lintamande: Abadar has been copying Osirion all contracts and all prediction markets related to Project Lawful. Most of the time these didn't have intellectual property concerns, but there were a couple of prediction markets on which of several spellsilver approaches would pan out fastest. Osirion has no qualms about espionage against Cheliax because Cheliax would do it to them but they don't want to have stolen anything from Keltham, and are happy to pay him whatever seems fair. They were not able to make spellsilver cheaply off just this information by itself anyway; they didn't have enough detail on the Prestidigitation technique.
Keltham: Not urgent, then. It wraps into whatever else Ione Sala can give them.
Who else has bid on his time? Keltham is too tired to read and doesn't want to be alone with his thoughts.
lintamande: New request since this morning: a different Prince has bid six thousand gold to be taught Baseline immediately.
Keltham: ...by casting Share Language (Baseline) from scroll outside of the Dome? 6000gp is enough play money to still get Keltham's attention, he could buy some useful things with that and own them, but not if this is a bid on literally being taught the whole language over the course of months.
lintamande: Oh, he thinks it'll take him about three days. Maybe two.
Keltham: ...Keltham's not seeing it. But three days is a lot of Keltham's time even at the 6000gp level.
What's this Fe'Anar guy's bid on Keltham spending an hour sketching the technical basics of Baseline, and then Keltham can cast Share Language (from a scroll to be provided him) (outside the Dome because otherwise Keltham can't cast that high), up to 6 times over the next few days, on somebody else who can teach Fe'Anar all the particular words etcetera?
Also Keltham has not had time to learn any 'etiquette', and might need some sort of legal release form or whatever saying he's allowed to not know it.
lintamande: - 1000gp for the diminished version. Keltham can get an etiquette waiver.
Keltham: Not as attractive, obviously, but it requires less brainpower than a lot of things, so sure.
Prince Fe-Anar: "The same offer goes for any other languages spoken on your planet of origin, obviously, and for dialects, if you know any, and I'll also pay for literature or poetry, if you remember any, or brought any with you, or think you can coax Abadar to give it to you out of the Vault on the grounds it's just returning something you already had. Why is it called Baseline?"
Keltham: "It's the language everybody can be assumed to speak, as a baseline on which to build other ideas and concepts. For example, all the phonemes are a minimum distance away from each other that guarantees people with slightly less acute hearing can understand it when spoken under slightly adverse conditions. In-between phonemes that are possible to pronounce, but potentially difficult to hear correctly, are then reserved for constructing 'conlangs', constructed languages, many of which use 'Baseline' as a baseline but add new short words using the expanded phoneme set. The only one of those I know is 'Default-Conlang' which has a lot of subtle in-between syllables, so that children will hopefully grow up to be able to distinguish 'conlangs'; you can teach your child a different conlang but it ought to be conlang-phoneme-complete."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Huh, is the idea that it's free Law if you've got everyone teaching their child languages with phoneme-differentiation in mind? That's brilliant, now I'm annoyed my children are all grown, maybe I'll do it to the grandchildren. How did you get the language to that state, I assume it didn't start that way. Did you do a bunch of deliberate consonant shifts?"
Keltham: "No Law-Chaos judgement built into the universe, no magic, no afterlives just the equivalent of turning people into statues until we can heal them later, people just do it so their kids can learn conlangs when they grow up. I assume our language got synthesized de novo, but for unknown reasons Civilization sealed off all its history, so I don't know the story of that. It's held in fictionalized standard fanon history that there was a huge fight between all the conlang fanatics in the world over how to design it. But compared to Taldane the difference is very stark, it's very obvious that Baseline was designed and Taldane just happened."
"For example, grammatical Baseline - not all conlangs - always has exactly one legitimate parsing. There's no homonyms, no cases of two meanings with the same sound. If you stick to a subset used for emergencies and basic social interactions, there's no two sentences that sound the same even if you run all the phonemes together and eliminate spaces. The most common words are short and long words are used more rarely. All digits are single syllables that sound completely unlike each other and are written using very clearly distinguishable strokes. That sort of thing."
"Taldane would reduce most of our people who care about language properties to frothing incoherent horror and madness."
Prince Fe-Anar: " - no, they'd love it, if your world only has constructed languages. It'd be like a palace-raised child seeing their first tree. Language as a carefully optimized spellform is beautiful; language as a thing that grows anywhere, among everyone, men and orcs and demons and angels and deep sea creatures, is also beautiful. In Taldane, scientific words tend to have sibilants, because we borrow them from Nex, which like most of the fringes of the Keleshite Empire speak Kelish inflected with their own native tongues. Our shortest words are for things that have been around for a very, very long time. Pig. Bread. Cow. King. Tree. Sky. There's a whole history written there, what things people needed words for first. 'potatoes' are a long word in Taldane, and in Osirian, because they're a new food, introduced from Arcadia about a hundred twenty years ago. In Narragansett, spoken in Arcadia, it's 'nuna', because it's a staple.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't optimize a language. You should, and it's beautiful, and I want you to teach me it immediately. But your people who care about language properties wouldn't be horrified, to see a thing growing in the wild they've only ever built in a lab."
