lintamande: Some things break your heart but fix your vision.
Project Lawful: It is still Day 90.
The remnants of Project Lawful - diminished by only two members, but one of those was sort of important - have now Teleported back and regathered at the Fortress of Law.
It's plausible they should change residences, even at the price of recasting the Forbiddance. Keltham can identify the surroundings of this location more than well enough to guide a scry there, or a Teleport.
Abrogail Thrune II: Everyone here looks terrified, of course, to her Sense Motive. (Not counting Aspexia, who does not count in any number of ways.)
One can hardly expect otherwise. They have failed. Even though, compared to your typical Chelish project and personnel, they're doing a lot better than average - in some ways if not others - Abrogail Thrune II does not have a reputation for taking failure well, regardless of the fight put up until then.
Abrogail Thrune II does in fact take failure well, when somebody has far outperformed their rivals before failing. The trouble is, she cannot possibly allow this to become known; because everybody thinks of themselves as better than their rivals, and will massively slack off unless they think their superiors will tolerate only actual success.
Carissa Sevar has, by now, reached the level of her tyranny where - having put up a good fight that perhaps no other in Cheliax could have waged as well, having gained Project Lawful three full months, in which time Cheliax has gained several halfway ilani and a spellsilver refinement pipeline that Osirion cannot instantly duplicate, for Keltham does not know every refinement that the Shadow Project has developed and contributed to the non-Project workers - sweet Carissa would usually not be punished that severely for her failures.
Usually.
But Carissa Sevar feels herself greatly deserving of punishment, now; though she experiences that as the obsessive fear of punishment, with no thoughts of trying to evade it as most mortals would. It would be failing Asmodeus's faith if Sevar were left bereft. It is Hell's kiss that Sevar needs; and if Asmodeus is looking now in this direction, He probably approves at least that much of Sevar's thinking. Or perhaps even then He cares not; but His mortal slaves, among themselves, must make of His service a faith that mortals can hold.
What to do with the rest of Project Lawful is another story. Their advancement in Asmodeanism is plainly falling behind their advancement in ilanism.
Abrogail Thrune II: "My first order of business will be to review your failure," Abrogail announces. "You may go about your own business until that's done, under Maillol's direction. The Project must now scale and expand beyond what it could have done while Keltham was still kept deceived, and your first orders of business will be to train wizards and apprentices in 'chemistry', and to prepare to train other Chelish ilani."
"Carissa. Aspexia. With me."
Everyone here looks terrified. It's not an excessive amount of fear for her purposes, so Abrogail Thrune will not be doing anything about it just yet. They're fools to think that Project Lawful would now be ground into rubble when Cheliax needs it most, and disobedient fools for still thinking it after Abrogail Thrune told them what to believe. But it is good for Asmodeans to feel a little terror, now and then; whether their worst fears come to pass, or just their lesser fears.
For a fact, Abrogail Thrune II has not decided yet what to do with them, and some terror under those circumstances can hardly be unjustified.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa would really, really like it if they could skip all of the discussion and failure analysis and retrospectives and get to the torture, at this point. This is not to say that she's not scared - she is very scared - or that she thinks reality won't be as bad as her imagination - it can very easily be much worse - but -
- once the torture starts then the scope for action is over. She's not so weak she won't be trying to act, while she still can, but she is weak enough to rather wish the need was done.
She follows her Queen.
Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm sorry, dear Carissa, but Maillol will need some direction in your pending extended absence, and your subordinates should be reassured to the extent they can be justly reassured."
"To that end, there are yet decisions to be made, for the interim until your return, while you are still coherent. And my decision of your punishment does rather depend on what you've done wrong." More importantly, Carissa must needs have fixed in her mind what she is repenting for.
"Aspexia, a Restoration and Remove Fear for our junior?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: She rather dislikes it, in truth; it feels un-Asmodean to her. But Aspexia is not without her own sense of pragmatics, and does as requested.
Carissa Sevar: She hadn't realized she was exhausted, but the Restoration helps a lot. She had realized she was scared, but if you can't function through that what are you even doing serving Asmodeus. The Remove Fear helps too, nonetheless.
Fine. Not the time to stop trying, yet. "Your Majesty. I would estimate we have perhaps one month's advantage over Osirion, if Keltham settles down and starts teaching there, plus whatever advantages we derive from having many, many more wizards. It seems to me that Maillol and Subirachs should be directed to focus on training as many people as possible in the spellsilver refining process, which a nation with more wizards can exploit farther. The other wing of the project - producing ilani thinkers, for whatever Hell values in us and for the advantages we may have in understanding spy reports from Osirion and identifying new applications of chemistry - merits a more substantial rethinking, since I've yet to invent a version of ilanism that isn't in substantial tension with Asmodeanism."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I noticed," Aspexia Rugatonn says very very dryly.
Abrogail Thrune II: "I as well. Not so much in you, dear, or of course Pilar. But the other Project members who spoke before Keltham seem to not only be compelled by fear more than faith, but to openly know this to themselves. Meritxell - seems a potential exception, but an unrealized one. If we do not demand her returnability then I am not convinced we shall receive her back from Osirion."
"I am inclined to say that at this point we have little choice but to simply have Asmodia, Pilar, Meritxell, and upon your return yourself, begin teaching ilanism to as many young intelligent highly-Asmodean wizards as can be found, in hopes of finding some who can become true ilani even if the others end up ruined. I am open to better ideas."
