Keltham: Actually! Keltham will cast Glimpse of Beyond - unwarned, but Carissa has probably guessed it's coming, since she's the one who suggested that - and verify he can see the correct original people beneath them.
And then Keltham will immediately turn around and look the other way once he's done that, and ask how long the spell needs to stay up. If it's not long, they can change back now.
lintamande: Ah, okay, cool! They'll all do that. Most girls find it kind of uncomfortable to be boys, and vice versa.
Keltham: Yeah his sexuality was apparently less than totally okay with seeing that.
Somebody needs to hurry up on that Male Bisexuality Enhancement, this is ridiculous.
Keltham: Keltham goes looking for Paxti.
Iarwain: Paxti did notice Ione and Keltham slipping off on a date at dinnertime. She heard about the Asmodia/Keltham date from Pela.
Keltham: Okay, but did she see Ione and Keltham going from dinner to a cuddleroom?
Iarwain: ...no?
Keltham: Keltham will go ask Pela what she thinks happened between Keltham and Asmodia. What does Pela think she knows, and how does Pela think she knows it?
lintamande: Pela has a familiar, a bird, and it was out flying and saw them. It wasn't spying, that'd be creepy, it was just getting some air, and she has a little page of pictures for it to point at because it's good practice to communicate with your familiar, and it pointed at 'Keltham' and 'Asmodia' and 'bed.'
...did she do something wrong?
Keltham: Not particularly. Keltham is trying to figure out if people are going sideways through alternate universes, or, if that's not what's going on, get a grasp on how 'rumors' operate inside Golarion.
Did Pela herself tell other people that Keltham and Asmodia were having sex, or that he'd gone to his cuddleroom with Asmodia, or just describe to them what her familiar had said?
lintamande: Well, over lunch Jacme said that Keltham must be sleeping with half the students by now, and Yaisa said it wasn't half, and Paxti said it was Ione Carissa Meritxell Yaisa at a minimum and then Pela said Asmodia too, her familiar was out flying and saw them together in bed, and everyone said huh, and then they started speculating about who Keltham would sleep with next. They know he's not sleeping with Pilar because she'd look way cheerfuller.
Keltham: ...okay that sounds sort of like maybe 'rumors' happen when people don't rigorously distinguish their observations from their inferences.
Keltham guesses that sounds plausible???
...he'll keep an eye out for signs that there's some kind of massive trope-related sideways reality slippage going on and the Conspiracy is trying to hide it from him, he guesses. Though under the circumstances, this seems less like classical Conspiracy, and more like something where people like Yaisa don't know and will blurt things out in front of him??
...Keltham wishes he had some sort of reference magical world with Average Intelligence 10, known to have no Conspiracy or tropes, so he could know whether 'rumors' were a totally reasonable phenomenon to be occurring there.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 23 (19) / Late Morning
Keltham: How's Meritxell doing on her Possibly Dangerously Destabilizing Mental Technique Acquisition experiment? Any further awful revelations since then?
lintamande: Yeah, she's got a bit of a list.
- her mother never loved her
- she thought that getting the best grades and being the smartest would make her mother love her, but it wouldn't have worked
- when the baby died, and she had a stomachache for a month, those were probably related, even though she thought she wasn't sad because it was only a baby
- the reason she doesn't have close friends is that she feels uncomfortable when people are nice to her
- she doesn't really want Keltham to want to hurt her, she wants him to look at her like he does at Carissa, and Keltham hurting her probably wouldn't even accomplish that
"There's a couple more but they're, uh, kind of private, unless you really need more examples for some reason."
Keltham: Understood, and he's sorry for having had to ask. He's grateful to Meritxell for reporting to him on this; he needs to know what's happening.
Meritxell's report... basically sounds right, it sounds like a bunch of things somebody would notice after suddenly acquiring Law-shaped skills you didn't have for the rest of your life, and a lot like what happened to Keltham after he got hit by an Owl's Wisdom.
Well, her personality and emotions just got yanked around some, how's she doing general sanitywise? Any signs of instability or tension spreading beyond the specifically high-tension thoughts?
lintamande: "I have no idea how I'd tell. I don't wish I wasn't on the project. Even when I'm really upset this is better than being at the Worldwound. I - am pretty upset. If there'd been a way to not have this happen for another couple months until we'd settled into a steadier sort of pace, that would've been nice."
Keltham: "Heard."
Keltham had before a momentary sense that Meritxell realizing that her mother never loved her, just then - didn't ring quite right, it felt like Asmodia and Manohar - but he couldn't see any reason for the Conspiracy to do that, or for Meritxell to lie about it - and then her list seemed right, maybe even too right, or something, but it laid that sense to rest some - and then Meritxell talking about wishing those realizations could've been delayed another couple of months, again rings false, somehow -
"You still want to be in the Keeper sessions?"
lintamande: "Yes." Stubbornly. "Maybe I'm the way I am because I thought it'd get me things I can't have, but noticing that doesn't make me not that way, apparently, and if I drop out then I'll just be wondering what the next thing like that is, because there's got to be more. - I'm trying not to pick around trying to find them, but it's one thing to not be trying to find them and another thing to not be trying to learn things where I'll find them - does that make sense -"
Keltham: "I think so?"
