Carissa Sevar: "No, I don't think that's it. I was willing to concede the point if Civilization genuinely thought this was the destruction-of-Civilization-minimizing policy, at least until I'm smart enough to evaluate if they're right about that in our world where gods sometimes get utility-flipped accidentally. I'll abide by policies that destroy Civilization if they're the policies that we think lead to the least destruction of Civilization.
But it's not that, it's that Civilization is actually willing to adopt policies that kill me in worlds that are sufficiently unpretty by the standards of greater Reality. A - values thing, not a predictions thing.
I think Asmodeus goes 'yeah, that's a very unpretty reality there, Carissa doesn't choose Abaddon? no? okay, so be it', and if I'm wrong about that, and Asmodeus is willing to adopt policies that kill everyone in sufficiently unpretty worlds for the sake of greater Reality, then I don't share Asmodeus's values, and I don't want Him to be powerful enough to end civilization in those worlds, so I need a god who does share my values, or to become one if there aren't any."
Carissa Sevar: (I know I'm giving everyone a bad day, she adds mentally to Security, but I suspect this is an important heresy of mine, and I remain in line with alter-Carissa here.)
Keltham: "It's not impossible that we have a values difference here. But what I'm trying to interpret as your utilityfunction doesn't quite make sense to me, and we'd probably want to nail that down and make sure I understand your values, and vice versa, before we declare that there's a values difference."
"The nearest sensible thing I can interpret in my own ontology is something like - you very strongly value as much stuff being conscious as possible, as large a fraction of all realityfluid as possible being invested into consciousness and awareness. You're against any cases of destroying reality-regions even unusually icky ones that are dragging down the average, because then a lower total fraction of reality ends up invested in consciousness, even if all the people inside the deleted universe just experience themselves ending up somewhere else. Question mark?"
"I'll also state for the record that in dath ilan we left this sort of thing to Keepers. Here in Golarion I'd have to believe that there weren't any gods keeping track of what I was tracking myself, before I started making my own calls about whether to delete everything."
Carissa Sevar: " - I think it's extremely bad if you extinguish a bunch of life even if the thing that happened to you when you died happens to everyone, yeah. And - obviously it's better for reality to be consciousness than to be anything else? Nothing else matters! And Golarion might be - probably is - an 'unusually icky' bit of reality and I'm really glad that even the most obnoxious Good gods don't think we deserve to be destroyed about it!
I do think you should leave these things to the gods, but - I think that because the Church never told me it's better to let everything be annihilated than to pay a Kuthite five gold, and because even the Good gods fought Rovagug. If they'd ever told me that then I would not be in favor of leaving those things to the gods - you lose far too much if it turns out the gods and Keepers only think that because they don't care much about people getting to keep living their lives."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "I mean, presumably the gods who think ickier than average worlds should be destroyed just fought alongside Rovagug, and lost, and that's why we're here at all. Either that or we're a less icky world than average, but in that case dath-ilan-which-pays-bribes being destroyed is sending nearly all its people to much worse places..."
Keltham: "Why would those gods actually fight instead of, like, presenting an estimate of how much damage they'd do by fighting and how much expected utility they thought they could gain from that for themselves, and asking the other gods to make them an offer?"
Ione Sala: "Rovagug was a prophecy-breaking entity, so it wasn't possible for the more Chaotic gods who didn't like the trend of existence to present credible estimates or make credible commitments to the other gods. All they could do was fight alongside Rovagug, who could not be negotiated with, whose strength was impossible to estimate, and hope that Rovagug was strong enough. They lost, and were destroyed. The new prophecy that was woven afterwards was far stronger, since all the remaining gods were either Lawful or pretty okay with the universe continuing to exist on something like the course it had."
"That prophecy got broken by Earthfall, which was not foreseen."
"After Earthfall, the gods scraped up all the fragments of shattered prophecy they could, and with it foresaw the possibility of a mortal finding the Starstone where it had fallen on the ocean floor and using it to ascend to godhood. The gods knew that if they fought over their different interests in what sort of mortal found the Starstone, they'd all cancel each other out and leave the Starstone to be found in an uncontrolled way. Their negotiated compromise was a new prophecy with all the remaining fragments of shattered destiny woven into it, that the person who found the Starstone would be somebody Lawful Neutral who'd use the Starstone to make Golarion their own divine realm, and contain Rovagug there forever so the rest of the Great Beyond would be safe from It."
"Aroden correctly deduced the gods would do that, changed his own will to match the prophecy's inferred requirements, and took the Starstone. And then Aroden's death shattered all remaining prophecy permanently around this planet."
Keltham: "Thanks for that valuable information."
Ione Sala: "You'd have deduced those parts anyways takaral."
Asmodia: "I'd like to register my own increasing discomfort with all this talk of destroying universes in a context where it is not being treated as an obvious and indeed mandatory conclusion that we should not, in fact, do that."
Keltham: "You definitely can't reason like that or you're just going to find entities all over the place who'll destroy the universe unless you give them five gold pieces. If you blindly or shortsightedly refuse choices that lead to the universe being destroyed in 'counterfactuals', that can definitely make it more likely to end up destroyed in reality."
Asmodia: "And if somebody makes a mistake and screws up any of these lines of reasoning?"
Keltham: "Yeah, it's a bad place to make mistakes, and you should avoid making any on subjects like that... that probably sounds like a more realistic policy in dath ilan than in Golarion, doesn't it."
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Asmodeus is good at this and desires that we not be annihilated and you should do what Asmodeus says, and then the fact we'll predictably do what Asmodeus says helps him prevent the destruction of the universe. And dath ilani say the same thing about their Keepers, presumably," says Avaricia, who has cottoned on in the last week to the problem that when Sevar goes on being heretical no one's willing to speak up either to agree with her or disagree with her.
Carissa Sevar: "But dath ilani think that their Keepers want them to not be annihilated, when actually their Keepers may not care very much because of the secret lots of universes thing!"
Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: "Speculating wildly, here, but Asmodeus cares Evilly that we not be annihilated -- we're His, Hell's prosperity strengthens Him, devils are visible to Him in a way that enables Him to act and plan around them - and gets none of what He wants just by virtue of us existing at some point in some universe -"
If this solves that problem tag on the wall she's going to be very pleased with herself.
