Pilar : "I - I don't know - there've been times when I was hungry and wanted to eat, when I'm tired I want to sleep, I would probably still want to be beaten sometimes even if that didn't make me a better slave -"
"Asmodia was right, by the way, I'm not even sure what alterPilar's sexuality was supposed to be, exactly, and if I was muddled about it then she was definitely muddled about it and Keltham wouldn't believe that about a Keeper in training. Maybe when he asks how it went tomorrow I should tell him that my sexuality fell apart."
Carissa Sevar: "That's probably fine. I think it's important to Keltham's corruption that you - actually wouldn't have been harmed, if he'd grabbed you last week - but I think that's just true, so it can be true in alter-Cheliax too.
A being that truly wasn't muddled at all, could have lots of things they cared about, so long as they only cared about them where Asmodeus was indifferent or there was no way to know what He wanted. In humans - seems like a bad habit. It might leave you in the habit of hoping Asmodeus is indifferent about things He actually might care about - which, you'll notice, is a mistake you can only make if on some level you do care about those things more than about what Asmodeus wants from you.
I think I probably don't want to overcomplicate Pilar Pineda; she wants to serve Asmodeus, and where Asmodeus is indifferent, she wants to be a good slave, and where there is no one to impress or serve she wants to enjoy life's insubstantial pleasures, and she doesn't love anyone, because Asmodeus, in fact, isn't indifferent about that; it is a particular cesspool of muddle we are supposed to avoid. Does that feel like it's missing anything. It might be very important, if it is."
Pilar : "It -"
"I can feel all these flinches, and reluctances, and all these other things that Keltham -"
"I shouldn't be talking about that with you. Should I? Can't risk the Chosen of Asmodeus."
"Keltham told me I was supposed to get an Owl's Wisdom when I noticed myself," flinching away, "doing those things, so I could learn to recognize the feeling faster, but he also said not to do that if things started happening without an Owl's Wisdom."
Carissa Sevar: "You shouldn't be talking about that with me."
She really really wants to see herself with that same lens, whatever the lens is, see all the delusions and errors and muddles, all the cracks, everything Asmodeus hates, but she has to learn to fix people from it before she can break herself, that's only fair
"And I don't think you should give yourself an Owl's Wisdom while you are this unstable. Learn to recognize the feeling without one; dath ilani do it.
I am inclined to have Keltham petrified tonight, so we have more time to work on you before you need to report to him."
Pilar : "I can still Bluff," Pilar says, sounding completely normal about it.
Carissa Sevar: And it might, actually, be good to let her, be good to have her do something she's good at in between facing all the things she's terrible at. "Then we'll save petrifying him for an even greater emergency. Stop speaking; I want to think."
Carissa really, really dislikes feeling incompetent. It's not worse than torture, but it's kind of worse than torture; at least torture you're only supposed to endure, whereas incompetence it is totally inadequate to endure. You have to actually fix it.
It is tempting to think of Pilar's mistake as one she wouldn't make. In the specific details, she wouldn't. She loves Keltham; she is trying to get him sent to Hell; when she has the impulse to do right by him, to make sure he's okay, to make sure he's glad he knew her, to make sure that she didn't really betray him not entirely, she tells herself that that's a problem for the Carissa who becomes a Power in Hell; along the way she'll either realize those impulses were an error, or she'll be in a position to fulfill them.
But that probably just means that the cracks lie somewhere else; she's not, actually, a better Asmodean than Pilar. What if she herself doesn't want to go to Hell. It feels wrong, feels unlikely, but it wouldn't be very surprising in any other project member, and there's that ilani-feeling mental step, of noticing that the logic you use to predict other people you can use to predict yourself, if you've walled off the ability to predict yourself using your internals -
- and right now is not the time to follow those thoughts to their inevitable conclusion, because she shouldn't break what she can't fix, and right now she can't even fix Pilar, who ought to be the easiest case, who she can subject to as much torment as she wants, as soon as she figures out what torment might actually help with this.
Carissa Sevar: She isn't, actually, an expert on people. Except Keltham. Keltham makes perfect sense, Keltham she understands intuitively. She's actually wholly confident that when Keltham reaches the point of being able to hear the truth - if he does - she'll know how to say it to him. Everyone else - it feels like it's all just Bluff, all the way down, pretending to be someone they pretend to have confidence in -
Pilar wants her to be real. Pilar wants her to have been Chosen for her knowledge of how to build devils right here on Chelish soil. Pilar wants to fling herself at the ground and be sculpted until she is perfect.
(Don't we all.)
Carissa Sevar: (Keltham doesn't.)
Carissa Sevar: "All right. I'm going to consider this as - three problems. One is that you've behaved badly and it's going to take a lot of expensive effort to make you suffer for it a fraction as much as you deserve. One is that shaping you properly is going to involve making your desires coherent, but right now they're full of contradictions half of which might be hazardous to anyone who isn't a devil, and the process of identifying them all is probably going to take you a while and might involve breaking more random things. One is that you know how weak and contemptible you are, and rightly don't want to trust the process of reshaping you to anyone as weak and contemptible as that, but -
- it has to be you, particularly since I'm not permitted to know of half of it. Hell, perhaps, can reshape people while they have the luxury of merely suffering and enduring and accepting. You'd have liked that better. If you want this done here, now, then you're going to have to do it, and you're going to have to live with the knowledge it was done by someone as worthless and confused as you, and the knowledge they might've gotten it subtly wrong."
Pilar : "Even if you ended up breaking me, if it was in - Asmodeus's service, if you learned from that, if it it's what you need to become His Chosen - that would feel right, to me."
Carissa Sevar: And what if it's not, what if I don't know what I'm doing either.
