Keltham: The problem, Lady Avaricia, is that they don't just need a size, they need a shape, and even thrice as large across would probably not be large enough -
Asmodia: "Okay, he's trolling."
Keltham: "Correct! Though we do, fundamentally, have a problem where we could maybe use a spectroscope to build a spectroscope but we don't have a spectroscope and therefore can't use a spectroscope to build the spectroscope we'd need in order to build a spectroscope."
"Besides time travel, can anybody else think of an obvious solution there?"
lintamande: Gregoria's thinking she missed what was wrong with the solution where they wait a couple days for a glassmaker to send them some attempts at following their instructions.
Keltham: "What I'm actually going to do is use Silent Image to create illusions of spectroscopy stations for everyone. If a Silent Image of a mirror works as a mirror, a Silent Image of a spectroscope should work as a spectroscope, or so I reason. If an illusionary mirror works as a mirror, a light-exclusion hood should work as a hood, a light source should work as a light source, and a prism should work as a prism."
"I'll also create illusions of prisms the correct size and shape to do the job, illusions of evenly frequency-distributed light that's good for testing absorption lines, and illusions of diffraction gratings."
"I'm going to maintain my concentration on that for as long as I can, and, before the spell ends, you need to manage to either Prestidigitate quartz to clarity, or Prestidigitate a surface to behave like a diffraction grating. If possible, also Prestidigitate a light source to behave like an evenly-frequency-distributed light source, but that may legit be harder."
"And if we can't get that done today - take note of how far you got in deliberately shifting the frequency lines, where you started, where you ended up, and how much progress you made."
"Assuming, of course, that this whole clever plan does not completely utterly fail on step zero."
"Carissa, you said you had an illusion spell prepped, right? You're on learning to make your own illusionary spectroscopes that work, in case we're stuck with illusionary spectroscopes for a while, so that I'm not the only one who can cast them using my one first-circle wizard spell per day. I mean, fine if you can teach others here after that, but you being able to learn it yourself would give us some breathing room. You have good concentration."
Carissa Sevar: - sure, she'll try to learn that.
lintamande: This seems like the kind of thing that couldn't possibly work but they'll try it.
Iarwain: Cleverness results:
- Keltham's spectroscopy stations sort of suck; not really in a way where they work, per se. But maybe in a way where they literally work at all and you can try to guess where the spectral lines might maybe possibly be?
- They can't get their shaped quartz clear to where it's better than the sucky spectroscopy station's illusionary prism, but they're getting it clearer.
- Carissa learned how to make illusions of Keltham's illusionary spectroscopy stations, and her illusions of his illusions are at least no worse.
- Diffraction gratings are really neat, nobody besides Avaricia has ever seen that rainbow-holographic sheen before on something that isn't an oil slick or in some cases an absurdly expensive magic item, buuut they can't Prestidigitate a surface with that 'color' well enough for it to work inside a spectroscopy station.
Ione Sala: Ione will, at some point, wander over to the visible Security and ask him if he's by any chance got a Major Image or at least Minor Image prepped today.
lintamande: Security does have Major Image prepped.
Ione Sala: If he can maintain concentration for a while, how about if they throw a Major Image specifically at creating an illusion of a clear glass / clear quartz prism, the same size and shape of Keltham's rougher Silent Image of a prism.
lintamande: - sure, he can do that. They don't put you on Security if you can't concentrate on an illusion and also do your job.
Ione Sala: Great.
How about if Sevar dispels just the prism part of the illusion that she's maintaining of a spectrography workstation, and then Security puts his Major Image of an illusionary prism where that prism used to be?
Carissa Sevar: Sure.
Iarwain: Carissa's illusion of Keltham's illusion of a light source sure is going into Security's illusionary prism and making a nice rainbow on Carissa's illusion of Keltham's illusion of a display axis marked with unreadable wavelengths because Silent Image isn't fine enough for writing!
Ione Sala: "So, uh, Sevar, do we tell Keltham we've got a working spectography station and risk disturbing his concentration, or..."
Carissa Sevar: "Use it to try cleaning quartz, I'll talk to him."
Ione Sala: ...huh. Somehow Ione wasn't expecting that much of a reward, that she'd get to be the first to use the spectography station on quartz.