Carissa Sevar: "If Hell is permitted this, I want us to try teaching ilanism to devils. I also want to try teaching it to stupider people - I know ilanism was designed for an intelligent population, and might just fail entirely on people of average Intelligence and Wisdom, but I have a theory that wielding the techniques and developing them are different skills, and in dath ilan, the techniques are developed by Keepers and merely wielded by people like Keltham, and there's something Asmodean in that, something we can best imitate by having people who aren't our best and brightest try to learn. I also have several lines of research I thought of earlier today, for training comprehension of how to be commanded - I want to try following my own instructions and intent while I am much stupider, when I'm working on the ilanism for average people. I also think that there might be substantial promise in teaching ilanism by use of Suggestion, which would be another asymmetrical advantage."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Good. More like the Carissa I know. Though - I think we may need to wait on teaching devils, for your own return to the Project. They have too much pride to be instructed by the likes of Asmodia."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Our power that Keltham knows not will not be Suggestion, or not only that. It will be pain. Dath ilan did not use it on the likes of Keltham - I have small doubt it is how their Keepers are produced - and he arrived knowing nothing of that art, nor may he use the little we have taught him without becoming us."
"If there is any hope for this contest that is now begun - of Cheliax, or perhaps all Lawful Evil countries, against all the rest of Golarion - it will be that Keltham is teaching his students to imitate weak, soft, ordinary dath ilani teenagers. We must shape Keepers."
"I stayed silent, on that topic, while there was no higher priority than keeping Keltham contained a little longer. But we are now past that."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't know how to hurt people so they become more ilani rather than less so. If we did we've have nearly won already."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Then start trying things, Sevar, until you learn! We can send you plenty of mortals who are disposable, if you hesitate to practice your hand on Pilar! I will have all of Cheliax scoured for natural slaves and masochists who are also young wizards, male and female alike, if we think that's what creates the potential to learn without shattering! There are twenty million mortals in Cheliax, and if you kill one in a thousand of those simply to learn how to do this it will be a good trade!"
Carissa Sevar: " - yes, Most High." She isn't, actually, sure she's strong enough to do that, but - she'll just have to learn.
Abrogail Thrune II: "- do not kill the twenty thousand most promising young people in Cheliax. That would not be good for the country."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "We are soon to have a sufficiency of +4 intelligence headbands. We can make them promising, and if they survive unshattered they can stay promising."
Carissa Sevar: "Did either of you at some point struggle with, and then overcome, squeamishness about killing twenty thousand people, such that you have advice, or is that a flaw not generally common among powerful Asmodeans so that I'm going to have to figure it out entirely myself."
She's not a particularly squeamish person but if you take her baseline level of reluctance to kill people and MULTIPLY IT BY TWENTY THOUSAND you do, actually, get something large. Ten she could do without even losing sleep about it!
Aspexia Rugatonn: "No."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Not at all."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "It's not particularly common among clerics of Asmodeus."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Usually by the time anybody makes it to the level of the Chelish system where I have any direct dealings with them, they've gruesomely killed enough people they knew personally that they have no squeamishness left about gruesomely killing strangers, even if they started with any."
"You did jump the promotion ladder a good deal in order to end up in charge of Project Lawful, dear."
Carissa Sevar: "I know I'm lacking a bunch of the skills I need to achieve my goals, and this is one of them, and I'm eager to fix it, but - I don't see how gruesomely killing a couple dozen people would help at all! I wouldn't mind doing that! Is the idea that most peoples' reluctance to murder is sufficiently - made of slime and muddled thinking - that it's much easier than I'm imagining to squish it down to not just 'very negligible' but actually literally zero? I can kill my family, if that is likely to work, but there's only, like, ten of them, and killing ten people isn't aversive!"
Abrogail Thrune II: "Do you have any idea what she's thinking, Aspexia? Or rather, why she's thinking it?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "No, possibly it's - some dath ilani stumbling-trap? That kicks in when you're about to kill a large number of people? I don't see how that's Lawful, though. If you're willing to kill ten people I don't see why you wouldn't be willing to kill ten thousand, it's just a matter of killing ten people repeatedly."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Now I'm wondering what happens if we ask Asmodia this question."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I think she dislikes killing ten thousand people and also dislikes killing ten people, which seems to me to be a more Lawful though less Evil stance, and will do either of those if sufficiently threatened."
Abrogail Thrune II: "No, I mean, does it trigger some strange dath ilani trap inside her?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "How could we tell, if she disliked killing small numbers of people as well as large numbers?"
Carissa Sevar: "If she's doing the thing I'm doing, you'd have to pay her precisely a thousand times as much, to be happy about killing ten thousand people as ten people, or - no, that's wrong, because what do you even do with that much money - you'd need a threat that's a thousand times worse. If she's equally averse to killing ten people and ten thousand, or if she's twice as averse to killing ten thousand, then that's not the - possible dath ilani mental trap I'm experiencing."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "That makes more sense. The answer then is simple: When you require no payment to slay ten mortals to Asmodeus's benefit, but would rather pay a copper yourself to do it, you'll pay then ten gold to slay ten thousand."
Carissa Sevar: " - right. Well, in that case, then, I will just work on getting to the point where I'd gladly pay a copper to slay ten mortals to Asmodeus's benefit. I'd like to say of course I'd do that but I think actually I wouldn't be glad, I'd just be bothered a very unimportant amount, and as the numbers get bigger the failure gets magnified."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Let us turn then to Project Lawful. I begin by noting that they performed well above the competence bar I would expect from others of their previous rank, training, experience, talent -"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "- openly announced that they thought Cheliax was a horrible place and they wanted to defect, humiliating us in front of Osirion -"
Abrogail Thrune II: "- confusing Osirion -"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "It seemed to me that Osirion had a rather good idea of what was going on, in fact!"
Abrogail Thrune II: "That is a separate issue about which I shall be having a pointed discussion with some senior intelligence officers. It was not Carissa's assigned responsibility. I am raising the question of whether to continue Sevar's policies on punishment pending her return."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I'm frankly against it. Asmodia's insolence is reaching a point that I must consider intolerable, especially if Sevar is now having her own thoughts on corrigibility. She all but openly - no, she did openly declare that she wanted to leave Cheliax and defect to Good and was awaiting Keltham's rescue. In front of me. Without looking particularly scared."
