5.5.1 - my fun research project has more existential risk than I anticipated

Asmodia: "Welcome to Project Lawful. At least we have cookies. And if we ever run out of cookies, one of Keltham's likely romantic interests can suddenly appear with additional cookies - namely the extremely devout Asmodean, who was chosen as oracle by Cayden Cailean, whose curse, which we call Snack Service, has really been quite helpful in, for example, ridding Egorian of Lawful Good spies, and giving apparently good advice about how to corrupt Keltham further, and also offering snacks. Wherever Keltham was placed inside Golarion or somewhere larger than that, it somehow rendered that a totally reasonable thing for a Chaotic Good god to do around a Lawful Evil project."

"If we're inside a dath ilani romance novel, it's probably not one that takes itself very seriously. Hopefully I don't get smote for saying it. But, you know, the sort of being who could do all that, could probably see me thinking it even if I didn't say it. So I might as well say it."

Korva Tallandria: "Do you, uh, want me to voice my first ten objections to this theory, so that you can explain to me why they are stupid."

Asmodia: "Oh, yes."

Korva Tallandria: "Okay."

"Independent of what I might think of all of the specific pieces of evidence you just brought up - am I getting it right that Keltham is the one who came up with this theory, and he came up with it because he felt like he was in a dath ilani romance novel, after Cheliax spent an enormous amount of resources providing him with a harem of vulnerable pretty wizard girls who could keep up with him intellectually but also hung on his every word and wanted to have sex with him, specifically because the Crown was trying to bribe him into helping us by making his stay here as closely resemble his wildest fantasies as possible. Because that seems like the sort of thing that might skew someone's sense of whether they were in a romance novel."

Asmodia: "They provided him the harem within hours of him arriving in Golarion. Transcripts show it was Sevar who first made the suggestion, after reading Keltham's mind about how his own Civilization hadn't valued himself and his kind of people, and how he'd wanted to become rich and give dath ilan's next generation hundreds of himself whether dath ilan liked that or not. Sevar's proposal was to seduce Keltham with a sense of himself and his kind of person being valued by Cheliax more than Civilization had. Maillol made the call after getting a vision from Asmodeus, which I don't think had that specifically in it, but we could ask him."

"Keltham wasn't a cleric then, so we have a full transcript of what went through his mind at the point he realized why there were so many pretty girls around him. Namely, he thought Cheliax wanted his heritable variations for high Intelligence. He thought that was a totally reasonable thing to do with an alien visitor and that his Civilization would try the same thing."

"The first point at which Keltham showed overt outward signs of suspicion was when he had everyone in the class independently rate how much we thought we had an unusual background or a weird problem for him to solve, that he'd find out about if he romanced us. And also, we had to guess what we thought everyone else's average answer would be."

"We didn't have eyes on his thoughts then and didn't understand why, didn't know how to game anything. The call was made to have us answer independently, in hopes that would look right to him. Keltham's prediction, which came true from his perspective, was that there'd be 3-5 special girls only some of whom knew about some of the others."

Korva Tallandria: "I'm not suggesting that the harem of pretty girls is his explicit reason for believing any of this; he's not that stupid. I'm suggesting that being surrounded by a harem of pretty girls might still affect his sense of how similar his overall situation is to a romance novel, and that it might affect the sorts of theories one generates about their circumstances.""As far so many of his girls being special - which couldn't have been the thing that originally roused his suspicion, unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline here - almost all of them are special by way of being oracled by particular gods, right? It was already otherwise obvious that multiple gods were trying to court Keltham. And if the person you're trying to court is a teenage boy who is more vulnerable to love than most, who sure seems to be making pretty full use of the harem that was provided to him, and whose information about the world and contact with other people is being filtered by Cheliax - well, I don't think that it's a particularly surprising tack to take. The fact that it matches something that happens in the specific romance novels that Keltham has read and remembers, the ones that made an impression on him, is information about Keltham, information about how to make an impression on him that other gods could, in principle, have accessed. That doesn't require us to actually be in a romance novel, it just requires the romance novels that Keltham reads to reflect something of how one might go about courting him in reality.""Whenever Keltham interacts with information about the world that isn't either part of the web of lies we've spun up around him, or a consequence of a god trying to court him - not literally always, I guess, but often - he doesn't seem to act like it's narratively consonant, or like the world makes sense to him as a story. Sometimes he acts like it can't possibly be true, sometimes he acts like it just doesn't make any sense to him, and sometimes it's so alien that he automatically writes a different version of events in his head, one that has only a very tenuous relationship with whatever is actually happening."

Asmodia: That's a dangerous line of thinking, if Asmodia's earlier guess was right about what her patrons might be trying to conceal.

"At the point where Cayden Cailean decides that His best option is cursing the Project's most devout Asmodean with snack powers - which Keltham reacted to with considerable surprise and astonishment, not with a sense of being courted, so far as I can see - we have to ask if Keltham was put somewhere that this was made to be a clever thing for Cayden Cailean to do, I think? Obviously Cayden Cailean from His own perspective is trying to accomplish something. There's a question of what. But there's a larger question of how it came to be the case that this thing could be best accomplished by giving Pilar cookie powers."

"We don't believe this theory because Keltham believes it, we believe it because the theory's predictions keep coming true. Keltham guessed, knew, that I was an asexual before any of us knew what that was, because we appear in dath ilani romance novels like that, so I lied to him and told him that I'd felt a couple of flashes of desire in my life."

"And I have, at this point, met Keltham. He likes confusing people. Supposedly it's to train strong minds that don't weakly rely on being told how reality works. I think it may be what dath ilan does with all its repressed sadism. Either way, the part where Keltham is in a really strange world to him fits with his theory. The part where we're all lying to him and he has to figure that out fits with his theory, which is why we keep trying to convince him that he's not in an eroLARP. Though one of the rays of hope for Cheliax is that Keltham has also said it's possible that he's just the oblivious boyfriend of our story about mastering his Law."

"The other ray of hope is that Keltham is already going outside of what dath ilan thinks is good sexual behavior. Maybe this is a story about our corrupting him, and we just have to do that before time runs out on his inevitably seeing through the lie."

Korva Tallandria: "I don't mean that Keltham is confused by us lying to him. I mean that - okay, the theory here is that all of Golarion, possibly the entire set of planes we have access to, was created for the benefit of telling this specific inane story about a normal teenage boy from another universe who is suddenly extraordinary and surrounded by extremely special girls who are fawning over him, which is all secretly a plot by the forces of hell to corrupt him to Evil, which might or might not work depending on our author's taste for tragedy or comedy, and also whose side they're on in the first place. Do I have that right, the scope of this theory?"

Asmodia: "Keltham thinks that reality is very large and we were selected for him, not created. Which does make a difference to the Law of our strategic playing, though only at the level where the Most High oversees all our moves. In particular, it matters whether, if we consider doing something that would cause Keltham to have retroactively never arrived here, the alternative we're negotiating against is this world having never existed, or this world never getting a Keltham."

"Leaving that aside, I'd point out that Keltham is, in fact, a normal teenage boy who suddenly ended up in a very weird-to-him universe where he's extraordinary and has a lot of extremely special girls fawning over him, as is secretly a plot by the forces of hell to corrupt him to Evil. This part is not, in fact, in question. It's an observation, not an inference. The question is why. And the theory is that it's all part and parcel of the same force that put Keltham down at the Worldwound where Sevar would be the first person he'd talk to."

Korva Tallandria: "Sure, I agree that it happened. I suppose the idea of selection vs creation does punch some kind of hole in what I was about to say, but I'm going to say it anyway, just so it's said, because I haven't figured out how to think about the selection thing yet."

