: ...it's sort of weird, actually, he would have thought he'd want to be with Carissa, after this, but his brain is saying "Asmodia" instead.

Does she happen to have the time?

Asmodia: Actually, no

Sure, Asmodia has totally been in her room studying this whole time, and was not doing very important Conspiracy things just before then, and did not frantically run in here ten seconds before Keltham arrived after his intended destination became clear.

What's up?

Keltham: He's been getting martial arts retraining from Security, all healed now but he's still feeling a bit psychologically worn, and for some odd reason his brain returned an answer of "Asmodia" when queried for who he wanted to snuggle after that.  Probably relatively quiet going-to-sleep snuggles, if that's okay.  He doesn't know if that's something that would interest her and it's obviously okay to say no.

Asmodia: Sure.

(It's - probably not quite the same as Keltham having been through a torture session, and seeking her out afterwards - that, she feels instinctively, would be crazy high up on the Chelish Relationship Escalation Scale - like well past the point where the Church arrests you for being in a relationship that healthy - but -)

(Fuck it, she doesn't know.  Whatever.  Either the tropes have fated them to fall in love or they haven't.)

Keltham: He doesn't say much.

Asmodia: She holds a warm thing in her arms, big spoon to his little spoon this time, and wonders whether her future self will try to sabotage it all, if it starts looking like Keltham is actually heading towards Hell.  That's probably what being in love would mean, right?

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 20 (16) / Long Night

Security: High Priest Ferrer Maillol will speak to you now, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer.

(It's not a request and doesn't sound like one.)

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: She has no particular idea what he wants but one doesn't mess with High Priests; that's not a title one got two weeks ago because Project Lawful's handing authority out like candy.

She goes in.

Iarwain: This place is very cold, and very flat, and has no particular distinguishing features.  Miles away there is smoke in the air, as from a chimney. 

Farther miles away there's a big soap-bubble force-field kind of thing.

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Worldwound. 

She's not in fact an idiot. 

She is confused. There's a Forbiddance. Someone could have knocked her unconscious and carried her outside it. Or it could be an illusion. Well, trying to will away an illusion is cheap. She looks at the ground in front of her, closely. Tries to disbelieve it, to brush aside the magic standing between her senses and reality. 

While she does this she curtsies, perfectly, just in case she's standing in the High Priest's office.

She hopes she's standing in the High Priest's office. It is miserably, horribly, cold.

Ferrer Maillol: It is in fact an illusion, obviously, but a sufficiently high-level one that Lady Avaricia can go on feeling horribly cold for a while.

"Welcome to the Worldwound, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer, heir of Girona County.  Three weeks ago I ran an installation here.  Miss it quite a lot, in fact."

"Serving out a tour of duty here is something that excellently tempers a Chelish citizen.  Makes you wonder why your mother didn't send you here, really.  You could have learned so many valuable lessons."

"Do you know why your mother didn't send you here, Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer?  Why most noble children don't get sent here, as would be, in my own opinion, immensely beneficial to the Chelish state?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Because it's horrible and full of demons and peasants. 

She has a feeling she should not voice that guess. 

"We'd die like flies, High Priest. It's well known that a young noble in a situation where they plausibly might die by freak accident always will."

Ferrer Maillol: "Your mother can certainly afford a resurrection spell, if you die like a fly once or thrice.  But if you want to act stupid about it, go ahead.  Just means the conversation takes a bit longer.  Cold's not bothering me."

"I'll be astonished if you're not thinking that the real answer is that this place is beneath you."

"That, in fact, is why the Crown doesn't instruct the nobles that they've got to send their children here before they can inherit.  It'd serve the Chelish state, but not the Church.  It wouldn't be good for Asmodeanism."

"Do you believe you already understand why not?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "It would teach Cheliax's leaders the habits of peasants, drudgery and idiocy and mindless obedience. I am not persuaded that serves the state, let alone the Church. I think people are best ruled by their superiors, actually, and it's not all in the blood."

Ferrer Maillol: "They tried sending noble children to the Worldwound, back when.  It was an obvious enough idea for preventing Chelish nobility from going the way of the weak, useless fops in other countries."

"Problem is, this place doesn't kill noble children.  It breaks them, in a way that even True Resurrection and Greater Restoration can't fix."

"To be specific, it breaks their pride."

Ferrer Maillol: "Pride has always been the one of our Lord's domains that I've understood the least.  My specialty among our Lord's concerns is tyranny, and that alone."