Abrogail Thrune II: "They were, and are, outperforming. We continue to have any priorities besides Hell's pride."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "They're a pack of trope-sent, trope-empowered special cases from whose outperformance we can conclude little or nothing. It's possible we'd be better off if we'd been disciplining them all properly this entire time."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Tonia is not outperforming Gregoria, and neither of those seem trope-empowered."
"...admittedly that sounds stupid in light of what Keltham has now told us about adequate sample sizes, but still. One sample is better than zero, he also said."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Tonia has been barely punished because hardly anyone on Project Lawful ever gets punished for anything, whether on the Chelish regimen or the Taldorian one!"
Abrogail Thrune II: "Tonia's thought transcripts show that she was more frightened -"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Has the thought occurred to you, Abrogail, that Asmodeus's way involves inducing ACTUAL PAIN and not just FEAR!"
Abrogail Thrune II: "I suspect I understand the topic better than you do, frankly." It's going to cost Abrogail a lot of personal time, indeed, because Sevar needs to be actually punished and not just afraid, and nobody else in Cheliax including Aspexia can use torture to do anything complicated, which leads Abrogail to have a rather poor opinion of their grasp of mechanics. "I'll be blunt, Aspexia, Cheliax needs the Project and short of my personally excruciating every one of them I have zero confidence in the ability of any of your priests to preserve their usefulness by anything more than sheer luck."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "This is not a sustainable state of affairs, Abrogail!"
Abrogail Thrune II: "Then somebody in Cheliax who is not ME needs to learn how to do things with pain other than scare people with it!"
Aspexia Rugatonn: "What's wrong with everyone on Project Lawful being terrified the same as everybody else in Cheliax?"
Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm not terrified, you're not terrified, and our respective overpriced headbands are very far from the only reason why the two of us are the best thinkers Asmodeus has at His command! I agree, dath ilan almost certainly uses pain to train its Keepers! You know what I bet they don't use? Fear! When have you ever seen a devil powerful enough to bear a name show themselves afraid of anything?"
Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia passes a weary hand across her brow. "If we are this much in disagreement among ourselves, the issue will wait. Temporarily. On Sevar's return and further debate."
"There will be that debate and there must be changes made. Outperformance or no, the Project is visibly not on course to successfully produce Keepers of Hell. It is on course to produce more Peranzas who will need to be kept under tight Security watch every day of their lives lest they flee."
Carissa Sevar: It seems to Carissa, not that she's going to interrupt a conversation between the Queen and the Most High, that Carissa more or less licensed everyone to be heretics as long as they were good at their jobs, which was the correct tradeoff with Keltham around, but that means there's a lot of low hanging fruit just in teaching ilanism without licensing everyone to be heretics and having them visibly led by heretics.
She does want to handle that personally, though; it seems like Maillol or Subirachs might not quite understand where she intends to draw the line.
Abrogail Thrune II: "If Carissa thinks she knows what to do, let us give her a chance to try it."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I am pessimistic and would see other experiments tried in parallel. We have delayed far too long already on addressing this matter, and must now play catch-up more vigorously than hoping Sevar's next idea works."
"But for Sevar's current slaves to be left to her own attempts, at first - yes, fine, the hierarchy of Hell is layered for a reason. But be it clear, Sevar, that if others do better than yourself, in this, you will no longer be the leader of Hell's would-be ilani."
Carissa Sevar: "Understood." She genuinely doesn't think anyone can do better than her at this, but perhaps that's arrogance; if it is, then better to learn that as quickly as possible.
Abrogail Thrune II: "The remainder of the Project's less-than-perfect performance is a matter for the Crown, I think, not the Church."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Good. I have many other matters to attend to this day."
Aspexia turns and stalks off, towards the edge of the Forbiddance where she can leave. She is not, in fact, in a particularly good mood right now; matters have not gone well for Asmodeus, and she is not content with only Sevar paying a price in pain for it. Possibly she needs to submit her own self to Gorthoklek to properly regret her own inadequacies - she should not have tried to pose as Nefreti's true annoying self, Keltham would not have known any better and the pretense of omniscience was something he could all too easily test - but that is best left for when the day is otherwise done.
Abrogail Thrune II: "Go, Sevar, and tell your subordinates that they are not to be smashed to rubble. Give them due warning, if before you asked something else from them, that the heresies of Project Lawful will be less licensed by you after your return. Instruct Maillol in how to manage matters in your absence, such as he may require. Then you will attend upon me in Egorian, to discuss in more detail how you and yours fell short of perfection."
Carissa Sevar: " - yes, your Majesty."
Iarwain: Day 90 / Osirion
lintamande: They land in the heat of a summer day in Sothis, right outside the gleaming Black Dome that is the shell of the giant beetle Ulunat. It towers over the city; it'd be tall even in dath ilan.
And suddenly there's the sensation of - being plunged into ice cold water, or flung through the air at terrifying speed, or being scoured by a blast of energy -
- and the accompanying sensation of something darting around the scouring forces, tugging, pulling, cushioning -
Iomedae: And then Keltham is at the Worldwound, at the place where he first arrived in Golarion, though it isn't cold, and a Chelish woman in shiny metal clothing is standing across from him.
"Abadar paid me to convey a message to you as soon as you left the interdicted zone," She says.
Keltham: The flash of hope/despair about being out, into the next layer of reality, fades as soon as she starts talking.
"According to you, is the whole thing with the Osirians part of another elaborate lie or not?"
Iomedae: "- not. You departed the interdicted zone about half a round ago for Osirion, accompanied by forces of the Osirian Risen Guard and a dozen adventurers they hired on short notice. They hope to protect you while you reorient, recover, and decide what you want to do in Golarion. Abadar, who chose you as His cleric, can convey other instructions to them if you wish."