"If our world had been created specifically in order to engineer this story about Keltham - there's a lot going on in this world. It has a lot of elements that don't obviously match to any kind of story, but also a lot of elements that match to stories that are less stupid than this one. It sure looks, to me, like whoever created this world had better taste than an entity that would have this story as its endgame. Better stories have been told before, and more detailed, interesting, and sensible elements of reality have been introduced than the ones that make up whatever the Abyss is happening here. Probably that won't make sense as an objection when I've considered all the implications of the selection thing, or - whatever the reasoning was behind us having the ability to cause Keltham to have retroactively not landed in Golarion, given that he's already here, but - whatever."

"Raise you an alternative theory, not one I think is obviously true, but one that I've been thinking about for a couple days now and think ought to be considered. Have you heard of Hermea, beyond the name?"

Asmodia: "I don't even think I've heard of the name. Ostenso academy does not leave time for anything except studying and plotting."

Korva Tallandria: ...Korva is also from an elite wizard academy, but that's not worth commenting on.

"It's harder than most countries to find information on, maybe because it's one of the few countries that gives Cheliax a run for its money in terms of actual functionality as a society. Near as I can tell, though, Hermea is a young island nation, founded post-prophecy, run by a gold dragon - obviously lawful good - that only accepts the best and brightest applicants as immigrants. A society of only smart people, wise people, talented people, careful and meticulous people, and their children; a society that aims at the sort of heredity optimization that Keltham sometimes talks about, a glorious experiment meant to push the limits of what humankind is capable of."

"Keltham's obviously not from Hermea. But suppose that Hermea isn't the only experiment of its type. Suppose that someone or something more powerful than a gold dragon managed to seed another planet with another set of humanity's best and brightest, to see what they would create. Found some way to bathe the planet in antimagic, to push them in other directions. Found some way of shielding them from the interference of other gods. And then suppose that that shielding cracked, somehow, and one of our gods was able to pull one of these dath ilani here. Perhaps you'd pick a dath ilani who would be most useful to your servants here on Golarion, one who would find the environment of his ancestors to be something that matched his particular fantasies and suppressed desires beyond his wildest dreams. Certainly you would ensure that the circumstances of his arrival here were useful to your followers, as opposed to allowing him to immediately die. Suppose that Keltham was selected for us, rather than us for Keltham."

"It explains Keltham's observation that he's obviously a human like us, who eats our food and was born of some similar ancestry. It explains his planet's hidden history very neatly, if the planet doesn't have any. It explains why Keltham would have a latent desire for sadism despite being from a planet where people have apparently never heard of sadism or masochism. And it's less, uh, wild than supposing that we're living in a specifically dath ilani romance novel."

Asmodia: "The fact that Keltham's world sealed off their history - has never been far from my own mind," what with Asmodia having a strong sense, somehow, that it is her duty alone to also prevent the actual world of Golarion from ending up destroyed, "because of how it seemed to imply that - they must have encountered something incredibly dangerous, something dangerous just to know about, that they had to seal off all their history just to prevent anyone from hearing about again -"

"As for your brilliant new theory that dath ilan has no history, because their world was just constructed like that, not very long ago - do you know what I think of that?"

"Well, I'll tell you."

"I think it's ridiculously obvious in retrospect, is what I think."

"Keltham has given arguments about how his world could have ended up with their incredibly Lawful Good system already in place at the point where they sealed their history. Why it had to end up there, given that they had no magic. Those arguments always seemed a lot more stretched to me than everything else Keltham says."

"So, yeah, obviously, if you look over all of the larger reality, most of the places where everybody grows up believing that their world sealed off their history a while ago for mysterious reasons, are places where their whole world was created then. I'd say there'd obviously be some elaborate excuse but it doesn't sound like Keltham's world even had an excuse. And those worlds will also have an incredibly powerful and mysterious conspiratorial group, that knows the forbidden truth, and secretly controls the government, who were put there by whoever created that world to keep it on track for its intended purpose why did I not see this earlier."

Korva Tallandria: "Well - I am getting the sense that you've been very busy, these past few weeks. But - we don't have a reason why that's stupid, then?"

Asmodia: "I'm not seeing a reason. But then, I'm not the only one with eyes on this problem, so maybe somebody else thought of it, and saw a reason it obviously couldn't be true, and didn't tell me about it."

"If in fact that's just a brilliant idea that nobody else involved had at all, well, let me put it this way. If your ambitions previously involved living the rest of your life without ever once coming to the attention of the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn or Her Infernal Majestrix Queen Abrogail Thrune, you probably just blew it."

Korva Tallandria: "Well, we can't have everything."

Asmodia: Having her own Korva is great! She's so useful! Asmodia never wants to give up her shiny new Korva! She'd purchase three more if they were available! They actually help with things!

"What do we do now? File a report with the Most High? Tell Sevar as soon as she's not busy wrangling Keltham? Maaaybe but I have the feeling that, if we were Keltham, we'd be thinking of something else to do with this theory besides just running off and telling our superiors oh right I know we make advance predictions! What else does the Tallandrian Origin Theory of Dath Ilan predict, even in probabilities?"

Korva Tallandria: "Okay, um... oh, I remember one of the things that originally got me thinking about this was - how Keltham peppers in warnings against ways of thinking that often sound pretty clearly like things you'd observe in Golarion, even though he says he doesn't see the point of them, has never seen the point of them, and can't imagine anyone actually being that silly. Like the thing about certainty. That's not itself an advance prediction, but - if someone on his planet has knowledge of ours and is specifically warning against mistakes that we make, even if almost nobody on Keltham's world makes them, I wonder whether we're going to eventually see things that seem even more targeted at ways of thinking that are promoted on Golarion."

"...dath ilan having fewer plants and animals, but mostly ones we recognize. Because - because it'd be harder to move absolutely everything from our world to a different world, right, and if it wasn't relevant to the project, you probably wouldn't bother? I'm - trying to think of probabilities for these but I'm not sure the math part of my brain is entirely back up and running yet, and - I don't really know how you'd assign meaningful probabilities to these sorts of guesses anyway, exactly. I know you do one probability for each question for the world where dath ilan has nothing to do with us and really is old, and a different probability for the world in which it's an experimental offshoot. But - it's not like I know how many plants and animals a normal - hm, no, if it were a totally different planet I'd expect it to mostly have different animals than ours. I think. And about the same amount. Except that we already know that dath ilan also has humans, which suggests about the same kind of life."

Asmodia: "Don't worry about making up probabilities on likelihoods. Keltham didn't tell the rest of us how to do that either. You might as well say 'more or less likely' and leave the Law part to me once I know what I'm trying to do with the Law."

"Dath ilan has humans but no other sapient species. That's lower variety right there. But we could ask Keltham if his world has badgers or archaeopteryxes or bats or giant hamsters or octopi or squirrels or ujaheim... I mean, I'd have to think about the context in which to ask him, but that's an obvious thing to check. And see if his world has lots of animal species that Golarion's never heard of, but that sound like they wouldn't be all that related to the humans..."

"I think the really big question is whether, if dath ilan is that close by, a Greater Scry would let us look at it. Maybe one of the people Keltham's shown us in a Silent Image, like his writing-circle friends or, what was her name, Merrin."

Korva Tallandria: "Yeah, that's a good thing to check, now that you say it I'm surprised we haven't done it already. Although - can you scry people in an antimagic field, does it interfere with the sensor? Because I think they must be suppressing their arcane magic, somehow, in this scenario, and some ways of doing that might interfere with a scry."

Asmodia: "There's also the question of whether, if the creators there are much more powerful than golden dragons - we're willing to risk the scry being traced back to us -"

"Korva, we're not talking about something that's just slightly much more powerful than a golden dragon."