Why is this ringing false. He can't put a finger on it at all, it just feels like - somebody else's world, held together wrong, Meritxell knows what she should say but there's no deep pattern talking, a deep pattern would have a different shape - this one is like - somebody trying to put together the shape of disturbing revelations that they think should be there -
Meritxell knows she shouldn't try to be a Keeper, on some level, that she doesn't belong in the class with Pilar and Asmodia, and is trying to be there anyways? She found revelations inside her that weren't the real revelations, the right revelations, but would prove to Keltham and herself that she could be a Keeper??
...It feels like that would be enough falsehood, at the center, to explain his feeling of falsehood???
Or he could be drawing a complete false positive on his anomaly detectors.
"Meritxell, I intuitively feel that you're in danger in the Keeper class. It's possible that some part of me still thinks Pilar and Asmodia are Trope Girls and you're not one and only Trope Girls can do this safely, it's possible that some other part of me knows something that it's having trouble making fully clear to me."
"This could be a bad idea and could end up with you in Hell, but assuming you don't want to otherwise never get an Owl's Wisdom again, one of the thoughts that occurs to me, is that you could take an Owl's Wisdom and focus specifically on why you want to be a Keeper and whether that's smart for you."
lintamande: " - huh.
- I'm going to just think about that for a bit, instead of saying 'sounds like a good idea, I'll do that', even though it does sound like a good idea and I probably should do it.
I'm going to be so annoyed if they get to be Keepers and I don't. I know that's not really a good enough reason in itself but I can't imagine how frustrated I'll be every single day, if there are secrets I was too fragile to have and that Asmodia gets to have."
Keltham: "That is famously not a good reason to become a Keeper. It's known that before you even get to be a Keeper trainee, in dath ilan, they check to see how much you've mastered the mindset of being fine knowing about questions that rank-one Keepers get answered and you don't. Anyone who is disturbed by not knowing secrets, it is said, should definitely not be a Keeper, because then they'll find out about all sorts of questions they can't get answers to."
"Asmodia, one gets the impression, could be handed a box saying 'the secrets inside this box will destroy you' and she'd be like 'welp obviously I should not open this box then'. This, it is said, is among the first fundamental requisites of being a Keeper. Pilar - would have some sort of Asmodeus-related thing going on but I get the impression she does have a mode like that."
lintamande: That - seems like a way to have all the people who rule your society be MISSING AN INCREDIBLY FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN VALUE, Meritxell thinks, but does not say, because she doesn't really want to have that argument right now, or rather have that argument bounce off Keltham's insistence that actually for some reason dath ilan isn't missing something.
"I don't try to find out things I'm not supposed to know. But I'd rather know more things than less things, even if knowing more things also means knowing more things I don't know."
Keltham: "Keepers definitely want to know more things rather than less things, they just - know how to operate inside a world full of ideas, concepts, structures of information, that were - crafted too much, designed too much, by minds running too far ahead of them, to the point where those ideas are deadly to less tightly woven reasoning processes. I mean, even regular dath ilani know that's how the world works, you can tell because I know it. That's what happens when you have people deploying and crafting ideas at - an overly crafted level - you have very stable geniuses who can think of things and not be driven mad themselves, but then those ideas - which less stable people would've bounced off, been deflected from, before they finished them to a quality level where they become dangerous - can get buffed up to finished structures that - well, I don't actually know."
"Look, there's an experiment that gets done every five years, just to check that things are still the way they were, settle rolling prediction markets with a five-year periodicity. A bunch of relatively smart people who are going into cryosuspension anyways, volunteer to hang around a bunch of rank-one Keepers. Not being deliberately told infohazards, just overhearing rank-one Keepers casually talk among themselves. And, like, actually listening to those conversations and trying to think about them, not just sticking their fingers into their ears and playing safe, because that was the experimental instruction."
"And, yep, normal people sure do end up unstable and unhappy and depressed and frozen up and anxious and starting to believe increasingly weird ideas built out of pieces of that fascinating stuff they overheard."
"The same thing happens, we're told, when rank-two Keepers checking out early are placed to overhear unfiltered rank-seven conversations. Assuming they're otherwise experimentally-instructed to go ahead and think about those things, of course."