Well, she'll go right out and try it, then!
(But is not, in fact, the best at Prestidigitation chemistry, as yet.)
Carissa Sevar: "Hey Keltham, is there a procedure for if I have a question that is mildly time sensitive, but not important enough to disturb your concentration over, and I don't know how to tell if asking it will disturb your concentration or not."
Keltham: "Meta-question too complicated, just ask the object one and I'll ignore it if it's also too complicated."
Carissa Sevar: "Okay. We added a Security casting Major Image, got it working. Change any plans?"
Keltham: "Assuming I'm still needed to go on concentrating for whatever reason, like my light sources are better, go have everybody else carry out the original plan. Otherwise, tell me I can stop."
Carissa Sevar: "Ideally you go on concentrating on the stations but not the prisms."
Keltham: There's no way in the Abyss he could've done that a week ago, but Keltham will try.
Carissa Sevar: She'll focus very diligently on trying to match her illusion more closely to his now that there's the spectrometers to make it clearer what the differences are; once she gets that down they won't need his.
Iarwain: Keltham's white light going through a Security-cast prism creates a rainbow that's - smoother? more evenly lighted in every color? - than Carissa's white light that looks exactly like Keltham's white light to the naked eye.
Carissa Sevar: Weird. She will - try to imagine her light different and see if any of the differences produce different rainbows.
Iarwain: Imagining her light looking the same white color tends to produce the same uneven-looking rainbow.
If she wants to try imagining her light looking different colors, she can produce different rainbows.
Carissa Sevar: What a bizarre constraint on the spell. What if she imagines her light is sunlight. What if she imagines it's firelight. What if she imagines it's Dancing Lights.
Iarwain: The rainbows of different lights sure are different-looking!
Sunlight's got a lot of green in it and less blue than Keltham's source. Firelight is mostly orange and red as you'd expect but also has more green in it than you'd think, not nearly as much as sunlight though. Illusionary imaginary Dancing Lights cast a narrow light band that looks like basically the same color as Dancing Lights themselves.
Carissa Sevar: "What are you imagining as the light source to get a full rainbow."
Keltham: "Light source that's a fairly even mixture of frequencies as produced by am afraid to think too much about it right now but I've seen it so I know what it looks like."
"If you can't get it by seeing mine, try adding and subtracting light sources and colors from each other maybe."
Carissa Sevar: Fire and the sun and Dancing Lights.
Iarwain: To the naked eye, if she tries combining the illusions into one, it just looks like sunlight again. Maybe if she imagined the sun part to be less bright?
Spectrographically, you can't really see the fire-rainbow part inside the sun-rainbow, which already had plenty of red and orange. But - yep, she can see the sharp line of the Dancing Lights in there!
Carissa Sevar: She...actually can't readily think of very many other light sources. Mostly light comes from fire, the sun, or her cantrips. Lantern archon? Light cantrip, if it's different from dancing lights?
Iarwain: The illusionary lantern archon's rainbow looks like dimmer sunlight, an illusionary Light cantrip is also a narrow peak of light the illusionary cantrip's color.
Carissa Sevar: Okay, she predicts she just actually isn't going to be able to imitate Keltham's light source until he tells her what it is. Though there's no reason not to continue to try various combinations which she strongly expects not to get anywhere: sunlight with blue dancing lights to make up for the insufficient blue? No; dancing lights are too narrow. Overlapping a hundred hypothetical dancing lights at different points on the rainbow? She can't hold them all in her head.
Pilar : Don't shut down the party just yet? Pilar is making much faster progress on Prestidigitating things to burn in different colors, now that she's getting rapid feedback on the subtle results of anything she tries, instead of waiting for the first result visible to the naked eye.
Keltham: Sorry, Keltham is actually going to lose concentration about now, and then fall over with a melodramatic ceremonial thud for several minutes before he tries talking to anyone.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa will wait until he's recovered to ask him questions about light.
Keltham: Right, uh, so, sunlight's going to have, like, hydrogen lines in there, and produces more green than blue to begin with. But the larger problem is that sunlight is missing a bunch of blue from how the air scatters the sun's blue light all over to form the daytime sky.