Keltham: "We've got lab-grown versions of those too. The fictional nonsynthetic language used by a common alien species in our stories has an imaginary history extending over 60,000 years that was built by thousands of conlang designers working in parallel to extrapolate a reasonable history, and then turned into a real language when some children were raised to speak that as well as Baseline. I don't speak very much of it but I can say 'Yo let's equalizeassetprices', we come with intent to peacefully trade everything worth trading, or 'Take us to your Keepers', bring us to your most Lawful people who can bargain with true oaths. Those aliens were expensive to create, but so many authors use them that the license is now practically free."
"But their language doesn't have homonyms because that's just crazy, like, nobody thought aliens would put up with that."
Prince Fe-Anar: " - yes, that seems like exactly the kind of mistake that clever people trying to invent a language that evolved without seeing any languages that evolved would make, obvious from our side but not from theirs. Sitting in the palace trying to extrapolate trees won't get you anything even remotely resembling a tree, though I'm sure it gets you something fascinating in its own right, and I'll pay you for that too.
You might think with thousands of people someone would notice that alien language ought to be crazy and if it doesn't have two dozen features that seem crazy you did it wrong, but it's so easy, when you've grown up with the world all around you, to underestimate how much creativity would be required to invent it; I'm sure they were doing their best, and I don't expect I could've done it well either. Well, today I easily could, but not if I'd grown up in your world.
I actually wonder what share of the obvious errors are a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating history, versus a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating linguistics specifically. How long has it been since your rulers banned your history, did they permit notes on the relative frequency of wars and migration and epidemics and transitions in staple crops and durations of rule or did they ban that as well?"
Keltham: "Screened off the entire thing, nobody except a handful of people at one pole of the world have any idea now what was happening some unknown number of decades ago. All the old cities were put into long-term storage. Nobody can look at any old books."
"I expect more people than a handful know why we had to do that, but I don't. We're told that a false analogy is getting a pessimized message from aliens with unshattered prophecy, that was allowed to spread in an untracked way, resulting in everything needing to be causally screened off, but that this is not what actually happened."
"Anyways, you want Baseline's type system or what?"
Prince Fe-Anar: " - wow, that must've involved killing more people than Aroden's death managed. I disapprove, obviously, but on some level I'm impressed your rulers had the capabilities to carry out a crime on that scale. Yes, I do want Baseline's type system."
Keltham: "I'd be surprised if the number of casualties was greater than like a dozen people who fell off a ladder while mothballing a city, but I had this conversation in Cheliax and don't want to repeat it here sooo..."
Baseline! All of the rules are known to Keltham explicitly! They have zero exceptions! No word is both a noun and a verb! You can infer the syntax tree in a single forwards pass! Words agglomerate using explicit agglomeration-markers! Anything beyond two levels of recursion gets handled by explicit matched parentheses! If you can learn an actual human language in three days you can probably learn the basics of this in an hour.
The writing system is designed to be displayed using a small set of LED lines, or alternatively to be writable in quick handscript, or alternatively to be readable in fine calligraphy full of sweeping curlicues that look like something Fe-Anar might invent just to be pretty, all using the same underlying shapes.
Prince Fe-Anar: Thankfully for everyone involved, he is too distracted by learning all Baseline's grammatical rules and asking questions about the design constraints that motivated them to get into an argument about how many people die when their rulers tell them to evacuate their cities and farms for secret reasons, or in the ensuing civil wars.
It doesn't even take him an hour. He does not need things explained twice.
Keltham: Keltham will have time to chant Baseline's Central Cheating Poetry then! Where the Central Cheating Poetry of an ahistorical/synthetic-style conlang is the stuff that rhymes and scans because you built the language to make it do that. It's often how conlang designers fill in final details after all the syntactic constraints and other purposes are laid down.
Baseline's Central Cheating Poetry is mostly homilies of rationality that Civilization wanted people to be able to keep in mind even under moments of stress, plus some other proverbs they deemed central to themselves. "Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. I notice I am confused; therefore something I believe is fiction." "You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed." "Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't." "In life's name and for life's sake."
There's important Central Cheating Poetry about accepting reality and accepting costs already sunk and losses already accrued. Keltham will say those later. Sorry.
Prince Fe-Anar: He listens intently and immediately starts remixing them. "You can move faster if you're more confused by fiction than by reality? Your strength in the Way is you can move faster? I notice I am confused anyone can kill anyone! Therefore something I believe is fiction."
Keltham: "Full points on syntax, semantics not so much."
It's a less impressive feat when Fe-Anar is doing it in a language that actually has a type system, ya know?
Prince Fe-Anar: He's still confused by the claim anyone can kill anyone but if Keltham is unwilling to explain it he'll just have to wait for the person with Share Baseline to try.