"Dath ilan isn't a country. We talk about it like it's a country, because their Civilization acts like it's one country, but it's a planet, with as many people on it as all of Golarion, Keltham showed you the view after getting into space. The antimagic field would have to be wrapping their entire planet. Maybe their entire star system, because Civilization set up outposts on dath ilan's moon and on the planet nearby. I mean, their Conspiracy could be lying to Keltham about that, I guess, but -"

"Keltham thought that history had been screened off decades ago, not millennia ago. Even if a gold dragon kidnapped a hundred people with Intelligence 18, which people in Golarion would've noticed - well maybe not if it was right in the middle of Aroden's death. But it doesn't sound like Keltham thought his world started out with much fewer people, a hundred years ago, and then bred really frantically to get a billion people... I guess the kidnappers could be duplicating people, like in Keltham's hints about 'anthropics'..."

"I think the fundamental question is where their knowledge of Law could've come from. The dath ilani wouldn't have had time to create it, there, it would have to be stolen from somewhere else."

Korva Tallandria: "...yeah, you're right, the timelines don't add up. Although, hey, that's something this theory predicts, that there is some incident in our past in which a bunch of really smart people disappeared at the same time, that neither of us currently knows about. If we do find something about that later, well."

"But they couldn't have gotten to a billion people in a hundred years, no, and if they were copying their population would be way more samey than ours is. - I guess we don't know that it isn't, Keltham's hardly been exposed to the full variety of Golarion's humanity. But it still doesn't really work, does it, even people who are as smart as our smartest wizards with headbands couldn't - forget about the math, he talked about flying machines, he's surprised by disease, he doesn't know how his people got past our level of metalworking because they already had it, when the screen was put in place. They had to have had time to build all of that."

"I can think of explanations, there, but it's hard to say how contrived they are. Maybe there were two phases to the project, one before the screen and one after; maybe it had always been planned that way, or maybe they screened off their origin story because it's about us, and they knew that if anyone ever found a way to unwisely contact us, the whole project could be jeopardized. Maybe there are multiple worlds of stolen people, and - but that doesn't work either, the population still doesn't fit, forget that."

"Could they have - supposing their patron is a god, could that god be the source of their Law? If the god had found some way to sequester a population away from other the other gods, to hide them - Keltham talks a lot about how the gods have a much better understanding of Law than we do, that Lawful gods are things that understand the Law perfectly. If there's some - force, interference from the Chaotic gods, or something, which is why our gods can't just tell us what Keltham is telling us, given that they already know - would that still have held, on a world that had a single godlike protector, and no balance of power between opposing factions?"

Asmodia: "So, several major important concepts, here."

"One, wrapping an entire planet or solar system in an antimagic field doesn't sound to me like any one god. That takes something on the scale of Pharasma, or whatever other beings are out there like Pharasma. Rovagug, maybe, had to be on that level, because otherwise Pharasma would've easily squashed it. So there's more than one thing like that in reality, and if there's two, there's more."

"Second - I don't know what the rules are like, but - it can't be as simple as Asmodeus and Abadar and Irori and Nethys and Cayden Cailean setting up a world somewhere, and cultivating the kind of knowledge that Keltham knows. They could've done that earlier, if it was possible, if it was allowed. If it's happening just now, it would - have to be because of prophecy breaking - and then we're back to there not being time, again, unless they're just pouring knowledge directly out of Axis and that has to break the rules - maybe something out of Azlant, another and hidden Aroden, emerging from hiding after prophecy shattered, would know that much -"

"But what makes more sense to me is if they're just - from outside, they're just not governed by our rules at all."

"Third, we still have the question of why Keltham is landing in a romance novel. Why not just throw some dath ilani who knew all that stuff better, straight to Egorian, and let Egorian torture or enchant them to give up all their knowledge? Why a teenage boy who died in a flying-item crash and only had a loose idea of how to synthesize one kind of important acid, why stick him next to Carissa Sevar, why bounce him to an asexual like he'd find in an eroLARP, and while we're on the subject, why did Asmodeus tell us not to enchant him and why did Cayden Cailean curse Pilar Pineda with cake powers?"

Korva Tallandria: "I don't know why Asmodeus told us not to enchant him. I'm not going to try to figure out what Cayden Cailean is doing, not right now, I don't think I know enough about him but I know that he's one of the human gods, he might just - think it's funny, or something."

"But I think there are good reasons to pick a teenage boy who isn't one of his people's best and brightest, if there's some reason I haven't thought of why you can't just enchant him and have to trick him instead. Because we couldn't run this operation on their best and brightest, they would see right through us in an hour, and they wouldn't want to work with us. Keltham is smart, and well-educated, but he's careless, he doesn't know all the right questions to ask, he lets things hang in the air that probably wouldn't get past an even smarter or more experienced person."

"I don't know why someone wouldn't have done this before. I agree that there would have to be a reason, and that the timelines don't work for the whole thing being after prophecy. I did think - I don't know whether something could have happened during Earthfall - but that's a really long time ago, it doesn't at all explain why their history would have been sealed off so recently. So -

" - did he say how many decades? It's not right when prophecy broke, is it?"

Asmodia: "Keltham didn't say. But that's definitely a probabilistic prediction right there. Not a certainty given your theory, but more probable - more 'likely' - if it's true than if it's not. If the timelines matched to within a single year, I'd be certain - not literally probability 1, but fifty times surer than I was before, in the 'posterior' -"

"I am so tempted right now to declare that alter-Cheliax would just tell Keltham about this theory so we could ask him about it, but that's a larger decision than I can make and I don't think I'd be making the decision for the right reasons. I'm just so desperately curious right now."

"To be clear, this is all well past the point where we'd do literally anything before reporting to Aspexia Rugatonn, but we should loop in Sevar before we do that and see if the Chosen has her own ideas to include in the report, or maybe shoots the whole thing down with some objection we didn't see."

"What's your thought on whether Keltham was placed by something with unbroken prophecy, and whether that required searching through a lot of worlds like Golarion to find one world where events would play out like they did? If that's true - does it mean that some other part of your theory is false, or less probable?"

Korva Tallandria: "I'm not entirely sure I understand the question. We mean 'worlds like Golarion' as in - the way that Castrovel is like Golarion, or the way that shadow Golarion is like Golarion, or just - copies of Golarion with different people on them, or - ?"

Asmodia: "Whoever placed Keltham had to search through enough - different somethings - that they could find somewhere where Keltham would land next to Sevar and then bounce over to an asexual, some girl who Nethys would want to oracle, some other girl who Cayden Cailean would give cake powers, and also Sevar would try to sell her soul and fail and the government would cover that up from him."

"It could be millions of slightly different Golarions, which Keltham's transcripts suggested he - thought he knew existed? For some reason I'm not sure anybody followed, but if anyone did it would be Sevar."

"The part I follow is just that you have to look through a lot of places to find one place like that, if you're not just creating it... actually, now that I'm really thinking about it, it has to be more like, trillions of trillions of trillions, not just millions. Every time you ask for another thing that only happens with 0.1% probability, you have to look through a thousand times as many worlds, and there've been many things like that. Maybe that's how Keltham knows, like, he looked up at the night sky once when it wasn't cloudy, deduced how large our whole multiverse was using unknown Law, and then knew there weren't enough planets like that for his senders to have found one, unless reality was further expanded in a particular direction..."

Korva Tallandria: "Okay, I'm sorry, this isn't the important thing, but what exactly is an asexual."

Asmodia: "Somebody who doesn't experience sexual desire for men or women, period, no matter who or what you dangle in front of them."