Firelight, plus metal heated white-hot, plus, ideally, metal heated blue-hot, superposed, would plausibly work for the light source? If each illusionary component had realistic rainbows underneath the illusion? He's surprised she couldn't just copy Keltham's light directly. Maybe there's something here about, if you've seen a real thing, you can make an illusion of that thing. But if you've only seen an illusion, you can only make an illusion of how a thing looks to you, because that's what an illusion is... maybe... if that made any sense, or rather, if it made the correct amount of nonsense for magic.
Keltham has a feeling regardless that Carissa might be well-served by just messing around with this until she can control the light spectrum of illusionary light period. Get her magical control to where she's controlling the rainbow underneath the illusion, not controlling how the illusion looks to her eyes. That will plausibly be the equivalent of a Spellcraft exercise for this, and might be preliminary towards being able to Prestidigitate chemical properties.
Though he doesn't actually know the two manipulations would go through a common route, he's just guessing.
Carissa Sevar: That does seem like the ideal end-state. She has no idea if it's possible, to feed your visual illusion as input something you can't distinguish visually, not sourced from any real source you're referencing but constituted backwards from what it'd look like through a prism. But it seems like the sort of thing that you might have to try for a long time before you could be sure it wasn't possible, and where you'd learn something interesting from trying.
Keltham: Possible step one, overlaying two different light sources to make a new light that looks the same as some other light, but has a different underlying rainbow.
Mixing firelight and white-hot metal until they look the same color as sunlight, for example, adding more or less firelight to the mix, shifting the light's tone redder or bluer, until it looks the same as the sunlight-source. Possibly, if that's a thing you can even do. But trying to preserve the part where fire-light + metal-light should have a different underlying rainbow than sunlight.
Then, practice shifting back and forth between 'rainbow 1' and 'rainbow 2' while keeping the appearance of the light source constant.
Carissa Sevar: She hasn't actually seen white-hot metal. She's seen a forge, but the metal was not heated to the point of glowing white. She'll see if she can get there with light sources she's actually encountered, though.
Keltham: Somebody's probably got a spell for it? It seems like the sort of thing that absurdly overspecialized-for-combat Golarion magic ought to do.
Carissa Sevar: There's a spell that makes metal red-hot, which is suggestive but she doesn't actually know of a more powerful version that makes the metal hotter. Her understanding is that it is sometimes used in combat but was actually a failed attempt at a utility spell that could replace forging.
Keltham: Actually, now that Keltham thinks about, he has a nearly white-hot metal sex toy. Might not work because it's just an illusion itself, but then again, it might? Or it might at least give her a light-source that could be combined with firelight to make something that looks sunny but has a different underlying spectrum.
Carissa Sevar: That'd be great.
(Some people are staring. What. In alter-Cheliax that would be an extremely weird thing to overhear.)
Keltham: Oh, stop it. Do they have any idea how hard it is to do something that Carissa Sevar will find even slightly scary?
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 25 (21) / Evening
Keltham: Would Carissa Sevar care to try to persuade him otherwise, before Keltham orders her off to his cuddleroom to cuddle?
Carissa Sevar: No, she wouldn't.
Keltham: Didn't think so. Off with her, then!
Keltham: Yep, definitely feeling closer to her now.
They just have to remember to work on common problems where Carissa can also be impressive, hopefully.
Carissa Sevar: "Well, I'm not expecting to have a shortage of those.
Are you - okay? Happy? Satisfied with the path we're on? Stuff keeps happening and I just want to be sure that you feel like - like you're glad you're here, ideally, but if that's too high a bar, like you're growing closer to the true Keltham -"
Keltham: "I am. A little sad about the Korva thing, but - pretty happy about everything else. There'll probably be additional hiccups and nothing will be as easy as it looks and everything will take longer than expected, because that's just always true, but - it feels to me like progress is being made, things are within reach, I'm successfully using magic to cheat, and I'll be able to make enormous quantities of acid."
Carissa Sevar: She is possibly more reassured to hear that than makes strategic sense. "So much acid! I'm having a great time. But for me 'way better than anything else that was ever going to happen' is a much lower bar."
Keltham: "Eh. Not that high of a bar for me either, unless you count whatever dath ilan's Future would've had to offer me."