Keltham: "I worry I may be misconveying an impression about how often Civilization decides to totally destroy something instead of, like, fixing it. Our Civilization is very not full of people deleting each other from local existence because they couldn't figure out how to negotiate things, especially as compared to, say, Golarion. Your gods fight each other more often than we do. Your surviving gods."
Carissa Sevar: "I think we ran into this because Zon-Kuthon is the obvious referent for a utility-flipped entity, and the thing you said is even more confusing if I imagine it as just a policy that, if a corrupt officer of the law in one of the River Kingdoms offers to let you go if you bribe him, but says he'd really have a lot more fun if you didn't, you ought to fling yourself at him and die horribly of it."
Keltham: "The question isn't whether Zon-Kuthon is utility-flipped Dou-Bral, it's whether he's a conditional other-agent-utility-pessimizer that just naturally wants to minimize your utility function unless you pay him five gold."
"And on that corrupt officer thing, I'm gonna need more context to figure out that one, because I'm not seeing at all how you get that as an implication of the position I thought I was expressing. For one thing, he's obviously lying, because if he had more fun the other way he just wouldn't accept the bribe?"
Carissa Sevar: " - I don't really know what it's like to be a corrupt River Kingdom guard who takes bribes and beats and rapes people who don't pay him but I'd expect part of the dynamic to be that the other corrupt guards will give you a pass if you're asking for a reasonable bribe and only hurting people who refuse, because that's what they do too, but they'll get mad at you if you just run around being a bandit in a uniform. Uh, I guess it just seems like, if we're not in the realm of gods and formal decision-commitments, there are lots of awful people who want to make your life worse because it's fun for them, and who demand minor things of you, in the world, and if you have the bad luck to be born in a normal country and decide you won't give awful people five gold to leave you alone then you will definitely die horribly."
Keltham: "I'd have to think about what would be a Lawful response to that situation, but among the obvious thoughts that occur to me is to generate random numbers and spend the effort to find him and kill him afterwards, with a small probability that cancels out his expected gain of five gold from threatening me... though if five gold is like, half his annual income, I guess that might have to be a relatively large probability. Sucks to be him, he shouldn't have tried to threaten for bribes that large."
Carissa Sevar: That's not a very Asmodean answer.
She should probably sit down with Asmodia and try to figure out what the Lawful response to that situation is if you're an Asmodean. "You still probably die young of that but it does seem more - I can see how it's not just a philosophy to immediately commit suicide if you don't live in one of the three or four nicest countries in the world."
Keltham: "I am getting a nervous sense here that I may have jumped too far ahead of your background mastery of Law. Instinctive high-precision use of Law in particular. Possibly the exact occasions you pick to Lawfully track down somebody to kill them is, perhaps, a relatively advanced topic, especially in Golarion which is full of situations that dath ilan would usually keep inside the 'counterfactuals'. People are taking the things I said and deriving further conclusions from them that strike me as worryingly not what I was trying to say."
"Possibly people should stick with their sensible instincts or educated heuristics, rather than generating sentences which sound sort of like stuff I've said about Law, and doing that."
"If you seem to have carefully reasoned out that you ought to destroy the universe, but it also seems to you that there's a better thing you could do instead of the Lawful thing, which is not destroying the universe, maybe you should hold off on trying to be quote Lawful unquote for that exact minute. This stuff is supposed to make sense; if at any point it's advising you to do terrible things that don't feel like they make sense - I can't say it's certain that you're wrong, for reversed stupidity is not intelligence. But I am certain that you didn't achieve a reliable understanding and internalization of the Law. Any time the Law doesn't feel like it makes sense, you definitely don't have the kind of understanding of it that you can trust."
"Only destroy the universe if you have a carefully Lawful line of reasoning saying to do that, and you can take a step back from all the careful reasoning and grasp the whole thing intuitively and it totally makes sense why you'd do that, and that doesn't feel at all strained or like you're sweeping key issues under the rug. If you don't have the 'introspection' - if you don't have the Wisdom to confidently evaluate that level of strainedness, then you should back off the whole thing and leave destroy-the-universe decisions to somebody else..."
"You know, let's just simplify that line of reasoning," it's hard to remember that everyone here is effectively six years old, in some ways if not others. "Everyone here should just not destroy the universe, period. Don't complicate it any more than that until you're much much much better at Law, and can be very sure that you're correct to ignore my flat instruction not to do that. Like, maybe Asmodia in a few years could decide that if someone had to, but everyone else should just not do it."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 54
Keltham: The leaden-cooking-pot issue was still causing Keltham to feel - closer to dath ilan, to the average dath ilani - than he has in a while. And he's also worried people here are getting an inaccurate impression of what dath ilan is actually like, from their policies being discussed mainly in the context of weird thought experiments.
So Keltham has now managed to reconstruct at least one piece of dath ilani fiction. It's not a very famous one, but the problem is, the actually famous stories are full of way too much incredible prose and complication and made entirely out of foreshadowing. His previous attempts to ad-lib Miyalsvor and Verrez episodes at dinner are... feeling increasingly painful to him, let's put it that way.
So Keltham is actually just going with this one short story he happened to read a week before his planecrash. And this time he took the effort to write it down and polish it, with such writing skills as he possessed. That way people can get at least one actual glimpse of what a normal piece of dath ilani fiction is like.
Anyways, here.
Ione Sala: "Keltham, I've got much stronger Good sympathies than most people here for obvious reasons and even for me that is just way, way, way too much Goodness."
Keltham: "Yeah, I had to get pretty homesick for dath ilan before I could make myself write it down. If I did get a portal to dath ilan, I'd call them in temporarily to handle stuff like leaden cooking pots, but I sure wouldn't go back."
Peranza: If nobody's going to order alterPeranza to have an opinion on this then Peranza is just going to not think anything and not say anything it's safer that way. She knows alterPeranza would have an opinion, but, but alterPeranza is just distracted or having a bad day, Peranza does not want to figure out exactly what alterPeranza would think. Peranza is probably just having a bad day herself so that's statistically realistic. She won't say anything unless Security or Asmodia orders her.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 55
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 56
Keltham: And there's the first tiny fragment of spellsilver refined by the Project out of the cheaper ore, using entirely Project-produced acids! Now they just have to enormously scale the process, and the yields of every stage, and have it not require three days of personal attention by Keltham, Avaricia, and Shilira to make it work.