"I genuinely don't understand what He sees in people like you.  Never have.  Always seemed to me like I could eat a pile of raw meat and vomit a more useful tyrant than most Chelish nobles."

"One thing I'm sure of, though.  Whatever it is that the likes of you possess, it's not real pride.  Not what our Lord really wishes mortals were like, just some seed or shadow.  I can't imagine that a proper devil reshaped to our Lord's will could have their pride broken by the Worldwound."

Ferrer Maillol: "But then, not every child of nobility has their pride irrevocably broken by the Worldwound, among the ones who do get sent there, punished or cast away.  The vast majority of them, yes, but not all."

"Maybe you'd be one of the ones whose pride the Worldwound couldn't break.  No more than it could break a devil reforged in Hell to our Lord's true will."

"Can you guess how the Worldwound breaks children with false pride, child?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "The living conditions are miserable, and everyone around you is a peasant, and even if they're impressed at first they stop being so, if you can't actually hurt them, and then you pick up the habits of peasants," like I said, "and end up no better than other people."

She wouldn't dream of correcting a priest about theology but she thinks that if you think of it as 'pride' you already have a problem. The thing you want is to be superior to other people. Not smarter than them, necessarily, or richer than them, not necessarily possessed with authority over them, just worth more than them. She is worth more than other people; pride is just knowing it.

Ferrer Maillol: "Even the noble children of Cheliax, as far beneath Hell's standards as they fall, are not that weak in their pride."

"The Worldwound breaks pride by being real.  Run into a superior force of demons, you've got to flee, doesn't matter what arguments you invent for why they're beneath you, they don't care.  They don't argue with you and win, they don't strut their contempt as they ignore you, they're just straightforwardly trying to kill you."

"It's that lack of caring, that breaks the noble children.  Not the way that other people make a point out of ignoring them.  The way the world around them doesn't notice their existence on a fundamental level.  The demons don't give a shit, the cold doesn't give a shit, the work shifts don't give a shit.  You can survive them, but you've got to change to survive them on their terms."

Ferrer Maillol: "Learning to survive at the Worldwound is like waking out of a dream, Lady Avaricia.  Like seeing through an illusion."

Ferrer Maillol: "And for most noble children, it turns out their pride was just part of that dream."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Can we send my sister there?"

Ferrer Maillol: For all that he reacts, you could get the impression that she tried speaking to something that doesn't care about her existence at all, like the cold that her senses tell her is freezing her to the bone.

"You understand why I'm taking my valuable time to tell you all this, kid?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: I, too, am surrounded by peasants, and a situation that I can't command to be less annoying. 

"I assume you'd like me to make a more interesting mistake than that, because it'll be useful to your project if I learn to be commanded by peasants without becoming one."

Ferrer Maillol: "Project Lawful is far more lethal and unforgiving than the Worldwound.  One accidental word that gets Keltham looking in the wrong direction is as deadly to Cheliax's interests as a full Worldwound breach, except more irreparable, because we can't just teleport in the army to fight it back."

"That deadly stray word doesn't look as lethal as a five-story fire-spitting demon.  That's a problem."

"I don't give a flying fuck about whether you make it out with your pride intact.  The moment your mother handed you over to Project Lawful, your usefulness to the Church as a proud heir to Girona County was finished.  You come out of this as a Duchess, or you end up as a heretical future paving stone."

"Wake up, kid.  Keep your pride in the process, lose it, whatever, the Church no longer gives a shit.  Seemed like a priest ought to tell you that, since maybe you'd been told differently, at some point."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: This really does not seem like the kind of lecture one argues with. She waits to see if he has more to say.

Ferrer Maillol: "When you end up in my office with pain being applied to you, it indicates you've made a mistake.  Whimsical cruelty is more Subirachs's thing."

"You poked a dangerous thing you shouldn't have poked.  Guess which dangerous thing I'm talking about?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: She's actually not sure at all. 

She explained her reasoning on the salt. She's - pretty sure that's it for interactions with Keltham.

She was arguably rude to the Chosen of Asmodeus, though she was actually trying to be helpful while remaining in character, there, and would in fact never be rude to the Chosen of Asmodeus deliberately.

She - ignored most of lunch because the chefs here can't cook duck and she has a Ring of Sustenance anyway?

"I confess I do not understand my error, High Priest."

Ferrer Maillol: "That's an improvement over all your wrong guesses so far.  At least you didn't guess something stupid, like that it was Sevar."