Carissa Sevar: "...now I feel distressed at imagining the worlds where Keltham didn't die in a plane crash. I am ...pretty sure that is not a normal emotion and I assume I'm applying the theory of worlds wrong, since you haven't actually explained it except in bits. But what if those worlds exist and he's sad and lonely."
Keltham: They definitely exist, yes. Possibly most of the branching Kelthams identical to him as of the moment of getting on the airplane, are still alive in dath ilan. People were saying at the end that they couldn't think of any better explanation for what took out the left wing besides a meteor strike, and there's no way Keltham-who-boarded-the-airplane could've been precisely state-correlated with a meteor strike that precisely pessimized.
But that is not what Carissa is asking about, not in the most important part.
"Nobody's hit him with an Owl's Wisdom yet. He still has a dream, he's energized and pursuing it, that counts for a lot."
"When he gets older and realizes what's actually going on in his life, he might be less happy then."
"But - there's always the Future. For everyone. Except this version of Keltham, who is very rare, and even he - got you, and Yaisa, and the Project. And someday, if Golarion can make its own version of Civilization, this place's own Future."
Carissa Sevar: "I think we can do it. Maybe it'll be hard, sure, but - we've got forever, right, at some point we'll get around to it just because we were getting bored."
Keltham: "It's not quite something I can promise you, Carissa. If this place is wrong enough for me, in the end - if everything Golarion seems to be, in terms of how much it's suited for me, is misleading - then I might turn statue to wait on someone else making a Future where I can be happy, or touch the Starstone, or go to my god's afterlife, or, if all those things look not good enough for me, walk out of this reality entirely through Abaddon to see what's next in the sequence."
"Even dath ilan doesn't want to be so Lawful Good - is actively pushing against an extreme of Lawful Good - that people are told to live on somewhere they're unhappy, for somebody else's sake. If you don't want to live in the Now, you leave the Now to the people who do enjoy living there, and go on to the Future. Everyone gets told that, nobody is to think that they're trapped, nobody is to think that they need to live for somebody else's sake. Nobody owes that to anyone. That's part of the point of cryopreservation."
Carissa Sevar: " - that makes sense but I am having a hard time fathoming the person who'd benefit from hearing it because -
- wouldn't everyone want to exist selfishly, the way you want water when you're thirsty, or air when you're suffocating - why would you have to tell them they shouldn't drink when thirsty just to appease other people -"
Keltham: "A number of strange people in dath ilan do not, in fact, want to exist, even in the Future, and don't want anything else to exist either, and they started visibly planning to shut the whole thing down, Civilization I mean, by having lots of kids who were like themselves, so they could become a voting majority and vote to exterminate all life, and there was a big fuss, and the Keepers negotiated with their leaders, and their leaders all told the nonleaders that a deal had been struck, and all of them should just go into cryonic suspension and let the Keepers keep the mysterious deal, and that was really really flaming creepy so there was another large fuss, but, being the sort of people they were, they accepted that and went into cryonic suspension regardless of the fuss, so... yeah."
"It actually makes a lot more sense to me, now that I realize that, among the things the Keepers must have told them, was that it was literally impossible for them to stop existing and true-suicide would throw them into a dangerously unknown distribution of universes."
"So that's not even the question. The question is just - do you have to exist now, or can you just step through time and exist later instead? And nobody who's not having fun in the now is obligated to stick around in the now."
Carissa Sevar: " - but, you exist less, right, if you spend a bunch of time not existing until the Future. Also I am mentally setting that story aside to be horrified about later since it doesn't seem very helpful right now but I'm horrified."
Keltham: "Well, you had your version of the Rovagug problem and we had ours."
"And - I'm sort of not getting the 'exist less' part? If you offered to suddenly inject a bunch of realityfluid into me and have me exist five times as much for the next week, I wouldn't be particularly excited about that because, from my perspective, it wouldn't feel like anything to exist more. It's not like getting to go on an additional date with you, it's like going on the same date but there's five times as much of it."
"If a Keltham has such a thing as a natural lifespan, even in a world with souls and the chance of godhood, it's determined by how much time he can spend being Keltham before he gets tired of that. Why spend that limited time you have to be yourself, before you have to move on and become somebody different, experiencing not having fun?"
