lintamande: It's mostly standard fare for adventurers; they're where the reliable money is. Bags of Holding, Muleback Cords, Immovable Rods, Insistent Doorknockers, acid and fire grenades, Wands of Cure Light Wounds, swan boat feather tokens, beads of Fireball and beads of force, +2 headbands, +2 belts of Strength and Dexterity and Constitution, bracers of armor, hats of disguise, gloves of elvenkind, sleeves of many garments, scrolls of Death Ward and Protection from Arrows and Stoneskin and Protection from Energy and Restoration and Breath of Life and Rope Trick and Ant Haul and Align Weapon and Lead Blades and Endure Elements.
Keltham: ...okay count one point for Golarion just being strange, though the Immovable Rod at 5000gp and the Insistent Doorknocker also at 5000gp, as some of the most fascinating bits of conceptualmagic, are outside his shopping range. If the Conspiracy was trying to impress him with how generally weird and surprising Golarion was, by way of reminding him how many surprising things happen after all, while keeping the alleged surprises outside his price range... nah, Keltham doesn't actually believe that, there's some strange cheap stuff too.
Lead Blades doesn't actually turn blades into lead, does it? Lead is poisonous and has neurotoxic effects, as Cheliax recently announced - has he heard anything about that?
lintamande: "I don't read the news, it just ruins my day for no reason. The spell makes them denser when they hit the target, which is very bad for the target but, you know, I think mostly in the conventional way where it chops right through 'em. It's a temporary transmutation so I wouldn't expect it to have permanent effects even if it is lead."
Keltham: ...the awful thing is, if the Conspiracy is choosing to depict things this way, it's presumably because they think the Ordinary Golarion they've shown him would not have smart wizards in Absalom hearing about Element-82 even after Cheliax announced it very loudly, which, for Conspiracies on the level Keltham is facing - the sort that gave him a century-old history of Absalom to read on his first night in the palace - probably does mean that the rest of Golarion is actually like that.
Scroll of Rope Trick sounds interesting, can the proprietor say more about that?
lintamande: "The rope rises into the air and creates an extradimensional space at the top you can access by climbing it. Holds you and up to three friends, not detectable from outside except by people seeing the rope and climbing up after you - you can't pull the rope into the Rope Trick. It's popular for camping."
Keltham: Seems pretty weird and powerful for a second-circle wizard spell, plausibly the weirdest of the options here.
He'll take that one for 150gp. The store doesn't have anything really odd that Keltham could afford, something most adventurers couldn't use... such that purchasing it would tend to verify that the store was real and they didn't just rush something from... all of Cheliax... and he can't really blame a low-productivity economy for not stocking any but the fastest-selling merchandise... yeah this was actually not such a great test in the first place.
Keltham shall also inquire if the wizard remembers about how long ago it was that the sky started flickering to signal the start of the godwar, and if any news has reached Absalom about how Cheliax is currently doing against Nidal.
lintamande: "Not quite three months since the godwar," he says, "which I only know because it was pretty bloody obvious; I really don't read the news. I suppose Cheliax isn't losing too badly because we haven't had them showing up here by the thousands."
He'll sell the scroll.
Carissa Sevar: "Rope Trick won't work inside the Forbiddance," Carissa warns him once the proprietor pulls it off the shelf.
Keltham: "Noted. I think we're being mostly protected by Broom's god out here, not by the Forbiddance. I got close to the edge of the Forbiddance so I could watch Fennelosa teleport out, and we didn't get an invading army after me that time. Not to mention, our primary theory is still that the gods on our side deliberately triggered that attack while I was outside the villa, not that Nidal detected me going outside the Forbiddance."
Carissa Sevar: "Sounds about right."
Carissa Sevar: (The mindreader accompanying Keltham into the Rope Trick is going to need to be gaseous, and also invisible, and they're going to need to wait to go in until after Keltham casts Invisibility Purge, which she predicts he'll do within about a minute of getting in there; that does mean there won't be mindreading coverage for a brief time, but then there'll be far more valuable mindreading coverage of someone who suspects he's not being mindread.)
Carissa Sevar: "Conceivably you want to get two Rope Tricks and stick me and Asmodia and any other suspected Conspirators in the other one for the duration, Telepathic Bond doesn't work across planes."
Asmodia: "Sevar, he has only the Conspiracy's word for that. That's Keltham's entire problem. He could solve this in five minutes if he had a reliable outside source of information telling him what all the rules were."
Carissa Sevar: "He can in fact check that his spells don't work across a Rope Trick!"
Asmodia: "This shows neither that more powerful 5th-circle Telepathic Bonds don't work across Rope Tricks, nor that the Conspiracy is not just blocking his magic each time to make him think it doesn't work!"
Keltham: Keltham is in fact currently thinking about whether he can find a one-inch iron helmet and, if so, if there's any reasonable way he can test whether it blocks emanation divinations. But Keltham is really not seeing a method to test that, by which he can know that the Conspiracy isn't selectively blocking divinations from the helmet only when they please. If the Conspiracy can fake his own spell signature on the truthspell, they can do an awful lot - and if they can't do that, truthspells are unbeatable that way, which doesn't sound like it allows Golarion to be such an untrusting wreck.
This also reminds Keltham to perform a Detect Magic, as he's been doing occasionally, and look around the shop that way. Though he's pretty sure what he'll find.
lintamande: Lots of noisy overlapping magic signatures from all the magic items!
Notably none of them except those on the Hats of Disguise are Illusion auras, though probably if the Conspiracy is deploying a lot of illusions it can also hide the auras of doing that.
Keltham: Yes, obviously they can, otherwise Keltham would have Detected the illusion of his god's symbol when they were faking his truthspell.
...okay, if the Conspiracy can fake this, they can probably fake the next thing in the sequence, but Keltham's going to try anyways, because it seems like he should, just in case.
Message: Next, please head on over to Absalom's Ascendant Court.
Keltham doesn't block very hard that he's planning to briefly visit a lot of temples; it's an obvious step.
lintamande: Sure. Off he goes. He won't ask again about lunch, though he'll cast longing side-glances at vendor carts as they go.
....they're going to need the Greater False Vision for this part. The plan is for someone to genuinely go to all the relevant places, so the illusionist can grab the right visuals from that, but for Fennelosa to go to a different, them-controlled, location, where the people who walk up and speak to him are actors and will respond correctly to having someone Message them.