"Out on the Worldwound there's a distinction between what goes on at base, and how you act when you're out on patrol.  You want to play Asmodean games on base, push somebody into a corner, take advantage of them, or just be cruel for your own amusement?  That's being a good Asmodean, so long as it doesn't significantly impair their combat efficiency."

"Playing games while you're out on patrol?  That's serious."

"I've never had the job before of breaking a county heiress, but I've had the job of correcting some rich asshole's son who just didn't get it.  He didn't have a mode he could go into for not playing Asmodean games.  Couldn't switch it off when our Lord's interests depended on that to hold the demons back.  He played the enigma, dropped ominous hints, on patrol."

"Eventually he ran out my patience, I corrected him hard enough to reduce his combat capability, demons ate him, I wrote up a brief report and Egorian never sent me any questions."

"You're here because Asmodia came into my office saying that she didn't understand why you were calling the others 'peasants' around Keltham, couldn't figure out if that was a game the real Lady Avaricia was playing, or alter-Avaricia's game, or what.  Asmodia reported that she couldn't predict what you were going to do next around Keltham, because you had not explained any such game to her while setting up your alter-Avaricia persona.  She didn't request you to be corrected, if you're wondering, Asmodia just requested orders from me.  She was rightly unconfident of her own ability to steer from there."

"You want to play games with the Chosen of Asmodeus, test her on her ability to decipher you, critique her outfit?  I won't stop you.  Could be good for her.  Sevar's new to her role, used to work underneath me until a couple of weeks ago in fact.  Maybe learning to play the game against you will be good practice for her."

"But do it when Keltham's not around."

"Or if you're doing it as alter-Avaricia, clear it with Asmodia first, so that alter-Sevar can play whatever part she's supposed to play."

"Anything you do around Keltham needs to be completely transparent and predictable to your superiors."

"When you are near Keltham you are out on patrol at the Worldwound."

"Clear?  We are playing a lethal fucking game, we do not have time for surprises from you, we do not care about you, and you will adapt to those conditions immediately or be removed as a liability."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: The Chosen of Asmodeus started it!!

She is not stupid enough to argue. "I understand."

Ferrer Maillol: "You'd better be right about that."

"Your next move is to report to Asmodia, explain what you were thinking before, and set up a pre-approved gameplan for alter-Avaricia that takes into account whatever the Abyss she was doing today."

"Now, you do give off the impression, maybe it's a false impression, but who knows, of somebody with a short attention span who thinks all this is beneath her.  Somebody who might be distracted by fiddling with her nails, or maybe just wander off."

"To make sure that doesn't happen while Asmodia is talking to you, your arms and legs will be removed."

"If you impress Asmodia with your good behavior under those conditions, your limbs may be Regenerated afterwards."

"Any questions before you're taken away?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: She keeps her face still. There's not a lot of point in complaining that she has a very safe and predictable conception of alter!Avaricia, had it in mind all along, and would have told the idiot-child-on-a-power-trip all about it if the idiot child had asked her instead of asking Maillol. Going to Maillol instead is precisely the thing that an idiot-child-on-a-power-trip would do, and having pegged someone as an idiot-child-on-a-power-trip you don't get to be surprised or offended if they behave like one.

You can either avoid even faultlessly provoking idiot-children-on-power-trips or you can accept the consequences. 

Relatedly, if your superior is a grouchy old man who hates nobles because they don't spend enough time in the freezing cold fighting demons, which is what all people should be doing, you're not going to argue him out of that; you have a superior who hates you and is going to persist in that, even if you're right and he's wrong. Being right doesn't give you power; power gives you power. 

(She is right, though.)

She can't help it if they're reading her mind but she can have the good sense to show none of that. "I don't particularly have questions, High Priest."

Ferrer Maillol: They are.

"The problem is that you didn't get it approved in advance, Avaricia.  It doesn't matter how predictable your concept seems to you.  If you don't actually explain it and get it pre-approved, it still ends up a wonderful clever surprise and you get to see that beautiful look of suppressed confusion on those peasants' faces."

"Your superiors don't need to be able to predict you.  They need to have actually predicted you."

"Take her away."

Asmodia: "I'm going to note for the record in case it makes any difference that I did not actually ask for this, and then move on."

"So.  Why was alter-Avaricia calling the rest of us peasants in front of Keltham?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I actually thought this had been adequately communicated earlier, but perhaps I was being too diplomatic, and therefore too indirect.