Korva Tallandria: "Well, that only multiplies the number of worlds if it's rare, then, which I'm not actually sure of."

Asmodia: "It's more like, one of the obviously Special Girls, which I sort of admit I am, is an asexual. And then also that Special Girl is the one who - this part is politically complicated, so pay close attention for your own safety."

"If you ask Carissa Sevar, she'll tell you that I came back from Hell with some sort of superpower that Hell told me not to talk about, but Keltham predicted that anyways, which is how she now knows."

"If you ask me, I'll tell you that I don't have any superpower like that. I'll point out that Keltham also said that the Special Girl who was asexual would sometimes be the one who didn't have any oracle powers and would just be very good at math."

"Also Keltham's - prophecy, it's basically prophecy at this point - said that the asexual would be the one who stands back and watches it all."

"Worlds with asexuals are maybe easy. Keltham's world has them too. It's more that Keltham's sender had to drop him off at the Worldwound of a planet that would teleport him into a villa near Ostenso, whose wizard academy would have a top graduate slated for the Worldwound, who was an asexual, and would have the politically complicated quality, and would be the right sort of person to end up running my Wall."

Korva Tallandria: "Do we have a transcript of the conversation where he said that, I think I want to read it. Because I notice that one of the reasons that I'm not persuaded that it's rare is that I also don't want to have sex with anyone, ever, and I notice that I have now been assigned to the Wall section. Not that I find that convincing, but it's information you might want to have. So. That's out there, now."

"Anyway. If I'm going to make a really solid argument about this, I'm probably going to need a written list of every prediction Keltham has made relating to the patterns and likely plot twists of the romance novel that he finds himself in, and which ones have come true and which ones haven't. But my snap judgement is - landing on Sevar, that's obviously not chance, but neither is it prophecy; it sounds like personality filtering of the same kind that gods probably do to identify clerics. If Asmodeus grabbed Keltham, it stands to reason that he would drop Keltham on the Asmodean person most compatible with him in the ways necessary for Asmodeus's goals. I'm pretty sure you said the first prediction Keltham made was the question about his harem having interesting backgrounds or problems to solve, but being an oracle isn't that; as far as I've been told, there's no reason to believe that either of the oracles was particularly special until after coming into contact with Keltham. They're not even clerics, which would constrain their alignments a really improbable amount - I tried to look something up about it after I heard about them, and I don't know yet that there are any known constraints on who can become or be made an oracle. So I'm not inclined to give him many points for that, either. "Special" is a corner fortune-teller's prediction, it's too vague to give very many points for. Still not very sure that being asexual is rare enough that 'one of the eight girls was an asexual' is particularly surprising either, or a higher rate than we would normally expect, and I'm not giving him points for it until someone convinces me that it is. The Chosen of Asmodeus being unable to sell her soul..."

"I have no explanation for that one, it's legitimately bizarre that he would be able to predict that. But it's one prediction, not many."

"So I don't think that unbroken prophecy is necessary to explain most of the predictions I've heard, and if it's only one, I'm inclined to think that there's a less-bizarre explanation that I haven't thought of yet, especially if he's been making a lot of them. But if he is right, and there are - let's say trillions - of Golarions, then - "

"I don't entirely know how that interfaces with my theory. It's a little hard to wrap my head around, someone writing a romance novel not by writing it, but by - what, paging through every possible string of words that could make up a book, and selecting the one that read most like a romance novel? I - guess I'm inclined to say that if more fundamental features of reality do start looking like they would make more sense if they were a romance novel than in any more normal situation - not Keltham's personal interactions, which we and lots of other powers are manipulating constantly, but like, I don't know, the cultural practices of nations, the distributions of traits on our world other than masochism, something that doesn't have as many obvious alternative explanations as masochism - if the world in general starts to look like that, then that should move us towards the romance novel theory and also away from my theory, because if we're being selected that way then I don't think there's any reason why we would also expect Keltham's people to have originally been from Golarion, if you can just generate trillions and trillions and trillions of worlds that all independently have humans in them and every possible combination of events."

"Probably. I guess. Unless dath ilani are all subconsciously into the things that caused their ancestors to have lots of the sex that resulted in their slightly less distant ancestors, and write romance novels that reflect their ancestral environment, even though they have no records of it. Which would loop us back around to - I don't even know."

Asmodia: "I'll get you the transcripts, though... I suspect that it has a lot more impact when you're living through it yourself. I found my own personal interactions with Keltham and his predictions to be, uh, extremely convincing, especially given the way I had to hide all of Keltham's correct predictions from him. I'd guess it was that way for, like - Sevar, coming back from having faked selling her soul, and hearing Keltham call her out on having faked it. That probably left an impression on her too. And then there was some whole thing with the Queen of Cheliax that we are not really getting to hear about for... what I suspect to be... obvious reasons... but, uh, maybe if the Queen shows up, don't say right in front of her that you think the tropes aren't real, it might not be... entirely wise."

"So... now that the topic of Special Girls has come up..."

"Keltham's romance with me isn't predicated on him ever having sex with me. It's apparently fine for him if we just lie in bed clothed and talk, or sometimes hug."

"And you, possibly, hit on an important possibility that was missed by myself, Carissa Sevar, Aspexia Rugatonn, and the Queen of Cheliax."

"Would you, possibly... um. Be on track for your own divine empowerment? Though if not, you could also call that a successful prediction of the eroLARP theory, that Keltham would only end up with one asexual..."

"I'll just ask about your current opinion on Keltham as a boy."

Korva Tallandria: "I think he's callous, cruel by the standards of his own society, annoying, careless, thoughtless about the consequences of many of his actions, kind of a shitty cleric of Abadar, kind of a shitty teacher, unnecessarily full of himself, that his judgement of me after one very mild bout of tears was that I am some kind of emotional leper who is going to infect the entire project and take advantage of everyone around me, that he's a sadist who gets off on injuring people badly enough for them to need magical healing, that he's already dating like eight girls and shouldn't have time for any more, and that in the middle of my crying fit about an hour ago, I fantasized about cutting out his eyes in retribution for having placed me in this position."

"I'm over that, to be clear, I'm not actually at all tempted to hurt him. But I'm kind of ticked off."

"I am fully aware that this is a romance novel pattern. I might forgive him, I might get to the point of enjoying working with him, but if you see me change my assessment of him to the point of wanting to have a serious romantic relationship with him, or, gods forbid, falling in love with him, and I'm not doing it because someone has a metaphorical knife to my throat, throw out all of my arguments and consider it a major piece of evidence that we're in a romance novel. Or that someone is mind-controlling me to make you think that. But I'm very confident that it won't have happened naturally."

Asmodia: People who seem to passionately hate you at first, and then fall in love with you, are also a frequent plot development in State-approved Chelish romance novels! Of the sort that are safe lunchtime discussion topics in Ostenso wizard academy when Paxti and Ione start going on about them!

"So I know that having an enemy who hates you, and then they fall in love with you, and then you get to wreck them, is a romance novel pattern. But now that I think about it - do you think it'd be a dath ilani romance novel pattern? Though maybe we're in - the kind of romance pattern that their Keepers get to read about, and Keltham only got to read the censored kind..."

"How about, if Keltham doesn't know, that you hate him, for a while. I mean, that might be a good idea even for other reasons, but... definitely it's a good idea because we're still hiding the tropes from him..."

Asmodia is feeling sort of queasy, for some reason.

"The problem is, Sevar's going to think that would be incredibly important for her corruption plan, if there's some way to get Keltham to be into it. She'll offer you anything you want, to go along with it, if it gets that far. You could ask for your sister back and Sevar would make it happen in a heartbeat, but - Sevar's not actually going to take no for an answer, I don't think."