Keltham: Okay, so Fe-Anar is now speaking to Keltham exclusively in well-formed Baseline, has mastered all the phonemes, only needs to be told any word once, and can be told whole translated sentences and infer back the words. This is probably impressive and not just because Baseline was designed to be easier to learn than Taldane? Keltham doesn't have any reference points here except that if Carissa could do this she probably would've.
However if Fe-Anar wants to pass as a native Baseline speaker to Keltham, he's going to need to learn some mental distinctions that influence voice tones, now that Keltham thinks about it. Some aspects of pitch in Baseline aren't controlled by language design, they're allegedly free emotional expressions that have nonetheless settled into informal troughs.
The way that Fe-Anar is doing the rest of this perfectly makes it stand out that Fe-Anar, for example, sometimes uses an implicit tone of voice that sounds like... he's instructing reality what to do as if it were a person, or pronouncing a conjecture like it's a flat statement of fact, or saying an ought-statement at a pitch that makes it sound like an is-statement. You can do that to make metaphorical points, but Fe-Anar seems to not be doing it on purpose?
Keltham apologizes for not being able to state explicit generative rules here. He can just tell that some inflections sound wrong, state why they sound wrong, and say the sentence over again the way a dath ilani would.
Prince Fe-Anar: Yes, that's how learning a language always is; you can't actually make all human behavior explicit even if you have put lots more effort into trying than anyone else. He is delighted to pick it up the slow way.
But seriously, he wants to know once he has a bit more Baseline fluency, why is there poetry making the claim that anyone can kill anyone.
Keltham: No economicmagic, no conceptualmagical medicine, no alternatephysics saying important people are mysteriously harder to injure, dead people with uninjured brains can be stored indefinitely but not brought back right away by Civilization's current capabilities, and everybody is way too creative.
Like there's probably some people who can't kill some people? A three-year-old is going to have a hard time taking out the Chief Executive of Civilization. That's why it's spoken with the 'this statement is literally false but in a way where it's mostly true and the exceptions are important' inflection, rather than the 'overt trolling' inflection, which would sound like "Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Huh [surprised, dubious, questioning]. <Conjectural inflection>It'd be hard to have government if most people could kill most other people.</Conjectural inflection>."
Keltham: "...okay so it's not just Cheliax that thinks that. It's hard to have terrible governments if a majority of people can outfight any minority that tries to tyrannize them. All Golarion governments are terrible, and would thus not last for upwards of thirty seconds in dath ilan." [Inference rather than observation; submitted for further challenge.]
...if you can't read off these inflections, or infer them from obvious-to-a-dath-ilani context, you might think that Keltham was a lot more confident of what he was saying than he'd sound like to someone in Civilization.
Prince Fe-Anar: "Causing everyone to leave their farms and cities can only be done with a Governance that can outfight its population better than Cheliax can." [Confident, submitted for argument.]
Keltham: "Too many simultaneous replies. Please hold while I order them." [Humorous.]
"One, it can't be done that way even if Governance can outfight its population. That would be a negative consequence presented only in anticipation of the other's output change, 'threat'. Which people would ignore because they don't want their predictable decision to offer a reason to threaten them." [Unobserved, confident.]
"Two, one of the few facts passed down is that, when it was said this must be done, all of Governance quit and was never allowed in Governance again, to show that they took it seriously and didn't expect to benefit themselves." [Reported, confident.]
"Three, I'm much more of a cognitively-diverse nonconformist, 'rebel', than the average dath ilani, and it's never occurred to me that I ought to go trespass in an old city that somebody presumably had a very good reason for hiding." [Direct observation.]
"Four, farms are huge mechanical operations operated by one person in a hundred. They would just change out the machinery once it had been redesigned, not give up the farmland." [Effective certainty.]
Prince Fe-Anar: "One of the facts in your banned history books is that people do not actually ignore threats, that is not how people work.[Unobserved, confident]. Some people would bravely ignore the threat and then they would be executed in front of everyone else, and the government would go on down the line until they ran into some people who had realized about themselves that they did not actually ignore threats. [Unobserved, confident]. Your government can just lie to you about whether all of Governance quit or not, if all the books and records from the time are banned. [Effective certainty.]
It is possible that instead of mass executions dath ilan did mass Suggestions which produced an entire population that would not go look at cities so long as someone told them 'someone had a very good reason for hiding this city', but that is not a result that can be achieved without powerful mind-control or mass executions. [Unobserved, confident]. If we go ask a hundred Lawful people in Osirion, at least twenty of them would go try to dig up an old city if this would not be punished severely. [Effective certainty.]"
Keltham: "I'm not getting it. People did a really huge amount of work and spent a lot of money to preserve those cities, they had some very strong reason I don't know, why would I wreck all their hard work and probably endanger everybody on my planet?" Inflections of puzzlement are much the same in Baseline as in Taldane.