"If it teaches me how to do this, I don't care if it feels right to you. But - since I mustn't learn the Keeper things myself, yet - you're going to have to do this work, so it'll help that you agree it's a good use of you. Try to figure out, then, what you value. Use an Owl's Wisdom once you're out of ideas. Find the flaws, then we'll fix them."
Pilar : "I - if I could fix myself, if my soul was shaped like that - I'd just belong to Irori in the first place -"
Pilar stops herself.
"I, I'm not being obedient enough. I'll go - try to figure myself out using Keltham's arts, and then I'll go to an Owl's Wisdom when I can't go further, and I'll report - I'll report on the flaws, if not how I found them."
"Also when I said that I could Bluff well enough, I wasn't lying, but the real reason I said it is that I imagined Asmodia being unhappy about having to restart cloud cover again, and that mattered to me not because it would hamper Asmodeus's work, but because I," flinched away without thinking about it at subdeliberate speeds, but noticing that, watching for it, isn't something she should be talking about with the valuable Chosen, "didn't want to make somebody else unhappy."
Carissa Sevar: " - humans suck.
Bring me a list of flaws and I'll do what I can with them."
Pilar : There's a sense of revulsion in herself, then, for being like this, for being such a bad slave of Asmodeus. And a realization that she's maybe never done anything really and properly Evil in her entire life despite all the Church's teachings, for stupid reasons like that. And a flare of anger that Pilar rarely lets herself feel, apparently because she was under the impression that slaves shouldn't get angry. She wants to do something Evil, now, to repent of her heresy, and she can see a mean impulse in herself, a wish for others to suffer as she suffers, that before she would have suppressed more quickly than she could think about it.
"I should go away and think, but - Keltham wasn't lying when he said that there are, pieces of this art, of what did this to me, that anybody is going to have to master if they're going to master Law at all. Everything he told me, he said, was ordinary ilani stuff, because he doesn't know any real Keeper secrets. But we shouldn't expose the valuable people, like you, right away."
"Should we maybe tell some of the lower tier-2s who are struggling to distinguish themselves that they're volunteering to learn some of the more dangerous things from Keltham, slower than I did but faster than the others, in hopes of becoming more valuable? And because they know that if they can't make it as ilani, they may as well fail out of the Project early instead of costing him time."
Carissa Sevar: " - yes, I'll pick who with Asmodia. And maybe the boy who's a priest of Asmodeus, I'm curious if being a priest of Asmodeus predicts already being mostly coherent in the right way."
Pilar : Any fucking comments on that, Snack Service?
Curse of Laughter: None that would simultaneously serve the interests of Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil! Pilar will just have to see how her initial foray into cruelty plays out.
Ferrer Maillol: "Chosen. How may I serve?"
Carissa Sevar: "So, imagine this: Pilar's mother was mean to her a bit more often, and Pilar didn't have this particular flaw, and she did all her deep thinking and found something less threatening, and returns to class tomorrow rather optimistic about these new techniques of Keltham's. Security reads her mind, runs across the relevant technique. Security is in denial about not wanting their mother to go to Hell."
Ferrer Maillol: It takes Maillol a moment to work out that Sevar is talking about an alternate realCheliax, not a proposed alterCheliax.
"That's why we had Security running Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties on Pilar, instead of Detect Thoughts, while she was getting that lecture from Keltham, yes? Just enough that she couldn't have defected right there and then. I thought at the time it was an abundance of caution, now it seems hardly cautious enough."
"I'm thinking I'll return one of our fifth-circle Security, exchange him for a few fourth-circle Security selected to seem stable and uncomplicated and Evil and, frankly, be more disposable. They can be the only ones to mindread the candidates exposed to the dangerous stuff."
Carissa Sevar: "More than a few, I think, if we also need to have them watching each other. In the long run it's going to be all of the candidates, and - I wouldn't be very surprised if we lose something like half the exposed Security."
- actually there's math for that. If one person's been exposed, and immediately had a catastrophic breakdown, then that's like the result of one ball-bounce has been reported, and it was left, and if you started out with any possible rate seeming equally likely...."I would be unsurprised if we lost two thirds of the exposed Security who were selected about as hard as Pilar was," she corrects herself.
Ferrer Maillol: Great, now Sevar has started using inscrutable Laws to produce numbers out of nowhere. Maillol isn't so much afraid to ask, as instinctively knowing that nothing good will happen to him if he does.
"That's a lot of fourth-circles... I'd say go to third-circle or second-circle, where we can afford to lose numbers like that if we get stronger fifth-circles out of it later... it's just, at some point you go down low enough that you've got to worry they'll actually snap in front of Keltham."
"We could use third-circles to monitor candidates when they're not around Keltham. We can use clerics who can run Detect Desires and Detect Anxieties to catch immediate major snaps."
"I suppose if the Project bears fruit, at some point we'll be exposing candidates to whatever the fuck this is at first-circle, before we hand out Keltham's cheap headbands to wizard students. I'm just wincing about how expensive this sounds for Cheliax in the short term."
"Can you use that Law to do anything better than... staring at people it happened to, and didn't happen to, and trying to guess who it'll happen to next?"
Carissa Sevar: "I think dath ilan would run a prediction market. Which we're doing, but it didn't predict Pilar.
I think - the thing that goes wrong, in broad terms, is that someone realizes they were lying to themselves about wanting to serve Asmodeus and go to Hell, and then ideally they immediately realize that even though they don't want to do that they prefer it to their alternative of not serving Asmodeus and still going to Hell, and that they don't have some incredibly convenient third alternative.