The illusionist says he's ready.
Carissa Sevar: He'd better be right.
Keltham: Keltham catches that longing side-glance! He is very sorry! Yes please have lunch, Keltham said he could.
(No, it's not great that Keltham said their next destination, before that point came up; but if Keltham doesn't like that, it was Keltham's responsibility to remember what he told the other person they would do.)
lintamande: Then he will grab some kabobs from a vendor, shove some money into her hands, and keep going. It's significantly less than a minute's delay, all told; soldiers are not habitually slow eaters.
Carissa Sevar: "It's Ione's line, I know, but should we also eat."
Keltham: 1.2x for Ordinary that he didn't try for a longer delay.
"We can have food brought here, sure. Preferably something I can eat while distracted."
"You and Asmodia have both been quieter than I thought you would be."
Abrogail Thrune II: - is thinking that he admittedly looked like he was focusing a lot, but he wants to see what you say, but he knows his mind might be getting read -
Carissa Sevar: "I think you're doing pretty well except I'm confused about how you ended up back on the are-masochists-real track and I'm sad you didn't buy the book defaming Abrogail, I bet it would've been funny. Should I be talking more? You often looked about as interruptible as I feel when I'm doing crafting and whenever I say anything Asmodia bites my head off about how you couldn't possibly know if I'm lying, and - I do realize that you're starting from the assumption that the Conspiracy can conceal a lot about how magic works from you, but also it seems to me that at least some of the time you might know a clever physics-based test that can confirm that I'm right, and it'd be worth a lot of twos if you did happen to know one."
Keltham: ...hard to remember, with everything he's trying to keep track of simultaneously, that in the Ordinary world Carissa is not reading his mind.
"Via the shopkeeper's claim that pornography was banned in Absalom, then passing what were obviously storefronts advertising sex work, and those two things not going together, which made me realize that the pornography ban was a Conspiracy plot to prevent me from checking for erotic novels written with submissive masochists as viewpoint characters."
Carissa Sevar: "Oh, I just figured he was a Sarenrite. I guess your version makes sense too."
Keltham: "The ass does Neutral Good have against erotic literature anyways? I know the dath ilani reason to gate perverted stuff behind a prior level of achieved perversion, namely so as to not accelerate people's natural descent into sexual corruption over time, but I bet it's not the same here at all."
Carissa Sevar: "They.... think people's natural descent into sexual corruption is bad for them and instead of that they should strive to not descend into sexual corruption? You should probably ask one of them, I bet I'm not doing it justice."
Keltham: "Maybe some other time. Now that the topic has come up explicitly, the Conspiracy has time to find a real Sarenrite priest and get an account from them of how they'd defend that position."
Carissa Sevar: "Sure. So should I be talking more?"
Keltham: "...probably not, in the end, if it looks like I'm currently concentrating."
The thought comes to him, then, that if the Conspiracy is real and Keltham ends up deciding so, this could be some of the last conversation that they'll ever have.
He dismisses the thought, not by assigning it low probability but by assigning it low priority; Keltham does not see how thinking of such a thing will serve him in this task.
Carissa Sevar: "Okay. Do you in fact have any clever ideas for how to check the thing about lead and emanations? I was thinking if you have some technique to Prestidigitate lead, or some chemical correlate that you expect is driving the emanation effect, you could flicker it on and off faster than anyone could dispel and re-cast a spell to mislead you, or maybe there's something to be done with the fact lead is denser than other metals, immersing it in water or something and then if anyone does anything to it the volume changes..."
Keltham: "Hard to be sure the Conspiracy wasn't messing with my experimental results, is the basic problem here. If the Conspiracy exists at all, it was able to fool my truthspells on day one in such a way that Greater Detect Magic made it look to me like my own magical signature... maybe I should see if some scroll shop's got an Arcane Sight, now that I can afford one. Or if Cheliax could get a borrowable item of constant Arcane Sight to me in a hurry, it'd be some pretty significant evidence for Ordinary, I expect that makes the Conspiracy's life a lot harder. Should've thought of that earlier. Anybody feel free to remind me to put that in, the next time I send a message to Egorian."
"Meanwhile, there's problems like - I know there's spells that change materials around. Can the Conspiracy turn the iron in an iron helmet into something that doesn't block divination? Even if I can verify it working in one experiment, that doesn't mean they can't mess with it after I put it onto my head."
"Also also I expect that introducing density changes will usually come with potential energy changes... maybe there's a way to sidestep that, but if you think of the forces you'd need to apply to a metal to pull it apart or compress it, it'd probably be pretty forceful. That means the new potential energy in the current position isn't like the old potential energy in the current position..." Where it's been established via experimentation that everyone on Project Lawful is of course thoroughly familiar with, at this point, that Prestidigitation doesn't let you change materials in a way that greatly changes their potential energy.
Carissa Sevar: " - hmm, okay. I think the next thing I'd try would be sitting in an iron box with my own Detect Intelligence up, having requested a bunch of people stand around right outside it so that it's instantly obvious if my Detect Intelligence is leaking through the box, and then I'd ask for some kind of powerful metal-transmutation spell and transmute the iron myself intermittently until satisfied that I was getting a read whenever I poked a hole and not otherwise."
Keltham: "Carissa, that works a lot better if you start out knowing for sure that the invisible seventh-circle wizards who can easily beat my Invisibility Purge are forbidden by the Law of alternatephysics to flicker their interception of my Detect Intelligence spell faster than I can transmute the metal in the box."
"Yes, it's very silly in Ordinary. If you know that's where you are. Conspiracy Carissa is only suggesting this because she knows she can defeat it."
Carissa Sevar: "Which is why it'd be so valuable to figure out an actual test you were convinced of! But if that's not one I'll keep thinking. - and if Egorian doesn't have an item of permanent Arcane Sight for you I can probably make one, it'd be something like twelve thousand in materials costs which is soon to be a lot less than that."
Keltham: "Yeah..."
...part of his brain sure is increasingly convinced that things which happen on those kinds of timescales, will not happen; that the happy bright future she's talking about no longer exists.
Keltham really hopes that's his brain discharging a burden of gloominess brought on by things apparently going so well and a lingering belief in tropes, and not because his brain is picking up on a pattern that Keltham hasn't seen, or is refusing to see.