"Keepers are still operating in a world full of dangerous ideas that will destabilize their minds, that they're not allowed to know yet. They're just sufficiently super-adult to be totally fine hanging around dozens of boxes saying 'reading my secrets will destroy you'. Instead of children, who shouldn't be told that the box exists. Or ordinary dath ilani adults, who could be safely given a box, but would be disturbed and weirded out about having it resting next to their bed every night, and would be noticeably better off not being given the box if they were never supposed to open it anyways."
"Or sometimes just, there's secrets deadly to society as a whole, even if they're not deadly to the people who bear them. And that's - something Keepers respect, because it's their job, the duty they're taking up, as the trade they made to be told. Or just because they're - what you'd call Good, I'd guess, though I doubt it's anything at all like Lastwall."
lintamande: " - and that is an important theological revelation," Meritxell says. "- sorry. I appreciate that you're trying to give me advice and it's probably good advice and yet what I want to do right now is run to Subirachs and tell her that because it's possible that it's an important teaching of Asmodeus that was taught to me much worse than that because no one knew that was true, to teach it that way.
...I should probably also talk with her about the Keeper thing."
Keltham: "Uh huh. How sure are you that you're not about to destabilize Subirachs? Maybe there's a reason you weren't told that theological revelation in the form I spoke it just now."
"You want to be a Golarion pseudo-Keeper trainee? It's your job now to see that possibility yourself without my having to point it out to you, Meritxell!"
lintamande: She flinches. " - okay, one, if you want us to not check theological realizations with a priest then you are going to break Pilar, actually, arbitrary amounts of caution or having to write it up straight for the Most High in all Golarion are fine but she belongs to Asmodeus and she's not going to do well having to judge for herself which things His church ought to know about. And two, I need you to not give me advice and tests at the same time, not right now, everything's kind of painful and confusing right now and I can either be trying to think clever thoughts that'll make you impressed with me or trying to be confused out loud at you but if you're looking for the first then I won't be able to breathe enough to do the second, and if you're making decisions off how I sound when I'm confused out loud then I need to be confused out loud anonymously at someone who won't. That's why I wish it'd happened in a couple months, your sense of me wouldn't be dominated by this."
Keltham: "Risking the top person in the entire Church sounds crazy to me, especially given the way most of Golarion seems to be structured. Who overrides Aspexia Rugatonn if she goes nuts? I'd consider Lrilatha or - Gorthaklok? - a more obvious candidate if they're allowed to do that. If not, we ask Subirachs or Maillol if they're willing to throw themselves in the line of fire."
"Discard the entire notion of thinking clever thoughts that impress me. You don't have the spare capacity to juggle that and the rest of this problem."
Keltham is going to look and sound a lot more forceful right now than Meritxell has previously seen him, by a pretty wide margin.
(If she can't take this much pressure she should not try to be a Keeper. Keltham is sure it gets worse than this. Keepers are exactly the people you don't have to be careful with.)
lintamande: Meritxell doesn't actually seem further intimidated. "If she goes nuts Asmodeus un-clerics her. That's - the entire point of clerics, it's that you know every day. But also, the reason you take it to her is that she almost definitely already has a procedure for this, because you are not the first weird situation the church has dealt with. I don't know what the procedure is, I don't actually even think it'd be worth guessing, but I do predict that 'we didn't tell the Church about this implication of dath ilan that's of great theological importance or else heretical, because we thought the containment procedures we could come up with ourselves were better than yours' would not impress her."
Keltham: "Good point if that's reliable."
"Proposed protocol. You write up a description of what you think you learned, that doesn't give away the contents of what you learned. That's the header; body text is the contents of what you learned that you think is theologically important. That gets routed to Lrilatha first, who can decide whether to route it to Aspexia or Subirachs next. If Lrilatha isn't allowed to output any action, it gets routed back to you, I review stuff to make sure it discloses the dangers appropriately, and then it goes to Maillol because he can be overridden by Subirachs if he goes unstable."
"If you're concerned about spending social capital, I'll attach my own note that I requested this because we've got no clue what the procedures are around things that are maybe possibly infohazards, and whatever object-level route the information flows along here will hopefully be future-reusable without wasting important people's time."
lintamande: " - I would like your own note, yeah, because that's a terrifying amount of important peoples' time for what, if it's not heretical, I expect to amount to 'a better way a specific precept gets taught in wizarding schools'. But the process seems reasonable for things more important than that, and worth establishing in advance."
Keltham: "All right. I propose you go do that, I write my own cover note, we exchange docs when we're done, package them together and send them off."
"I'll do my daily wizard practice and scrolls practice, once I finish my cover note. Should be less time than your docs."
lintamande: "Sure."
Meritxell expects any Asmodean will see it, from Keltham's description, but she spells it out just in case. Dath ilan might have pretensions of Lawful Good, but that's Asmodeanism, at the very core; that hierarchy is natural and wholly inevitable, that it'll impose itself - if one doesn't try to impose it externally - in the wholly unavoidable form of ideas that make people useless and confused, and among people who've mastered those ideas deeper, truer ideas that'd make those people useless and confused; a hierarchy you cannot climb above your appointed place in because it's made of your own weakness. It's proof that the inevitable human condition is as a subordinate, with either the strength not to look up at what you should not see or a strong hand keeping it from you.