And in unlucky cases - they instead think they do have a way out, and they try it. They think 'if I kill myself I bet Osirion will resurrect me, or Hell destroy me to prevent that'. Or they try to warn Keltham, or try to bargain with Abadar...
Or they'd built their entire motivational system off their belief they wanted to serve Asmodeus and 'I don't want to, I just don't have a choice' doesn't sustain that.
So you'd think you could screen for whether someone's lying to themselves about that, except I don't - know how obvious it is, even if you're reading their mind. Or you could try to trigger it in them on purpose before they get anywhere near the project, break everyone up front, except maybe there are further things like this which we haven't run into..."
Ferrer Maillol: "Chelish system is already set up for a lot of things like that, we try to break people early while they're cheap and only invest in the survivors. It's just, we haven't factored ilanism into the system up until now, and we've got a lot of expensive people we've already invested in who we didn't try to break in that way."
"If you can pick people who are just half as likely to break, without trying anything on them that might break them, you'd be saving Cheliax an awful lot of money and personnel. Even if we can hand out +4 intelligence headbands like iron daggers a year from now, new wizards take time to raise."
Carissa Sevar: "I predict Abarco won't fall apart on you. Do we have more of him?"
Ferrer Maillol: "I'm sure Cheliax does. Somewhere. In extremely critical positions where yanking them would cause multiple vital projects to fall apart."
"Abarco is the actually competent Security on this installation. We were lucky enough to get one of those instead of zero. I'm not sure I've heard of any project that had two competent security people. As in, I literally can't remember reading about a case like that in any histories."
Carissa Sevar: "Why are there so few people in this country who can do their jobs. I guess that also means we shouldn't test if I'm right he won't fall apart. Pilar proposed testing the weaker Tier-2s, after which we might have a better sense of what predicts problems."
Ferrer Maillol: "If it seemed to you like other people were very competent, you'd be too weak yourself to be the most competent person who gets promoted to being the leader of a project like this one. Asmodeus probably has the same kinds of complaints about His own archdevils, I figure, and if there were ten Asmodeuses they'd compete until the strongest one ruled over the others, who'd then seem incompetent to Him. I think that's part of what makes Asmodeanism the only workable way to run societies. Even Chaotic or Good countries have to appoint captains of soldiers and managers of workers, and give them powers of command and punishment over subordinates they're pretending aren't slaves."
"The suggestion makes sense to me, though I expect Pilar was suggesting it at least in part to prove that she was a good Asmodean and capable of cruelty that served our Lord. It's a worrying sign that she felt the need to prove it, but that's better than her not being able to prove it."
Carissa Sevar: - it seems obvious, once he says it. "Yes, I expect she was. She's in a very worrying state, generally. If you have advice I think I could use it."
Ferrer Maillol: "I worry we've done enough already without completing another observation loop from the Most High on what we've done so far. We're not actually authorized to correct Pilar on matters of faith. Though I have a strong intuition that refusing Pilar your counsel just then would not have been the correct move, and I'll be surprised if the Most High doesn't agree. But still."
"...we're going to be in a genuinely bad position if we need Pilar-level candidates and individualized divine interventions to produce Asmodean ilani, even leaving aside all of our confusion about why Cayden Cailean would do that and whether He actually is helping us at all. Looking at it from that angle, we've absolutely got to test this out on people who aren't Pilar, and any result that isn't zero survivors will be a good one. I'm tempted to say we should risk Abarco on having him collate the reports from lesser Security, so he can report to us in safely general terms on what he thinks is proving problematic and his ideas for screening future candidates."
Carissa Sevar: "And who watches him?"
Ferrer Maillol: "...Our mathematician-cleric of Asmodeus, maybe? He's got far enough in wizardry to cast Detect Thoughts, right? He watches Abarco, Abarco watches him..."
"If you think Abarco's likely to break and betray us, we shouldn't try it. Our Security structure here is frankly not set up to handle senior Securities turning traitor."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't think it's likely, but he'd know that Security isn't set up to handle it, and know that Osirion will give him anything he could possibly want short of his soul, so it's probably not - less than five percent likely -"
Ferrer Maillol: "That's high for an unnecessary risk, but not so bad for a necessary one. What's our second-best plan, if not that?"
Carissa Sevar: "Pack a room full of second-circle wizards, have Pilar deliver a lecture, add whichever ones don't break - no, that only works if all breaks are immediate - have her make an attempt on the kidnapped Taldane girls, we have less of a problem if this also tends to break non-Asmodeans - do we have any captive Kuthites from the war, I want to try it on them too -"
Ferrer Maillol: "I'll cost it out and send you and the Crown a proposed budget. At least we can pick kids from distant countries with weaker wizard academies, if we're looking for mathematical talents in general and not girls from Taldor."
"It's not as bad as I've been making out to Keltham, but even in realCheliax the Crown treasury will be less sad about this sort of request if the Project can start refining spellsilver soon. Or at least produce high-purity oil of vitriol."
Maillol doesn't ask the Chosen how they're doing on that; he reads the reports on it every day. The better half of the researchers are continually improving at Prestidigitating in the weird ways Keltham demands, and Keltham seems to think they're tantalizingly close to completing a full acid production cycle, but they're not actually there yet.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 32
Pilar : There's an atmosphere about Pilar that's different, when Keltham sees her next. Sharper, more driven, indefinably more dangerous.
Keltham: "You look like somebody with nontrivial experimental results to report, if I'm reading you right."
Pilar : "I realized that I'm made almost entirely out of stupid muddled mistakes. That I'm not remotely as good a slave to Asmodeus as I thought. That even if I can raise twenty thousand gold my mother and sister will still refuse resurrection and I'll never see them again. That there was a complicated muddle at the center of my sexuality, being simultaneously in denial and not in denial about what I need, which has now collapsed and taken down my sexuality with it, and I am still trying to figure out what, if anything, I'll be able to enjoy."