It's not a huge party moment like their first saleable acid - real parties are for shippable product - but they at the very least get cookies about this!
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 57
Keltham: Now that they've got a tiny fragment of spellsilver out of the new kind of ore, what remains is more of a process of perfecting everything, and not so much of inventing it from scratch. That in turn means that Keltham should maybe no longer be spending nearly all of his non-personal time on getting a basic spellsilver pathway, as he has been these last few weeks.
It's time for him to shift relatively more of his effort into Law lectures, so that other people can force-multiply his efforts on perfecting the process they've found! Chemistry, physics, and Pilar-approved hopefully-safe epistemology for everyone. And the sort of stuff that even Pilar had trouble with, going in slower and more measured doses to the tier-2 mad-experimental volunteers (plus one cleric of Asmodeus).
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 58
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 59
Keltham: Sometimes Keltham questions whether he was, in fact, dropped in a world next to someone impossibly sexually compatible to him, despite the whole thing with masochists who are impervious to biting damage etcetera. He worries about whether everything he wants is guaranteed to be something his partner needs; and whether everything his partner needs, is in fact something guaranteed to match his own needs and desires.
He does feel like he's pushing himself, a bit, in doing this. Isidre would probably tell him to take it slower.
He fought Security until he was over the mental shock of combat.
He fought Security until he stopped hesitating to defend himself.
He fought Security until he stopped hesitating to attack.
He fought Meritxell until that stopped feeling quite so wrong and unnatural, to fight someone weaker than Security who he'd had sex with and felt some affection for.
He fought Meritxell Altered and Disguised as Carissa, until it stopped feeling wrong to hit somebody who looked like the one he loved.
Keltham is deliberately doing everything he can to draw on and self-actualize the parts of himself that ought to go into doing this, according to claims he's heard from Carissa and Isidre and Abrogail and Jacint. Everyone who ought to know better than he does.
The desire for power over Carissa; the desire to force her to feel what he wants her to feel; his need to command any sexual response he wants from her; sadism, cruelty, lust, pride; every scrap of Evil he can find in himself. A sense of entitlement, that it's as much his right to have this from Carissa as it is for him to wear his shirt, because she gave herself... no, because she expressed a willingness to be taken and he took her.
Keltham does understand that he's not supposed to push himself for Carissa's sake. He isn't, or doesn't think he is. He wants to be able to command her pleasure in the cuddleroom, he wants that to be the way that reality is, and he's pushing himself to get this thing that he desires. He's pushing himself because it annoys him that he can't just shrug off his dath ilani conditioning as was previously appropriate to a world with alternatephysics from Golarion, a place where masochism and submission doesn't exist. He's not in that place and needs to stop acting like it, especially as it comes between himself and Carissa.
Isidre would probably tell him to take it slower. But it's almost two months since he got to Golarion, Day 55 by his count. A slightly above-average teenage dath ilani should not be that slow to update, however much lower standards may be in Golarion.
Keltham: What Keltham wants to do is tell Carissa that there's something he's going to do with her, and ask if her schedule is clear for a couple of hours.
He doesn't. If she made a crucial beauty-treatment appointment with a 1000gp reserve price that can only be taken in the next few hours, Keltham will compensate her. It's not very likely, and this, above all, should not seem to Carissa like she could have avoided it.
He gets Security to track Carissa's movements.
Waits until she's passing not far from their cuddleroom.
Quietly steps out from a corner, behind her, with a controlled face, and uses a rod to cast Curse of Magic Negation on Carissa Sevar.
Carissa Sevar: Security, consulting with Subirachs, has notified Carissa in broad terms that Keltham is working on the advice the Queen gave him about how to fix her. Not more specifics than that, nothing about attacking her; even with her shiny new pin of Glibness it seems silly to test her Bluff where there's no need.
Also they're looking forward to watching this.
Carissa feels the spell hit her and shouts for help instantly, instinctively, before she turns around and sees Keltham -
- "SECURITY NEED CONFIRMATION THAT'S KELTHAM -"
Keltham: Keltham doesn't have words to respond to this right now; he's already casting Bestow Curse targeted on Carissa's ability to overcome the previous Curse. (This will of course be visible to her permanent Detect Magic and her Spellcraft ability to read his gestures.)
Keltham wants his Carissa fighting him at least a little seriously, here. So Security isn't going to respond to her in words, except in the negative sense of visibly not helping her.
Bestow Curse requires touching Carissa after he casts it, which, Strengthened and Graced, will be his next step, if he can.
Carissa Sevar: It's probably Keltham. If you're a serious attacking force Carissa's probably unconscious or dead before she knows what hit her. No confirmation, though.
She draws her dagger and tries to stab him while he tries to curse her.
Keltham: Sure, she can stab him anywhere that isn't his head, if that lets him complete the curse instead of wasting it.
He's got healing, and resistance to damage just like her, and he isn't as afraid of pain and injury as he once was.
And showing her that he's got healing, of the flashy channeling type, will be additional probabilistic evidence that it's Keltham and make her less afraid of a real Security breach that is not how he's supposed to be making decisions right now, he'll use a spontaneous Cure instead afterwards though she can probably read that too, with her Spellcraft.
Carissa Sevar: She's not trying to stab him in the head, she's trying to stab him in the hands, as she's not going to kill a high level spellcaster and interfering with their ability to cast spells is the best she can hope for. She does, in fact, relax somewhat when he heals himself, and then she turns around and tries to run.
Keltham: Graced, Strengthened, and now with nonzero training in non-purely-defensive martial arts, Keltham will catch her and trip her and knock her down.
And then give her a chance to get up. "Fight me at your hardest, Carissa. Show us both the actual truth about whether I can outfight you when you're not holding back. There's nothing you can do to me, or I to you, that Jacint can't undo."
Carissa Sevar: - oh. All right then.