"So, Asmodia, have you figured out yet what Conspiracy Asmodia thinks of me?"
Asmodia: "I mean, mostly I've been staring at what you're doing, trying to figure out whether it reflects any Laws you haven't explained yet. I think I've deduced the basic concept of why you keep asking for books, it's because it's expensive to fake a lot of those, and you can look at just a page of them in the shop and then use that to verify the entire book already existed when they buy the book and bring it back. I bet there's some much more extensively worked Law for seeing that sort of viewpoint in dath ilan, the work that goes into things and how to force somebody else to do a lot of work."
"And, yeah, Conspiracy Asmodia doesn't have to be like the Asmodia you know, but she's a person such that I was an easy person for her to pretend to be which is an endlessly fascinating question. There are probably not meaningless divergences between us because all of those are extra work for her with no reason. Our favorite foods are the same, she eats the same things at breakfast. She's - probably got ambitions that lean more towards world domination than getting a big share of the Project, was my first thought about differences? Except she was probably more of an ordinary Ostenso student, before the incident that wasn't really Manohar. She wanted to be running something important, well, obviously so do I, so is that even really a difference..."
"I think she's getting something out of snuggling clothed with you, because there's other Project researchers who would quickly jump for that item-slot if Conspiracy Asmodia didn't have some reason to hold it for herself. Despite her incredibly busy existence leading her entire life as well as mine... which is a lot of busyness, even taking into account that a lot of the work she pretends to do for the Project is really being done by somebody else," since she doesn't have a Ring of Sustenance. "Given that her overall personality is probably mostly similar to mine, and that I don't have unusually Conspiracy-useful effects on you that I can figure out, I buy that she finds it nice to have a warm boy to snuggle."
"She thinks of you - as an opponent in her game, probably? I can't say how much she respects you as an opponent, because I don't know how close she thinks you are to breaking out, or how much of that was because of you being smart and how much of that was just her screwing up. But I don't think she'd find it, warm to snuggle you, if she didn't respect you at all."
Keltham: "That's not by any chance a message from the true Conspiracy Asmodia to me, is it?"
Asmodia: "Ordinary Asmodia is insulted that you think anybody who could pretend to be Ordinary Asmodia would ever do that. I'm just reporting Ordinary's model of Conspiracy's thoughts to you, Conspiracy would never tell you her real thoughts like that, she'd figure out exactly what I'd say and then she'd say exactly that. Which is not the same thing because I don't know what she's actually thinking."
Keltham: "I know. Just teasing."
Asmodia: She knows. She's having his mind read.
lintamande: The Ascendant Court comes into view.
They ended up deciding to just have Lady Avaricia do the diffraction-grating-and-baseline art on a cloak, and then swap the Keltham-decorated cloak with that of the person who is really walking the Ascendant Court, so the illusionist doesn't have to fake that, or fake how it looks in the mirror or anything.
The real Lord Fennelosa is entering a different building where everyone around him is safe to Message.
The illusionist is pretty sure he can stitch the two together seamlessly. Greater False Vision is supposed to be good for that.
The temples to Iomedae, Norgorber, and Cayden Cailean overlook the fog-cloaked island where the Starstone sits behind Aroden's protections.
Keltham: "Up first if you can find one, temple of Irori." Iomedae is too predictable, and the Ascendant Court supposedly had temples to practically everything a century ago.
lintamande: He asks a passerby for directions, gets pointed left, goes left. There it is. The architectural style is distinctly different from that of Absalom or Cheliax. The temple is crowned with a graceful green bulb.
The Chelish agent in the real court walks in, and Fennelosa walks forwards. The air is smoky; someone's burning incense.
Keltham: Anyone around who looks like the salesperson or manager for Irori-related services?
lintamande: There's a priest doing a channel healing for a large crowd; there's a ring out on the floor marking where to stand, with the priest at the center. He raises his arms and channels; after that, the crowd disperses. A man limps over, belatedly.
"Next one's in an hour," the priest tells him briskly.
Keltham: "Can't heal or channel through this, right?" (aside to Carissa)
Carissa Sevar: Ugh stop being Good. "No."
Keltham: Message to the priest: Hi, I'm a strange person in a strange situation, here via scry on the wizard who just walked in. Do you have a price for a few priority minutes of your time to answer weirdly basic questions?
lintamande: He casts Detect Magic, looks for the scrying sensor, tilts his head to address it. "It is worthwhile to seek to understand the world. You may have three simple questions without charge, and after that pay half what you earn in a day for more questions, up to the next hour bell."
Keltham: "I worry that none of my questions will count as simple. Your stated price to me works out to 36gp in terms of my direct salary, but most of what I earn is not in the form of salary but ownership of something that will have more value later, and that is not something I'd pay over. I am not sure how long is until the next hour bell locally, but doubt I'll have cause to converse for as much as twenty minutes unless this becomes really fascinating."
"My first question would be what Irori would say of the afterlives for Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and Lawful Evil, and why one would wish to go to Axis rather than Heaven or Hell."
lintamande: "Irori would say that people should go on their path, wherever it takes them, Rather than reasoning backwards from the question 'do I want to go to Axis or Heaven or Hell', you should think about who you want to be and what you want to achieve, and then look and see what afterlife can offer you that."
Keltham: "I want a lot of very complicated things, but most of all, to become - myself, I suppose, realize the parts of myself that haven't developed yet, have the experiences that will show me who I am."
"But what I am trying to get at here is not to make that choice for myself, but - basic orientation to how certain choices work at all. What do the different afterlives have to offer, who should go to Heaven and Axis and Hell, what happens to them when they do?"
lintamande: "In Heaven over time you become an angel, a Lawful being with the Good in your nature amplified and strengthened. You can go to Heaven and refuse to become an angel but it is not common, and everyone you know will leave you behind. In Hell when you are ready for the trials you will face you become a devil, a Lawful being with the Evil in your nature amplified and strengthened. It is more common for people to go to Hell but refuse to become devils: those who go to Heaven generally aspire to become angels to do the work of angels in the universe, but people only become devils for themselves.
Axis is a city of a hundred thousand smaller cities, and too many things go on there to name, and the Lawful outsiders of Axis are designed by a process the Material plane is not permitted to know. It is the afterlife that is most like living."