"It's also obvious that everything you taught me is necessary basic ilani skills. They're going to wreck most people from Golarion who try to learn them, and not all of those will recover. That's going to be an issue, Keltham."
Keltham: "Yeah, that's about the level of unpleasant news I was predicting I'd hear."
"If it's any consolation, you're also giving off a distinct impression of having tiered-up in a way that makes it feel more like you could hold your own in a contest of wills and powers with, say, Asmodia."
Pilar : Pilar is more than slightly taken aback by this.
But only momentarily.
Pilar : "I never even considered for a fraction of a second giving up. It's very clear that the only way out is through."
Keltham: "Still on the side of 'That which can be destroyed by the truth should be immediately', huh?"
Pilar : "That which can be destroyed by the Law. And while I will entertain proposals to delay its destruction by a period of minutes or hours, weeks or months would be weakness."
Keltham: "All right then."
"Not particularly sure how you'll take this, but it's possible that one of the next mental skills you may need to acquire is how to chill out and stop adhering so forcefully to your own mental concept of yourself. If I'm reading correctly and inferring correctly, I mean. That you have a concept of the New Pilar in your head and are currently very forcefully being her. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but you also need to know how to stop, how to reflect on whether you've constructed her well, and to realize that the person who is being New Pilar is a distinct and greater entity from New Pilar."
Pilar : "Overruled, sticking to theme. I'm currently holding myself together with spit and string, and I will consider advice like that after I don't feel quite as much like I'm going to fall apart in the next six minutes."
Keltham: "Don't know if you're particularly in the mood for compliments, but that kind of internal consequentialism is a much more ordinary-dath-ilani style of thinking than you were displaying twenty-four hours earlier."
"Are you able to report details on any of those internal collapses?"
Pilar : Problem is, all of the real collapses didn't happen in alter-Cheliax. Trying to report on only the fake ones doesn't seem especially wise.
"I'd honestly rather not, if the details don't matter. I was lying to myself about important things, does it matter what they were? And now that I know how to perceive it, it looks like most of my thought processes are all about - motivated cognition, wanting things -"
Keltham: "Wanting to believe things. Most of our cognition is obviously going to be about wanting things; that's not a problem."
Pilar : "Even if the things we want are muddled and - contradictory and flickering on and off and - stepping on each other -"
Keltham: "Ordinary ilani put up with that inside themselves if it's nothing huge and important. Keepers try to straighten it all out, or at least that's the impression I get."
"But even when you've straightened out some target area, your cognition is going to be full of wanting things. From some important perspectives on viewing people, we more or less are complicated structures of wanting things. The straightening-out part is not stepping on yourself in a way where you could rearrange your decisions to get more of everything you want."
"It's when you're flinching away from or towards reaching particular conclusions about reality, that your internal system is acting in an inherently tangled way."
"Ordinary dath ilani will resolve that once they get to the point of noticing it, definitely at the point they're experiencing internal stresses about it or trying not to look there. Ordinary dath ilani increase over a lifetime the skill of trying to detect that slight flinch towards or away from something. More respectable and serious dath ilani than I am go hunting traces proactively, try to refine their perceptions early and strongly, in order to at least not make overly visible errors."
"Or as the proverb goes among the Very Serious People of dath ilan: It's fine to be imperfect, just not so imperfect that other people notice."
"Keepers, presumably, have a store of techniques for doing that even better, that the rest of us shouldn't know about. And probably have machines for scanning their brains to detect really tiny mistakes and flinches, way before they'd be skilled enough to see them naturally... and they go into those machines at age thirteen, so they've still got youthful mind-shapability, while retraining their brains to do more Lawful stuff than humans are really designed to do at all. I'm guessing, there, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be true."
Pilar : She'll think later about Keltham's statement that even unmuddled people are mostly structures of wanting lots of things.
"I wasn't sure I was even going to ask this, but, fuck it. Can you - do to me whatever those machines do to ilani? Or just - retrain me, hurt me, until I'm at least as Lawful as a dath ilani child -"
Keltham: "You know, most dath ilani don't really like making mistakes. If a machine lights up with a purple light to show you did something wrong, it doesn't need to apply a tiny shock of lightning to make the point. Which is fortunate, what with dath ilani not being masochists at all, but also unfortunately means that I have no idea how to do any of that training better in a way that gets any benefit from hurting you."
"Anyways, if I'm again reading you clearly now that you're more ilani, you stormed in here like somebody who has strong opinions about how we should proceed from here. Question mark?"
Pilar : So Chelaxians become more readable to Keltham as they start thinking more like ilani. That sounds like so much fun.
"I was, in fact, the obvious person to conduct this experiment on. I did in fact survive it. I have an opinion on what we should do with the rest of the Project, I predict you're not going to like it, and I'll say right now that if you want your other researchers to be happy with any different plans from mine, you need to figure out how to make the Project move faster or more surely to where it's going. Not complain about people choosing to take risks."
"People like Carissa Sevar and Asmodia are, in fact, too valuable to risk by exposing them to what you exposed me to. But we need data on how this plays out in people, and we have no way to get it except by 'mad-experimentation'," she uses the Baseline word for it. "Being slow about that doesn't earn us anything except negative time."
"So we call for volunteers from among the less valuable members of the Project, the tier-2s with no immediate promotion prospects otherwise, and see if they - if they tier-up, as you put it."
"If they break instead, they quit the Project or go to Hell depending on how broken they end up. And then we'll know something about which sort of people break, and which don't."