The Lady Avaricia, in alter-Cheliax, was raised as the heir to a Chelish county, and raised believing that because she is much better than everyone else, it is her duty to study hard and become wise and govern them responsibly. Yes, her mother is Good. She has been warned she'll probably end up Good too, once she's a Countess, but it's considered healthy not to try to rush there deliberately, when you're young and your decisions don't yet affect other people. 

The Lady Avaricia is not an idiot, and it would have occurred to her, at some point, to wonder if it was true she was much better than everyone else and that it was reasonable for her to rule over them. She studied the matter carefully and concluded it was entirely true. Most people are terrible at planning, barely if at all literate, impulsive and violent, sexist and stupid. If you ask them how their county ought to be governed they propose less taxes and more public-goods." She uses the Baseline, rather pointedly. "Lots of them want to conquer Andoran; the most popular complaint about the Church is that it's not out there killing more infidels. It's not just an impoverished upbringing; my tutors' children, raised alongside me, are stupider, and have worse judgment, and handle themselves worse in negotiations. My best guess is that half of nobility is in the blood, and the other half in the bearing, and you actually do need both. 

Now, 'better than everyone you've ever met' need not translate to 'better than everyone in Cheliax'. If nothing else, there's all the other counties, and there are Dukes, and I have never been given reason to believe I rival the Queen in any of my strengths. And so the Lady Avaricia, advertised a secret project, joined eagerly, not because she wants money - she has all the money she could reasonably want - but because there might be people there who are as good as her. 

The Lady Avaricia was disappointed. The project had some children with the blood, maybe, to be nobles, but not the bearing; some who can surpass her in how fast they do arithmetic in their heads, or how desperately they want to impress the teacher, but none who actually see as far, none who can pay attention from as many angles, none who are doing anything other than trying to race down the track Keltham laid out at top speed, none who are venturing off the track every few minutes because they see so many connections, between what's being spoken and what they already knew. And Keltham, himself a child with no leadership ability to speak of, selects for his favor those who hang on his every word, because that feels, to him, like those are the ones who really understand it.

The Lady Avaricia does not blame them. They are all peasants. None of them were raised to rule because none of them were going to. The skills they lack would have been less useful to them than the skills they possess, if they'd gone off to fight demons like they were supposed to. But she is disappointed, and she is aware that she is unlike them, and she does not care to be like them; if nothing else, she thinks it'd be a loss to the project. 

All this but my mother's alignment, wall-girl, is green. Should we go on to the parts that are orange?"

Asmodia: "It's on the wall now in green, I guess, if it doesn't look like we can revise it retroactively.  Maybe it should have been orange and that's the issue here."

"We lie to Keltham as little as possible, but the truth isn't safe either.  The fact that Asmodeus is Lawful Evil is on the wall in red, not green, because, true as that fact is, Keltham has correctly seen that fact as an anomaly in the light of other lies we've told him about Asmodeus."

"Keltham makes deductions using Laws we don't know.  I'm trying as hard as I can, and I can't begin to read far enough ahead of him.  To him, what you're describing about Avaricia isn't a fact about her, it's a fact about an equilibrium of forces we don't understand that hold Avaricia in place, like a balanced element inside a spell being hung.  Forces out of real-Cheliax that even we in real-Cheliax don't understand."

"There's an Avaricia like that in real-Cheliax.  Does that Avaricia exist in Taldor?  Does she exist in alter-Cheliax?  Does she have a Lawful Good mother?  Keltham has met a fake paladin that we intended to be realistic, that paladin would not have seemed like Avaricia's father."

"It's not enough for your version of Avaricia to be above others.  The others have to know that they're below her.  She doesn't hide that she thinks she's better than all of us, on her first day in that strange place, she flaunts it openly and without caution, because for others not to oppose her then and call her out on it, confirms her place and her power."

"There's probably a less Asmodean version of that pride in Taldor, that's still pride.  Maybe only among children whose mothers are not Lawful Good, I don't know if it's in Lastwall.  I - I'm not sure how I know this, but I would bet at a very high probability that it's not in dath ilan.  That Keltham will see it as something very strange and hard for him to understand, he will kneel down to peer closer, he will ask questions, he will be driven to understand it.  Ione is not wrong that there is something of Nethys about him and his world -"

"I'm still not explaining this right.  Keltham can feel the difference between fiction and reality, I think, on some level below all his Law and math.  He knew that Manohar hadn't really put an artifact headband on me, and his thought transcripts showed that it was just - how it felt to him."