"At least nobody's going to try to nudge Keltham into that until after he's been raping Pilar for a while, I think you're safe until then, at least. It's not a certain thing the corruption plan ever gets that far at all. You might not even be one of the destined girls period."

I'm sorry.

Korva Tallandria: "Well, if she's not going to take no for an answer, then I guess it doesn't matter whether I'd trade it for anything."

"I do think that particularly hating your love interest is a more general - it's not just a Chelish thing. I don't think. I think there's something with - it's a way of introducing conflict to a story that otherwise wouldn't have it. But dath ilani writers might be better at coming up with conflicts and not need a crutch like that."

Asmodia: "Sevar is a lot more concerned with the Project succeeding than with us being good Asmodeans. If she thinks she can get a 10% better chance of success by having you on her side and not just forcing you into things, she'll go full heretic on whatever it takes to get you on her side."

"I - do think we probably have at least a month, before it becomes a possible issue, even at the rate Keltham is going."

Having a love interest who hates you, and them not falling in love with you, and you getting control of them anyways, is also a romance novel trope.

"Anyways, I think we're at the point where we actually do loop our superiors in on things, if Sevar is free."

Keltham: (Keltham is now working up the Project's non-disclosure agreement with the professional alchemist who was brought in.)

Carissa Sevar: " ...callous, cruel by the standards of his own society, annoying, careless, thoughtless about the consequences of many of his actions, kind of a shitty cleric of Abadar, kind of a shitty teacher, unnecessarily full of himself, that his judgement of me after one very mild bout of tears was that I am some kind of emotional leper who is going to infect the entire project and take advantage of everyone around me," she reads aloud off the transcript. " - the point I do want to make, Tallandria, is that at least half of those traits in my assessment are not innate but are purchased through really quite a lot of effort.

Actually, based on some of the things he said this morning, my current theory is that our lives are being made significantly easier by some ways dath ilan weakened him for us in advance. The - warning about emotional lepers thing felt like that. What kind of Lawful Good society thinks that way? If I imagine the question being put to a paladin, 'I'm supporting my ill friend but it's stretching me beyond my means', I imagine them saying - and maybe we should have someone run out and check this right now - 'good for you, but remember that if you take ill yourself you help no one, so pay yourself enough attention to stay healthy'."

Korva Tallandria: Korva isn't really clear on whether she's supposed to say anything to that or just listen to the lecture, so she's going to opt for just listening to the lecture, until that's cleared up.

(Asmodia didn't ask whether she thought the Chosen was doing a good job. Obviously she is. She asked what Korva's opinion of Keltham was, in the context of wanting to date him.)

Carissa Sevar: "So what's dath ilan doing? A wild guess that recently occurred to me is - I think it is the conceptualization of Golarion Good people that Good is effortful, that it is not intrinsic to human nature, and that we ought to fight our intrinsic selfish nature in order to do the right thing. Dath ilan instead seems to have tried to breed people for - what would you even breed for, if you were breeding for Good?"

Asmodia: "If they're from outside the reach of Pharasma, they may simply not have our concept of Good as something to target. Keltham didn't have a concept that meant Evil as in the alignment, for the word to translate into, and that's why this whole Conspiracy wasn't blown in the first hour."

"They're not breeding for Good, they're breeding for - something else they, or the Keepers, or the real master of the experiment, decided to target."

"I don't think we know very much, from the transcripts. Intelligence, probably also Wisdom, and they thought Keltham was too selfish."

"...servitor race?"

Carissa Sevar: "Doesn't quite fit. They seem to have had the impulse to service trained out of them as well, and not just sexual service.

But I think at minimum they selected on - a kind of interpersonal squeamishness, a deep dislike of harming the person right in front of you. Built the kinds of people who'd have a hard time in war because they'd think about how all the enemies have wives who'll weep for them, who find it painful and stressful to fire people, who - are manipulable by people being sad at them. And then they noticed what a horrific weakness that is and tried to counter it by telling everyone very forcefully that they must tone down their natural impulse towards sympathy for sad people, and show them only indifference; that it takes expertise to ease human suffering and non-experts shouldn't even try...

Tallandria, you're supposed to talk, when I speculate on these things. Three peoples' random guessing will be worth more than one."

Korva Tallandria: "Oh. Um, well, compassion for suffering right in front of them, right, you could probably measure and select people for that, and - maybe like, if the entire world were made of people from Lastwall, except smarter, and also they had solved all of their problems, but they still had the - discipline, left over, from when they did have problems, and they were still all kind of organized in many of the same ways? Except that really doesn't mesh with how Keltham is at all, he doesn't act like someone from a planet that was just sort of, uh, residually full of military norms."

Carissa Sevar: "He really doesn't! Until he reacted so strongly to you crying I actually hadn't considered the angle that they'd be running into problems from excessive Goodness, even though of course they would. But it does seem that they pointed a lot of indoctrination at - some people are Problems and you mustn't try to help them, that callousness is a virtue both from the perspective of Good and from the perspective of Evil."

Asmodia: "Personally, I'm trying to throw out everything I know about Good and Evil, and start over to envision a society that sees the entire world using a different alignment chart created by some being who wasn't Pharasma and maybe doesn't use nine sorting categories at all."

"It's actually quite hard, and makes me feel like I might understand Keltham a little better. Our world's structure - must be absolutely strange to him." Even when he tries to throw out one of his basic assumptions, he just makes a different wrong assumption instead...

Carissa Sevar: "And we sure would be having some problems, if it wasn't. I do want someone to send to a Good priest somewhere and present them the question about the sick friend."

Asmodia: "Taldorians in the Facility too."

"Do we have any atheists who haven't been executed yet, to ask? Dath ilan doesn't have gods. Whatever built the place, it didn't want worshippers."

Carissa Sevar: "I think atheists here are fundamentally different in character from atheists in places where there aren't any noticeable gods."

Korva Tallandria: "Is it possible that the people who have problems as significant or more significant than ever having cried are also all unbearably - Keltham's sideways conception of Good, and all kill or remove themselves, which would ding them but avoid dinging anyone else, and then the rest of the population isn't actually any better at handling interpersonal problems in a way that wouldn't make them Evil, than people on Golarion, they just don't run into those problems at all because all of the weak people are dead. And then they're not Good in the sense of having any resistance to Evil, just in the sense that they've somehow cut out everything that normally makes it convenient."

Carissa Sevar: "They've got to turn up the occasional person who doesn't care at all about hurting other people, in a population of a billion. But maybe they don't turn up any - dilemmas for Good, yeah, any people who are weak and useless and who Good says you're supposed to be compassionate to anyway?"

Korva Tallandria: "Yeah. Especially if people usually weed themselves out well before the point where they would actually be causing what we would consider significant inconvenience for other people."

Asmodia: "From the perspective of the superpowerful being running the place, it wouldn't want any experimental failures hanging around clogging the place up, using resources, or reproducing. The story the population was given about what they're doing may tell us something about their natural temperaments, what they're doing doesn't tell us as much."

"I also note that the place may be non-Pharasman enough that the whole thing with people going into the cold to wake up later, isn't suicide, or if it's suicide, isn't that being's equivalent of Evil, or if it's Evil doesn't send you to a particular afterlife based on that."

Carissa Sevar: "I wouldn't expect it to get counted against them as suicide, they think of it as more like petrification to be unpetrified by a civilization that has the resources to deal with you, even if they're wrong and the bodies are all destroyed that's how they're imagining it."