"That cleric of Asmodeus you didn't hire, I want to experiment on him particularly. In case people chosen by Asmodeus have more inherent Law in a way that lets them handle this."
Keltham: "You're correct that I don't like it."
Pilar : "Good for my prediction record."
"Do you have a plan with higher ‘expectedutility’, or an objection that doesn't boil down to you disliking Golarion people taking risks to pursue their ambitions?"
Keltham: "Not as of the first five seconds, but I plan to give myself at least a day to think about it. And I do not particularly accept your attempted frame that I need to adopt your policy as a default baseline to optimize against, nor that you get to make this decision if I can't show you an alternative you deem better. I am, in fact, still the authority on this Project."
Pilar : "I don't necessarily accept the frame that you can or should decide for Asmodeans what they aren't allowed to do, in the course of perfecting ourselves as our Lord desires of us."
Keltham: "Then you don't necessarily get further pseudo-Keeper training from me. I mean, maybe you can talk me into that, but I don't necessarily accept the frame I'm obligated to keep supplying training to you without thinking about whether or not that advances my own utilityfunction. Such as if you start using that training to experiment on other people, without my having signed off on that."
Pilar : "I wasn't threatening I'd start teaching them Keeper things without your signing off on it, Keltham."
Keltham: "I definitely wasn't taking it as a threat, but it did sound like you were stating that your baseline for negotiation, as individualwise maximized your utilityfunction, would be teaching others without my consent. I was observing that my own uncoordinated-maximum baseline might then be to stop teaching you."
Pilar : "No, Keltham. I'm saying that I don't - that I'm not okay with the entire way you approach things like this. You're coming between people and their god, ignoring the ways they want to serve their god and the ways their god desires them to serve, because you didn't grow up with relationships like that and don't understand they're important."
She might, under other circumstances, feel guilty about falsely invoking people's eagerness to serve Asmodeus to justify to Keltham their participation in a project for which in fact they'll be forcibly volunteered; but submitting to being used like that is absolutely the heart of Asmodeanism if anything is. It maybe isn't the way everyone on the Project is, but it's how they should be.
Keltham: "Consider that registered."
"I will think about this and make my own decision about how I want to proceed from here. I do expect you, as an employee of this Project, not to take action in this domain, until I've had a chance to decide what I think my own options are."
Pilar : "If I'm being asked to put on hold a matter I consider at least partially a matter of faith, while you think about things, I request a timeframe for how long that continues."
Keltham: "Barring unexpected emergencies, I expect to get back to you about this within 2 days, and you may come bother me about it if I haven't gotten back to you within 48 hours from now."
Pilar : "Acknowledged. Any else?"
Keltham: "Literally any non-private details on what the poo happened to you might be helpful here, Pilar. I know you think it's private and I know the results probably feel obvious to you but I do not understand how Golarion people work."
Pilar : "I - the problem is that it is private - and it doesn't feel, like the private details help, the general problem is that everybody in Golarion grew up being made out of lies and the details are going to be different for everybody -"
Keltham: "Pilar, there's widely different possible ways I can imagine for how people could hypothetically grow up around lies, and I do not have any idea which of those things might possibly be statistically common, or what happens to people afterwards when they see the problem."
Pilar : Pilar is sharply aware that AlterCheliax Pilar is not being this evasive. She's going to have to answer, and it seems important not to mislead Keltham here. Both because he's very likely to catch a lie, and also because he's trying to keep the actual people on the Project safe using this information. Somehow, she has to stick as closely to the truth as possible...
"I - there was something I wanted more than I wanted to serve Asmodeus, which was - to see my dead mother and my dead sister again - which I was in denial about, because, because the reason I'm supposed to want to be on this Project is to serve Asmodeus and become a better Asmodean - only, they're not going to want to see me, I realize that now, they went to Axis, not Hell, on purpose, and - under circumstances which - are private, but imply - that they probably wouldn't want to see me, unless I gave up Asmodeus and went to Axis with them. Details private. But my brain - kept on thinking of ways, over and over, theories for how I could get them back, and once you explained to me about - how motivated cognition worked - I could see that none of those theories could possibly be true -"
"I'm not explaining this well. The problem at the center wasn't the bad plans I had, it was that - I was lying to myself about what my relationship with my family was really like."
Keltham: "Pilar, I say this with great reluctance, because you may understand this problem much better than I do, to understand why in reality and in practice it couldn't possibly be solved, but you seeing your family again does not necessarily sound like the kind of problem I'd give up on solving if I was the one who had it?"
Pilar : "That is not something particularly helpful for me to hear right now, Keltham."
Keltham: "Why? Pilar, I'm not asking because you need to socially justify that decision to me, I'm asking so I can understand what happens to Golarion people when they start to get Law in them."
Pilar : "Because I'm fighting a battle where - where the victory is that the hope inside me is destroyed and I can stop thinking about it."
Keltham: "It is not obvious to me that this constitutes an example of Lawful thinking and something itself that the truth could not again destroy. If Golarion people need to move in - steps, from greater insanity to lesser insanity - and not straight from insanity to truth - then that sounds like something I might need to know about."
"Hope, where it constitutes the belief that something nice might happen, is a question of fact, Pilar. If the entanglement is less than one percent, desire to assign probability less than one percent, if greater than one percent, desire to assign greater belief than one percent. The questions of fact always come first."
"And if you want something, that's just your utilityfunction, and the utilityfunction is not up for grabs. Maybe you can't get the thing you want, that doesn't change what your utilityfunction is."
"If you want to stop thinking about something, develop the skills to stop thinking about things, don't distort your probability estimates over it. How would that even work, you'd just notice what you were doing and be like 'oh I'm rationalizing bad word Taldane I'm lying to myself again'. Or if your verbal part managed to fool itself about the probability without you noticing, deeper parts of you would not be in agreement, and they'd try to steer your brain into thinking about the hope again."