Prince Fe-Anar: "To find out what's there!"
Keltham: "...a bunch of old cities? I'd understand if you were curious about why we had to do that, but what's inside the cities is just going to be, like, people's old tableware. And museums with all of our lost art and history from the last thousand years or whatever, I guess. I'd go look if that were costless, but it's not costless."
Prince Fe-Anar: "I would go to learn their languages myself. My wife would go to see their art. My son Masaharta would go to hear their music. My son Merenre would go to learn how economics was invented and whether the path we are on is the best one or just the one we ended up at by chance.
My son Telcar would go because the government told him not to."
Keltham: "There's one particular preserved city that's supposed to be super super forbidden, for no declared reason, and my guess is that one is just a trap for people like your son. Possibly where they manage to cleverly make their way past all the defenses, search the city, learn some plausible incredible secret, and get to go home and be smug about being the only ones who know, and never realize how obviously they were being manipulated. Not that I'd be saying this out loud if I were still in dath ilan, of course."
"For the rest of that, sure, that's all very reasonable if it's free. Do you also - just eat cookies, 'cookies', because they're tasty, and not consider that you're supposed to pay for them?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "What does super super forbidden mean, they kill you more slowly?[Sincere best guess expected to be wrong]. The reason you pay for cookies is because another person's labor produced those cookies in anticipation of a market and there would be no cookies in a world where we steal them instead of paying for them.[Common knowledge]. It is not because if someone says something is costly you should care about that."
Keltham: "No, that they tell you very emphatically not to do it. We literally never do the 'torture' thing."
"So to me it feels obvious that you want to be the sort of planet where, if something weird happens, people can successfully coordinate, 'coordinate', to deploy an appropriate weird response, in much the same way that you want to be a planet where people can produce cookies and not have them get stolen. There should be some procedure for figuring out whether you need to bury all your old cities and then everybody does that, which includes sensible aspects like firing everybody in your government, occasionally sending somebody on a one-way trip to the pole of the world where they report back using codes on whether the real reason seemed legit, that sort of thing. If there's no possible procedure which does that then your world is defenseless against any problem requiring that response, and probably lots of other problems too." [Attempted chain of valid inferences with overtones of moral inveighing.]
Prince Fe-Anar: "To me it seems - to protect against some classes of danger is to make yourself more defenseless to other classes of danger. [Assertion with defense of it upcoming.] A strong king protects against external threats, but risks becoming a tyrant.[Common knowledge]. A compliant populace protects better against some problem where you need to ban all of the past, but protects worse against some problem where the government decides to ban all of the past not acting in the interests of the people. A society that is inhospitable to people like Telcar is more likely to be making errors that being Telcar prevents. A society full of Telcars will of course barely be able to solve any problem that cannot be solved by shooting it or running off to live in the wilderness or overthrowing the government. There is no society that is defended against every possible direction of danger.
So then there is only the question, how frequent are good reasons to ban all of history, compared to how often will kings manipulate the populace to that end when it weakens the people? I think probably one king in ten would do that if he could, maybe one in five. Certainly Cheliax is attempting it. So good reasons would need to be frequent indeed, for that trade to seem wise.[Attempted chain of valid inference]."
Keltham: "That stakes Civilization's survival on never being wrong in advance about how often some weird situation actually comes up! Instead of having a weak government so that it can't become tyrannical, we have a somewhat stronger goverment with emergency weapons behind locks not controlled by the same people who can use those weapons, and run the Annual Oops It's Time To Overthrow The Government Festival to rehearse the motions needed to overthrow it if required. We don't have a population that goes along with anything the government says, we have a population that will tell the government it will go along with weird things but only if the whole government quits and we use a paper-cryptographic-protocol, 'mathematically trustworthy procedure everybody can carry out using paper', to recreate a new government entirely from scratch in a way that would be very difficult for a conspiracy to manipulate. You can optimizedly-design being able to defend against more situations instead of just saying, oh, well, I guess there's a tradeoff, let's stake everything on guessing the right side of the simply-formed tradeoff."
Prince Fe-Anar: "If you have a population that will not go look in the hidden cities because they were told they should not, you have staked everything on guessing the right side of the tradeoff."[Confident.]
Keltham: "Not seeing why. Life goes on, people continue earning money and spending it, almost nobody dies for real and nobody ever gets 'tortured'. What goes wrong if we don't look in the hidden cities and should have?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "What goes wrong? [Rhetorical].
Your government is lying about the frozen people and if they come back, everyone dies for real.
Your government is lying about no one gets 'tortured', you have afterlives and they are bad, or some are bad and you don't know enough to avoid those ones.
Your people had invented something much much better than 'life goes on, people continue earning money and spending it', but some powers wanted to stamp it out, and now instead of trading with every star you are stuck poorer and they will do it again if you rediscover it.
This is the eightieth time it has been done to your civilization, by some power that wants you at your current level of strength but not bigger or stronger.