It must be something she didn't properly believe, for it to be such a relief to learn. But even if others lack that particular failing she thinks there's something in this of interest to the church.
Security: Security's frankly kind of confused about what the Secure thing to do is, here, but fine, if it's going to Contessa Lrilatha he'll wait on otherwise reporting it through channels.
Keltham could ask to see what Meritxell is sending off; Meritxell probably needs to write a fake version of this.
lintamande: Yep, she's on it. Alter-Meritxell was confused in school about the teaching that there's hierarchy among humans in a way even ideal conditions couldn't alter, and that in a necessary hierarchy it's a great virtue to learn to live in your place rather than seeking a higher one. This felt adjacent to various false things she was assured it was not, and the explanations she got were unsatisfactory, though she assumed it was probably a case where there was a good answer her teacher didn't happen to know. She wonders now if the enclosed description of Keltham's is the thing Hell was saying, there.
If Security thinks that's still too risky she could alter it further? They don't have a full theology of alter-Asmodeanism for her to work off; they'd need Sevar.
Security: Okay, you know, given the way this actually seems totally safe, Security's making the call that Sevar needs to approve the alter-Asmodean version Keltham sees. Indulging Keltham's attempts at Security thinking was fine back when avoiding a lie wasn't going to cost the real Cheliax anything, but a risk to Sevar's game is more than this nonsense is worth.
Carissa Sevar: Yes, please do alert her of heresies currently being entertained on Project Lawful.
She thinks they want to claim 'hierarchy in Hell' rather than 'among humans'. She doesn't have a full justification of this, but it seems like claims by the Church about what Cheliax should be like will prompt more questions from Keltham he could reasonably expect someone to be able to answer.
Keltham: Keltham's got his cover letter ready for her and is otherwise continuing in his scroll practice. He checks over her own work when he's got a moment, writes some corrections to her version of what he said, and hands it back.
To be clear: Keltham is not saying that Meritxell needs to get an Owl's Wisdom right away. She is clear to wait on this message getting routed, so that she can, very likely, talk with Subirachs about this.
lintamande: Yeah, Meritxell thinks that unless she shouldn't talk to Subirachs for some reason it's better to do it before she gets an Owl's Wisdom.
Her letter is all ready and can be sent off.
Keltham: Make it so.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 23 (19) / Afternoon
Keltham: Spectroscope improvisation day!
Let's see if they can get this to the point where they can both see the lines of emitted spectra from heated materials, and also, see the corresponding absorption lines when you shine light through! That's because photons are emitted by electrons falling from orbitals energized above minimum, back down; and electrons can correspondingly absorb photons of that frequency to jump up.
Once they've got enough spectrographic detail, they can probably start to figure out where Golarion materials are on the Periodic Table; Keltham doesn't actually remember how the regularities work, but he knows they're there and don't require advanced math to notice.
Incidentally, do Golarion miners already have ways to tell exactly which minerals and metals are in which bits of ore? Because if not, they can just burn ores under a spectroscope and find out exactly which elements could be mined from that kind of ore, in principle, if they could find a way to extract it.
lintamande: None of these people know anything about mining but the question and idea can be passed on to project consultants who are.
Does it matter what kind of light you shine? Are all magical lights going to be just as good as each other?
Keltham: The light has to cover the full spectrum from red to blue for absorption lines to be noticeable, but they can determine whether light has that property by shining it through the spectroscope.
...of course that's assuming magical light behaves the same way as regular light at all, but if it doesn't, they can use mundane fire.
Also dath ilan has specialized burners that generate less light-noise when you put materials in them to burn under a spectroscope - less light from the fire and more light from the burning material; probably something about the fuel. If they know of magical fire sources that burn with less luminous flame, that's potentially useful for spectroscopy.
In related thoughts, they seem to be making progress here and spending multiple days on this stuff. Project Lawful is getting to the point where they could use an expert alchemist on call to answer pure alchemy questions, even if they're not Lawful and not able to mentally organize the research. Or an early-professional alchemist if a real expert would be too expensive...
Uh, Keltham may possibly have been something of an idiot here, is it perhaps the case that an expert alchemist in Golarion does not cost the same amount per week as ten Security wizards?
lintamande: (There's some brief panic about whether to change these numbers? No? Okay -)
- the alchemist would be more expensive than a Security wizard but way cheaper than ten, yeah.
Keltham: Okay, then Keltham wasn't quite as stupid as he was worried about, but yeah, they're getting to the point where having an alchemist on-staff and Security-cleared seems worth it.