Korva Tallandria: "That's fair, I don't think we really have any evidence on their afterlife situation. They wouldn't have any way of seeing whether they were going anywhere, without magic. But - 'we have all of the weak people petrify themselves' is also not something that rings like what a Golarion nation that was aiming for Good would come up with, even if Pharasma doesn't specifically disapprove of that specific step. Which - I guess we've already established that, yeah, they're not aiming for a Golarion understanding of Good."

Asmodia: "By far the most important information we need out of all this, is what it says about that superbeing's concept of romance novels."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know, I think it's also very relevant to my project of corrupting him. If we knew the thing he was scared of, here, we could have Korva pretend to be it, and validate his impression that all compassion is a grievous weakness or whatever exactly his impression is. I don't want to risk that at my current level of confusion.

As far as the romance trope goes - if dath ilan has something about winning over people who hate you I'd much sooner point him at Lady Avaricia, who I expect can play the part a little more cleanly and who is also doing the 'openly disliking Keltham' thing."

Asmodia: Asmodia bets that doesn't work unless Avaricia hates him personally the right way, and requires that Avaricia even be a Special Girl at all, but Asmodia's not pointing that out to Sevar if it keeps Korva out of trouble for longer.

Asmodia: "Maybe there's - a way to corrupting Keltham through Law? Or by learning his Law? That feels like - it should be part of the romance novel - and what I'm thinking in particular, is, we tell Keltham, and we're not in fact lying to him, that one of the Project Lawful girls came up with an interesting theory about dath ilan, though she wants to stay anonymous for now. We copy to Keltham her advance predictions based on Tallandrian Origin Theory, like about the distribution of animals in his world."

"And, if we can zero in to where she's getting those predictions right, we can at some critical point reveal to Keltham her theory - that his world was created by a superbeing, that the Keepers were placed in control all along, and that dath ilan's real masters didn't like his selfishness because that made him less useful to something else's experiment."

"You'd have to time it right, but as a step in his corruption - it feels like that could be Korva's role in the romance novel" which doesn't require Keltham to hurt Korva and makes her be valuable as something other than a torture-doll.

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not firmly opposed but it sure doesn't happen in alter-Cheliax, Asmodia."

Asmodia: "Does it not? What does alter-Cheliax do when alter-Tallandria tells me about her theory? I'm worried about what it does to Keltham, if she's right. I probably write a report to the Most High, because that's how infohazard protocols work in alter-Cheliax. Alter-Tallandria is nervous about coming to Keltham's attention, after their last interaction. I still know how beings who aren't Lawful need to make their predictions in advance. We don't want to add it to Keltham's plate while he has so much else on his mind, either; even if we're right, it's something that can wait."

Carissa Sevar: It kind of feels like in alter-Cheliax Asmodia is somewhat less fiercely attached to Tallandria but she doesn't know where she got that intuition and maybe it's wrong.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 25 (21) / Early Afternoon

Keltham: Time to rate tests. He called Carissa back in for this part, for second and independent opinions.

Willa Shilira... just kept talking about probabilities everywhere and it was hard for Keltham to make out what was prior, likelihood, or posterior - there's a reason why well-designed languages have three different words for those! And Willa is expressing things in strange awkward ways, mathematically speaking! But she could be saying the correct things awkwardly and therefore, probably is.

Alexandre Esquerra... seems to have a solid grasp of the basic way to apply math in principle but to have not quite grasped what mortals can't do at all, let alone without computers. Still, that's better than a lot of other exam submissions. If you look at it as 'tried to invent a new way of expressing his ideas about Probability and didn't completely screw that up', it becomes some evidence of Golarion genius / dath ilan averageness.

Lady Avaricia has apparently caught up to Meritxell in her grasp of Law, as to be expected of a ????????. But Avaricia was a trivial-proof for tier-1 regardless.

Nobody matched the standard set by Carissa or Asmodia, but that's only to be expected.

...Korva would have made it in easily as tier-2, based on what she wrote down before she cracked. She did have any idea of what the Law meant at all, and that combined with her chemistry work would've been more than sufficient.

Keltham feels awful about that. Like he made some basic mistake, like there was supposed to be some better outcome than this. But, well, that's what everybody warns you happens any time you deal with mental health events in any capacity other than 'I am an actual trained professional doing what I have been trained to do'.

The cleric of Asmodeus whose report claimed him to be excellent at mathematics, may in fact be excellent-for-Golarion at math, but doesn't seem able to relate his proofs to the structures of Lawful thought. He proved the Rule of Succession rigorously using integral calculus, instead of the discrete calculus that Keltham used, which is hella impressive for somebody who'd never heard of the gamma function up until that point. But then... couldn't answer any of Keltham's actual questions about how to use the Rule of Succession inside of Science. He's not made any progress on Prestidigitation chemistry.

Fail him out? Tier-2 in case they run into a purer math problem at some point? This person seems maybe useful if they run into just the right kind of problem, but Keltham can't guarantee that, and it's famously bad for mental health to hire people and then not have enough work for them.

Carissa, thoughts?

Carissa Sevar: "Failing him out seems fine; it seems like he treats every question as practically in isolation anyway, so if we later present him with a pure math problem I doubt he'll be impaired by not having followed along with the lecture up to that point."

Keltham: "Assumes he's otherwise willing to stay around the Fortress, and if we're asking him to do that I think we pay some option-value fee to him. But if he's willing, then sure."

Any other opinions Carissa has about hires, non-hires, and tiers?

Carissa Sevar: She's inclined to err on the side of leaving more people in, some of them might catch up later or think of something from an original angle. So long as they seem to be basically following along and understand the fundamentals of what is being covered.

She's not seeing any new tier-1s here aside from Avaricia.

Keltham: He would've guessed Willa Shilira for tier-1 based on her combined math and chemistry performance. But even in dath ilan it's easier to promote people later than demote them, and he'd guess that effect to be exacerbated in Cheliax where there's no explicit emotional disciplines against loss-gain asymmetry.

Offer Willa tier-2 at first, but be ready to jump to tier-1 if she counter-negotiates? It shouldn't make a Lawful difference to where she ends up, but could make an emotional difference to her trajectory whether she's tier-2 on watch for promotion or tier-1 on watch for demotion.

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, sure, that works."

Keltham: They'll finish agreeing on job offers while the Doom-Tested candidates are still well inside their promised 2-hour break time. The decisions didn't end up very ambiguous, in the end.

Keltham will, trying not to sound diffident about it because new gendertropes, note that he's been feeling slightly more distant from Carissa over the last week or so. If he already knew an order he could give her to solve this Problem, or could drag her off to his cuddleroom and hurt her to fix the Problem, he would've already done that; this Problem is not being produced by Keltham's hesitation to do something he already knows he wants to do.

Carissa Sevar: Huh. Carissa has also noticed this but on her end it's straightforwardly that many evenings Keltham is sleeping with other people, which she assumes he wants to do and intends to continue doing. Possibly it'd be good for there to be something going on between the two of them which does not have the property shared by both 'kinky sex' and 'serious conversations about bad things in the world' where Keltham wants to do them incrementally and not rush to the end state, and which are therefore things to be rationed rather than indulged on impulse whenever one feels like it.

She's not sure what a good candidate thing would be. There's the problem where many topics of conversation turn into the 'serious conversations about bad things in the world' failure state. She has been working on training into Wondrous Items to decompress in the evenings, but that's not a good shared activity. She could.... watch his magic practice and give extremely Spellcraft-loaded advice but isn't sure he'd find that fun.

It's also possible that how much he's in the mood to give orders varies for him week-to-week? She thinks that's true of some people and can mess up a relationship founded on giving orders. Some people vary all the way to 'in the mood to take orders now' but Carissa suspects she'd have noticed, if Keltham were like that. But if he has even the weaker version, then querying 'what do I want to do with Carissa' might come up empty.