You are ruled by a secret cabal of aliens that are mind controlling your government and you do not learn it. Maybe also they eat people, if you do not mind being ruled by a secret cabal of aliens.
There is some terrible threat to your world that sealing away history means you do not know of, and might now unleash.
Your world does have gods and magic, but in sealing away history, you ensured that only a small ruling elite will know of them.
You would have been able to figure out Cheliax much much faster, if you had known how history is. Oh, I wasn't supposed to talk to you about that. [Apology]."
Keltham: "...I think our people could legitimately not optimize for their True Dead ending up in worlds they'd decrypt faster if they knew the hidden history. That seems like a legitimately hard call. By the same token, you could say that there is an afterlife in dath ilan, which most people didn't know about and our Keepers probably did infer in a very general way, namely, people like me ending up places that turned out to be here. It's not Hell, but I'm not having much fun right now. And Civilization did the correct thing about that by cryopreserving almost-everyone so that they almost-entirely wouldn't end up in places nobody could predict."
"I think - this is hard to describe. Our world's physics, 'laws of reality', is much more closed, 'systemically closed', than Golarion's physics. We know all of it, it is a single equation. It is contrary to the character of that physical law for us to easily trade with other stars. There's - when I came to Golarion, I didn't worry about the correct things, because Golarion was such a different place. If you were suddenly transported to dath ilan, you wouldn't worry about the correct things either."
"Civilization thought of possibilities like your worries, as appropriate to dath ilan rather than Golarion, and defended against them. There is a powerful beacon far away where it would not be easy to destroy, emitting an invisible force akin to light but wider. That beacon, it's been passed down, marks the moment when history was erased, and sends signals spaced in a way that makes it easy to identify when that moment was. There is only one beacon like that, not eighty, and it's very loud so we wouldn't miss the others. If somebody said we had to erase our past again and destroy the beacon, I think people would be a lot more suspicious at that point. That's the point where it starts to look like somebody is trying to hide something, or fool future generations, and not just respond to a strange threat in a way where they're happy to let you take all the precautions required to make sure nobody's fooling anybody."
"I think the basic idea you're missing here is possibly something like - the degree to which it's possible for a huge number of people to make a decision, and know that it was their decision, using paper-cryptographic-protocols and so on. You think in terms of a small number of people being able to command the rest. Not in terms of an argument where everyone evaluates it and comes to the same answer because everyone has been trained in the same rules of generally valid argumentation, and then people can act in unison from there."
Prince Fe-Anar: "People want very many weird things! If aliens came to Golarion with an alien mind-virus, even if everyone were sure the decision was theirs, the decision would not be close to unanimous, even if they followed the same rules of reasoning. It is true that they don't because all people except me and my wife and some of our smarter children are idiots. But even if they did, some would say 'submit to the aliens' and some would say 'destroy the aliens' and some would say 'unleash Rovagug' and some would say 'have sex with the aliens' and some would say 'screen off our history' and some would say 'evacuate the planet', and they would not agree, even if they followed the rules of arguing, any more than gods agree even though gods follow all the rules of arguing."
Keltham: "Presumably your 'gods' don't disagree on questions of fact, they just have different utilityfunctions, things-they-want. That's not a disagreement, it's just having different utilityfunctions."
"We're not 'gods' but we try not to fall too far short of 'godhood'."
"Disagreeing about whether 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't make you a cognitively-diverse nonconformist, it makes you bad at math." (This scans but in the way of a real rhyme, not Central Cheating Poetry.)
Prince Fe-Anar: "Yes, that is the word I was looking for. People on Golarion have different utilityfunctions so you would never get them to agree on screening off history, even if you made them all into gods."
Keltham: "Apparently some people in Golarion will go to Elysium, get Hell scried to them, and willingly return when resurrected, to serve Asmodeus in Golarion, and then in Hell. Pilar said that under truthspell supervised by Osirion." (Keltham says this in Taldane, it'd be too weird to try to use all the loanwords in Baseline.)
"Dath ilan is just straight up legitimately not that cognitively diverse. You want to brag about having more cognitive diversity here? You win. I'm not sure it's been good for your planet, but you win."
Prince Fe-Anar: "I actually don't know if Asmodeans count. They are all lied to until the part of their brain that notices lies is ignored like a boy who always cries wolf. If you raised them somewhere else they would not be like that."
Keltham: "I really would have thought I'd given some of them enough training in noticing self-deception to snap them out of that. Pilar noticed that she didn't want her family to go to Hell so her curse very sensibly arranged for them to get kidnapped by Osirion, atoned to Lawful Neutral, and killed so they'd be in Axis. So she was seeing things but - she herself, whether she wanted to go to Hell - and Carissa -"
"Can you leave the room until I come out again to say it's okay? I need to have a brief crying fit and the last one lasted five minutes, this one will probably be less."