Keltham: "Nirvana, Elysium, the Boneyard - what makes them less like living than Axis?"
lintamande: "The Boneyard is meant to be temporary; Pharasma desires that no one make their permanent home there, and encourages the souls there to develop some sense of an alignment so they can move on there instead. In Nirvana every soul takes a form that relates to Nirvana's read of their deep desires and needs, which is nothing like the form they took in life. Elysium is a place of abundant joy and exploration and many people prefer it to Axis on the grounds that you do not have to pay rent, or purchase concert tickets, but this also is a respect in which it is unlike living."
Keltham: "I see. Thank you. Those were not meant as simple questions, but you have given short answers to them, which is fair enough, I suppose. Your price for more strikes me as relatively steep; I will pass on to other temples and perhaps return to this one, if it turns out you made the most sense after all or they charge even more."
Keltham is, in fact, remembering to check how the surroundings look in his Prestidigitated diffraction grating. He has detected no anomalies so far.
Message to Fennelosa: Next up, Abadar.
lintamande: Sure. Off they go.
Abrogail Thrune II: - Keltham felt intuitively dissatisfied with those answers but he's avoiding focusing on that intuition until later so as to not give away his password, if he doesn't figure out why he's unhappy maybe the Conspiracy won't figure it out either -
(Keltham is also deliberately refocusing his attention on annoyance with a pricing concept that implicitly states that his time is worth at most a quarter, no, locally a tenth, of the other person's time, no matter what Keltham's own time is worth, but this doesn't seem like the priority for Abrogail to rebroadcast)
lintamande: The temple of Abadar is larger than most of the other ones, and has a busy currency exchange at the entrance, where a group of chattering cat-people are exchanging lumps of jade for Absalom printed money. The woman behind them in line is yelling at them to hurry up. There's a thin teenage boy at the entrance, who greets Fennelosa. "How can I help you?"
Keltham: "I'm attending by scry, in a complicated situation, and looking to talk to whoever present has the most knowledge of theology and the workings of money, if they have a reasonable fixed price for that."
Abrogail Thrune II: - intends to use the priest's knowledge about economics as a test against their real identity as a priest of the commerce god, interwoven with theology questions, and telling them to shut up if they get suspicious that his questions have become desynchronized from their answers, to prevent - person-in-the-middle attacks - where we're giving his questions to a real priest of Abadar at the same time - he's not sure he can do it in a way the Conspiracy can't beat, but he intends to try -
lintamande: " - most knowledge of theology would be the seventh circle priest Temos Sevandivasen," says the real attendant at the real temple of Abadar, which gets passed through with the name slightly changed so that the person isn't targetable by Sending. "An hour of his time is 400gp on short notice, 200gp if you book for later in the week, minimum of a quarter-hour."
Keltham: Hm. That's... expensive. Sanity check, if fifth-circle is 500gp/week, and it goes up by a factor of 4 at each circle, and Temos works 4 hours a day 4 days a week... that would make sense, but Golarion people are supposed to have longer working hours than that. Maybe Keltham will circle back to the Irorian priest after this, after all.
"Second-most knowledge of theology?"
lintamande: "Sixth circle priest Allandra Kemi. I'll have to look up her rates for you." He has a book to hand for this. "80gp for an hour, 500gp for same-day."
"Five hundred? That's more than the seventh-circle priest!" Fennelosa's impersonator objects.
The clerk looks at him strangely. "There's ....not a rule that your appointment prices have to correspond to your circle."
Carissa Sevar: Why are the prices so high, she assumes they're quoting them straight-across.
Keltham: "Yes, but it's a surprising pricing anomaly given that you'd expect the supply of seventh-circles to be lower and the demand for their time to be higher."
lintamande: "Yes," says Fennelosa's impersonator, "but it's a surprising pricing anomaly given that you'd expect the supply of seventh-circles to be lower and the demand for their time to be higher."
Shrug. "Kemi's mostly a researcher and hates having meetings in the middle of the day, or unexpectedly."
lintamande: On the scry, the person at the door of the temple visibly startles. "Sorry - did you just -"
"I have a mysterious patron who likes Messaging people through a scry. Please answer him, whatever he said."
"Uh, I think I missed the window to reply to the Message."
"He can hear you."
"Oh. Well. Kemi's mostly a researcher and hates having meetings in the middle of the day, or unexpectedly."
Keltham: Hm. Not much of a detailed theoretical response, but then it didn't really need one and the person apparently understood the question... may not be fair anyways to expect that much of the initial-sales-direction-person in Golarion, Keltham isn't sure what Intelligence 10 or Intelligence 12 lets a person do.
"Alright, one quarter-hour of the seventh-circle's time, 100gp." Keltham does have higher hopes for this test than for some others he's run; and with his emotional alarm level where it is, and Keltham's own ability to request a higher monetary salary obviously way above what it was a few months ago, he needs to just start spending money like seriously.
lintamande: "All right. Wait here, please, and I'll go and set that up for you."
Carissa Sevar: Does Cheliax think it has anyone better than Carissa-with-the-Crown personally at answering tricky economics questions on the spot.
Abrogail Thrune II: Possibly Abrogail-with-the-Crown but maybe not even then. This is Carissa's to win or lose.
(Carissa Sevar and Asmodia have been given access to only-slightly-censored books of Abadaran theology by this point, with all of the economics in there unchanged.)
Carissa Sevar: All right, then, let's do this.
While eating the lunch that was just delivered and absentmindedly but visibly to Keltham tweaking one of her headband-assistant designs. Keltham's not expecting her to be enhanced as aggressively as she is, and should hopefully conclude she can't possibly do all that at once.
lintamande: Temos Sevandivasen is a Vudrani man in his late thirties or early forties who earned his cleric levels trying to set up functional financial institutions in Kumura, a Vudrani kingdom that'd just thrown off Kelish rule. He fled to Absalom when the neighboring kingdoms got threatened and banded together to conquer Kumura.
He has been read in on the potential threat to the Inner Sea region from Cheliax, though not on any of the details that'd bind him to Abadar's obligation not to direct causal interventions at Ostenso. When a Chelish man walks into his office, his eyes narrow.
"Osirion is offering up to 80,000gp, the personal protection of the Church and Pharaohate, and Axis or petrification to defectors," he says immediately to Fennelosa's impersonator. "I can leave with you now."