"Also in a certain pragmatic sense, if you're going to live for billions of years before the stars burn out - and then, I guess, move on from there by death-travel, after your universe gets cold - are you really existing that much less, if you skip over a couple of unhappy decades to get to the Future a few centuries later?"
Carissa Sevar: "...maybe I've just never not been having fun but that doesn't sound right, somehow. I - think I won't get tired of being Carissa, and if that's a failure of imagination I'd get tired of being Carissa once I've explored all the states Carissa can be in, including the ones which aren't fun, and learned all the things I can learn from them, and grown all the ways they opened up to grow in, and so time not having fun isn't stealing from time that is.
...and I guess if my lifespan is infinite it makes no sense to be defensive of any specific decade but I guess I - don't feel sure enough it's definitely infinite to stop clinging?"
And -
Can someone ask Snack Service whether it serves Asmodeus for me to try to explain the interaction where I tried to dare Abrogail to torture me until I wanted to die.
This feels ridiculous but also she's pretty sure it's the right question to ask and the right person to ask it of.
Pilar : "Snack service says that this isn't one of the points where it has instructions about which rounded rectangle to select."
"I have no idea what that means either."
Carissa Sevar: That's upsetting and she'll process it later.
"I have a potentially relevant thought but it's about Abrogail and something I otherwise might not have told you for many more months. Yes or no?"
Keltham: "Maybe - not for now. I feel like I'm pushing around as fast as I should be pushing, on my sadism and Evil, and we did want to put some governors on how emotional our cuddleroom conversations end up."
Carissa Sevar: "Mmmkay.
The reason your Rovagug cultists strike me as more horrible than ours is that ours didn't have children they thought would be - broken like them and not want to exist, on purpose. Which seems worse than just being excessively Good and thinking you should do all existing people the favor of destroying them, not that that isn't quite bad."
Keltham: "They weren't having fun themselves, but they considered the prospect of Civilization growing to colonize other stars, and eventually disassemble other stars for raw materials, and there being trillions and quadrillions and septillions of people having fun, to be a much more horrifying problem."
"They said their children would understand and agree with them that it'd been worth the disutility of bringing them into existence, so that they could take up the vital cause of exterminating all life before it was too late and the universe ended up with sentient life all over the place."
"Which, you know, it's sloppy generalization, and a generally invalid form of argument to say that you could've solved a problem using a particular heuristic, and therefore that heuristic must be right across all cases."
"But still, one would've preferred them to go with the heuristic of people not having a duty to stick around where they're not being happy."
Carissa Sevar: " - or the heuristic of just doing what you actually want and not being Good but I guess I can see why dath ilan doesn't want to tell people to adopt that one."
Shiver.
"Existing is great and it feels like this is some kind of fact I could explain if I found the right metaphor even though it can't possibly be."
Keltham: "Yeah, I think that's just the utilityfunction, probably, in the end. We're not coherent and we don't know what our values are, we can learn facts and arguments that change what it is we think we want and even what it is that we actually want, but - all of that is ultimately inside a framework that you're born with, that can never become known to you - and there was a very long and very hard-fought argument inside Civilization, between the 'negative utilitarians' and everyone else, before both sides came to accept that the other side wasn't making a mistake. The negative utilitarians didn't want conscious life colonizing the universe, if that meant running a risk that people in any significant numbers would ever feel any amount of pain and unhappiness, even a small amount. That was, so far as anyone could tell, just their utilityfunction and their framework they'd been born with. If it'd been a question of the very smart people coming up with the right argument to talk them out of it - everything would have been simpler and much much less creepy."
"This is all before I was born, by the way, but an endlessly famous part of history because it's, like, one of the greatest moral stress-tests that Civilization was ever subjected to, and it generated so much drama, and the way it ended sure did not help."
Carissa Sevar: "It sounds creepy. And - terrifying, for all the people who thought that faction might win and murder them all -"
Keltham: "I doubt that was ever in the cards. I don't think the people of Civilization would've let all intelligent life be ended over their commitment to democracy. I don't know whether you'd call that Good, or Evil, or Lawful, or Chaotic, in Golarion's system, but it is - who they are."