"What you did feels to me... well, it feels like fiction, first and foremost, a pose, a mask.  And that's bad enough even if your alter-Avaricia would do it, because Keltham is so watchful, for signs of fiction being woven around him, we should have picked a different alter-Avaricia instead."

"Much worse is that it's fiction out of the true Cheliax, and not the alter-Cheliax we've been constructing."

"If even I can sense that, I'm very worried that Keltham can sense it too."

"Which is why you need to, yes, spell everything out very very explicitly and not take me by surprise about the way that alter-Avaricia - suddenly thrusts out a huge new theory of what it's safe for Keltham to believe about the equilibrium that produced an alter-Chelish heiress who is very much like a real-Chelish heiress."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Have you met nobles in Taldor?"

Asmodia: "Obviously not."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "They are not actually less prideful on casual inspection than Chelish nobles. How exactly you signify it goes in and out of fashion, of course, but they are like that. And some of them are Lawful Good. Not Lastwall Lawful Good, if Lastwall is your concept of Lawful Good you're going to have a hard time explaining why there are nobles at all, but 'it is our duty to benevolently govern our inferiors' is a Lawful Good ideology, if out of fashion among Cheliax's specific political opponents right now. 

I did, actually, listen to your entire incredibly tedious speech about people being the products of all the equilibriums that hold things in the place they are, and nobles with a conception of their duty of benevolent governance is already implied by nobles existing at all in the society you built. That's where nobles who have to justify themselves to other people land. 

It is mildly interesting that it sounds pretend to you and probably to Keltham, you sure might want a plan to handle that. Mine would be 'go talk to Taldane nobles until you figure out what you were missing that made reality seem fake to you'."

Asmodia: "Those are harder to kidnap, excuse me, rescue than the Taldorian refugees we have in the Facility.  I'll file a request to see if the Crown has any captive Taldorian nobility on hand anyways that I could try talking to."

"I'm afraid, Avaricia, that we still have a problem with respect to you and my wall.  You seem to think that you can say what ought to work and then argue me into agreeing.  Problem is, the one who has to believe your story isn't me, isn't reality itself, it's Keltham."

"Keltham does not know all these things that you know.  They are - complicated, like saying - not just that a ship comes in, but that it comes in from Absalom - and if Avaricia seems strange enough to him, if her perfectly reasonable and even true arguments ring wrong to him, the way he doubted that masochists really existed -"

"You believe that you're in the right and what you're doing is safe and fine because the arguments for it are so right.  You're not getting it.  We are fighting a precarious pitched battle in which we are outnumbered and there is no margin at all for error, because what is at stake is not whether we win but how fast we lose.  We are desperately trying to lose slowly enough that we can get enough Law from Keltham before he leaves us, or maybe, even, bring him all the way over to Asmodeanism first."

"Oh, that reminds me, you may want to check in with Sevar at some point about what Keltham ought to end up thinking is Asmodeus's concern of pride.  Keltham getting really unpleasant associations about that off you seems like it could interfere with Sevar's game and not just mine."

"To return to point.  We're playing an absurdly complicated and delicate game, not all of whose considerations are known to you.  There are gods playing that gameboard, and stranger things there haven't been time to explain to you.  You need to plan out all large moves explicitly, spelled out, to me, carefully, in advance, as you take your first steps onto this gameboard; not argue to me afterwards about how your moves were the clearly correct ones after it's too late.  Unless and until you prove to be better at my job and able to take over running my Wall; and if you think that's terribly likely I'd invite you to start a prediction market about it.  You'll outbid me, I'm sure, but I won't mind taking your money and I expect a lot of Security will want in on the action too."

"You're currently a limbless torso propped up fetchingly against a wall because Sevar is running an experiment about mercy, possibly a temporary one.  Blundering in here like this on an ordinary Asmodean project, throwing your pride around and expecting others to follow in your wake afterwards, would ordinarily get you a much more severe reminder.  I am considering recommending for that at this point because you do not seem to understand how to coordinate with others on this Project.  You don't make huge moves like that with a hundred implications, and then explain to me afterwards why they were clearly the right moves because sure nobles are like that in Taldor.  It is not your place to decide that the win condition for your idea is the fact that nobles are like that in Taldor.  You come to me or Sevar with the idea, you politely sell it to us, we check implications you don't understand, we maybe approve it, then you do what we expected you to do and nothing more surprising than that."