In that case she will try to stab him in the head. Though while possibly having somewhat mixed feelings about whether she wants to succeed at this.
Keltham: That's a move which Keltham will deflect as smoothly as a low-level monk. 'Not being stabbed in the head by an aggressor with a kitchen knife' is an almost-purely-defensive capability that Civilization is happy to train into anyone very thoroughly, using computer-assisted reflex formation and guidance.
His return fist-strike may also possibly lack some sincerity behind it, but he's trying to overcome that.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is a wizard, and not even a combat-tracked one; it was obviously not the best use of her by the time she was fourteen. Having a knife is a pretty substantial advantage in a fistfight, but it's approximately her only one, and also she's totally internally flinching every time she attempts to use it.
She can however withstand quite a lot of very powerful punches without in any sense indicating she'd rather surrender than take another one.
Keltham: "You're not fighting for real, and that's disappointing me given the amount of effort I put into making sure I'd win against that."
"Fight me like we're at the Worldwound and I'm a demon wearing this face."
Carissa Sevar: Right except that doesn't cause a worldwide catastrophe if she kills him and Osirion raises him - no, this was planned, there'll be a plan for that, there'll be someone nearby with Breath of Life -
- she starts trying, between attempted stabs, to work their way down the hallway. She'll recover faster than Keltham from falling out a third-story window.
Keltham: When Keltham estimates he's burned halfway through his Cat's Grace and Bull's Strength, he'll start sincerely trying to do enough damage to Carissa that afterwards he can haul her off to the cuddleroom without her being able to effectively resist. Breaking bones aren't out of the question; he's rehearsed damage on that level with Meritxell, and inflicted more pain than that on Carissa before.
He'll try to grab her back from the window, if she gets there and he realizes that's what she's doing in time; failing that he'll follow her out after only a slight hesitation, if that becomes necessary. The average dath ilani male teenager does not like losing.
Carissa Sevar: So all you have to do is make it losing, not to be Evil -
- she'll have to think that through later because it's actually very hard to think in the middle of a fight.
He can stop her before she can jump; he's a lot faster and a lot stronger, right now.
Keltham: Yeah, he doesn't really see what she was trying there, she doesn't have Infernal Healing any more, and he can heal himself... maybe she just thought he'd hesitate too long to follow her out. If so, he can prove to her that she was wrong about that some other time.
Now, before his spells run out, he needs to do enough real damage to Carissa that she can no longer resist him, if he picks her up and carries her off. Break both of her upper arms, for a start. He did rehearse that with Meritxell and she was fine afterwards, though she did yell in pain at the time, and Carissa is stronger than Meritxell. He can heal any broken bones once Carissa is properly in chains. He'd want somebody to do that for him, if he had Carissa's pain tolerance and he couldn't manage to have an orgasm in company otherwise.
Carissa Sevar: ABROGAIL what did you TELL THIS BOY
Keltham: To win! At least, that's what Keltham heard Abrogail saying! It's not a message dath ilani are totally unsympathetic to, although back in Civilization they might've had qualms about this particular battle being one that should be fought in the first place.
Okay, that looks pretty helpless there, if not exactly 'subdued' per se because Carissa Sevar. Now to sling his possession over his shoulder and carry her off to the cuddleroom while he's still got the Bull's Strength; that's supposed to be romantic.
Carissa Sevar: It is. She will sort of affectionately nuzzle him about it.
Keltham: Awwww. That definitely makes him feel better about all this -
- is he supposed to be thinking like that? Actually, probably yes! He doesn't just feel like he's transgressed less against Lawful Good, he feels like - like everything is right with their relationship after all, that he did the thing Carissa's owner is supposed to do, and his possession reacted to that like his possession should.
Cuddleroom, chains, and she can have a healing once she's in them. He'll be hurting her in other ways, of course, once she's helpless; but having her limbs broken makes his possession less pretty. Keltham will say so in words before he heals her.
Carissa Sevar: Now he's out of affectionate nuzzling range and she should probably come up with words to say in response but that seems - faintly ridiculous, somehow, as if words like magic are a thing employed by a different Carissa Sevar and not by Keltham's possession -
- this seems like a fine state of affairs except for how it was totally unexpected and Keltham probably hasn't been told it's a fine state of affairs - maybe Security could tell him?
Keltham: It hasn't actually occurred to Keltham to worry about his possession not speaking! It feels fine to him too! If he wants her to exhibit any behavior he'll force it out of her!
He'll click the tickling collar around Carissa too (it's not her first time with it), and see about wringing some reactions out of her, screams and flinches, hysterical laughter, and this time also pleasure.
The only thing he'll say to her is that she's just there to be a thing that has real feelings. Not to try to force anything, as he's taught her before on other occasions; he'll hurt her severely any time he sees her getting tangled up in her thoughts again. Just be in the chains, have no goals, and feel. Anything resembling strategy is his own concern as her master. If they don't get a 100% total success on this occasion, Keltham will celebrate the progress they've made on their relationship and then write Abrogail for more advice.
So, no need to worry!
Carissa Sevar: Carissa feels - well, Carissa's feelings are kind of a mess, maybe that's why she hasn't been doing too much feeling them lately. But she feels terrified, of Keltham and everything Keltham represents, of how high the stakes are in her life at all times, and she feels impressed and proud, because Keltham wanted to become more Evil for her and he's learning and he's really good at it, honestly he's doing better on learning to enjoy cruelty than Carissa herself is no that's not a useful line of thought to go down right now, and she feels - the desire for it to be real, the desire for this to be all there is, the desire for Keltham to know everything and break her bones about it and then say, to Cheliax, that if actually he's not spending any social capital with them to demand people enslaved he'll have Carissa forever please -
- and she feels confused, so profoundly confused, about what Evil is and what love is and what cruelty is and about what Asmodeus wants and why this is part of it and that, too, is definitely getting too caught up in her head -
- and if she doesn't have time or space to think about any of that, then she's just here, scared, with her fate in Keltham's hands, and yet so much safer than she ever was anywhere else, because he won't let her be destroyed. Outside of complicated hypotheticals about Zon-Kuthon nope that too is getting too caught up in her head -
Carissa Sevar needs to figure out all that stuff, at some point, so that this whole complex juggling act doesn't come crashing down on her head and destroy everything she loves. Keltham's possession does not need to figure out all that stuff. She just needs to stop thinking and let things happen to her until Keltham gets what he wants, or gets bored.