Back to spectroscopy. The 'diamonds' in Lady Avaricia's earrings are kinda tiny for this purpose, they need either a much larger version of this crystal or to find a different crystal... there should definitely be some cheap crystals that would work for this?
lintamande: Really big diamonds are ludicrously expensive. Quartz might work? Quartz is cheaper.
Keltham: Let's try it.
And if quartz doesn't work out of the box, let's try Prestidigitating it.
Keltham's got to remember to just cheat the shit out of everything, there's no point in not cheating when you've got magic.
Can somebody tell him about 'bound fire elementals'? If Keltham is right that they have max temperatures rather than max added heat, keeping the sulfuric acid process at the reference temperature (above water-melt by 450% of the difference between water-melt and water-boil &c) could be as simple as getting exactly the right quality of 'bound fire elemental'.
Depending on how tunable they are, they could also be useful for the fire source in flame spectroscopy.
lintamande: Fire elementals are sort of grub-like creatures from the Elemental Plane of Fire. They do burn at a specific temperature rather than output a specific heat; they generally need to be in a metal containment box when on the Material Plane, which lets the heat through but doesn't allow various contaminants to affect them or allow them to wander off lighting everything on fire as they go; they're not generally used for light for that reason. Larger ones burn hotter.
Keltham: Helpful that some of the new candidates knew fire elementals did have a temperature, though obviously if that wasn't true nobody would need fuel for forges.
If they can get a fire elemental close to 450%-of-etcetera, that might solve one of the major steps towards synthesizing concentrated oil of vitriol.
Asmodia: (Asmodia is not especially happy about yet another ORANGE STATEMENT going up on her wall, now they have to make sure that Keltham doesn't see or read about the way that fire elementals are actually used. But Sevar already told Keltham fire elementals exist, way back in the first hours when Keltham asked about the hot water in the archduke's villa, and fire elementals are obviously-to-him useful... so, Asmodia supposes the best avenue is to lock them in a box and make sure they never try to talk to him.)
(Why does she feel weirdly bad about that.)
(She guesses she knows why she feels weirdly bad about that.)
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 23 (19) / Evening
Keltham: Keltham gets in some martial arts practice after work, and then spends the evening with Carissa, having some uncomplicated sex with her. He doesn't want to have complicated sex all the time. His Carissamodel is telling him to not even ask her if that's okay with her - although also it is fine and in fact she prefers it that way - but he needs to not ask and just look to his own desires.
He'll then mention - without giving any of Meritxell's specific details, obviously - his sense and his worry that one of his Keeper candidates basically, like, manufactured a bunch of uncomfortable realizations inside herself, and made herself be distressed about them, because she thought that was how a Keeper would work.
He could be wrong. It just didn't ring true to him. Feelings like that have ever been wrong. He's not particularly thinking Conspiracy, his brain obviously did suggest that but the Conspiracy has zero visible motive here.
Pulling this anonymous candidate from the Keeper program on that basis seems - like taking a decision away from her. Maybe she'd be fine. Maybe this is something that lots of Golarion Keeper-candidates will do, maybe they all have to get past that. Maybe all of his other candidates will also exhibit a bunch of warning signs and if Keltham removes everyone like that he'll have no Keeper candidates left. He wouldn't have been disturbed the same way if that pattern had shown up in his regular ilani-in-training, that's like a normal sort of mistake a kid would make - but -
Keepers are supposed to be better than this, according to Keltham's cultural standard. Keeper candidates are supposed to be better than this before they start trying to be Keepers.
Keltham has a bad feeling about this.
...It's just, not the kind of clear-cut clearly-correct bad feeling, where it actually seems like you plainly ought to listen to it and stop.
Carissa Sevar: "Is the bad feeling, if it's accurate, that this person is going to hurt herself? That she's going to end up in a position like Keepers have, holding power over others, and use it in a way that hurts them?"
Keltham: "I guess - mostly like - that she won't succeed at what she's trying to do..."
"I suppose if I put it that way, it's not my business to tell her to stop, at all. It's just, Keeper training is very high on the list of interesting things to try where you don't try it unless the prediction market says you are extremely likely to succeed, but -"
"I still have the bad feeling after I've said all that."
"Maybe I'm worried that she does succeed and it turns her into something she shouldn't have been. She has very nearly zero context on all of this. Maybe no matter how much I keep telling myself it's her risk to take, my brain just doesn't believe it's reasonable to try to delegate management of a risk about which I know something and she knows nothing."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa leans on him quietly while she thinks, on several levels, about this.
"What does it mean, to turn someone into something they shouldn't have been?"