Prince Fe-Anar: "I can do that." Probably there is some weird alien thing where it is fine to say "I'm going to have a crying fit" but not to cry??
Keltham: It seems perfectly straightforward from a dath ilani perspective. Keltham is not trying to conceal the fact that he's in emotional distress. He's trying to not expose Fe-Anar's wordless perceptions to the sight of somebody in distress that Fe-Anar can't help except by leaving him alone; and, yes, maintain his masculine gendertrope's pride against the wordless update that Fe-Anar couldn't avoid making if seeing Keltham directly. Also Fe-Anar is not Keltham's girlfriend.
Keltham: "Back."
Prince Fe-Anar: Osirian men would in fact be far more reluctant to weep in front of their wife than in front of a stranger, but it does seem like the kind of thing where aliens might be different.
When Keltham comes out, Fe-Anar has cornered a servant and cast Tongues on them and is chattering at them in Baseline.
Keltham: "You know, theoretically your time's up, but I'm not going to stop because I'd rather not think about other things, and also I just can't resist at this point seeing how far you can get on sounding like a native."
Keltham will start repeating everything Fe-Anar says the exact way a native speaker would say it, if they had Fe-Anar's general personality instead of Keltham's.
(A dath ilani can totally tell the difference between these two personalities! They're very distinct!)
Prince Fe-Anar: Keltham is GREAT and Baseline is BEAUTIFUL. He also thinks this about Osirian and Taldane and Kelish and Hallit and Tien and Adlet and Sylvan and Protean, to be clear, it is not really specifically a compliment to the designers of Baseline, but today they have filled his life with delight for which he wishes he could repay them.
(The servant will anxiously scuttle away.)
Keltham: "...why did that person run away? I wouldn't run away if I'd suddenly found myself near an alien, for much the same reason I actually would look inside a Preserved City if that was costless."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Because he's worried he'll do something wrong and offend the alien and get into trouble, probably. I think you're actually moderately difficult to offend but people aren't going to assume that."
Keltham: "'Actually moderately difficult', not 'actually moderately difficult'." (Correction towards more colloquial word choice and intonation, with no simple mapping onto distinct Taldane phrases.)
"Are women here going to pretend they like me, because otherwise they're afraid they'll get into trouble?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "- if you marry them I guess they're reasonably likely to do that? Honestly you strike me as too young to get married and I would not recommend it."
Keltham: "'Frankly you strike me', not 'honestly you strike me'. Dath ilani don't lie often enough that they need to say when they're being honest, but they conceal things often enough to say when they're being frank."
"People here are immune to concerns about other people getting upset with them, or won't try to hide or alter their apparent feelings around people, unless married to them? That sounds like the literal opposite of how I think things should work."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Women will lose standing and respect from their peers and superiors if they're being friendly with you, so they'll probably only do it if they are strongly motivated to by internal concerns and not by fear of getting in trouble. The one context in which social pressure points in the direction of more friendliness for women is towards their husbands, if they are married, so if you married a woman here then you might reasonably worry she was subject to social pressure to pretend she liked you. You can of course avoid this pretty easily by not marrying anyone until you are older and wiser."
Keltham: "Definitely not marrying anybody from Osirion until I'm at least older and wiser enough to understand the gendertropes, which is the standard library of terms that can compress descriptions of gender, which is the thing that people's personalities make of their sex, which is the axis along which almost everyone in dath ilan is born either male, which is what I am, or female, which is the shape males match."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Yes, that seems like definitely one prerequisite! Also you'll need a stable income, which shouldn't be that hard but me paying you to teach languages won't count to most families, and many women will have concerns about the harem in Cheliax. I'd generally say having a harem in Cheliax is outright disqualifying for marriage but you're going to be very rich and that compensates for most disadvantages."
Keltham: "Wow, you're tactless. It's not clear that I still should see myself as having a harem in Cheliax, Abrogail was all like 'everything you value here will be waiting when you return to us reading Lawful Evil' but she was not under a truthspell when she said it."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Well, formerly having had a harem in Cheliax is still fairly disqualifying for most people because what if one of the girls turns up here with your child, that's a complicated situation for a marriage to navigate if you're the kind who'd take her back. [high uncertainty] I'm really not a good person to give marital advice, I only have one wife myself."
Keltham: "Signed a contract requiring them to use Alter Self, which Lrilatha said was effective in preventing pregnancy, having a child, so that should work if they're actually bound by contracts and Lrilatha couldn't lie - does that match your understanding? I mostly don't want to talk about this, but should check that part." He needs to send back a message requiring them to use Alter Self one final time - Carissa was so happy, when he - he's just had a crying fit, Keltham is not really okay with himself having another one so soon after, so he won't, this time.
Prince Fe-Anar: "Cheliax will obey their contracts, unless there's something sneaky in the wording. I.....don't know what to make of the idea of having women shapeshift until they aren't women but I think my objections are not that it wouldn't work."