"Avaricia's an asshole, fine, it's maybe too late for alter-Avaricia not to be one too, but she can't be a revealing asshole.  Talk to me about what alter-Avaricia hoped to gain by offending her classmates in front of Keltham, keeping in mind that if she was just lashing out blindly then maybe alter-Asmodia and the other tier-1s would logically recommend to Keltham that alter-Avaricia not get hired or not be given a tier-1's authority."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "At this point I think I do need to get to the parts of who alter-Avaricia is that should be orange on the wall. Alter-Avaricia is not scared of you. She does not expect that if she disagrees with you you'll escalate until she is no longer capable of objecting. She does not want this job that badly, if taking this job is going to require appeasing people she thinks are worse than her. Alter-Avaricia is not in this for the money, she is not in this for the power, she is in this for the chance to meet people who might be interesting, and they haven't impressed her yet and she doesn't feel like pretending they have, even if it means Keltham doesn't hire her.

And if the game you want to play is 'no, you should in fact act like you're scared of us and act like you're desperate for Keltham to hire you, because we'll arrange to make you regret it if he doesn't, because we'll take away everything you previously had in life and make sure this is the only thing that matters to you', well, then fine, you're in charge here. 

Every other one of your new hires is desperate for Keltham to hire them. Because they don't actually believe that being a massive threat to national security who is also useless ends well, and the fact that the last batch of rejects are presently being treated well is nowhere near enough assurance on that front. You probably literally could not give them sufficient assurance on that no matter what you tried; they're stupid, but they're not that stupid. They're people whose lives are on the line and they can't entirely act otherwise.

They're not going to be able to act like this is something they tried that might work out or might not but which would leave them perfectly fine if it didn't work out. Luckily, Keltham does not seem to have caught on about that; maybe he thinks the incentives he's offering are powerful enough to explain all their desperation. 

You seem very invested in making it clear to me that I'd better be desperate for Keltham's approval, that I'd better in fact think of whether I'm hired or not as the sole determining factor of whether I have any opportunity to do anything at all with this life or the next one.

As Maillol put it, 'The moment your mother handed you over to Project Lawful, your usefulness to the Church as a proud heir to Girona County was finished.  You come out of this as a Duchess, or you end up as a heretical future paving stone.'

So the question is: do you want me to act like that?

Or do you want me to act like a genius kid who has never had a job and didn't expect to ever need one, who if she fails to impress Keltham spends a couple years under house arrest and then goes back to ruling a county, who knows that and therefore expects the project to impress her as much as she needs to impress it? Who isn't scared?"

Asmodia: "I must say, I never realized until now how much of a life disability 18 Splendour could be, if it wasn't in a headband and you had no way to take it off."

"Stop trying so hard to persuade me, Avaricia.  Every time you do that, I have to redirect attention away from what you're actually saying, and make metaphorical Will saves against being the sort of person who just believes anything told her by somebody with 18 Splendour."

"What I'm hearing from all of this is that alter-Avaricia doesn't make alter-Cheliax look so great, or act like she's trying to impress Keltham, and that's a better look to his Probability-Sight because somebody like that should exist and alter-Avaricia should logically be her.  I'm concerned that you're vastly overestimating how much Keltham expects somebody as rude as Avaricia to exist in Golarion in the first place, I'm worried that he'll deduce something from that we don't want even if it's something that's not true, the more it surprises him the more it narrows down which surviving realities he's still in and that's our loss condition on the whole Project, he does not need to think that 'Governance' would send him anyone rude they could have just all been filtered out earlier..."

"As for how worried you need to be about failing out of Keltham's Project, Sevar's going incredibly far out of her way to make that less scary than usual.  If that's not unscary enough for you to act unafraid then you're a liability, because we're all going to end up in more stressful situations than that, places where we might blow the whole Project, before this is over."

"I'm still considering whether we should be trying to undo any of these moves, but let's say we don't.  Are you considering a romance arc where Avaricia gradually gets more impressed with Keltham and switches from being rude to him to trying to please him more?"

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "No, I was planning to keep not giving him the time of day. Seems implausible for all the girls to fall all over him. Maybe eventually he realizes he doesn't have to put up with that."

Asmodia: "All right, good.  I'll tell Security to monitor your thoughts about that for signs of changes, though.  Among the considerations you haven't been read in on, for sheer lack of time and to avoid distractions, is that there's something like an unshattered prophecy about Keltham landing in a plane containing women who might fall for him.  Keltham is very aware of that possibility and knows that it operated for himself and Sevar, but we've been trying to conceal from him how much detailed evidence there is about a lot of other cases, places where Keltham made predictions and we've hidden from him that those predictions came true."