Keltham: "I don't know because, like, either that's secret, or just not a thing I happened to look up answers to, and I don't know how to put it into words because - you don't really have very much of a model of how minds work yet - and this isn't a very explicit model even within that, it's an intuitive sense of something that mastered Law skills but got itself twisted up into an unpleasant weird unnatural shape in the process, because those skills - didn't resonate with it, weren't natural to it, and it forced itself to master it anyways."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm not sure that anything I'm thinking of is relevant, or helpful, but - a thing about Abrogail, from the kind of person that she is, is that if she participated in shaping someone - if part of the structure of their mind is something she built, when they were in her power, when it was her responsibility - then she'd be very upset about them getting put back together wrong. It seems likely, to me, that that'll also be true about you, once you get to the point where you want to do that, feel competent to do that. And I wonder if - it's wrong for Keltham, to participate in shaping someone while suspecting that they're not going to end up shaped right, even if - even if that's hard to ground in being wrong for them or being wrong for Good..."
Keltham: "I'm not sure I'm Evil enough, yet, to just make the decision my way because I don't want to hurt someone. I'm not sure I want to become Evil enough that I go around just not hurting people and protecting them because I want to."
"She's her own stuff. She's not my stuff. I don't necessarily get to decide what to do with her."
Carissa Sevar: " - yes, but maybe back up a little? I'm - not particularly thinking you ought to kick her out, I think Hell can fix it no matter how bad it is so I'm not worried for her sake and for the Project's sake it's probably good to see what happens if people who want it, but are not necessarily ideally shaped for it, try it. And she's her stuff, like you said. But even if 'this is bad for Kelthams' isn't a reason you want to use as an input to decide, it seems important, if it's right."
Keltham: "Yeah."
"Fair."
"I feel so much like I'm trapped in an awful void of not knowing where anything is, how anything actually works, and if any of my fears are real."
"...which is what ordinary pre-paradigmatic Science! feels like, I guess, when the objects of discovery and manipulation are people that you care about at all."
Carissa Sevar: - hug. "- now I'm thinking of solutions to that but they all seem like very stupid solutions that would actually be a hilariously bad idea. For example you could declare Keeper training is only for people who are incredibly annoying so you won't get attached to them emotionally."
Keltham: "So, what, ask Governance to send us somebody who I'd find very annoying, but who had a lot of mathematical talent and a Lawful frame of mind?"
Carissa Sevar: "Oh no. I changed my mind. This is how we get Keeper Avaricia and I don't want Keeper Avaricia."
Keltham: "You think Lady Avaricia is annoying?"
Carissa Sevar: " - do you not find her annoying?"
And here she'd been assuming Ione was WRONG about the TROPES thing.
Keltham: "- she seems like a pretty standard '????????'* which, I guess, doesn't really have much of a Taldane translation now that I go looking for it."
"Um, person who finds it hugely painful to be the slightest bit tactful to anyone or hold back her thoughts, and is constantly noticing how everything in Civilization is falling way short of her standards for how it ought to look namely perfect. You don't meet any of her standards either, but she thinks that way about everyone, so it isn't anything personal, or really about the person you yourself are at all."
(*) Dath ilan doesn't quite have the concept that some other places might call by names like 'autistic', because it's a pretty different phenomenon when the weirdos in question have INT 22 and WIS 16, and also are embedded in a larger Civilization that doesn't think about weirdness the same way as some other places; namely weirdness = difference = specialization direction = exploit for comparative advantage.
Carissa Sevar: - and is that a romance trope. This is a very important question.
" - huh. That does seem like it ...describes her. I haven't met anyone else like that but I wouldn't make that a strong prediction about how rare they are because they sure wouldn't go to the Worldwound. And is the idea that dath ilani - don't find it annoying because they know the complementary ways to act? Or because it's common enough you know they're not doing it at you?"
Keltham: "I guess the second one, that it's not directed at me? It hadn't particularly occurred to me that I should find a ???????? annoying especially while they were in the middle of helping me out with chemistry research. But sure, if she treated only me that way and seemed to feel like everybody else except me did meet her standards, that would be annoying, yeah."
Carissa Sevar: "Huh, okay. - I don't have an issue working with her in class, you don't have to like people for that, but I definitely wouldn't expect to end up friends and in fact was assuming she disliked me specifically-rather-than-generally.
I wonder if she knows she's a ????????."
Keltham: "I mean, presumably Lady Avaricia knows who she is, what with her having lived that whole life from the inside and all. Not having a word for a category to categorize yourself with, or not knowing the statistical commonality of other people resembling you in some dimension, isn't the same as not knowing what you are. Asmodia didn't have a word for 'asexual' or 'demisexual', but she knew that she'd only felt a couple of flashes of possible sexual attraction over the course of her life."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa decides not to make the observation that Avaricia's weirdness might also be explainable-including-to-Avaricia by her being the heiress to a county; Asmodia's right they don't want to look too closely at that. "I'm sure she has noticed that she thinks everyone else is deficient and disappointing, but I wonder if she's noticed that other people don't feel that way about each other, and wondered why she is different in that respect. ...I know to a dath ilani that's an extremely obvious mental move, but it's not, really, in Cheliax, any more than I thought to check whether Avaricia disliked me specifically or generally. You can be quite smart and lack that habit entirely."