Aspexia Rugatonn: This priest is not the first person to make that offer. The impersonator is soul-sold, apparently loyal, and is under a complicated useful curse from a certain ninth-circle priestess of Asmodeus who once specialized in curses. Nefreti Clepati could possibly break it, but she'd charge more than 80,000gp to try.
Carissa Sevar: Fantastic.
lintamande: "I just have some economics questions," the man says.
"I regretfully decline. We'll refund you."
Carissa Sevar: Offer him...more money?
lintamande: "I hear Abadarans always have a price. Name it."
"Sure thing. A hundred souls of our choice, one of them yours."
Keltham: "Hi. I'm attending by scry and am in something of a complicated situation. Roughly speaking, I need theological knowledge, I need to know that theological knowledge is coming from an actual high-level priest of a god, I'm concerned about this scry being intercepted, and so I'm going to be asking you theological questions and then asking you to give money-commerce-pricing takes on the answers or rephrase the answers in strange commercial terms. You can assume that my own knowledge of that field is extremely complete in underlying mathematical principle, but not that I'm familiar with any standard examples or technical terms of art being used here."
"If you're with me so far, talk about how that would have affected your pricing if you'd been pricing by detailed effort instead of by simplified flat rate, by way of helping me know that an Abadaran priest heard this question and responded to it. I can hear you if you reply by voice, you don't need to use Message."
lintamande: Keltham is of course talking to Temas Sedavasen, in a room well away from the Ascendant Court. And this actor is just blindly but with high Bluff and a Glibness repeating what he's told by -
Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar, who is becoming pretty convinced tropes are real. Why don't they send someone to ask economics questions of a different priest of Abadar somewhere else, and offer this man dath ilani economic knowledge, someone else will have to handle both those arrangements as she's being Temas Sedavasen right now.
Temas answers immediately.
"I would not have charged a particularly elevated price to reflect the additional effort from phrasing my responses in economic terms, unless my comprehension of what you're asking for is substantially incorrect, which does seem plausible to me. I would have charged an elevated price to reflect risks to my person, my church, and surrounding parties if there is some kind of ongoing effort to deceive you or deceive me about something of importance. I would have charged an elevated price for receiving questions by Message, which I find viscerally unpleasant, and which make some sounds difficult to distinguish for me -- this isn't my first language. I'm going to cast Comprehend Languages in case that helps, which might reduce how much I'd be tempted to charge you for the Message-conveyance. The overall result is, I think, about a hundred forty percent of the price I did charge, which I'm actually regarding as something of a success of the case for flat-rate pricing given how unusual this case is."
Keltham: "I'd considered that price relatively high so I'm not bumping my own offer immediately, pending how this actually plays out. Bit surprised you don't have piecewise effort-cost estimates, but I guess that's something you only have when you're trained to maintain a certain kind of coherence between all your prices... Go ahead and cast Comprehend Languages."
Keltham casts Detect Magic, just in case the Conspiracy was about to be really silly there and try to fake that. Cantrips are nearly free.
Carissa Sevar: It's a real Comprehend Languages.
She knows how an actual Abadaran answers that, and unfortunately it's with a bunch of thoughtful commentary on what it means to have coherence between your prices, why you want that, what goes wrong when you try it, etc. The plan to make significant use of an actual cleric of Abadar was probably doomed from the start, given how much they've had to change Abadarism to not make Keltham immediately want to flee to Osirion.
Fine.
Carissa Sevar: "Businesses need to know the unit prices of the components of the things they manufacture in order to notice where their costs are highest, and in order to project how much fluctuation in the price of components will affect them. There's enforced coherence in the prices of goods, because there are markets in which they are freely traded among strangers, but nonetheless businesses sometimes manage to plan and purchase so as to not coherently value the different pieces of their supply chain. I have not seen it proposed to treat effort in the same fashion, I haven't seen a business fail of its failure to do so, and I'm uncertain what that failure would look like exactly. I specify this not to ask you for the information, which I'd need to pay you for, but in line with your request that I give Abadaran answers to the things you say."
Keltham: "Received, let me think a moment."
...nobody in Cheliax talks this way natively, or Keltham doesn't think so, and it's also not the Lawful answer that a Project member would give. It's not of a complexity level where Keltham would have thought a 7th-circle was required for it; but then, he may have been a bit spoiled by talking to the likes of Carissa Sevar, who has 7th-circle spellcraft at 4th-circle within her own profession. But Asmodia could talk like this given an Abadaran book and some stupidity assertions about the character she was playing, or so Keltham worries.
Oh, there's something he can do about that.
"Carissa, Asmodia," he says out loud, "I basically buy that this could be what a 7th-circle priest of Abadar is like, given that they've got to be selected on service and devotion and apparently often combat ability rather than just intelligence and wisdom and skill. But I worry that either of you could improvise responses on this order."
"Asmodia, if I tell you that a central distribution, mean 0, deviation 1, corresponds to the maximum-entropy probability distribution with mean 0 and deviation 1, can you write up a proof of that as quickly as possible and poke me when you're done, and then write up any further obvious thoughts you have about your proof and poke me again? Carissa..." The problem isn't thinking of what she could do, it's figuring out what she could do that nobody else in the Project could do. "Try to prove that two agents, if they have common knowledge of each other's probability estimates of a proposition - they know which probability the other estimates, they know the other person knows their probability estimates, they know the other knows they know, etcetera - must have the same probability estimate on that proposition, using the weakest assumptions you can get away with. And before you ask, I'm not just having you maintain a cantrip with a heating stone attached to you because we're not in private and also there is for example such a thing as a Delay Pain spell that could be secretly cast on you."
Carissa Sevar: Why is he like this.
Carissa Sevar: "I wasn't going to ask. You are plainly the kind of innocent person who hasn't even mentally made an ordered list of which people you'd want around if you were in the mood to hurt me in public. Asmodia, do you have scratch paper?"
Carissa Sevar: No way in Hell can she pull that off simultaneously and she shouldn't even try, either Asmodia'll have to do both - but they'll lose bits on that, Keltham knows how smart Asmodia is, and Carissa wants Asmodia pointing out additional angles of Law -
- or they'll have to get the other girls from the Project on it. Throw every enhancement in the book at them and have them try it -
- and, she can't help it, she has to look at a math problem with this headband on once in her life and she'll never get the chance again -
- and for mine, start by imagining two people watching the same biased coin flip repeatedly, but privy to different subsets of results; quite obviously if they get running updates from the other person on the other person's new probability estimate they can infer the result they didn't see, as sure as seeing it themself, and if they don't get running updates they can't necessarily infer each individual result but make the same update - prove that -
- it takes a lot of her Wisdom to stop there and refocus on the faith of Abadar.