Keltham: She feels like - the same sort of thing - that was his god talking to him. That makes everything worse, so that Keltham has to exert an additional effort and dissociate further from his emotions to continue emergency functioning. She's now tied the credibility of gods to the credibility of Osirion, and if that breaks when he exits this layer of reality, Keltham isn't sure where to go from there.
Well. She doesn't have to be an allied god. But if this style of communication can be initiated by non-allied deities, why suppose he ever talked to his own god of Coordination at all?
"And the supposed message from Abadar?"
Iomedae: "Abadar can speak directly to mortals, and desires to speak directly to you, but doing so causes severe, debilitating headaches, lasting hours, with the length depending on the length of the conversation. Long enough conversations would also cause brain damage but he stops them short of that point with some safety margin. You can request to speak directly to Him rather than to me if you prefer it; Osirion will protect you while you recuperate.
I can communicate with mortals at less cost to them, because I was once a mortal, and have access to an aspect of myself that comprehends the world as mortals do.
You may now know this, but Abadar desired it communicated unambiguously anyway: Asmodeus does not trade fairly, Asmodeus's Church does not trade fairly. They abide by the word of their contracts, but seek to write them to the disadvantage of those they contract with. Hell is a place that most mortals strongly prefer to avoid, and a place where there are not fair or free transactions, and He predicts that aiding Hell is not something you'd do fully informed. Almost any other country on Golarion is a better place than Cheliax for you to teach and work, except Nidal and lower-confidence Irrisen, Wanshou, Bachuan or the Underdark.
When you first arrived in Golarion and thought of Abadar in a way mortals rarely understand to think of Him, Abadar paid Asmodeus to have his mortals not torture you, not arrange for you to be never able to speak with Abadar's Church in Golarion, and not impede you in departing if you so chose. If in your assessment Abadar in so doing left you worse off, He wants to pay you the difference; He also wants to pay you to teach His church. "
Keltham: So Asmodeus was never, from the beginning - on this layer of reality - never intended to deal fairly, was paid not to - break him -
"Doesn't sound like I was worse off, no. Sounds like I owe Abadar, if anything is true - do you have a complete and consistent account of why I arrived in Golarion and why next to Carissa and why Snack Service says the decision theory of everything is complicated -"
Iomedae: "No. Not this facet of my attention, at least, though we're operating in an environment where I wouldn't be very surprised to learn I figured it out and had to avoid taking any actions that were a product of having determined it, and so chose not to have most of Me know it.
I have guesses, and can share the information I have in case it permits you to make the inferences that'd figure it out. Abadar paid for this conversation to be confidential, so if you do figure it out, and don't prefer that I allow myself to know that, I won't. However, Osirion knows what I know, here, and you can also ask them, which would be less expensive for Abadar."
Keltham: Aaaaggghhh. Keltham is increasingly of the opinion that the existence of any decision theory more complicated than 'just do things' is a tragic flaw of mathematics.
And time here is expensive, great, somebody should've told him that right away and maybe attached a quantitative estimate of gp/second.
"You Erecura?" As formerly-mortal goddesses go, the Lawful Neutral one seems a more obvious guess than Iomedae or Milani.
Iomedae: "Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of ending the Evil afterlives."
Keltham: "Right. Of course that's what Lawful Good does around here -" He's wasting timemoney. "Is there an existing plan on that which I should be fitting into instead of doing my own thing there, and if so, what's the existing timeframe on finishing up."
Iomedae: "Plans leveraging your world's capabilities are likely to work out much faster than the plans from before you arrived. If you need an army, powerful spellcasters, rare magic items, a spy network, ask my Church. Be aware that Cayden Cailean deliberately acted to weaken my spy network in Cheliax, under some possible explanations of why He did that you shouldn't take Me up on that, consider checking with Him first. I consider it unlikely He's been compromised and is no longer pursuing the destruction of the Evil afterlives."
Keltham: "Hah. Funny. I don't think I realized I'd become - actually homesick - until I ran into local Civilization again."
"I don't know if whatever overcomplicated decision theory will allow me to take you up on it. But thanks for the offer either way, Iomedae. Real or unreal, the thing you appear to be is all right."
Iomedae: There's the sensation of being embraced and held tightly, by someone who is not wearing a suit made out of metal; the scene fades, and the sensation fades more slowly than that, and then he's sitting on a wooden bench inside an antechamber of some kind, surrounded by worried uniformed Osirians.
Keltham: He's got a headache but a mild one, like he'd spent too long in the sun while not drinking enough water; and he can tell, somehow, that it could have been a lot worse. "According to your view of reality, is it completely normal and unsurprising that Abadar would pay Iomedae to -"
Abadar: Have another cleric circle, Keltham.
(It feels like a sudden rainstorm that clings to your skin and then soaks into it, rather than dripping off it; and with it a sense of divine presence, like when he prays for his spells, but more attentive, more specific, almost possible to parse as emotional: pride, and approval, and worry, and protectiveness.)
Keltham: ...Keltham will now wait an additional couple of rounds to see if he has any more queued messages, like from Irori or Nocticula or something.
lintamande: No other gods or demigods or demon lords immediately interfere with him.
Keltham: Some internal-introspective sensations, that Keltham has only started feeling over the last three months, have now grown stronger. He can guess that was another cleric circle he just got.
The timing of that event, just as Keltham asked his question, would be more reassuring if he could be sure that none of the players in this game such as Nethys were not playing clever games with exactly timing things.
"Sorry, just got a vision purportedly from Iomedae paid for by Abadar." Keltham is not going to say out loud immediately that he now has another cleric circle; he has started to acquire some of that security mindset which advises to just not reveal capabilities information unless there is a reason and a good one. "Is that something that would be a totally plausible and probable thing to have happen according to your own understanding of reality?"
Merenre: "Yes, Abadar told us He planned to arrange that months ago, though I imagine the contents were renegotiated more recently," says another robed man, who wasn't present on the expedition into Cheliax. "The formerly human gods can communicate with mortals more easily and more safely, and Abadar considered it likely that Iomedae would end up considering the message worthwhile by Her own values, and so charging Him less for it."