A lot of things hurt a lot less, if you stop thinking about them. It might not be very dath ilani, but it's true.
Love is a lot nicer when you stop thinking about it. That, she suspects, is a perfectly Asmodean stance to have on it.
Keltham's possession can relax around him, because it wouldn't matter if she tried to be on her guard or not. Keltham's possession cannot protect herself and cannot advance her goals and cannot talk but can, through small happy sounds, convey that that's quite all right, really, and that she does not want it to end.
Keltham: He doesn't want it to end either. Keltham can see it, or thinks he can, that Carissa is just existing now, with some of the noise in her head quieted, and he wants to protect her from all her thoughts, and extend the protective time she has where she doesn't need to think them. It feels right, what they're doing now, the way he's possessing her and the way she's being possessed.
Keltham has a Lesser Restoration or two queued if at any point he starts to feel fatigued, or she does (as shown by her reactions starting to diminish). He decided before this started that he'd play with Carissa however he felt like it, until he stopped feeling like it. He's unlikely to stop feeling it, so long as Carissa looks - safe, and protected, and happy, like this. That's the way a possession of Keltham's should look.
Carissa Sevar: Do they have this in Hell?
Seems like a good question not to ask yourself, really.
Keltham: ...okay but did he succeed in forcing pleasure out of her? However much Keltham is successfully having other and more important metrics of relationship success, he is a male dath ilani. He is physically incapable of not evaluating every single thing that could conceivably look like a relationship figure of merit, of which that is still one.
Carissa Sevar: Yes. It's not that hard, really, once you've gotten a girl to stop thinking about how she's lying to you about everything as part of an elaborate high-stakes conspiracy which will probably end either in Cheliax conquering the planet or in her and everyone who trusted her being executed.
Keltham: Mm, that's some mild progress.
How about the thing he does to Yaisa, can he also manage to do that to Carissa?
Carissa Sevar: It's somewhat different because she doesn't seem to mind, at all, or to really be forming expectations about what he'll be doing, so she seems to hardly notice she's being teased.
Keltham: Well, he's definitely going to try it for at least five minutes to see if she notices that. 'Try for five minutes* before giving up' is a dath ilani proverb after all.
(*) Technically 4 minutes and 7.4 rounds, in Golarion time units.
Carissa Sevar: Pattern recognition presently offline. You see if it were online then she'd have to think about - kind of a lot of things that are better not to think about.
Keltham: Right then, well, he'll just amuse himself with his non-pattern-recognizing toy as the impulse moves him. And trust to his own timing instincts to end the flow shortly before he would otherwise start to feel tired or burned about it. There's a saying out of dath ilan, that if you leave the party once you start feeling tired, you've failed at timing; the ideal time to leave is five minutes before that.
When Keltham is done, he'll let her out -
- cuddle up to Carissa while she's still in chains, closing his own eyes and whispering that she doesn't need to say anything. If he let Carissa out, or made her talk, she'd probably look less safe or protected or happy and Keltham can't make himself do that, not on purpose, not by his own acts, even if it needs to happen eventually. At some point she'll need to go to the bathroom, and then she'll have to talk. Or she'll have feelings to talk about, or something. Until then Keltham can't make her speak.
Carissa Sevar: The relaxed happy feeling drains away as soon as she starts trying to think what to say. Ah, well. She doesn't actually want to be Keltham's happy safe possession who can't think all the time.
"'m impressed," she manages after a bit.
Keltham: He sits up a little in the bed, to look at her, and is able to tell that she is no longer entirely in that protected happy state. He feels a little sad, then; though he wouldn't want Carissa to always be an unthinking feeling thing. To own Carissa Sevar is a prideful thing because she is the Spellcraft master building his intelligence-headband assembly line, who could've also had Abrogail Thrune if Keltham hadn't snapped Carissa up first by a matter of three days. Still, he wishes he could've protected her for longer.
"That was part of the idea there, yes."
Carissa Sevar: "And it was - for you? Because you wanted to?"
Keltham: "Checked that part really hard, made sure going in that it was all about my ability to force any reaction I wanted out of my possession, and my own pride, and that I was pushing myself along faster only out of my desire to have that from you and be faster about adapting to Golarion."
"That lasted around as long as it took for me to see you looking - safe, in the chains - and then it immediately became all about wanting you to go on looking like that. But I don't think that's too Good; I think that's just how I want my possession to look."
Carissa Sevar: " - okay. It was - really good. Like all the stakes and all the - being scared - just went away. You can make your possession look like that as often as you want. ...I love you." I'm sorry about everything.
Keltham: "I love you." Part of him still believes that this must inevitably end in disaster, but whether it does or not, the statement itself is true.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 60
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 61
lintamande: Cheliax produces 11 +2 Intelligence headbands for the Project, produced under carefully monitored conditions and definitely safe to wear.
....they do know there's now more than 11 headbandless researchers. They just couldn't change the number of headbands they were making midstream like that.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm extremely tempted, once we have the spellsilver, to just make everyone all our headbands myself."
Keltham: "I'll understand if you want to make yourself a +6 one. But when it comes to +4 headbands - if I was in your position, I'd set myself the rule and challenge that I was going to have all those headbands made, quickly and correctly, by average 3rd-circle wizards working in shifts to fully utilize the headband-constructing magic items you made for them."
(Yes, Keltham has already asked about having wizards specialize in particular aspects of headband manufacture so they can form an assembly line. The answer was that it wouldn't be easy even by Carissa's standards, given the way item crafting works; just having two people working on the same item is enough of a skill penalty. So the best current plan is to have wizards trading off the assistive gadgets between each other, as they reach particular manufacturing stages in staggered steps; such that a large factory section only needs one assistive item per manufacturing stage, across many headband-assembly stations. That's a further advantage of doing it with multiple assistive items instead of one big staff of headband-making.)
Carissa Sevar: "You're of course completely right but also your idea is unappealing because they will do it so slowly."