Asmodia: Asmodia wordlessly hands over some of the paper she usually carries on her.
FUCK KELTHAM AND THE MALFUNCTIONING AIRSHIP HE CRASHED IN ON.
No Asmodia can still salvage this. The other Project members may not be able to solve a problem like this individually, but collectively - with Asmodia fully enhanced and coordinating their work on both of their problems - that's even a trope, Asmodia has gathered, they've gotten hold of some novels written by Lawful Good authors, now. If everybody on Project Lawful unites to back up Carissa Sevar so she can fight at her best - it should be hardly possible for Sevar to lose, not just this battle, but the war, because this would almost have to be the climactic moment of greatest difficulty -
Keltham: "And, Security, please relay that I'd like the rest of Project Lawful's researchers to spend the next half-hour writing up a description of everything the Conspiracy would be doing and why, according to what they think would be the most likely Conspiracy given their own knowledge of Golarion, but based on only evidence I know about myself." Later, not now, Keltham will think about what correlations and independences ought to exist there and what level of effort he expects to see, after they've produced their work and just before Keltham himself looks at it.
Back to the Abadaran priest. "What sort of trade occurs between the afterlives and Golarion?"
Asmodia: There's a deadly calm about Asmodia now, none of which shows on alterAsmodia's face.
Keltham doesn't know about the extra third-circle wizards they have secretly on hand, to further augment Asmodia, Tallandria, other Project members during their long nights. He doesn't know about the expensive backup wands for emergencies. If they burn all those enhancements now, they can still win.
Pair up people on the Project by similarity of writing styles. Half to start working on their Conspiracy submissions now, in case Keltham demands to check their interim work or their paired partner's. Half to do Asmodia's and Carissa's homework under Asmodia's lead. After a quarter of an hour they all switch. The amount of work every person does will be consistent; and with +4 augmentations to Intelligence, Wisdom, and sometimes Splendour, they will hopefully be able to impress Keltham even with the work they did in half the time.
And then if Keltham comes up with anything more difficult than that, for next time, they're all hosed. So be it. "Failure is always for sale, even when you can't afford the price," goes the saying out of dath ilan. It's a phrase that could also have come out of Hell.
Go to it, Sevar. I've taken responsibility here.
(Asmodia has entirely forgotten at this point that she secretly wants Keltham to win.)
lintamande: "Almost none, with two exceptions I know of," says Tedas Sedavasen. "Many of the longest-standing agreements among the gods and the organizations each of them commands regard intervention in the Material, and they tend to restrict it. Communicating information discovered or refined in an afterlife to the Material is exceptionally costly. The two occasions I know of where significant trade exists between the Material plane and an afterlife are major interventions by Shizuru and by Asmodeus, respectively. Shizuru backed the Lung Wa Empire for about nine hundred years, with legions of angels, in exchange for the right to choose the emperor's successor, and ceased that intervention when prophecy broke. Asmodeus provides Cheliax with books and other resources mass-produced in Hell in exchange for Cheliax pursuing Asmodean policies, and further allows people to sell their souls in exchange for powerful magic.
Both gods are ancient and powerful, and my understanding is that this is incredibly expensive for them, with the circumstances those rare ones under which despite the high costs such trade is favorable both for the god and for the subject organization in Golarion."
Keltham: "Okay, let me think a moment..."
Aside to Security, "Please tap Carissa with Owl's Wisdom, and Asmodia with Fox's Cunning." It's occurring to him that, since the Conspiracy could secretly tap them with empowerment like that, Keltham should jump ahead and have it done officially in Ordinary, then adjust his quality expectations upward accordingly. "Also, Wisdom and Cunning taps for Ione, Avaricia, Meritxell, and Shilira." Pity he doesn't have the Ordinary capacity to boost the rest of the entire research group.
Back to the priest. "People do seem to know what the afterlives are like, and I used a spell called Early Judgment to catch a glimpse of my own, a higher-tech city where I somehow knew things were being traded, presumably Axis. For that matter, my god gave me a spell that showed me a pretty horrifying vision of people on fire, which I'm told was Zon-Kuthon's afterlife. Do you know why that information can be sent to the Material, but not information on the order of, say, afterlife-written fiction novels?"
Abrogail Thrune II: ...all right, that is a little admirable in a boy who's never even heard the expression "Hell is the destruction of hope."
Her turn no wait this is not her turn, she is definitely not turning right now.
Asmodia. I authorize you, but not Sevar, to know of the existence of the Shadow Project, and command you to secrecy thereon.
In a further basement carved beneath this fortress's secret basement, there are twenty other researchers who have access to all Project transcripts and technologies, who've been trying to develop refinements of those technologies that Keltham doesn't know about. So that we'll have some edges Keltham can't immediately duplicate, if he goes to Osirion. Abarco can relay orders between you and them.
Abrogail doesn't say anything else. It's not her move.
Asmodia: Asmodia does not need to be told the obvious; she's already relaying orders through Abarco to half of those researchers to carry out Keltham's thought exercise, which any non-shadow researchers can use as inspiration if they fall behind there.
The other half of the shadow researchers are to carry out a variant version of Keltham's stated request, for them to imagine Conspiracies in which the Project Lawful girls are secretly plotting rebellion together against Cheliax. It'll show Asmodia natural statistical properties of imaginary Conspiracies that are indeed imaginary, as imagined by people who know at least a little Law.
Carissa Sevar: "My understanding is that there are several negotiated carve-outs in the general god-agreements governing transmission of information to the mortal plane for information. One such carve-out is for information about afterlives. Another is that it's possible to summon outsiders. There is plenty of speculation about what set of desiderata those agreements were aimed at, but none of it informed enough I'd care to repeat it; the ultimate principle, of course, is that Pharasma's vision governs, and that mutually negotiated nonintervention is cheaper than mutual intervention in most cases but plausibly not with respect to, well, recruiting - all of the gods have an interest in identifying, and identifying themselves to, those mortals who they can compact with.