Keltham: "I - am not entirely sure what I need, right now - and maybe presume too much in thinking that my credit is good, here - but if you don't have other plans, other ideas - I think I need - something like - a library with uncensored reference books, and a bedroom, and realistically food of any kind, and privacy in which to feel emotions, and I haven't thought this part through very clearly but if this place has a spare headband of Splendour just lying around then I may do better by borrowing it for a time."
"Unless you think that Cheliax is likely to attack immediately in which case I should - just get a Lesser Restoration, and probably some other cognitive boosts, and then hurry and decide whether to -"
He can't finish the sentence.
Merenre: "Our prediction markets are down to about a 3% chance of an attack today. We can get you all of those things, and if we're wrong, interrupt you later."
Keltham: "- what else have you already got besides prediction markets, was the entire thing with Cheliax needing my knowledge to refine spellsilver a lie -"
Merenre: " - we have no idea how to emulate what you had Cheliax doing with spellsilver, and that's despite having quite good intel on the Project - anything you put into a contract, or on a market. We have policy prediction markets, after someone wrote a paper proposing them a decade ago, and they're small, and haven't yet proven they work better than my personally guessing, though they should work better and they're more legible to Abadar so we do them anyway. We're 90% sure that the value of your knowledge to us is in excess of ten million gp."
Keltham: Keltham considers the prospect of reteaching everything himself, winces, almost immediately sees a possible alternative. "Allegedly one of my ex-employees now resides in the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, which I'd guess to have something to do with Nethys and Nefreti Clepati, do you know where -"
Merenre: " - it's here in Sothis. We'll send an inquiry, though Nefreti may have her own plans, she usually does."
Keltham: "Right, well, I have no idea how traumatized she is, but considering that she just got more rescued and less told her world is a lie, it's possible she'd substantially underbid me on starting to tell you things you ought to know immediately to start organizing your own acid-making and spellsilver refining, and search for candidates who can be trained in further researching it. If that's something you want to start today, rather than waiting for me to recover, and it'd take some of the time pressure off me too."
"Not saying her name because privacy principles, ask Nefreti to pass your message to her."
Merenre: "Understood. Your room is ready. The reference library and food are there already; the headband of Splendour should be there shortly. Do you want the spell, in the meantime?"
Keltham: "No. A headband I can freely put on and take off again seems wiser."
That they selected his books, by the implicit sound of it, and had months apparently to do that - is not great - but, still, it's a place to start.
"Let's go, then."
Iarwain: Day 90 / Egorian
Carissa Sevar: For some reason, the specific stupid thread Carissa's brain has decided to race off on the instant she arrives in Egorian is wondering what the Palace Security think of her. Presumably they mostly don't; her project was secret, after all. It's Pilar (unintentionally) and Paxti (intentionally) who ended up the faces of Project Lawful.
"Her Majesty requested me," she says. "Carissa Sevar."
The Remove Fear has worn off.
Security: This produces an immediate (barely visible) scramble of fear and respect and people standing further upright in the presence of CARISSA SEVAR. Last month's set of (now somewhat outdated) rumors hold her to be the secretly declared heir to Abrogail Thrune's throne.
"You shall be escorted at once," says the senior Security, and with a wave of his hand designates his least liked, most disposable subordinate to do it. The fool was babbling last week about Carissa Sevar being sometimes allowed to wear the Crown of Infernal Majesty; perhaps the idiot will bumble into asking her about that directly and he'll be rid of him.
Carissa Sevar: She doesn't ask what they heard. Clearly it was inaccurate.
Carissa Sevar: She will give herself the pin-Glibness to be cheerful and at ease, walking to wherever one gets sent to await the Queen, because it'd be horribly embarrassing if anyone reported, later, that she looked scared.
Cheliax: Good decision! People dignifiedly... basically run away from her... when they see her in the hallways. Anything that could visibly scare Carissa Sevar would have them fleeing outright through the halls, terrified that Cheliax and perhaps Hell itself stood on the verge of destruction.
Carissa Sevar: Well, they might. It's up to Keltham.
Security: Carissa is directed by further Palace personnel to what looks like a very ordinary secular torture chamber, such as you might find in a wizard academy, or in the castle of a non-devout noble, or in any large business concern of Cheliax; though one in which all the furnishings are of Palace quality. It has a comfortable place for the boss to sit and a less comfortable place for a subordinate to stand, as torture chambers used for managerial purposes often do. Plenty of bosses in Cheliax consider a torture chamber an appropriate place to have a chat with a subordinate in trouble, though it's usually more ambiguous than this about whether torture is in fact impending.
The Security who brought her there obviously doesn't think Sevar is meant to be the victim here; he flees as soon as he's dismissed.
Carissa Sevar: ......on some level she was definitely expecting to descend for subjective hours through the darkest void into a pit of flame that Abrogail keeps in the basement.
She's pretty sure she's not disappointed, because that would be insane.
Abrogail is definitely making a point, she's just not sure what that point is.
Maybe it's 'this isn't a sex thing'??
Maybe it's 'I'm obliged by Asmodeus's instructions to punish you exactly as much as you've earned?' But it's not like there's a standard punishment code for 'while wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty as a personal loan from the Queen, fail at a task of incredible importance to her and to Asmodeus which was literally your one job. Or, well, there kind of is, and it's 'execution'. Maybe that's the point Abrogail is trying to make?
At this point it flashes across Carissa's mind, and is then immediately obvious, that Abrogail is probably here already invisibly, reading Carissa's mind because she likes doing that. She resists an urge to flail her arms around trying to bump into the Queen. Why does she even have that urge. Why is being a mortal like this.
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail is in fact fucking busy. There's a lot to do as regards a possible war with Osirion.