"The threat that the negative utilitarians held against Civilization was that Civilization would have to put aside democracy to stop them, if they just played out the game the obvious way that was there for them to play it to end all life. That was - their negotiating leverage, that Civilization could either give up on its system of law and property to stop them, or bargain with them that nobody would ever be allowed to suffer in the future, not even the smallest bit of pain."
"The Keepers took a third alternative and, yes, incredibly incredibly creepy, but nobody called them out on it being wrong, given that it was apparently an option."
Carissa Sevar: "I mean, if they just explained to them that there's life everywhere and Civilization seems way more concerned than most of the rest of it with avoiding suffering, then that's not even very creepy except for how it's secret.
I hope they didn't - commit Civilization to try to stop other Civilizations that have more pain in them because of having different kinds of people, who want it and grow from it."
Keltham: "There's not life everywhere in dath ilan's universe. Calculations suggest the nearest aliens are half a billion, two billion years away by the fastest you can travel in a non-magical universe, which is the speed of light, which is around... uh, three hundred million yards per second very loose figures in Golarion units."
Carissa Sevar: "But if you're going to be Good at all why limit yourself to caring about one universe?"
Keltham: "Can't see and touch the other ones by any known possible means."
Carissa Sevar: " - maybe I'm thinking about this wrong, I'm not Good and haven't worked through it much, but - if I think there are only a thousand people, and that it'd be better if they didn't go turn into a billion people, so you kill them all, that's one thing. But if there are infinite people, and there's a group of a thousand of them that's going to turn into a billion, and you kill them to prevent that, and there's still infinite people, that - seems even stupider."
Keltham: "Our cuddleroom conversation is literally getting into anthropics at this point, but I'm a finite fraction of everything that exists, you're a finite fraction of everything that exists, if we were an infinitely tiny fraction we'd be somebody else instead."
"I'm no doubt a much tinier fraction now than when I got on the airplane. This does not bother me."
Carissa Sevar: " - that would definitely bother me! It sounds like you're saying - it's not bad to be murdered if the murderer first spins a coin and only murders you if it comes up heads - but it definitely still seems bad."
Keltham: "You're probably like two trillion times less real than my last girlfriend."
Carissa Sevar: "And I would like to be more real than that. I might not know how to get it but I still care about it."
Keltham: "Think your three options here are to create a lot of copies of yourself, become a god, or investigate whatever weird disturbing options Golarion might have on offer in the foundations of its reality if those have any cracks or flaws."
Carissa Sevar: "Three seems risky. But one and two are both appealing, once I know how to pull them off."
Keltham: "I have straight-up never gotten the thing where some people say they want there to be more copies of themselves, which I guess is good, because otherwise I'd be incredibly sad about however much of my reality I lost in the plane crash."
Carissa Sevar: "It seems like only part of it being good by my values that I exist is that this specific thread of consciousness gets to experience existing and the other part of it is some other thing to do with charactistically-Carissa thoughts and experiences happening, and the other thing is more satisfied if I exist more. But I will admit I haven't thought about this much.
That said I'd have a hard time being sad about the plane crash or about existing two trillion times less than your last girlfriend, because - that wouldn't change it any -"
Keltham: "Does it make a difference if I say that my last girlfriend wasn't a wizard, wasn't a masochist, would not have been as difficult to injure by biting, lived in a world where Spellcraft didn't exist, and all of these things are because she was so much more real than you or I am now? Would you become two trillion times more real at the price of your magic?"
Carissa Sevar: " - good question. I don't know. I rather want to ask Subirachs if Asmodeanism has an answer, actually."
Keltham: "You're not allowed to leave the cuddleroom yet." There's still an internal jarring, each time he says something like that, and yet - it is comforting, that she can be here just because he wants her to be here, safely, without cost to him.
Carissa Sevar: She beams at him. "Yes, Keltham.
Anyway, there is a teaching that mortals are specifically bad at reasoning about really large numbers, and devils aren't, and so it seems possible that once I am perfected as a devil I could tell you exactly how much realness I'd trade for how much magic, and it seems further possible that Hell could tell me already, to at least moderate accuracy. But I am yours, and submit to you in the matter of whether I should ask about that."