Keltham: "I'm confused. They weren't shifting during sex - well, Meritxell, but she was shifting into other women, it was her thing - they were shifting male afterwards to prevent pregnancy."
Prince Fe-Anar: "- in the Osirian conception, the core thing that makes someone a woman is the capacity to bear children, and the core thing that makes someone a man is the capacity to sire them. There are also differences in personality traits and virtues and aptitudes and so on, but in Axis - where no one can bear children and no one can sire them - those are smaller than, say, the differences between different species, and it certainly wouldn't make very much sense to have laws about them. So in the Osirian conception, a person who shapeshifts frequently enough to ensure they cannot bear children isn't - exactly meaningfully a woman. They have departed from womanhood to be something else."
Keltham: "Wait, so a woman can own property, here, she just needs to learn Alter Self and shapeshift frequently enough that the system doesn't classify her as a woman anymore? Or is it that only men can own property, so if I make second circle and change to being a woman once per week, the government can declare I'm no longer a man and take all my stuff?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "....neither of those, but closer to the first one? Spellcasters can get classified as the head of an independent household, even if they're women, and widows past childbearing age can get classified as the head of their household, even if they're not spellcasters."
Keltham: "Also, does your society have, like, one gendertrope. Or two gendertropes, I guess. In dath ilan there's a lot of different ways to be a man or a woman or, like, do your best to resign from the system because you are a cognitively diverse nonconformist."
Prince Fe-Anar: " - well, if you are a man and want to resign from the system you can cut off your genitals, I suppose? Being a cognitively diverse nonconformist doesn't really strike me as strong enough reason for that but perhaps it is my turn to have underestimated how much people vary."
Keltham: "No, I mean, this is dath ilani male-coded clothing I'm wearing and I maintain my hair in a way that looks dath ilani male. I could stop doing those things and people in Civilization would still be able to identify me as probably having male genitals unless I did a lot more work, but they wouldn't assume that I'd behave in a masculine, 'masculine', way."
"There's a way of being a woman where you try to maintain a high sex drive so you can keep a harem of men you like, the haremmistress gendertrope. There's a way of being a woman where you don't have sex and marry a man who's married to a different woman so that you can get snuggles without fucking, the asexualnonsingularmate gendertrope. There's a way of being a woman where you don't like people drawing inferences about you just because you're female, which is the singleton nonbinary gendertrope held in common across all sexes. Uh, 'singleton' is, there's only one object that exists inside the class for that object."
"It sounds like Osirion has one feminine gendertrope, and if you don't fit it, they stop thinking you're a woman. Which, like, I'm pretty sure if I was a woman, I'd go off the standard gendertrope here just so that I could own property?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "I don't actually know where the source of this confusion is but I suspect it of being somewhere very distant from the conversation that we're having. It is true that in Osirion women do not ...marry multiple men....because then the paternity of their children would be in question, and it's bad for children to not have a father who is committed to providing for them, it strongly predicts dying of starvation as a baby."
Keltham: "...should've noticed earlier that this conversation was probably heading towards a Golarion doomfact. It's not easily possible in dath ilan to have enough children that the mother's job alone couldn't support them, unless she had an unusually low-paying job or she tried for like twelve kids or something."
"I'd ask if being able to test for a handful of genetic markers narrowing down paternity - 'genetic' being the tiny storages of information inside people that implement 'heredity', the way children resemble their parents - would solve that problem. But, unless the explanations I got in Cheliax were lies or not typical of Golarion, I suspect the answer is, no, there's some huge tangle of people being insane in a way that you can't change by changing the facts. Sort of don't want to go into that, because it was - something that Carissa would always take the responsibility of explaining to me."
"Unless it actually is just testing for genetic markers to determine the father, in which case I could think about if there's some simple way to do that at your tech and magitech level."
Prince Fe-Anar: "That seems like ....a good thing to have that many people would pay a lot of money for? I don't know that it would solve the problem you perceive because I don't think I exactly understand the problem you perceive, but I don't see an obvious problem with a woman having two husbands if they can afford to check which is the father and both have agreed in advance that the responsibilities of the father attach to them if the spell indicates it's them. I don't think it'd be a very popular arrangement but I don't see why people who want the option shouldn't be able to buy it.
People mostly do things for good reasons and changing the facts does change how they behave, but - a lot of facts are connected with other facts, and people don't change instantly."
Keltham: "Yes, much of the childhood training I got in being able to propagate updates more quickly and change my mind faster does make more sense to me as a vital necessity of a stable Civilization, now that I realize that, in the absence of this training, people will spend ten years acting like second-circle wizards can get pregnant by accident."
"Once I know the differences between Osirion and Cheliax, I'll just update on them. I won't complain about how facts are entangled with other facts, I'll just propagate all the updates I know how to propagate. You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed."
Prince Fe-Anar: "I guess now I should try to explain gender in Osirion and associated facts to you but I'd really rather someone else do that because it sounds really unpleasant....maybe less so if we do it in Baseline so I can practice my Baseline. Do you want me to do that."