Keltham: During his first couple of weeks here, they were fighting large problems together and making progress on them together. Now it's more - split up, Keltham working on chemistry, things in the Project feeling more routine. They're both still working but they're not fighting together the same way. Carissa being tied to a bed - doesn't always give her the same chance to, impress him, maybe. 'Impress' is not exactly the right word, but -

Of the things Carissa's described, her watching his magic practice and giving him extremely Spellcraft-loaded advice sounds closest to being right, to him. It's something they can work on together, succeed on together, and someplace where she can remind his brain that she's Carissa Sevar. It's - maybe something for him, like his being dangerous is, for her, that she's got ludicrous Spellcraft. Not just that she's a valuable possession, but that she's - somebody who could have had the Queen of Cheliax, if Keltham hadn't gotten to her first.

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I'd be happy to watch your magic practice and give you advice. Once you get good enough at magic you'll be able to be impressed by the things I can do, which is something I'll look forward to."

Keltham: Then let's try it.

How is Keltham at Spellcraft, by Carissa Sevar's standards? He's been a wizard for, like, two whole weeks now! And is smart and already knew some math!

Carissa Sevar: He's appalling, but she's used to that, for some reason the wizard academies barely teach this and so everyone's appalling. Usually less appalling, but still. She will avoid being rude about it and will instead just give pointers ordered by importance to address.

Keltham: Just to be, like, super clear here, because Golarion, if Keltham went and got Lady Avaricia for a second opinion, would Lady Avaricia be pointing out more things that Keltham was doing wrong and being less encouraging about his overall state of competence?

Carissa Sevar: "I would be very surprised if she noticed any errors I didn't notice. Her Spellcraft's nothing impressive herself - well, she's third-circle at eighteen, which is actually very impressive, but for a third circle wizard her Spellcraft is actually notably mediocre."

Keltham: "It's more that I wanted to explicitly verify you were telling me about what-all you noticed. I mean, not all you noticed, but not soft-touching my overall performance level."

Keltham will hang four cantrips under her supervision, one Silent Image, and then, if her supervision helps for that sort of thing, do some scroll practice.

Carissa Sevar: She isn't failing to mention things that might be useful to spare his feelings, that seems like it'd make it kind of pointless to have it be her doing it. She will have lots of opinions.

Fundamentally, Spellcraft is about anticipating the ways that magic hung in any particular state is obviously going to behave, so that you can move it to desired states without it thinning out, swinging wildly, sticking to other parts of itself, curling up, etcetera. Once you understand exactly how the magic is going to behave the way you understand how your own fingers are going to behave, the way you can reach out for something without calculating exactly how far your hands have to travel to get there, then you're going to be able to cast more or less any spell you've seen the structure for. Obviously there are lots of explicit heuristics that can be taught, and a good understanding of tension and flows and the way attraction-that-falls-away-with-the-square-of-distance makes things behave, but you also have to get an intuition for it.

It'd be really nice if he could cast Arcane Sight and see what she sees, but she can't think of any way to do it. ...maybe he could sell a devil a millionth of his soul for Arcane Sight.

Keltham: "Joke rather than serious suggestion, right? Because how would that work, sell them my soul with 1/1,000,000 probability?"

Carissa Sevar: " - you know, I had in mind a joke, but now that you say that I don't know that that isn't allowed."

Keltham: "I'd want to be pretty sure of the random number generator, write into the contract that it doesn't work if the random generator proves to be fixed, and have an option to buy back the contract at some reasonable markup like fifty times the price of Arcane Sight," Keltham is not insensible of how much this would basically be a weird loan allowing him to capture an unreasonable amount of value himself, "but if Hell will basically sell me Arcane Sight now in exchange for probably a large payment later when I buy back the contract, it seems like plausibly a nice cheat that cheating people should cheat about."

Carissa Sevar: "I do not know if Hell will do that but I do love cheating at things in order to get more magic. We could at least write Lrilatha and ask if it's worth trying."

Keltham: "I'll route to Subirachs first, we don't need to bother Lrilatha unless Subirachs doesn't know already."

(So is Carissa Sevar any good at, like, teaching Spellcraft. To Keltham.)

Carissa Sevar: Moderately? She's clearly noticing a bunch of things that aren't even worth particularly trying to pick up at his level, but she has a much deeper model of what goes wrong every time anything goes wrong, and can show him with an illusion - see, when you did this, that bit was dragging in a way that'd be a real problem if you'd been subsequently trying to close that loop -

She clearly hasn't done a lot of teaching before but she has done a lot of paying attention to Keltham and thinking about how to explain things to Keltham before and it's sort of the same skill.

Keltham: Well, but are there concrete results in terms of skill acquisition. Can he now, like, hang two first-circle spells in the same day, or cast one of the more difficult practice-scrolls without failure...

Carissa Sevar: Yep, with her assisting he can get harder practice scrolls down.

Keltham: At the current rate of progress, how long until he can cast third-circle wizard scrolls like Major Image?

Carissa Sevar: She hadn't been aware that was a specific aim of his. If they're willing to burn through a bunch of failed scrolls trying he could probably land it tomorrow. They might burn ten along the way, but he's rich, right?

Keltham: He'd be able to show them proper high-resolution video of dath ilan with actual sounds!

What's the cost of a Major Image scroll like?

lintamande: 375gp.

Keltham: What the superheated toilet paper, why, since when do ten casts of Major Image cost roughly the same amount as an intelligence headband.

lintamande: Paying a wizard to cast it for you ten times would of course be much much cheaper; the expense is that scrolls use spellsilver or magical inks with similar properties to hold the magic for you so you don't have to be competent to hang it, and they require quite a lot of the reagent they use.

Keltham: This is frankly insane and, yes, Keltham should've checked that before spending a lot of time on scroll practice. Though it's probably good Spellcraft practice in general, since it lets him keep going past his daily wizard magical capacity.

Is there a loanable magic-item Keltham can rent which would let him cast a few Major Images? For that matter, what was the rent-price of Goggles of Detect Magic, or of Arcane Sight, now that Keltham has any money?

lintamande: Probably rentable for a day for a couple hundred gp, though there are few enough such goggles that it'd be a matter of going and asking individual wizards who have them -- in Cheliax most wizards get Arcane Sight off Hell instead, so the goggles are even less common.

Magic items that let you cast spells with a duration 'concentration' are generally not possible to make.

Keltham: So long as he's asking things anyways: Is using direct Prestidigitation for all of his wall-writing purposes, in fact the sort of thing that trains his magical abilities at all. Keltham just started doing that at one point, but then every time he did it, he was in the middle of class and it was the wrong time to stop and ask questions of Carissa about that, and at other times, he wasn't remembering to ask.

Carissa Sevar: It'll probably make him better at Prestidigitation; it might improve his Spellcraft slightly but Spellcraft is one of those things where past a certain point that varies for each individual, you mostly only improve through deliberate practice not through incidental exercise of the skill. Carissa at the Worldwound made magic items for eight hours a day, which uses lots of Spellcraft, but then to actually improve at it she'd spend another several doing exercises where she tried to build her scaffold with a missing rung or something.

Keltham: Right then.

What sort of exercises should he be doing. Has he in fact been practicing in anything like the right way at all.

Carissa Sevar: Yes! He has been given and is doing all the right exercises for someone who is new at it!!

Keltham: Ah. Okay then.

Carissa Sevar: "You'll get there. You're actually progressing very very notably fast. If you were at a wizarding academy you'd have them talking about how quickly that one learns and whether to move him up a year."

Keltham: Notably fast for 18 intelligence and already knowing all relevant math and having Security wizards if not Carissa Sevar watching him with Arcane Sight while he practices? Or just around as fast as that should be?