Keltham: "Fair. I'll check in with her at breakfast tomorrow. Nice thing about ???????? is that you don't have to bother with being at all tactful yourself, around them. They're not going to be happy with you no matter how carefully you phrase anything, so there's no point in bothering, and they don't expect you to do any better."
"Lady Avaricia should actually be easier to be around than most other people, once you understand all the places where you don't need to put in any effort because the normal social thing you'd be trying to do is impossible?"
"...though I should probably explain to everybody else that it's nothing personal, and they shouldn't try to be tactful to Lady Avaricia or make her seem socially happier with them."
Carissa Sevar: "That does seem like a helpful announcement to make."
......probably not a romance trope.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 23 (19) / Long Night
Carissa Sevar: "So the good news is, Keltham doesn't think you're annoying."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Obviously Keltham doesn't think she's annoying. He's not as full of petty resentment as the rest of the people in charge here.
Carissa Sevar: "He has concluded that you have a not-uncommon innate personality type where you cannot bear to be tactful or courteous, ever, to anyone, but don't care if anyone's courteous to you either, and are perpetually disappointed with the world for not meeting your standards. He's used to such people and doesn't mind hiring them, and wants to make an announcement to the class so that no one mistakenly thinks you're being rude to them specifically rather than as the instance standing in front of you of the general inadequacy of the world."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I am trying to figure out what that implies about dath ilan and not getting very far."
Carissa Sevar: Shrug. "Not your job. Your job is to have that personality for the duration of the project. This is, as I'm sure you realize, very good news, don't ruin it by trying to convince Keltham that actually you think you're superior to other people for political reasons."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: You keep rounding off what I think of you to things that are easier to tell yourself aren't true.
She's not going to say that to the Chosen of Asmodeus.
"Understood. Is anything more known about this personality that I have."
Carissa Sevar: She hands her the transcript. "This is it. Listen carefully when Keltham explains it to the rest of the class, and then work with what you have. All that Splendour's got to be good for something."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "It makes your underlings with excessively fancy headbands nervous when I improvise."
Carissa Sevar: "- oh, grow up. Yes, if you stress Asmodia out she might light you on fire, even if you didn't have any other obvious plays to make instead. Nothing really bad will happen as long as Keltham's happy." She has a vague floating sense she'd have given a different answer a week ago but she's not sure which Carissa is right and this one seems Eviller, so, probably that's fine.
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Understood," she says again, and waits to be dismissed.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 24 (20) / Breakfast
Keltham: "Good morning, Lady Avaricia. How is the Project disappointing you today?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Really, Keltham, I'm still coming to grips with the fact that the government went and looked for the most promising students in the whole country and this is what they turned up! None of these people are all that clever or all that competent! I'm used to people not being clever or competent but usually there isn't any reason they should be! Also I'm not sure why you'd call your egg preparation deviled eggs if it's not deviled eggs. There's nothing wrong with calling it 'local artisanal stuffed egg presentation' or something."
Keltham: "Just to verify my flailing attempts to read you, I'm reading the deviled eggs part as sarcasm because of how I asked the question, but the part about you being disappointed in the competence of the people here is sincere, check?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Yes. Should I just simplify your life and tell you at all times if I am being sarcastic."
Keltham: "Yes, if it's important. Do I really strike you as being reliably able to figure that out on my own?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "No, you don't, but usually people are insulted when you point out that you are giving them special assistance because of their apparent incompetence."
Keltham: "Yeah, about that. Want to hear a theory based on knowledge out of dath ilan that doesn't actually describe you correctly, is hopelessly wrong about a lot of important details, and that I obviously didn't quite understand when somebody smarter than me in dath ilan explained it to me, but might nonetheless help all the other idiots on this Project feel less insulted by you?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "They shouldn't feel insulted by me! They should feel disappointed in themselves! - yes, sure."
Keltham: Huh. That's not what a usual ???????? would say, but maybe it works out differently if you grow up in Golarion and nobody around you knows what a ???????? is.
"Dath ilan has a number of people who sound to me a lot like you do, what with my being too stupid to tell the obvious differences. They're called '????????' and are disproportionately represented in more technical fields. Nobody within 6 INT of themselves ever meets their standards, and obviously only very few people like that will ever find some way to spend their whole day being around people 6 INT smarter than themselves. All of the people they know and most of the things they can afford are imperfect, and they are constantly seeing the imperfections. Ever keeping quiet about that feels like they're pretending, lying, not allowed to be themselves."