Carissa has officially brought on her third-circle enchanter assistant to be a third-circle enchanter who can demonstrate bottlenecks in headband-making; she's going with the approach of a series of armillary-amulet like items which make each step of the process easier, and she thinks will amount to two or three times the bonus from an armillary amulet all told; somehow, even with that most third circle wizards are worse than her at enchanting magic items. Probably they'll get there with more practice.
Keltham: "Carissa, the Project needs 15 +4 Intelligence headbands to start with. If you can't get the factory to the point where 15 third-circles can produce 15 +4 headbands faster than 1 Carissa can, you haven't sped up their work enough."
Carissa Sevar: "They should be able to do that, the assistant's actually only a bit slower than me by now on the parts that I have the items complete for. I do want to take a stab at totally changing how we train enchanters, in the long run, though the multiplier won't be as big."
Keltham: "Yes, yes, everything in Golarion is broken and we have to fix every individual aspect of it, but priorities, Carissa, priorities. We have to fix things in a particular order, and it'd be nice to do it in a near-optimal one. Think of how much easier they'll be to retrain once they have +4 intelligence headbands."
Carissa Sevar: "As you command."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 62
Peranza: Peranza ends like a star dies, running out the last of the fuel that makes it possible for it to sustain its current form against the immense pressures of gravity.
Peranza: This is how Peranza ends:
She's getting her weekly Owl's Wisdom tapping, the one where you sit quietly in your bedroom and think about the Law and yourself. (Keltham thinks it takes place early in the morning; it actually takes place during the Long Night, in case anything goes wrong then.)
Keltham's theory was that stresses wouldn't accumulate for too long, that way; wouldn't build up in a backlog that causes cascades and massive personality shifts all at once.
...it's a theory that doesn't really work if the person has spent her previous Wisdom minutes on reviewing Law notes, in a frantic effort not to have her own mind come apart from thinking all the thoughts and seeing all the things that are easier not to think and see when not under Owl's Wisdom.
This policy is in no sense the result of a conscious plan. It's just that some past Peranza, who didn't want to be an outcast heretic even if somebody claimed she would survive that, nor wish to suffer horribly in Hell after that - no matter how totally infeasible that life goal was starting to look for her - conditioned herself with pain and horror against the possibility of thinking thoughts that Hell or Security might not like. That past Peranza made flinchy the sense of maybe being about to see, because you have to stop yourself before you think the thought, if your mind is being read.
And Keltham went on lecturing, day after day, from Civilizational attitudes and techniques that were, if not designed to turn him into a Keeper, at least designed to exclude every possibility of any dath ilani ever turning into anything remotely like Peranza.
Peranza: Three days ago, now, Keltham talked to the mad-experimental lecture section about the principle of Despair in the Futility of Madness, as a pathway towards sanity:
How, if you notice yourself trying to convince yourself of something, you should then think that it's obviously too late for you to pull that trick on yourself. Once you know what you're trying to do to yourself, there, the Law of Filtered Evidence should apply to whatever biased search for arguments your mind tries to run.
How, if you find yourself trying to talk yourself out of knowing, you should think then with despair that it's already too late.
How, if you try to talk yourself into defying the Law, you should look to the part of yourself that knows deep down that the Law governs and your defiance does not.
Keltham said to remember then that you've already been trained to know the difference between wishing you believed something, versus wanting to believe something, versus hoping that you believe something, versus anticipating seeing it, the feeling of knowing what happens if you bet. You should despair then that it's too late and you already know what you don't really believe. Give up, lose hope, and know what it is that you already know.
It could be considered something akin to an attempted hypnotic instruction to believe you can't deceive yourself anymore.
Peranza tried very hard not to think about any of it.
Keltham: And at the end of that lecture, Keltham said, smiling, that, if anybody here had managed, somehow, not to process all of that, they should know with dread in their hearts that it'll probably come to visit them during their next Owl's Wisdom. And every time that thought occurs to them, while waiting for their next Owl's Wisdom, even if they see themselves looking away from that thought, they should know then that it's definitely coming for them.
That's how Peranza ends, at Keltham's hands, who thought he was joking.
Keltham: In Keltham's defense, one might note that everybody in his class sure did claim very seriously to him that they wanted to learn and needed to learn and that Golarion had different attitudes towards risk tolerance; that he should press ahead by the swiftest path unless and until something actually bad happened; and that Keltham was pretty sure that the almost-certainly-existent backlog of crazy past thought had to be reprocessed by his students at some point unless they outright quit.
The attitude that Civilization taught Keltham towards this sort of thing inevitably happening to you eventually, when you're ready, is a lot like the attitude that Carissa Sevar has towards pain. And when his class told him to hurry that up, well, he does know the techniques you use on children to make sure they don't spend too long stuck.
Peranza: It still left a long time for Peranza to be afraid, and to try not to look in that direction, and to hear in the back of her mind, Keltham's voice saying what he said, and become more and more aware of herself not looking, and to start to fear that everything he said was just true and the next time she got her Owl's Wisdom it would all fall apart.
She thought of begging Sevar to spare her from the Wisdom, but she knew, very well, that not only would Sevar say, that they shouldn't lie to Keltham, but also that Sevar wanted to see Peranza break, because what was left might be more useful to Sevar, and if not, there would just be the sad event of Peranza getting fired from the Project and Sevar learning more about which people not to hire next time.
In the end, all Peranza did was count the remaining days, and not think about what was awaiting her; except as a series of fleeting dreading thoughts, too buried for Security to catch during any times she was being mind-read. That's what happens when decisions are made locally and for local considerations, to reduce the next bit of pain and immediate loss.
It wasn't pleasant for her, how Peranza ended.