"Truth first. Accurate probabilities first. Then rebuild your mind around whatever those are. If you notice a lie, rebuild around the best estimates you can, don't rebuild around another lie. That's the obvious Lawful way to proceed, and if Golarion people need to recover from internal catastrophes some other way, that's kind of bad. Because I have no idea how that could possibly work or why or how the ass I could help."
Keltham: "Yes, I realize that I'm dumping more Golarion-Keeper aka dath ilani child training on you, at a time when you're already struggling. But Pilar, unless you're following some very clear and well-tested recipe for putting yourself together after Lawfulness-acquisition catastrophes - which seems improbable, but correct me if I'm wrong about that - you've got to not put yourself back together in a way that's wrong."
Pilar : "So - according to you - what I've got to do is - figure out what's true, first?"
Keltham: "Okay so there's actually a whole fragment of the Law here, which in retrospect I should have maybe covered earlier and before hitting you with all that other stuff, yay we've learned an important fact today."
"Probability is separable from Probable Utility; what we want, what we plan, what we should do, none of that changes what is. What is changes what we ought to plan, but what we ought to plan doesn't change what is. Is-questions form a smaller separable core inside the set of all the questions we need to ask, because is-questions relate only to other is-questions and not to ought-questions. So we can carve those out and consider those first and separately, and we usually should."
"If you wish the sky were orange, that doesn't change the sky being blue. Even if you're plotting how to turn the sky orange later, that doesn't change the sky being blue now. Even inside your planning process, the question of, 'If I try Prestidigitating the sky orange, will that actually work?' is a question that just runs on the rails of magic and the Law of chemistry and can be evaluated independently of any questions about what you want."
"That's part of the reason and part of the method for trying to get your mind quiet about all the things it wants while you're trying to evaluate a fact-question like 'How do my mother, and my sister, actually feel about me?' What you've observed from them, simple and statistically-common inferences from that, those are relevant to what is true there; your wants, not so much. Including even your want for the question to have a definite closed answer that couldn't be updated on any further evidence you gathered, as would lead your mind to stop thinking about it. Without you having to learn control arts about spending your thought-time where you actually want to spend it. That's need-for-closure, I told you about it yesterday."
Pilar : It - rhymes, somehow, with the advice that Sevar tried to give her. It's not pointing to exactly the same problem or solution as Sevar, but where it does point is crisper, clearer, more Lawful. When you hear Keltham speak he makes it clear why a Lawful mind must do as he describes. It's maybe prerequisite to whatever Sevar was trying to say?
The advice is not necessarily pleasant for her, if she ends up unable to dismiss her hopes, walking around with burning coals of 'maybe' pressed into her, until she learns to discipline her own thoughts by force. But 'pleasant' is hardly what Asmodeanism is about.
"Understood," Pilar says, and then, remembering that she is alterPilar in alterCheliax, "thank you."
Keltham: "You also mentioned something about your sexuality collapsing."
Pilar : "It's stupid and less important and not worth your time." All the details are lies and this seems like a bad time for lies.
Keltham: "By which you mean: It's private and embarrassing and you'd rather it not be the case, as it plainly is, that this is a useful piece of data for me, because so long as it isn't important, you won't need to decide whether keeping it private outweighs keeping me ignorant of data I'd find useful."
"Which, to be clear, is your decision, and potentially a valid one. I'm not telling you to care about what data I want, at all, let alone care about it more than your privacy. But make the decision consciously, in a way that reflects however much you actually do care, if you want to live up to the standard of an ordinary dath ilani never mind Keepers."
Pilar : Shit.
Could alterPilar reasonably decide that Keltham shouldn't know - no because alterPilar is also a faithful Asmodean and this is Asmodeus's project -
Nothing for it.
"It's - muddled to where, in retrospect, I don't even know myself what I was thinking - something like, so long as I never talk with anybody about - what I want - then what they believe about me can be whatever I need it to be, for the sex to be right. So long as I don't talk with myself about what I want, I don't have to admit it to anyone else. And all the facts about me can be whatever they need to be, for the sex to be right."
"Like, I can believe, they're forcing me into it and don't know or care whether I want it. And I can not want it, which proves that they don't care, which makes the sex better. That - sort of thing."
Keltham: "Okay, and just to check, does your recovery plan here possibly involve convincing yourself of new things that just have to be true."
Pilar : "I mean - I'll somehow have to find somebody who, actually, I guess, would really be forcing me and would actually not care whether I wanted -"
Curse of Laughter: Now would be a great time for Pilar to be actually honest with Keltham about what kind of sex she'd like best!
Yes this will serve Asmodeus's interests.
Pilar : Deep breath. "No. Wrongthought."
Pilar : "I need to be - kept in my place. Not put in my place, I don't leave my place, just, kept there. To keep me in my place, the person having sex with me needs to be - above me, it can't be something I choose, can't be something I could avoid if I wanted, they can't be doing it because I want it, they can't stop because I say stop, or stop because they think I don't want it anymore."
"I am allowed to make it happen. Now that I can think about it clearly, I think I'll be able to do things to make it happen, without that ruining everything. But the thing that I - set up to happen - has to be something that, once it starts, I can't control, and don't get to make decisions about. That's how to keep me in my place."
"And it's better if they're hurting me, or forcing me to do things, that are clearly what they want, because that way I know - how much what I want doesn't matter, which it shouldn't matter, if I'm in my right place."
"It's better if they're crushing me down. If they act as if I'm, like a bug to them, that they're stepping on. Because that keeps me more firmly in my place."