Carissa can wait ten minutes in this very ordinary torture chamber, which is, hopefully, meant to convey the idea that Carissa will be paying fully for her sins in an ultimately stable and trustworthy environment.
Carissa Sevar: She'll spend them trying to figure out what the fuck Nefreti Clepati meant that if your plans are too complicated your pants end up across the continent. Across the continent in - Oppara? Mendev? Vigil? Does Vigil count as across the continent? Whose pants? Keltham's? But he's on another continent! Maybe the pants are a metaphor?
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune will in due time stride into the torture chamber, visibly, in an ordinary way, and seat herself.
Carissa Sevar: She's not taking that as much evidence Abrogail wasn't here earlier reading her mind.
She kneels.
Abrogail Thrune II: "I'd suggest you remove that expensive clothing and garb yourself in a penitent's smock."
"My time is valuable, so you can get started on explaining your own fault analysis while you do that."
Carissa Sevar: Nnnnnnnot a sex thing. Almost certainly not a sex thing. STOP THAT AND DO YOUR JOB.
She starts to change her clothes. Keeps looking at the floor, while she does.
"There were a number of day-of failures - would probably have been better to take a longer route around the slavemarkets entirely and just tell him straight-up that we were doing so, even though alter-Golarion has slave markets the sight moved Keltham the wrong way, would've been better for there to be a suspicious delay between Ione getting the book requests and sending the books over than for her to be in the bathroom, which is a weaker update towards Conspiracy but a stronger update towards a mindreading one, even though we actually didn't learn there was an emergency by mindreading him -
- but I actually don't think those are the interesting ones - I think if we'd played the day nearly perfectly we'd still likely have lost, and I think it was an operation complicated enough that there were going to be some day-of failures and the plan shouldn't have counted on them being none of them. I didn't allocate enough resources to inventing an immersive set of history, literature and theology for alter-Cheliax two months ago, as soon as we got out of day-to-day emergency mode and had any slack at all. I did a lot of things to a standard where it'd pass immediate inspection, but that was, obviously, something the Conspiracy could do from Keltham's perspective. It would've been worth the costs, though they would've been substantial, of hiring twenty more full-time writers and having an amount of content that was not obviously something the Conspiracy could do. An advantage of the initial Cheliax is basically Taldor plan over the complex alter-Cheliax we ended up going with is that we could've literally just showed him lots and lots of genuine verified Taldor history with some words changed. I knew that at the time, it was part of how I suggested it, but I underappreciated the cost when we started switching away from that. Going even farther back, we should've literally claimed to him he'd landed on the Taldane worldwound contingent and we were a Lawful Neutral country that had nothing to do with Cheliax, but I'd have had to think of that off no context in the first five minutes.
I had concluded tropes weren't real or weren't operative, after Keltham had some nice healthy romances with no elaborate backstories behind them, after he himself concluded that, after it became obvious he was nowhere near kinky enough for Pilar and all the reasoning from her being a 'romantic option' wasn't right. Tropes - are real and are operative, aren't they. If I'd noticed that I wouldn't've announced the yearlong pause plan aloud to anyone until Keltham was safely petrified."
Abrogail Thrune II: And Carissa's thoughts and feelings, as she speaks?
Carissa Sevar: Thoughts and feelings what are those she's a PROFESSIONAL she has been asked for a FAILURE ANALYSIS not for INTERNAL SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES.
She's terrified, and off-balance, and embarrassed, and really angry that any of those are emotions that brains will persist in producing when the only important thing is obeying Abrogail or technically Asmodeus. And she misses Keltham already. A lot. She wants him to give her a hug and say nice things to her and probably no one will ever do that again unless she makes them.
Abrogail Thrune II: "I, most obviously, failed in not giving the Project a minimum budget instead of a maximum budget, even in the midst of a war with Nidal. I should at the very latest have done that when Keltham perfected his method of acid synthesis and it became clear that his world's ideas had been made to work here. That perhaps might have encouraged you to think of ways to spend more money, before it was too late to spend it."
"A disadvantage of the plan to have Cheliax be literal Taldor is that he might have expected our country to possess a massive central capital with great walls, which would have required us to reject provisions of the Project Lawful contract breaking down revenues by geographic region, which Keltham might have found suspicious much earlier on. Similar difficulties apply to claiming ourselves to be the Lawful Neutral country of Taldor, though I suppose we could have also simply denied that any such things as contracts and oaths existed and declined to offer him anything of the sort. Again, that might have engendered suspicion."
"I think I would not, faced with a sudden Keltham myself, have told him that we were Evil, at all, or that our god was Asmodeus, or our afterlife Hell; that, I think, is the basic act of foolish honesty from which everything else spiraled. You had already showed him Tongues, he could have demanded a casting of that spell and then examined words' meanings in other languages, as he eventually did."
"If I'd already told him that our country was named Cheliax, I would have later confessed to him that a better place for him would be Taldor, a richer country on which we were with good terms, and arranged a Teleport to someplace claiming to be that. That could have been done after you had a little more context. It would then have been possible to send Keltham on tours or scry-tours of other countries with escorts claiming to be of Taldor, and he could have asked after Taldor's reputation and heard nothing of remark. Any questions about Cheliax would have been the exception rather than the rule."
"I could have thought of that, once the matter was reported to me. I could have thought of that again after the Zon-Kuthon godwar began and Keltham's real importance became clear. Told him that Cheliax lacked the power to properly defend him or support him, while the war with Nidal continued, and that we were arranging for Taldor to host him. I did not in fact think of it. In retrospect I should have done what Keltham called a 'pre-mortem', visualizing out in detail how the whole thing might fall down in time, asking myself at the end of that imagination what I could go back in time in do. Certainly, once Keltham explained the principle in so many words, I should have done that."
"I don't think I'd have done the fake Taldor transfer even if I'd thought of it. It would have presented different complications, not fewer. I'm not sure there was any way to satisfy Keltham once he started looking, and the path we chose seems well-chosen for extending the time before he did."