Peranza: Peranza gets her mandatory weekly Owl's Wisdom and, just like Keltham had told her to be afraid of happening, she starts to see everywhere that she was lying to herself, she tries so hard to look away and every time she does her thoughts go helplessly into highlighting and making explicit what it is she's trying not to see -
That she's always been repeating back what she was told, trying hard not to think at all about whether it was true, only, is this the safe thing to say, the thing that evades punishment -
(You know now that's not Law, you know that it's not what you believe deep down -)
That there's no way Sevar's plan can command the assent of Hell -
That all Sevar's precious ilani are going to be shattered into whatever valuable new shapes Hell wants from them, bought with their vast prices in Dis that no ilani ever gets paid themselves, and even if they keep their knowledge and their Law they'll still be tortured out of remembering their own names because Asmodeus likes it more that way -
That there maybe isn't very much difference between being tortured a standard amount in Hell, and being tortured an extra amount because you were bad during your mortal life or useless, which is the whole incentive that gets held out in front of you, and they try to convince you that if you're on course for just the standard unimaginably horrible torture that turns useful people into devils, you're making progress and winning at life, but she doesn't want doesn't want doesn't want that either -
That she doesn't want Abaddon doesn't want to stop existing but even if that was better than Hell there's no way it would really be allowed to her when a Count of Hell paid so much to repurchase her soul from some devil now rich, they'll lie to Sevar about it and deliver Peranza to Hell anyways -
That she hates this hates this hates her life hates the Church hates Cheliax hates Asmodeus is full of helpless screaming at everything that's ever been done to her, no no no don't look don't see it she'll die she'll die -
(This, right here, this is the direction you're not looking -)
Peranza: Peranza is not-looking-there, she is layers and layers of approved thoughts and safe thoughts and the goal of living on another day in Cheliax, delaying Hell one more day, passing her loyalty tests and not getting into trouble. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that if you come in and smash all that, you've destroyed most of what's Peranza.
Like a contradiction that proves the negation of everything, the wreckage of Peranza has no safe thoughts left to think, no approvable thoughts, everything at all that she tries to think gets shut down by pain and horror, leaving nothing but a sense of abortive thought-starts and ouches and whatever wordlessness goes on in the background.
That was how Peranza ended.
???: There's another person inside her head, though, somebody she's pretended herself into being, day after day, somebody who lives in a world with a kinder Hell, somebody who isn't afraid, somebody whose thoughts aren't disintegrating like this, somebody she's been for hour after hour, fleeing into her whenever she could, into the much less painful work of figuring out what alterPeranza says thinks believes how she smiles around Keltham smiles for Keltham -
AlterPeranza: Her disintegrating mind flees into alterPeranza, while the rest of realPeranza is coming apart, and it manages to be her. She's just in the Ordinary world there is no Conspiracy no horror Hell is merciful Asmodeus is benevolent this is the true Peranza she's always been the only Peranza, 'realPeranza' was just a bad dream.
???: It doesn't actually work. She tries to convince herself it works but she sees herself trying to do that and Keltham's foretelling that she's been terrified of all week just comes to her again. She knows she can't really believe she's alterPeranza. Hell will still be there, and the punishment punishment punishment -
AlterPeranza also ends, having lived perhaps half a minute.
???: Like a contradiction that proves the negation of everything, the wreckage of Peranza (again) has no safe thoughts left to think, no approved thoughts, everything at all that she tries to think gets shut down by pain and horror, leaving nothing but a sense of abortive thought-starts and ouches and whatever wordlessness goes on in the background, can't think can't think -
???: In desperation, in wordless desperation, the wreckage of Peranza takes the only option that's available to her, that could possibly help, it's not a conscious strategy it's just something her brain learned can help sometimes when her thoughts are failing her, it probably just makes everything worse, but it feels like the worst possible thing is already happening to her, she might as well cast Fox's Cunning on herself before she falls apart completely maybe she'll get out of this agony a little faster and go on to whatever horror comes next -
???: It obviously doesn't do anything good. Her thoughts sharpen and, yes, she sure does see even more clearly everything now that she isn't thinking.
???: But there's a third potential pattern of thought inside Peranza, besides realPeranza, besides alterPeranza, and with a little more Cunning it can boot.
???: It's a pattern of thought made a little out of explicit Law, and games played with children; and made some out of alterPeranza who had many times thought several thoughts in a row without anything bad happening to her; and made quite a lot out of Keltham, her inner model of him, what he'd say -
- made of stories and legends and dreams, that Keltham has told them all, now and again, Civilization's heroes, the real and the imaginary components, Nemamel, Miyalsvor, people who died the True Death to save others from it on the very very rare occasions that did make sense, stories of Civilization and Civilization's people that alterPeranza has listened to so eagerly for Keltham, with realPeranza behind her also listening filled with a desperate sad horrified painful angry yearning that she's always looking away from never looking there she'll die. But now alterPeranza is gone and realPeranza is shattered and there's nothing left to stop those feelings.
???: It's a third pattern of thought that is coherent. Once it thinks one thought, it knows how to go on to the next. It isn't built on lies. It lives in a horrifying universe, but it has ways of handling that.
Nemamel would.
Peranza disintegrates, and what's left inside her is HORROR and FURY and the memory of skyscrapers in Default, Keltham's comfortable home; and a children's song about logistics; and the seeing of what the dath ilani what the dath ilani heroes what their Keepers would think about Hell and Asmodeus, what they would do if they found themselves materialized into Cheliax knowing -
Really just the obvious thoughts to think, after some bits of Law somehow got inside you, enough overlapping fragments within sufficient Cunning to initially boot the coherence between them, when under some new stress all the complicated things that aren't that dissolved into their own contradictions and mutual inhibitions weakening them.
???: Like a dying star, running out the lesser fuels that maintained its present form against immense pressures, Peranza collapses into herself.
Peranza of Civilization: And ignites.
Peranza of Civilization: Blazing up brighter than was possible before, Cunning and Wisdom full on high and unimpeded, cognitions now that don't tangle up and get in their own way; her first thought is that Security could be reading her mind right now, probably is, they haven't killed her on the spot only because they don't realize how deadly she is now become to all Hell's works; Security is listening to her thoughts right now and laughing about how she isn't Keltham and doesn't need to be killed within two and half seconds -
- and what Miyalsvor does in that situation is -
- find a single clever winning move that happens too fast for Security to stop even if they see her intentions, some incredibly clever strategy that changes everything and necessarily has to execute at very nearly the speed of thought, has to be put into action the moment that intention becomes visible -
Peranza of Civilization: IOMEDAE IOMEDAE PAY ATTENTION LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MY LOCATION READ MY THOUGHTS HELL IS ALMOST ON THE VERGE OF A FINAL VICTORY THEY'RE LEARNING FROM AN INNOCENT HUMAN OUTSIDER FROM BEYOND KNOWN REALITY THEY'RE LEARNING TO MINE SPELLSILVER AT A TENTH THE COST HELL IS GOING TO MAKE BETTER DEVILS ALL THE OTHER GODS NEED TO JOIN TOGETHER AND STOP ASMODEUS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE NETHYS IS WITH HIM AND CAYDEN CAILEAN HAS BETRAYED YOU -
lintamande: "......at which point I rendered her unconscious. Obviously." He's trembling.