"I don't think you'd be one of his girls, there's no evidence of any particular god having chosen you for that.  But if you act hateful towards Keltham and then fall in love with him, well, I don't need to spell out how stereotypical that would be, do I?  If you do fall in love we'll almost certainly have to hide it from him, under those circumstances."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Noted.  

I don't hate him, I'm just continuing to reserve judgment about whether he's worth my time, as an individual separate from the things he knows about a more mathematically advanced society. 

I don't hate you either, I just have arrived at a judgment on the same question with respect to you and it's that you are a peasant in a job that needs a ruler."

Asmodia: Asmodia doesn't bother trying to conceal her smile.  She's genuinely amused, and wants Avaricia to know it.

"Oh, we have all sorts of special Project Lawful girls around here, in the jobs that require them.  We have Nethys's chosen safety officer, Cayden Cailean's chosen faithful Asmodean who delivers warnings and cookies, the asexual who stands back and watches it all - Keltham doesn't know I'm a true asexual, by the way, that would be too much confirmation of one of his predictions, he thinks maybe I'll start to desire him at some point - and, of course, Carissa Sevar herself."

"Possibly there's room for a ruler in the mix, somewhere, if you don't hate him."

"If you think the Wall needs a ruler operating it, though, I suspect you're just wrong, what with the god who improved my ability to do that having chosen me instead of you."

"Now.  Supposing for now that we accept your story.  Keltham asks you why you referred to Meritxell as a peasant.  After all, though Keltham doesn't say this out loud, Meritxell was, according to the story that she gave him, the daughter of a priest of Asmodeus who went looking for high-Intelligence fathers, and grew up in a temple.  He's quietly wondering whether 'peasant' means something other than what we told him, or if we were lying about everyone's backgrounds."

"How does alter-Avaricia respond?  You tell me that, like literally answer me as you would Keltham, and then I'll try to figure out what kind of Probability update Keltham would do about that."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Peasants are people who were raised to work a job for their daily bread. It's a very different mindset from mine. People like Meritxell think of themselves as different from people who grew up on a farm, and there are differences, but they're a lot smaller than the difference between being raised to work a job and not. 

I still wouldn't've called her that after she'd done a Worldwound tour, if she'd done one. War is the sort of thing that changes - the things about you 'peasant' says."

Asmodia: "'So I'm a peasant,' says Keltham, 'and the Chief Executive of Civilization is a peasant, and only people who go to the Silent Cities - no, it was Quiet Cities - are not-peasants... I'm confused, is being a noble not work or does it not get paid?  And why would the Worldwound change that, fighting at the Worldwound is work...'"

"Yes, I can tell my model of Keltham isn't perfect, you're welcome to predict out loud what he'll say and if you do a more accurate prediction maybe you get my job."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "It sounds like your civilization doesn't have this distinction, if you and the Chief Executive of Civilization would be in the same category by it. Nobles don't work for pay; their lands might grow more productive, and earn them more tax revenue, if they're governed wisely, but that's different from getting paid money in exchange for work; doing nothing in particular with your lands and just living off their rental income is perfectly respectable, if you don't have something better to do. Peasants get money from selling things they made, or selling their labor; soldiers are paid by the crown for their service in defense of the country or at the Worldwound the world; those produce different mindsets. Though honestly historically the origin of the distinction is probably that soldiers, if they're mad at you, will overthrow you, and peasants won't."

Asmodia: "Obviously my language doesn't have this distinction or the Taldane word would've translated for me, says Keltham... no, I don't know it doesn't translate."

"Keltham just focuses directly in and asks you to explain about the mindsets in detail.  It's not what he actually does, at this point, he asks some weird sideways question but I don't know what."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Peasants like passing tests. They want to please their superiors. They want to show that they belong and that they're clever and worthy. They are often insecure about that. They tend to be nervous about saying the wrong thing and sometimes even about thinking the wrong thing. What if their friends judge them? 

Soldiers have noticed which kinds of tests are important to pass because you'll die otherwise, and which aren't that important. They want their superiors to have good reason to be careful with their lives. They want to show that they are competent, and they don't want to overstate their competence because that's how they end up in a situation they weren't prepared for. They tend to be nervous about actually, literally, dying, because they got into a dangerous situation and weren't ready.

Nobles have noticed which kinds of tests are important to pass because projecting competence in that specific domain will achieve specific goals that you have. The domain they operate in is small; they all know each other. They don't care about their reputation in the sense of vague unease about who will like them, but in the sense of which specific traits which specific other people know they have; they care a lot more than peasants about not appearing to bow down to unjust authority, and not seeming eager to please.