Keltham: "I know how to reason about large numbers, which is only a matter of knowing how to carry out a whole chain of reasoning using numbers on every step. But in this case it's not about the large-number part of it. You value your experience of magic. You value there being more Carissalike things that are real. If your value on the second thing scales linearly and is currently strong enough for you to notice it at all, you'd sacrifice your future experience of magic to become two trillion times more real."
"Hell doesn't need to do the part where it reasons about large numbers. Hell needs to know whether your currently stated preference for there to be more reality in Carissalike things, is a valid part of your idealized utilityfunction, and one that grows as an independent component without limit until it trumps the part of your idealized utilityfunction that wants to go on experiencing being able to do magic."
"And - I would personally say - giving up your sense of joy in doing magic, because you had a sense that you ought to be obligated to become two trillion times more real even if you couldn't feel that at all from the inside, even if what became two trillion times as real was the sad Carissa who lost her magic - that does feel to me like - it has something in common with the thinking of the people who thought they had go on existing in the present in order to destroy the future."
"There's - something of Goodness - in caring too much about what's real, and having that drown out how things feel to you."
Carissa Sevar: "That's a very interesting answer, and maybe also Hell's answer, in which case I'll believe it. But two trillion Carissae would get to do so many things - I love magic, but I am sure I would love other things too - and there'd be enough of her for all the Kelthams around, and I'd be a little less always on the brink of being gone, and - Hell's answer might also be that, I'm not sure. Not that I'd be obligated to give up magic for there to be more of me, but that I'd chase the opportunity until I caught it, if I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
Also it's not like there wouldn't still be a Golarion Carissa who did magic, right? Just, most Carissae would be ones born into worlds that exist more, like worlds without magic or that didn't have an Earthfall?"
Keltham: "I doubt my last girlfriend existed in more different places than future Carissa Sevars will, over say the next subjective million years? I'd guess she'll probably exist in fewer distinguishably different places, because her reality is more densely concentrated. Or on a macro scale, I expect the different dath ilans end up less diverse than the branching Golarions."
"I think you're confusing the question of how many importantly distinct versions of something there is, with the ~~~~~~~~ of being any one of those versions. Probably some of the most individually real consciousnesses in all of reality are incredibly simple minds in simple universes that stay on single tracks and never branch."
Carissa Sevar: "Does anything important depend on how I answer this question or should I just drop it until I am older and wiser?"
Keltham: "I mean, we lead strange lives so I cannot guarantee you will not suddenly be offered a chance to become two trillion times more real at the price of your magic. And, come that day, it might be important for you to understand, that this is not at all the same thing as creating two trillion importantly different versions of yourself having diverse experiences."
"But, I mean, if you turn out to have the option of asking me first, you probably should."
"Oh, and you asked about permission, I should answer explicitly. No problem if you can afford the comms bandwidth someday to ask Hell about it, but I predict they answer that they need an unmanageable amount of detail about your psychology, or say '85% likelihood that if we knew everything about a random fourth-circle wizard we'd tell them blah blah blah, but it's incredibly hard to actually learn for individuals'."
Carissa Sevar: She bets they won't, because Hell doesn't care what she values but what they value in her. But - "yeah, they might. I'm still curious. Thank you."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 25 (21) / Long Night
Iarwain: (Branched subthread for an event during this Long Night: Korva explaining her own suggestions on alterCheliax.)
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 26 (22)
Keltham: Three of the twelve candidates are not being hired.
It's easier the second time. Maybe also because this group wasn't friends with each other the same way as the Ostensos. He doesn't have the same sense of splitting people up by assigning them different fates.
A note from Korva says she's fine working for Asmodia and would prefer to skip her exit interview.
The cleric of Asmodeus accepts without changing expression that he can best serve Asmodeus by staying on in this Fortress as a staff cleric, against their potential future need for a Security-cleared pure mathematician. He accepts the Project's offer to him for the option-value on that without negotiating.
The final rejected candidate says she's totally taking the Hell option, since Cheliax is offering a free round-trip ticket there and back.
Iarwain: (No, not actually. She'll just be a statue for a bit.)
Keltham: Nine of twelve are hired.
Lady Avaricia is the only immediate tier-1 among them.
Keltham has his eye on some of the others. They haven't had as much attention and Law-lecturing from him as the first twelve got during their first week; they should not necessarily despair at not being promoted to tier-1s yet.