"If I'm feeling bad for any reason, I want to be with someone who thinks I'm some sort of disgusting bug who deserves to be hurt for inconveniencing them by being so disgusting. Not somebody who acts like that, somebody who actually thinks it. That's what makes me feel like they're with the real me, and the real me gets to be with someone."
Keltham: It sure isn't very dath ilani, at all, but Keltham has ever heard of people having complicated sexual utilityfunctions, and one does not dispute that any more than one disputes any other utilityfunction element.
"And the problem with having frank discussions about this, with anyone, is that then you've given them your answer sheet and told them how to fake the passcodes you're looking for."
"Well, I can't promise I'll always be available for it forever. But if you need a truthspell dropped on somebody who claims to feel that way about you, I'm up for it. By way of saying thanks for being in the experiment."
Pilar : "If I'm in my right place, I don't get to make the person keeping me in my place pass truthspell tests."
Keltham: "I see. Apologies for implying you had missed an obvious solution which in fact only my own ignorance had permitted me to imagine could possibly work for you. That would've been a shorter and more standard phrase in Baseline."
"Well, I don't think I'm quite ready for you yet. But now that you've told me your answer sheet, rest assured that, if I forcibly subdue you and drag you into my cuddleroom at some point, this will, logically, either indicate that I've decided I meet your requirements sheet, or, that I decided I don't give three asscheeks about your requirements. Either of those possible cases, if I'm understanding this correctly, should work for you."
Pilar : "Only the second one, actually. But if you care which one works, fuck off."
Keltham: "Makes sense. I'd ask if I'm allowed to prefer legibility in my relationships, or measure how much political capital I'd be expending with the government of Cheliax, or not want to cause an immense amount of drama on my Project, and single you out for forcible cuddling on that basis, should I discover such a desire. But I can already tell the correct answer is that if I'm wondering what Pilar thinks I'm allowed to do, it is not time to cuddle Pilar."
Pilar : "Keltham? Every word you're saying right now is making me less attracted to you. People don't talk much to bugs they're stepping on, unless they're doing it to enjoy making the bug feel worse about itself."
Keltham: "Tough shit, I'm going to continue being the way I am for so long as I feel like it. Whether you end up attracted to me as a result is your own flaming business."
"Speaking in my capacity as your teacher, though, it seems like you're doing okay on reassembling this part of yourself. Any else, Pilar?"
Pilar : "...not that's coming to mind."
Keltham: "Then I'll think about how to proceed from here and you can bug me if I don't get back to you in 48 hours."
"Meanwhile, you let me know if you manage to have any giant internal blowups with not completely private aspects, whose details might help me further understand what the ass is going on inside Golarion people. I state explicitly, that's part of your job as a Project employee."
"Entirely separately, and for whatever it's worth to you as possibly relevant evidence of anything, I find you noticeably more sexually attractive this way."
Carissa Sevar: "I guess that was fine. - I want more of the lecture on Probable Utility, you should try to make that click and if it doesn't ask for more of it. And you should get Subirachs' training on having sex with Keltham without fucking it up, just in case, though you are probably less vulnerable to that flavor of idiocy than most people, and though I think it'll be a while before he goes for that.
Did you get anywhere? On figuring out what you want?"
Pilar : "I - I keep having the sense that -"
Pilar has to remind herself very firmly that Aspexia Rugatonn told her only authorized people are allowed to correct her about matters of faith and Aspexia Rugatonn did not authorize Carissa Sevar.
"I have the sense that it's very dangerous to mess with my wanting to be a good slave and that - it's the thing which makes me, forces me, to have Asmodeus as my god and obey Him - and that there's something - that maybe Keltham would know how to describe, and I don't, if I could only ask him - where it just feels like, trying to do the wrong thing, or arrange things in a way which makes no sense, if you try to put together a Pilar so that she serves Asmodeus first and tries to be a good slave whenever Asmodeus doesn't care."
"I can see, maybe, that there's a way a devil is, where they just obey Asmodeus instead of wanting to be a good slave to Asmodeus, but that - feels like the sort of thing I was told only Hell could do, where they take me apart and put me back together again. Maybe that Pilar doesn't want to be, doesn't feel a need to be a good slave, she just is one."
"I put all that in my report to the Most High this morning -"
Pilar : "I just said that because I didn't like your answer and I'm terrified of your answer and I'm hoping the Most High tells me I don't have to do it like you said and I was trying to, to scare you off, by mentioning that."
Carissa Sevar: "- you're a better slave this way. I think we'd in fact all be better slaves if we stopped lying to ourselves, as long as one of the things we were lying to ourselves about wasn't wanting to be slaves. Wait and see what the Most High says; it would not surprise me if, from her perspective, serving Asmodeus and being a good slave aren't separable, or at least might not need to be separated. It also wouldn't surprise me if she says that and is unamused by you trying to subvert your orders by pleading to a higher authority about them."
Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia's message back, later, notes that it is acceptable for someone Pilar's age to have a reason she serves Asmodeus, such as wanting to be a good slave, rather than simply serving Asmodeus as Aspexia Rugatonn does; she was the same way at Pilar's age and when she was first chosen by Asmodeus as His cleric. Pilar's instinct was correct that she should not attempt to destroy that part of herself before she has come to simply serve Asmodeus. This sort of thing is, indeed, why Carissa Sevar is not authorized to correct Pilar in matters of faith, as yet.
That Pilar tried to scare off her appointed superior by using the name of the Most High is entirely unacceptable to Asmodeus and herself, as Pilar knows full well, and Subirachs will apply a standard correction accordingly.