"Going on my rereading of all of Keltham's thought-transcripts, I think you are attributing too much power to tropes and too little power to ordinary causality. What set Keltham off seems to have been Cheliax's presentation about a massive nationwide push on spellsilver manufacturing, which made him realize that we were taking him seriously and that a set of sudden demands for verification would be something we'd have to meet. That should have been presented to him after he was statued, not before. Without foreseeing the particular disaster - as may not be done in a world of shattered prophecy - it signaled to Keltham that things had changed. It was a disruption of his status quo. And that is the general act that we should have avoided until after he'd been petrified and unpetrified. It wasn't your announcement of the plan to the Project that invoked tropes, it was our presentation of the fake plan to Keltham that changed the way he was looking at things."
"I failed to see that, too, and so did Asmodia, but you are the one person in Cheliax whose job it was to think of that."
Carissa Sevar: That hurts, but in the way where it's true, and correct, and she's glad she heard it and she wishes they could get to the torture instead of having to endure more of this and she's aware of exactly how weak and stupid that is. "I didn't think of it. I was busy with the logistics of the pause; he seemed at first to take it as reasonable of us, and as a boost to his pride, I saw no further cause for worry."
Abrogail Thrune II: She actually does feel angry, then. "That is a manager's-first-project sort of mistake, Sevar, that one thing seems to be going well and it consumes all your attention, and you've never had a project before, and never watched it FAIL before, and you don't understand in your guts and liver why you should go on being AFRAID OF FAILURE!"
There's fire, then, and an end to a smock's brief honor of being worn by Carissa Sevar.
Carissa Sevar: She wants Abrogail to fix her so she doesn't make mistakes anymore.
She is aware that this is literally impossible and that even devils make mistakes. She still wants it.
"I wasn't - scared enough -"
Abrogail Thrune II: If she's still TALKING and THINKING then she's NOT ON FIRE ENOUGH.
Abrogail Thrune II: ...Abrogail will in fact give Carissa Sevar a hug, during a pause in her punishment, and tell her that the Queen cannot, in fact, think of anybody else in Cheliax she could have assigned to this, that would in fact have done better. Carissa must still expiate the ways in which she fell short of perfection, and pay for those actual outcomes she obtained in what was her assigned task, for that is Hell's way; but these punishments are aimed to burn away her sins, not her pride. She is still above others, did better than others would have, and while her performance does not (yet) merit her to be a Duchess of Nidal, it suffices for her to be a para-Baroness at least. Higher ranks must needs wait until she has demonstrated her ability to produce stable Asmodean ilani, though, as is now her next one task.
Carissa Sevar: She knows. That no one could've done better. It's just, she's the only person who can do any of the things on her to do list, so she doesn't consider it even partially reassuring, that no one else could've done this.
Abrogail Thrune II: ...if she's still not REASSURED then the TORTURE WILL CONTINUE UNTIL HER MORALE IMPROVES.
(Why is Carissa like this.)
Iarwain: Day 90 / Osirion
dath ilan: People from one human-populated planet would rarely count as neurotypical on any other human-populated planet. To say this requires some measure on the human-populated planets across the multiverse; but if you pick a sensible such measure, the truth of the statement should be obvious enough on priors. Begin, say, from 50,000 years ago in dath ilan's history; most descendants of that primate species can interbreed with each other, if they're still extant and haven't deliberately shaped themselves otherwise. Thellim's world of "Earth" branched off no earlier than that - quite a bit later, in fact.
Keltham looks human. He can interbreed with humans. He is in fact human. But Keltham, in several ways, does not work quite like a Golarionite expects humans - or their related mortal species - to work.
Dath ilan, from the perspective of most human-populated worlds, has some unusual problems. Dath ilan has noticed those problems at all, but they don't know those problems are unusual or unusually severe. They have nothing else to compare themselves to. The dath ilani don't know that their failures are not part of the plan, any more than they think of themselves as being unusually good at coordination or decision theory, or their planet having above-average intelligence.
Every human-populated world that is alone in its neighborhood of the multiverse "dances like nobody is watching", you could say. If a planet is embarrassing itself in some regard, compared to the average descendant of that 50,000-year ancestral branching point, most such planets have absolutely no idea. If you ask the inhabitants to guess where they fall on the unseen spectrum of world-branches, they will have no more-sensible guess than 'Probably we're somewhere in the middle?'
dath ilan: Dath ilani know they have a problem where a lot of them aren't very happy a lot of the time. Their current approach is to have a societywide norm that unusually unhappy people shouldn't have kids, and, to a lesser extent, that unusually happy people should have a lot of kids.
But that takes time, so for now, the dath ilani carefully tweak their environment to make it possible for as many people as possible to be happy within the framework of their current genetics. This takes a lot of tweaking and a lot of work, and the dath ilani don't particularly realize there's anything odd about that; they don't have other human worlds to compare themselves to.
The dath ilani carefully raise their children in an environment free of spoilers about sex existing or how it works, so that young adults may have the pleasure of discovering that for themselves, among themselves - in an effort to preserve every bit of that rare stuff that is fun. They relegate pornography to the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods Store, because if a dath ilani reads a book about interesting people having incredibly interesting and exciting and fun and complicated sex, they will start to hold their own sexual encounters to the same standard, before they would naturally have become bored. Why wantonly burn up the time remaining until ordinary sex starts to seem repetitive? - so thinks dath ilan.
They're aware they have a problem, an aspect of reality that isn't as good as it could be. Of course they're aware. Dath ilani, by their nature, and by comparison to an average human world descending from their 50,000-year ancestor, are aware of dissatisfactions like that to an incredible degree. Their world is so optimized not least because any visible problems bug the crap out of them.