This is outside my core expertise, and my speculation is informed only by periodic discussions I've participated in about what kind of organizational arrangement would be necessary for such intervention by Abadar to seem worthwhile; He too is an ancient god, and could probably afford it, had we anything to trade Him that He values as Asmodeus values people who want to become devils and Shizuru values peace, stability, fealty and obedience in Her empire."
Keltham: "Mortal Golarion seems to be providing a lot of value to the afterlives and not getting much in return for it, as I currently understand this whole setup. Would the gods' representatives have a different take on that?"
Carissa Sevar: "Mortal Golarion isn't the kind of entity that participates in negotiations about the allocation of value it produces, and it's not obvious that it could or should be. Individual mortals go on becoming beings of value to afterlives because it's in their own interests."
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol winces, and thinks for relay to Carissa Sevar not to do that again. They shouldn't represent Abadar/Osirion as being something Keltham will dislike that much when it's that much of a lie about Abadaran attitudes, especially when Keltham may be on the verge of leaving.
Keltham: Not a god of fairness, indeed and check. Keltham has, in fact, been getting the impression that Golarion is not being treated by the gods as something they are really interested in negotiating with. He's never once heard any god-arrangement being justified as something that mortals asked for.
"One person I talked to said that Axis was a lot like mortal life. Another said that Axis turned you into a being of pure Law, or maybe pure Lawfulness, though I'm not sure exactly what that word meant to her at the time. I've heard it said that Hell amplifies the Evil in people, Heaven amplifies the Good, and all of these claims actually seem a bit concerning to me. What exactly do people turn into, and how?"
Carissa Sevar: "Most people, in the afterlives, eventually become outsiders -- beings that are closer to being made of pure Law, in Axis, or of pure Lawful Good, in Heaven, or pure Lawful Evil, in Hell. My own humble understanding is that there are many changes in the direction of being more Lawful, more Good, and more Evil which a person would make, as an improvement in their internal processes like a business changing itself to better profit, if they were aware of them, and that simply making all of those is sufficient to make you an entity fundamentally alien to the humans you once were. Some people hesitate to make these changes, and live for many many centuries first; and Axis takes pride in enabling more interesting and recognizable-to-mortals centuries than the other afterlives - but people do still generally become outsiders eventually."
Keltham: "Okay, but do we know - like, what's a specific example of a bit of Law getting added to anyone in any of those planes? Is there a point where you are given a chance to see it coming and say no? Or if saying no isn't an option, decide that you'd rather walk out through Abaddon first? If what you wanted was mainly to become yourself but more so, these planes sound like they might be a nice place to hang out for a couple of millennia tops before you had to exit the whole local multiverse."
Carissa Sevar: "I have always understood the self-modifications we are discussing to be entirely voluntary and deliberately undertaken, and in fact in Axis purchased. And no afterlife, to my knowledge, bars you from the destruction of your person, though -" earnestly - "if you destroy yourself then you just no longer exist, you don't find yourself somewhere else. If there's something you want, you have to build it here."
Keltham: "Everyone is, in fact, in so many different places that it's impossible to destroy all of yourself; the worst thing that can happen to you is being transformed while still conscious and existent into something you didn't want to become. It's not so much that you find yourself in another place, though it can in fact feel like that, but that you find yourself in the remaining futures that continued from your past. But my figuring out how to explain that may have to wait for later."
"Hell and Heaven don't run on the purchase method?"
lintamande: "My humble understanding, with yet more emphasis we've ventured far from the questions I contemplate regularly, is that Hell and Heaven both evaluate the suitability of candidates to be devils or angels, and people work for many centuries to earn an evaluation as a suitable candidate. A priest of Asmodeus might tell you that Hell's evaluation is not so different from how Axis does it, except that we are accepting some bad results in our process in exchange for the simplicity and transparency of having it done in a standard fashion, as a business arrangement. A priest of Shizuru might tell you that if the universe would be overall worse as a consequence of some person's growth in Law, then Heaven will not enable it, and so additional screening is necessary."
Keltham: "And what happens to people in Elysium?"
Carissa Sevar: "That is a much harder question to answer. The Lawful afterlives tend to have organized churches that don't tolerate, say, different branches in different countries teaching contradictory things about the nature of their god. The Chaotic gods have not prioritized resolving such contradictions. Elysium is perhaps an infinite wilderness populated by flighty beings of simple delights; is perhaps full of dangerous adventures; is perhaps full of places that distort your perceptions and comprehensions in different ways, that you may return from them with a deeper understanding of the contracts inside your mind. - they wouldn't say 'contracts'. It's a beautiful place, I'd bet money on that, and the people there seem happy. I really can't tell you more than that."
Keltham: ...enforcing consistency is not the same as enforcing accuracy, but this Keltham will not argue; if you can make that mistake at all, you are probably hard to correct about it.
"I'd think it would be something of a priority, if you wanted people correctly valuing Axis versus Elysium as a desirable destination, for even the Lawful Neutral priests to be able to tell people how Axis contrasted to Elysium, meaning that you'd prioritize having accurate info about Elysium yourself. Otherwise what prevents Chaotic Good priests from claiming that Elysium has everything Axis does, plus free chocolate cookies?"
Carissa Sevar: "Oh, there's misleading advertising, to my great annoyance. I've seen it argued that the reason the Chaotic gods don't bother clarifying their teachings is that they get to benefit from whatever interpretation of them is most favorable and most compelling to their followers spreading, without it needing to be constrained by truth. But ultimately, if you die and go to either Axis or Elysium, and decide you chose wrong, it's not an irreparable mistake; it's costly, and slow the way mortals mark time, but there are demigods who will ferry you between them, and effect your transformation from one kind of petitioner to another. I am open with Abadar's trainees that it seems to me that Axis, possessing more of the virtues that make men rich and businesses successful in life, is a better place, but that these sorts of things are hard to see from where we stand."
Keltham: "I have, due to strange circumstances, ended up as the cleric of an unknown Lawful Neutral god whose symbol now adorns the cloak of my representative here. Assuming I'm willing to throw quite a lot of resources at it, is there any fast way I can find out which god that is and get in touch with their church in Golarion, including by going through Axis?"