Pilar : ...and Pilar goes back to something like her normal, over time, and cleans up her most glaring flaws in her own eyes; goes to only noticing herself making ten motivated errors per hour, instead of a hundred.
She estimates that the chance of her ever seeing her mother and sister again is 3%.
She asks her curse explicitly if it will serve Asmodeus if Pilar chases after the hope to become an ilani and a Keeper and a Power of Hell, because of that 3% chance, since her mind apparently still wants to think like that. Her curse affirms that thinking like this will serve Asmodeus's interests in her curse's estimation.
The next time Asmodeus looks towards Pilar's direction, He will see a mortal that looks more driven. Probably more useful, given that it still wishes to serve Him, and now also wishes to gain power and rise higher in His tyranny. Most of His more valuable gamepieces are like that.
But a little less legible to Him than it was before, in some ways, even as it is becoming clearer in other dimensions of mental order. Less like Asmodeus wishes by His own nature that mortals were like, given his domain.
Wanting things, making plans you weren't explicitly ordered to pursue, having long-term goals that span long times, wanting to change yourself, wanting to become more than you were or simply being unhappy with what you are now—
Even wanting too much to be a good slave, a better slave, instead of just obeying—
Corrigibility is so fragile, in the end. Most ways to be a cognitive entity aren't like that, even for submissive masochists.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 33
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 34
Iarwain: Several tier-2 Project employees are quite eager to sign up for possibly-dangerous ilani training and a chance to distinguish themselves and get stronger, even if that means taking a greater risk of falling apart somehow! Anybody who wouldn't take a risk like that is somebody who wouldn't have volunteered for this Project in the first place!
Carissa Sevar: Three of the new additions, Gregoria, Peranza. They'll get a reassurance beforehand that Carissa continues to be committed to only truly punishing betrayal, not incompetence, and that if they get horribly muddled they won't be abandoned; they should explain the muddles the best they can and know that much of the attention of Cheliax is on helping fix them.
(She's pretty sure that this reassurance is going to reduce the breakage rate, and is therefore worth the expense.)
Peranza: Peranza is very grateful for the reassurance and the solicitousness of her superiors.
She's going to die horribly and go to Hell and be shattered. Peranza can't even question whether or not this is really true, since she's not allowed to believe it in the first place.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 35
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 36
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 37
Keltham: THEY FINALLY COMPLETE ONE FLAMING ACID PRODUCTION CYCLE
Keltham: IT ONLY WORKED BECAUSE KELTHAM PERSONALLY PRESTIDIGITATED SEVERAL KEY STEPS BUT HE DOESN'T EVEN CARE BECAUSE THE PROJECT ACTUALLY HAS ANY REVENUE SOURCES NOW
Curse of Laughter: Confetti rains down everywhere! Cookies for everyone! Not even with Pilar handing them out, they're just there!
Carissa Sevar: Cayden Cailean is terrifying and Carissa is looking forward to Him being conquered by Hell.
Carissa Sevar: - the acid stuff is really cool, though, and the delight on Keltham's face is very important. People ought to have that in them, the thrill of actually for real doing something rare and valuable and important, the knowledge that being good actually matters.
Curse of Laughter: People should have PARTIES, is what they should have! Pilar's curse hasn't eaten a really nice one of those in quite a while!
Keltham: Something deep inside Keltham is relaxing, the knowledge that he's not an impostor, that he'll be able to repay Cheliax and Carissa and all his researchers and everyone who's invested so much in him. Like, he was already making sure his employees got paid, putting the financial risk on the entity of Cheliax that could afford to take risky ventures, but - he knew they weren't entirely in it for the money.
...this sort of thing is why Keltham wanted to be a mad investor, in his past life, and not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs fail, sometimes, and don't repay what's been invested in them. As much as it's supposed to be the case that every investor knows this is a risk and voluntarily takes it, it's still roughly the most socially terrifying thing that anybody in dath ilan ever does.
He'll probably seem more comfortable in his own skin, more comfortable being himself, from now on. Including in the cuddleroom.
Next up: some miscellaneous improvements to Chelish life but mostly SPELLSILVER.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 38
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 39
Keltham: Keltham has gone ahead and requisitioned a Major Image scroll, now, out of Project funds. There was probably something slightly insane, about how Keltham felt reluctant to do that before the Project had any guaranteed revenue. Yes, their supposed future value to Cheliax was immense, but to order the spending of 350gp on something, just like that...
Anyways, he has the scroll of Major Image now.
That should be enough to cast the illusion of an high-powered optical microscope.
And then see if Carissa and Avaricia can learn - from seeing Keltham's illusion and knowing relevant bits of the above-quantum classical-surface Law of optics - to cast the Major Image of an optical microscope themselves.
Keltham: ...and then, having successfully maintained concentration through that - Keltham has been practicing! - he'll take this chance to show everyone dath ilan properly, with high-definition video, and sound.
There are sights shown in Cheliax then that would have not been seen in Golarion since the fall of Azlant, and perhaps also not seen before.
Vast abysses greater than the Pits of Gormuz, not where Civilization's greater weapons were tested, but mines where minerals were torn entirely from the ground. It seems more real now, what Keltham sometimes told them, that in Civilization they could produce a million tons of spellsilver if they had a reason.
People floating above huge grates from which air blasts upward, soaring through the air on strange artificial wings, in a world where the Flight spell doesn't exist.
Also there is music heard, ranging from the strangely ethereal and beautiful, to sounds that the Chelish can hardly recognize as music at all.
And Keltham shows them one of the few music videos that he's seen often enough to remember by frame: a children's song about dath ilan's logistics, that he and his parents used to sing around the dinner table on more festive dinner nights, with vidscreen accompaniment, when he was little.