Keltham: (Keltham does privately feel surprised that there'd be Asmodia and Ione out of the first eleven Ostenso students, and Meritxell though she is not quite looking to be in that same class at the moment; and only Lady Avaricia to clearly outperform the rest of a supposedly much more elite candidate class. It does seem a bit... tropey, if he doesn't just need to offer them more training. Or maybe these people have too much Existing Expertise and too much Achievement In a Narrow Field and not enough Being Random Very Smart Kids Ready To Learn.)
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Lady Avaricia is so incredibly unsurprised by this. What are they doing next.
Alexandre Esquerra: Tier-two is acceptable - for the moment. Once the field shifts from mathematics to crafting, Alexandre will demonstrate his skills and Keltham will amend his folly.
Willa Shilira: Willa should be thrilled to have succeeded, but it tastes like failure.
It's not the shares and the money-from-shares that really matter, even though it's really possibly quite a lot of money and it probably should. It's the having lost, to Avaricia of all people, it's the thrill of the test gone to ashes, it's the implied promise that the tier one girls are the special ones. It's painful to think about, that she might just be in the background, forever.
And it's not the kind of thing you can work harder to fix, because she's already been working hard, she doesn't have some extra gear she can tap into that she wasn't already tapping. But she very much wants to be distracted right now. Maybe they'll do more SCIENCE today, and if not, there's always obsessively playing with every aspect of Prestidigitation.
Keltham: They're not done yet, signing-agreements-wise!
Keltham has now produced a non-disclosure agreement between the Project's employees including himself, and the Professional Alchemist, if the Professional Alchemist is willing. Keltham sent it off to Cheliax last night, and they made a few corrections that seem fine to Keltham and sent it back signed on their own behalf this morning. Cheliax is signatory because the NDA also binds, for example, nearby Security, and anybody who's allowed to read transcripts.
lintamande: The Professional Alchemist wanted a long time to read it very closely but eventually declared it satisfactory.
Keltham: Yeah, cool. Keltham admits to being interested in what was worth the protection.
lintamande: He does temperature-reading with his familiar, a vampire bat, which has heat vision, and which he trained to distinguish fairly fine detail in heat - down to 10% of the difference between freezing and boiling water. He also has some secret processes he'll show them but that is most of his competitive edge.
Keltham: ...that does not particularly sound like it would scale. But it will, during the prototyping phase, plausibly save them some time, if they're ready for the SO2->SO3 step before Keltham otherwise invents a thermometer.
Anyways, welcome to Project Lawful.
They probably don't have everyone they need, now, they're probably also going to need a smith or a glassblower or who knows what else, but they've got enough to keep on storming ahead in what is hopefully a forwards direction.
Keltham: For, now that they have basically functioning spectroscopes, they can start learning to modify spectra of light rather than just the way illusions look to the naked eye, modify electron orbital levels rather than just the colors that materials burn, and by doing exercises like those, hopefully, graduate to being able to modify the chemical properties and most-probable reaction pathways of materials via their understanding, and not just hammer from outside on their 'color', 'smell', or 'taste'.
The road ahead of them will not be easy! Not trivially easy, definitely! Possibly quite hard! They'll be performing magical manipulations that don't just do what they want right away, and instead push on weird invisible properties, properties that can only be measured indirectly, in spectroscopic properties or reaction rates. They'll have to hone their exercises of magical power until they actually do much of anything predictable at all; and then, by observing the little they can observe, often after the fact, they'll have to figure out how to affect complex systemic properties in a way that adds up to a functioning pathway of chemical transformations. There's math that can guide their way, but only partially, for understanding particular steps; they can't just calculate everything they need to do.
In other words, just like being a wizard apprentice all over again!
Only this time they will become MATTER WIZARDS.
And then use their MATTER WIZARDRY to produce ENORMOUS QUANTITIES OF ACID.
Then magically perfect the reaction pathways to refine spellsilver cheaply out of less expensive ore, drop spellsilver costs by a factor of 10, probably do some other stuff too, but also get started on making more intelligence headbands for new wizards who can make more intelligence headbands.
And now, begin!
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 27 (23)
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 28 (24)
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 29 (25)