(Keltham is not unaware that he has Protagonist Syndrome, and is monitoring its progress vigilantly in case it suddenly turns acute. Well, more acute.)

Carissa Sevar: Probably just around as fast as would be expected from that.

Keltham: Not 'yay' per se, but, his expectations remain calibrated in that case and don't need updating.

...separate question, if renting goggles costs a couple of hundred gp for a day, does that mean their actual cost is over 72,000gp, because that's what you'd earn off them in 360 days per year even if natural interest rates were 100%/year, or does it mean there's some kind of huge extra cost associated with renting anything? And in the second case, can you, like, rent them for a whole week for only 25% more money?

Carissa Sevar: - a big share of the cost, renting to a person you don't know well, is a guarantee that if they're lost or broken or cursed or something the replacement cost will be paid. You can buy guarantees like that from the Church of Abadar. Rentals would be lots cheaper if they were to someone you trusted enough the guarantee wasn't needed. She imagines there's some relationship between the duration of the rental and the cost of the guarantee but doesn't know details actually.

Keltham: This sounds like a weirdly low-trust equilibrium for a planet with truthspells and priests of Asmodeus. Keltham suspects there's possibly something here about inadequate scales and institutions, like, there's no central Magic-Item Rental Agency that can form long-term customer relationships with people who could then rent lots of separate items much more cheaply...

Dropping spellsilver costs by a factor of 10 is probably a more sensible thing to get started down its critical-path first. And maybe there's not that much market to be unlocked, with lots of short-term non-recurring magic-item rentals. But it also could be the sort of thing where there's a lot of economic potential-energy pent up. For want of institutions that can establish durable trust, wizards not making magic items that could be rented much more often, to many more people, more cheaply, while still making a higher overall rate of return.

Well, he'll also focus on his Spellcraft, though.

Carissa Sevar: (Would alter-Cheliax have a higher trust equilibrium? Taldor sure doesn't. Osirion? Someone check rental prices in Osirion.)

"- I would be pretty excited about magic item rentals, because I like making magic items. It would be an economic transformation that would suit me particularly. So if you have more ideas on them I'd be interested."

Keltham: Well, the obvious startup idea if this were dath ilan...

...Would be to find everyone who has a magic item that they do not strongly need on a daily basis, nor need suddenly on demand, nor would be crippled by needing to replace; and have a single company, that is the organization all the lenders trust, to be loaned those magic items, and to compensate them fairly for damage or loss. All the renters know that, when they need to rent a magic item for a period, they can contact that company and see what it's got. Instead of having a lot of isolated lenders and renters who don't have durable business relationships with each other, everybody has a durable business relationship with that startup.

Depending on how the scale ends up working out, you can amortize Teleport costs between rentals, like, instead of needing to teleport an item from Corentyn to Ostenso, the item goes on the daily or weekly trip from Corentyn to Egorian along with all other items rented from Corentyn, and then from Egorian to Ostenso along with all other items rented in Ostenso. When items get requested often enough, the startup buys a copy of that item itself, instead of continuing to try to Teleport it around.

Zooming back out, the general question is how many magic items that somebody else would pay to use, that have daily uses or continuous uses rather than limited charges, are lying around somewhere being not already used on a daily basis. Because that's a waste of that item. Also or alternatively, which items would have daily or weekly rents high enough to quickly pay back the cost of their creation, even if there's no unused copies lying around.

That's the economic potential-energy within the whole system - a way that resources could be rearranged to generate higher earnings - and the question is just how to make the system slide down that potential-energy gradient, like catalyzing a chemical reaction.

Carissa Sevar: " - permission to try that, if I ever have enough free time?"

Keltham: "I had it in mind as more of a Project project, but you could make a play for managing it, assuming you're not too busy from being my second on the entire Project, which, in fact, you will be."

"If somehow the whole thing doesn't play out and the contracts end, you can take the idea and try to run with it, sure. But there's a whole lot more advice out of Civilization you ought to hear first, if you were actually going to do that."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay, okay, I'll be patient. I just really like magic items."

Keltham: "Got any ideas for making that stinking spectroscope work? It'd be nice if we could check candidate skill at learning to manipulate electron orbitals with Prestidigitation, and have a more objective measure of how good they were and how fast they were improving, before final tier assignments. I have a couple of wacky ideas for getting the spectroscope running, but I don't want to contaminate you with mine."

Carissa Sevar: Alchemy is not actually the area that comes most naturally to her but she'll try to come up with some ideas.

Alternately, if they were doing a magic item spectroscope, then she has tons of ideas, though it'd be very expensive and not a scalable solution.

Keltham: Prototype first! Scale later! But Keltham is under the impression that item crafting takes more than a couple of hours, and he is looking for a way to get it within hours. If he fails at that, it'll be time to drag out the magic item spectroscope plans.

Carissa Sevar: Fair enough! They can spend some hours trying at the non-magical version.

Keltham: Oh, he didn't say anything about it being non-magical. Just that it wouldn't be a magic item.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is deeply tempted to cheat here by demanding advice from Avaricia but she'll have to just try with her own more muddled understanding of alchemy.

Keltham: ...also he thinks the whole thing with Carissa being impressive and correcting his Spellcraft, is, in fact, working.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, good.

- then he'll be delighted to hear she has yet more objections to how he grabs Prestidigitation after he casts it.

Keltham: He is in fact delighted! Making clear verifiable Progress is fun, and dath ilani are heavily shaped away from taking offense at corrections, in their high-trust society where corrections are rarely offered for malicious reasons.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 25 (21) / Mid-Afternoon

Keltham: All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up! This is now day three of trying to build a spectroscope. Back in dath ilan, any startup that failed to build a prototype of anything in three days would be shut down by its funders as clearly hopeless.

Keltham was specifically hoping to have a spectroscope on hand while evaluating hiring and tiering, so he could see who was making the most progress at learning to shift the electron-orbital behavior of materials using Prestidigitation of color-taste-smell-stickiness.

Their present situation may be summarized as follows:

They don't have a professional glassmaker on-site, nor on-site glassmaking equipment to build a prism out of optical glass. Specifying and ordering a prism from off-site would probably take several days and probably not be quite right on arrival.

They have a large piece of cloudy quartz that was successfully Stone-Shaped into the right rough shape of a prism, and then further cut flat with overkill magical slicing spells.

Despite Prestidigitation supposedly being able to change the color of things, Keltham has not been able to clear this quartz in a way that makes it suitable for use in a spectroscope's prism, nor change the flat surface of it into a diffraction grating.

They have tiny pieces of nice clear quartz that would, if they were larger, probably work to build a spectroscope.

Keltham's plan is therefore as follows:

Step one, use their spectroscope to burn a piece of clear quartz and get a reading from the spectral lines off that.

Step two, other people will practice Prestidigitating bits of cloudy quartz 'clearer', burning those under their spectroscope, and trying to shift the absorption lines of cloudy quartz towards being entirely the dominant spectrographic lines recorded from the clear quartz.

Step three, Prestidigitate their large shaped piece of quartz clear, and use it to build their first spectroscope.

Keltham: Step four, send their spectroscope back in time to step one.

Now, Keltham isn't sure that part will work, but, if Civilization's teachings about the fundamental nature of reality are true, it shouldn't be that hard for him to use Prestidigitation to create a small time-loop -

Ione Sala: "VETO."

Asmodia: "VETO."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "I agree in these objections."

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "If the only problem with the diamond is that it's too small we can get a True Resurrection grade one, they're about thrice as large across."

Ione Sala: "Why would you even say that in public, Keltham, why in Pharasma's name would you?"