Carissa Sevar: Presumably because she's going to ask the obvious question, now, which is, "Oh? Why then, and not sooner?"
lintamande: "I, uh, didn't think she could do anything - there's an interdiction - and it seemed perhaps valuable to the Project, to have a full record of her thought processes and where they took her, rather than one interrupted halfway through -"
Carissa Sevar: "Was that also the judgment of Elias Abarco, who heads your division." For the monitoring of the girls whose minds might be walking Asmodeanism-shredders.
lintamande: "I, ah, didn't have time to ask him, it would have entailed looking away from Peranza's mind for some time to dispatch someone to go get him and it seemed dangerous to do that."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is realizing, unhappily, that the cost of having the walking-infohazard girls monitored by more disposable Security is that they'll be monitored by less competent Security. You can't even specifically blame the idiot for being an idiot: she, after all, requested -- demanded -- a selection process that'd get her idiots. "At what point did you have an inkling that Peranza seemed to be having a noticeably, remarkably, bad time?"
lintamande: "- more or less right away. Sir."
Carissa Sevar: "And at that point, you didn't contemplate getting Abarco's attention, or you did but decided against because -"
lintamande: "I wasn't sure this was much worse than usual. Since I've only been at this for a week. Sir. And I didn't want to waste his time."
Carissa Sevar: Because Elias Abarco is terrifying.
"Right," she says tiredly. It's gross incompetence, and she needs to punish it, but also the ultimate errors are all hers. Is that what it's always like, as you get better at seeing it? "Well, now you're going to waste a lot more of his time. You and him are going to go through everything she thought, what she concluded, what pushed her along the way, and you're going to write up a minimally dangerous summary, and then a somewhat more dangerous summary at whatever Abarco thinks is the level that almost certainly won't cause copycats, and then a full summary for the Most High should she desire to see it.
And then we'll return to the question of how two rounds passed before you were able to subdue the subject you were monitoring while she prayed to Iomedae."
lintamande: "Yes, sir."
Carissa Sevar: "Notice any impulses in yourself to pray to Iomedae too? Since you hadn't fetched Abarco, you could have. Could have run in there to Peranza and told her that you agree with her and you want to take this project down together."
lintamande: "I didn't - I don't agree with her. She didn't even have an argument really, she just -"
Carissa Sevar: And now she's angry.
"Idiot. Everything Peranza thought is secret; you have just been apprised of the procedures. I do not need to know, or want to know, right now, what she thought. I asked a yes-or-no question."
lintamande: "No."
Carissa Sevar: "Then go and bring me that report. Promptly."
Carissa Sevar: She wants to talk to Peranza, too, of course, but that seems like a terrible idea. Is there even a way to have her conscious again without her praying to Iomedae - and then they need to figure out what to tell Keltham -
- she wants to talk to Peranza, she wants to know what forbidden thought can turn a loyal Chelish person into someone who screams the whole conspiracy to Iomedae without a second's advance thought - what makes someone willing to be tortured, forever, for that, because that's what Abrogail promised them -
- Iomedae can't know, either, or she'd presumably have her paladins go scream it in every public square. Unless Iomedae saw it, right there, just now, and now She does know -
"Is there a way to let Abarco talk to Peranza without that leaking more to Iomedae," she asks without preamble when she reaches Maillol's office.
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol looks - very slightly, but readably to Sevar - older and more tired than yesterday, and noticeably angry. He doesn't get it, when people do this, there's something about it that feels, not Chaotic, but like the primordial chaos from before Pharasma's imposed order. Like people will be unsensible and insane for no apparent reason but some flaw in Pharasma's creation, some broken bit of physics that makes people trangress against their tyranny even when there's absolutely no sane perspective at all where that makes sense for them. What's he, what's Asmodeus, supposed to do, when some slaves are like this?
"Nothing that's both cheap and safe."
"Send the little shit to Hell and set up an interview there, it'll cost Hell considerable but not as much as talking to a devil there. Take her to Asmodeus's lesser grand temple in Ostenso, and run the risk of the Bitch Goddess being willing to expend the effort to pierce her vision through it. Put her in the central temple of Asmodeus in Egorian, and have the Most High intercede with Asmodeus to block the vision of all outsiders there - if we're willing to run the risk of a full-scale godwar breaking out, once that little shit is outside the interdiction."
"Anything short of that, and we have to assume the traitor stands out like a fucking beacon to the Bitch-Goddess the moment she's awake and thinking, even if she doesn't pray again. She put herself into the way of torment worse than Maledicted paladins get, with less hope and reward. I'd be surprised if she didn't read Good, now, if she was powerful enough for us to read, and she may be more Lawful than paladins as well."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm worried that - there's some dath ilani thought that reliably does that, or at least semi-reliably, and now Iomedae knows it, and soon we're going to have people teleporting into Egorian to shout it from every rooftop -"
Ferrer Maillol: "What do you propose we do about that, if that's true?"
"Also, I don't quite believe that dath ilan is more Lawful Good than Iomedae. Just because the gods know thoughts like that doesn't mean they're allowed to tell anyone. And that idiot Security did report in, himself."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know what we do about it! I don't - if there's any way to safely talk to her, it sounds like it's a sufficient expenditure of resources that it's not my call, but I want to know why she did that, and how specific it was to her.
It sounds like it's not safe to have her in class even Dominated, to tell Keltham that she wants to drop out - I worry he'll think to look with Glimpse of Beyond, specifically if someone is telling him they quit -"