"Civilization has recognized protocols for dealing with ???????? so they can stick around on your Project being slightly less horribly incompetent at chemistry than everybody else. Key point one, it's understood that the ???????? doesn't hate you personally. They act to everyone like that, unless they're randomly dealing with somebody who has +6 INT on them. It has nothing to do with your individual details, except insofar as all details of your personality are broken and wrong. Key point two, nothing you do is ever going to satisfy them, give them what they're looking for, or make them act socially happy around you, so you can actually just relax and stop trying. They don't even want you to try, since your horrible parody of an attempt to interface with them socially is just going to annoy them even further. You might as well just be your own self around them and speak your own mind to them."
"Leaving aside how much I messed up my attempt to interface with you socially, there, does it sound around as true as any other understanding I could reasonably manage to arrive at about you, given how badly I'm likely to be at phrasing it?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: " - I guess? At least, it's true that if everyone around here got a high-tier headband then they'd be impressive and pleasant to be around, and it's true that I don't particularly care for everybody to try to be friendly, and if you said it to my mother, who actually isn't incompetent, she'd probably say that it sounds about right. Though I could shut up about the project, if you wanted me to, it's just that then everyone would go around being wrongly pleased with how well the project was running."
Keltham: "Huh. Frankly, I'm surprised that your mother meets your standards. I was going to pitch that nothing on Project Lawful would ever satisfy you, but that if Golarion could develop its own Golarion version of Civilization, that might eventually generate some people you could bear to be around and you'd have the wealth to be around them..."
"Does your mother have, like, an artifact headband or something."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "She has a very good headband. Not something like the Queen's that was custom made in Hell, but it's +4 to intelligence and charisma. I was very excited about your proposal for making spellsilver cheap and giving all of the people in the world +6 headbands, I think I'd probably like a lot of them if we pull that off."
Keltham: "First of all, it's also going to take a lot of Law education, second, +6 to INT takes the average person up to INT 16."
"Based on dath ilan's experience, I would not say to get your hopes that high. What you're describing isn't even dath ilan, and you would not be happy living in a random city area in dath ilan."
"But there are any places in Civilization where you'd be happier, and Golarion can have some of those, maybe."
"Anyways, I was thinking I should make a quick announcement to the Project about how to interface with you. You want to be there so you can issue corrections, or not be there so you don't have to listen to me mangle it?"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: That feels like a test. Too bad she has so little to go on here. "I'll be there."
Keltham: Then Keltham will make a general announcement that Lady Avaricia hates all of everything rather than them personally and they don't even have to try to be polite to her!*
(*) Not the way Keltham phrases it, but...
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Lady Avaricia seethes in peaceable silence.
Keltham: Any corrections with respect to all the stuff Keltham horribly screwed up, Lady Avaricia?
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: She'll see if anyone does anything really obnoxious because of how they interpreted what Keltham said, and then correct if relevant.
Keltham: He's sure they will!
Ione Sala: ...Ione wants to think something along the lines of "That could have gone a lot worse" but she is not entirely sure that it has not.
Pilar : Is Lady Avaricia actually a trope? Or for that matter, actually a '????????'?
Curse of Laughter: Pilar should know her curse can't answer that!
Keltham: After breakfast, Keltham receives reply mail from Egorian. The basic guideline is that anything which seems maybe-possibly-dangerous, especially if it intersects with Asmodean theology, should be routed to Aspexia Rugatonn. Unless it seems to be actively driving mortals mad, in which case Contessa Lrilatha should Teleport in. Meritxell is cleared to discuss this topic with Subirachs; it was not in fact dangerous, but Keltham was correct to check and is encouraged to continue checking.
Aspexia Rugatonn: (Aspexia Rugatonn was in fact a bit nonplussed, and slightly worried, about how Meritxell seemed to think this was an important theological revelation.
There are all sorts of reasons to sort mortals and devils into hierarchy? Most of which are benefits for the tyranny, rather than benefits allowed to accrue to the slaves inside it; and the greatest reason by far, is that Asmodeus wishes it so. The notion that hierarchy exists for the benefit of the slave is very much the sort of lie that Aspexia is worried will disintegrate in the wind of Keltham's Law - a point she dares not press yet within Project Lawful, because it is not clear that Sevar herself is ready to hear.
Well, it would be to the benefit of Pilar, perhaps; for all those many reasons including the one that Keltham described. But most mortals are not Pilar, and Asmodeus does not withhold His hand from them therefore.
It is perhaps a useful fact that Meritxell finds this theological presentation more persuasive? Useful, but also disturbing, for it accepts dath ilan's premises into itself; not least the premise that secrecy is made for the slave's benefit, and so that what should be done, is whatever is to the slave's benefit.
Future such revelations should indeed go to Aspexia before Subirachs, if there is no emergency. There is not so much distance in possibility, between the strange case of something proving unexpectedly persuasive to Meritxell, and some such revelation proving strangely persuasive to Subirachs.)
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 24 (20) / Morning Lecture