Carissa Sevar: "The head of the church of Abadar is the Pharaoh of Osirion, long may he live, great may his nation grow, and it is said that Abadar has made a shard of Himself unusually available to the Pharaoh to direct him in the management of Osirion. It is conceivable that if I sent your inquiry to Osirion, and they deemed it worthy of the Pharaoh's attention -- which isn't a sure thing, though a large monetary contribution helps immensely - then He would be able to derive the answers you seek straight from Abadar. Before you tried something that momentous, of course, I'd take every possible smaller step - you could place an advertisement in every newspaper in circulation in Absalom, offering a reward for any information on the symbol. You'll get a lot of claptrap, but hire someone competent to investigate the more promising submissions. You could do the same thing in Katheer, and Goka, and at the Worldwound. A full page newspaper advertisement is 45gp, and reaches tens of thousands of people."
Keltham: Welp, that's definitely either a seventh-circle priest of the business-god with actual competence, or Conspiracy Carissa, because now Keltham feels like an idiot and there's not many beings in Golarion who have demonstrated the ability to do that to him.
"Bit surprised that Osirion would ask for a contribution rather than a bounty on successful identification. There isn't a standard pricing on this, is there?"
Carissa Sevar: "The Pharaoh accepts payment for his attention with some probability related to, but not only related to, how much you pay him, as a form of price discrimination. If he entertains the request in the first place he'll probably separately want a bounty for identification."
Keltham: "Uh huh. And do you have any idea what some attention prices and attention probabilities would be, or what kind of separate bounty the Pharaoh would be likely to ask?"
Carissa Sevar: "You'd get a better estimate if I knew anything about you; part of the point of the price discrimination is that 1000gp, from someone for whom that's obviously a year's wages, means much more than 1000gp from Xerbystes. But in general, 1000gp will mean the application gets seriously reviewed by the pharaoh's staff, 3000gp gets through a majority of the time, and I'd be very surprised to ever hear of an occasion where 10,000gp didn't. No, you can't just immediately resubmit with more money if it didn't get heard, you generally have to wait at least a year or until something has substantively changed."
Keltham: Not very multiagent-efficient... is this an attempt at extracting maximum value from customers via an elaborate one-sided mechanism that sometimes destroys value? Keltham is tempted to go pay them in spellsilver just before the news hits of the price drop... okay not really that would not be nice, they could resell it on directly to a customer who'd be harmed thereby. Actually they should figure out how to announce that sometime very soon, people are trading at bad prices, Keltham forgot there wasn't any Governance office managing that sort of news release in Golarion.
Keltham is trying to figure out a way to tell if this guy is actually Conspiracy Carissa. But that's sort of hard to do when Conspiracy Carissa is reading your mind about which tests you're thinking about trying.
No, he's not suddenly ripping off her headband, it's genuinely not nice, and also now that he's thought it out loud the Conspiracy has invisibly tapped Carissa with a Fox's Cunning so she'll keep the same +4 bonus.
"It's been represented to me that women in Osirion can't own property. What's the logic of that from a business standpoint? Half of your economy isn't free to participate in the economy."
Kind of a naive attempt at Carissa detection, Conspiracy Carissa probably has any ability to argue completely opposed viewpoints, but it's worth trying; they could be only reading his mind intermittently.
Ferrer Maillol: Don't lie about this one! The whole truth will sound bad enough to him anyways. Has Sevar been read in on -
Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia weighs up considerations in a lightning flash. Playing to tropes - does not actually override Asmodeus's orders - and reading in Sevar on this, which has not previously been deemed advantageous to Cheliax's interests, will take time and create a suspicious pause -
Aspexia decides to make a move; she is not Keltham's defeated opponent the way Abrogail is, nor has she driven enough of the story that her greater authority should threaten Sevar's main character status. She will step forward once, and fade back after.
(She is being respectful to the tropes, in following her own Lord's orders; she has previously not told Sevar of her Irori-cleric status, as the tropes wished; she does now attempt to do this in a way that will not disrupt their story-weaving - is this an attitude they wish to discourage -)
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I'd call that an unfair representation. Matters are more politically complicated than they represented to you. Osirion is not Absalom, the people there are extremely skeptical of the equilibrium as it holds in Absalom or say Cheliax - if I've correctly identified your representative as hailing from there - with high abortion, high infanticide, high infidelity, legal divorce, and women's rights. Most Osirians are deeply skeptical that you can just take the women's rights and legal divorce part, and not get the rest of the Avistani equilibrium."
"Mortal life only lasts a few decades. To the extent Osirians worry about the inherent badness of oppressing women, they think that's outweighed by the benefit of making sure that people end up in Axis rather than the Maelstrom - which is not a plane you can with any reliability leave if you did not wish to arrive."
"The reign of Abadar is not so old, and the current administration has been slowly shifting in a direction I think Chelish sensibilities would approve as a direction, in this regard. Before Abadar united Himself with the Pharaoh, property could only be held by married, landowning men; to this has now been added young married men with incomes but no land, and spellcasting women have been made eligible for that status as well. It is a great change to Osirion, and now they will want to wait and see what comes of it."
"Fairness does impel me to say, that did you ask this question of a priest of Abadar born and raised in Osirion, they might say less that they were trying to move in a Chelish-approved direction, and more that they are striving to build the institutions Abadar asks of them, institutions whose participants end up in Axis, whether that was best done through women having more rights or less. But that's involved slow moves in a Chelish direction, in that regard, not away from it."
Keltham: This reply was not immediately interrupted when Keltham had a bright idea in a flash, one that had to be implemented before the Conspiracy could react to the detected thought, and ordered Carissa to be quiet - he needed to hear the answer, after all - and then started suddenly tickling her.
"Heard, let me think," he Messages the priest, and then says to Carissa, "You can talk now."
Carissa Sevar: "You're - abusing me terribly, you know that?" Her eyes are shining. "I'd just had an insight on your math problem!" Asmodia help what insight did I just have on the math problem, she can use the one she genuinely had but it's not ideal, too preliminary.
Asmodia: Knowing they know you know they know goes off to infinity which means you're not going to be representing knowledge as probabilities assigned to propositions, it's got to be some finite representation that lets you can derive the infinite series of facts about who knows about who knows what.
We've actually got a specific system worked for partitions of possible worlds, but if you tell Keltham you've got that far, he'll be expecting a solution from you almost immediately after.