The dath ilani are aware they have a problem where it's hard for people to be happy, and they're applying all of the heritage-optimization pressure they can spare from more important matters to solving it. They don't know they have an unusual problem. The dath ilani don't know that their average species-cousin gets bored less quickly, or can much more easily become happy.
The dath ilani don't know that their cousins experience emotions, in general, more strongly than dath ilani do. The difference is more pronounced for positive emotions, but it's true about negative emotions too.
How'd it happen? Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history. Obviously the change didn't happen on purpose. Probably there's something like a balance, inside minds, some sheerly neural relative weight of cortex and thalamus; and the ancestors of Civilization selected on themselves for intelligence without paying proper attention and obeisance to that balance.
So dath ilan dances, less happily and excitedly than average, like nobody is watching.
dath ilan: Here's another not-so-little irony of Keltham's life, one that he'll probably never have a chance to learn now: When Keltham reached age 20, and Civilization first revealed to him the subsidy it would pay to him to have kids -
- as is kept obscured, until the socially-usual childbearing age of 20, for obvious-to-a-dath-ilani reasons; you don't go around telling eight-year-kids that secret prediction markets expect that Civilization won't want more of them, or not enough to pay for it. That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then if you tell the other kids that Civilization probably does want more of them, the silence is conspicuous for those who aren't being told. Judgments like that aren't final to begin with; sometimes, indeed rather often, kids turn out differently than expected. These are not confident prediction markets. It has not been found to be fun for kids, if you tell them that unconfident prediction. This too is information-that-harms-the-hearer, better not to know if you're not a Keeper. And the only way to be silent about it to some kids, is to be silent about it to all of them -
- Civilization would have told Keltham that they did, in fact, want more of him. He's shifted honorably-selfish away from altruistic, yes, and that's a little weird; he's noticeably less reflective than the average dath ilani, and that's bad; but he also experiences emotions more strongly, has stronger drive, than the average dath ilani, and that matters a lot. This organism is made happy more easily; he's happier than you'd expect for a self-conceived misfit. It would have outweighed his selfishness, in the eyes of what Civilization had voted on as its future targets; and the possibility would not have been lost on Civilization that maybe that higher-selfishness business was correlated with the happiness part.
It's definitely the sort of interesting mindstate where, if nothing else, you'd like him to have four kids out of sheer curiosity, to find out if the traits stay correlated in his children.
dath ilan: There are dath ilani who would have gone through everything Keltham just did, and felt nothing but a distant sadness about losing Carissa, after having barely managed to connect to her in the first place. They might have walked through the entire thing Exactly Correctly, not because they are that disciplined, but because their emotions were never strong enough to knock them off their Way, or even push on them too hard. On being told it was all a lie, they would not have dissociated from a single one of their emotions, even if it felt relatively awful, because it was so rare for them to feel anything even that strongly, in their lives.
They'd feel that same distant sadness, maybe, on turning 20 and learning that Civilization wanted no children from them. A lot of people like that need to not have kids, if you want to create space for people like Keltham to have four kids experimentally to see about fixing that problem.
Keltham: Keltham feels unusually strongly, for someone of dath ilan.
By the standards of Golarion-outside-of-Cheliax, not so much.
After having previously dissociated some of his emotions to run in emergency mode, Keltham isn't able to cry, even in private, until he puts on the Splendour headband that's found for him; knowing, as he does so, that he might well end up never wanting or able to take the headband off again.
Keltham: Afterwards, Keltham consumes the food brought for him, skims some books in the library. He tells them that tomorrow he'll probably want to talk to an expert on theology and afterlives, who can at least point him at which books to read.
He asks for a Sleep spell (technically Deep Slumber). He doesn't really feel like trying to go to sleep naturally.
Iarwain: Day 91 / Osirion
Keltham: Keltham awakes with his mind feeling numb, dissociated, distantly sad.
He looks at the Splendour headband, which he did manage to take off last night before asking for the Sleep spell.
Keltham decides - not to put it on, just yet, for a while.
There's a saying out of dath ilan, "You can face life without drugs, but there's often no point in trying." In context, it doesn't have exactly the import that the bare words sound like, because it's an instance of a proverb-template about how "You can X without Y, but there's often no point in trying." That proverb-template in turn is intimately paired by rhyme and prosody to a successor proverb: you probably should try at all, like once or twice, just be willing to give up if it turns out there's no point?
Keltham is going to try not to get addicted to Splendour immediately and in the middle of a major life crisis.
He prays. He asks for two Comprehend Languages in case he needs them for reading books in other languages. He asks for two truthspells. He keeps his Owl's Wisdom. He leaves the rest of his list blank. If his god is back in touch with him, his god should be able to fill the list as his god sees fit.
Abadar: Commune, fucking finally.
Keltham: Some new and unfamiliar spells that Keltham will see about identifying, in substantially increased total quantity. No Sanctuary, no Vision of Hell, no Protection, no Enchantment Foil, no Spell Immunity, no Summon Monster III. Cool.
He - sort of wants to eat breakfast around people - and at the same time doesn't know anybody or trust anybody and the only person, now, that he could even arguably eat breakfast with, is, like Ione Sala, maybe possibly Asmodia if she could be rescued.
Frankly, what he wants is to eat breakfast with Iomedae.
Keltham leaves his bedroom to find out what's up around here.
He doesn't forget to bring with the pin of glibness.
lintamande: The palace of the Pharaoh of Osirion is not less luxurious than the Palace at Egorian of Cheliax's Infernal Majesty. It is stylistically pretty distinct.
lintamande: Osirion has not made a lot of changes to impress Keltham - they're not making errors about the organization of their society on purpose, and if they are making errors, they want him to know about them to help them correct them! But they have ensured that all of the concubines are dressed the same as the male palace staff.
They're not planning to hide that that wasn't how it worked yesterday, just, maybe it'll help get off on the right foot.
The Palace is mostly full of open, half-overlapping courtyards and balconies. The sky up above is the eerie, magically-lit Dome interior, not the sky.