And then, with your approval, I would say something flattering about how it seems possible to me that dath ilan lacks this distinction because they train everyone to be nobles without land. Which, to be clear, I doubt; but were Lady Avaricia trying to win Keltham's favor, she'd say it."

Asmodia: "Is she?  Why?  I thought the plan was for her to not seem to seek his approval."  Her flattery won't land, but that's irrelevant if alter-Avaricia wouldn't know it.

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "You've got to give a boy a little opening to try to prove himself, even if he's almost definitely going to fail, and yourself a little reason not to call him a peasant, or at least to suggest your judgment is pending. But it'd be lying, so I'm asking. 

He totally is a peasant."

Asmodia: "My model of your attempted flattery is that it would entirely fail; Keltham would neither be flattered nor understand that you were trying to flatter him.  The mindsets you describe for peasants, soldiers, and nobles will all sound equally alien to him.  None will sound like the careful Lawful structures that Civilization teaches.  Parts of all three will sound like things he was specifically trained out of.  The game alter-Avaricia is playing with him, with her lie, is outside his ability to conceive."

"My model of Keltham nods with a confused expression and heads off to ask Sevar a lot of questions."

"Sevar... can probably do a fairly good job of recovering Keltham's sense that alterCheliax makes sense as a consistent universe, even though what you told him made no sense to him... but my fear is that it builds up in him a sense over time, that there is a strange reality you exposed him to, and that Sevar is trying to put him back to sleep by soothing the sharp edges away..."

"Maybe I'm underestimating Sevar here; she knows that as well as I do, and can maybe not give the appearance of soothing him.  She's guided him through a lot of dangerous-sounding revelations successfully.  I'll send her the transcript of what you said, and Sevar will decide if that's a path of explanation she wants to send Keltham down."

"If Keltham was actually playing this game hard against us, he'd find Tonia and ask her next, not Sevar.  But that would be a new class of game moves from him; his suspicions haven't apparently risen that high."

"My guess is that Sevar vetoes the lie."

"Different pathway.  Keltham successfully reads the open contempt out of your voice when you talk about peasants.  He asks about that."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I think I'm better than them. This might be impolite but I think it's also just true and I can defend it at length if its truth is relevant."

Asmodia: "Keltham gives you a confused look.  He asks you what it means for you to be better than - well, first he asks you what the word 'impolite' means, which has translated into some completely other concept in Baseline, and then he asks you that."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I think I'm smarter, wiser, prettier, know more, think more clearly, make better decisions, and if I end up deciding to join the project will be more of an asset to it."

Asmodia: "Keltham has seen your Intelligence and Wisdom scores and is confused about your belief that they're the highest on the Project.  He doesn't think it's a Conspiracy sign, though, because it's so obviously contradicted based on evidence the purported Conspiracy seems to have voluntarily given him.  He goes off to ask Sevar what's up with you, and Sevar explains to him about overconfidence and people overestimating themselves, which Keltham then remembers getting taught about in a class when he was seven years old."

"That seems basically innocuous to me as a sequence of events.  I predict Sevar approves.  I mark that it lowers the chance that Keltham hires you.  You can possibly get in anyways if you keep on outperforming at chemistry."

"Keltham asks you to do something, at some point, and you say that you need to paint your fingernails instead - feel free to substitute in whatever you'd actually say there.  Keltham completely fails in every possible way to take anything resembling a hint, and asks why your fingernails are more important than washing the sulfur bins or whatever."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Well, I don't want to wash the sulfur bins, and would rather do things that are fun for me than do that, which is not fun for me."

Asmodia: "I have a sense that there's something that potentially blows up, somewhere in this vicinity, but I don't know what to ask you that will expose it.  Maybe I ought to call in Ione, she has a good and possibly divine sense about things that might explode..."

"Something like, the way that all the rest of us have acted towards him, will have created an implicit sense in him of what behavior Cheliax expects from subordinates, or as he would see it, employees.  You're going to violate those implicit rules, and it's going to bring the existence of those rules into sharp relief and the focus of his attention.  You're - going to violate the rules in a way that shows off that you're better than them and the people who obey them; Keltham - asks you why the rest of us are jumping to obey him when you're not, and have given him such a reasonable-sounding reason why he shouldn't be obeyed?  It's not what I predict actually happens, but maybe that question still gets at the - repulsive energy at the center of the molecule, that would make things fly apart and release heat..."