Keltham: "Realistically, that should not happen to me today."
"You wanna go back to telling me about how dath ilan's government just had to be secretly awful? Got a lot of that in Cheliax too, only, in retrospect, without nearly the emphasis on how they thought there was any possible alternative to that."
Prince Fe-Anar: "That sounds like much more fun, yes!"
Prince Fe-Anar: "In the absence of gods but the presence of talk-control I'm actually not sure how I'd organize a society to not be ruled by tyrants. If you have any one powerful person, they can be talk-controlled. If you have no powerful people, you will be invaded. You could maybe do random selection of rulers for one-year terms, though I think that just gets you rule behind-the-scenes by some group of people that doesn't get turned over ever year, presumably the Keepers. Maybe the best you can actually do is tyrants who have to pretend not to be, which is what it sounds to me like dath ilan has."
Keltham: "The talk-control we know about is not instant. Supposedly even if you matched up a ninth-rank Keeper against an ordinary dath ilani they would still take two minutes and anybody else watching would notice the conversation being very weird."
"But, look, you're still angling at this from way too much of a Golarion perspective where you control a handful of top people and suddenly you control the society. If anything runs dath ilan, it's the prediction markets that say which observable outcomes we'll get in ten years if we do something a particular way, and the Legislature negotiates which outcomes we're steering toward. The designated-desirable-outcomes are a matter of public record. The prediction markets are things that anybody including me could bet on. If the Dark Conspirators want to actually steer around Civilization they need the prediction markets to be making bad predictions, presumably about the roads not taken because on the roads actually taken you can see the predictions not coming true. And then the bids get revealed after the fact, and people would notice if their own bids were not listed so you can't understate the bids in one direction, so you'd need there to be these huge mysterious opaque bidders coming in and bidding against all the people who did acknowledge their bids, to claim overly pessimistic outcomes on the roads you wanted to steer away from - you see the problem here?"
"Maybe you can take over Civilization in the sense of getting an Achievement Unlocked on how you theoretically control the minds of the Nine Legislators, but that doesn't actually get you anything, so far as I can tell. The Legislators can't say to steer for a weird outcome without everyone noticing. And Civilization has definitely ever thought about somebody trying to take it over via breaking into some computers, shaped raw causal processes, and making the prediction markets too pessimistic about all courses of action other than the way they want Civilization to go."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Like the prediction market of whether the dead will return, where you noticed exactly that kind of suspicious activity. Anyway, if you control the Keepers and the legislators you can declare things like that you're going to screen off all of history! I find it hard to believe you couldn't also declare things like that you need to launch a massive secret project almost no one is told about, or remove all works of fiction that might enable someone to learn the gods are real and contact them, or that you need to invent and refine talk-control, or that you need to make a bunch of specific people who are criticizing you decide to freeze themselves.
As far as I can tell, any high-rank Keeper can go to the home of a critic who is particularly troubling to them and in two minutes of conversation convince that person to commit suicide. That is sufficient power to cover up a lot without manipulating prediction markets, even setting aside how you can use it to manipulate prediction markets in a way that's not very obvious. Especially if talk-control works over mass media, you can do far more than that."
Keltham: "I'm sure there are massive secret projects we're not being told about. You can tell this because of how I think this is a totally reasonable thing to do, so long as they're prosocial secret projects with valid rationales. I would be horrified and disturbed to know that Governance was not running massive secret projects, because there are clearly going to be some things like that and somebody needs to do them and if Governance isn't doing them then what are we even paying for."
"If the gods are real then, yes, you'd want to remove all works of fiction that would let somebody contact them. This also seems like a totally reasonable thing to do."
"And there was, yes, a famous creepy incident where the Keepers negotiated with a dissident faction and then their leaders told all of their followers to go into cryonic preservation, but obviously the dissident faction took no precautions whatsoever against talk-control because the dissident faction was stupid, and that all happened in public where everybody could see how creepy it was because the Keepers were stupid." [False statement illustrating what the truth must be by contrasting to it.]
Prince Fe-Anar: "At some point you are just conceding, yes, we are a tyranny that has and routinely exercises the power to crush dissidents and ban the speaking of true important things that would dramatically change the life priorities of many of our subjects, and we like it that way."
Keltham: "The dissident faction in question was one that wanted to destroy all life before it could colonize the stars, so that we wouldn't spread the possibility of suffering through the universe, and the fact that our Civilization is not so constructed as to entertain the possibility of crushing them was why our Keepers had to negotiate with them secretly - using obvious protocols for avoiding known possible levels of talk-control, like exchanging notes written on paper with delays built in that an intermediary person rewrote - and told the negative utilitarians something, struck a deal with them, that made them voluntarily ask their followers to voluntarily go into early cryonic suspension in exchange. I can now guess that one of the things they were told was that Truly Dead people just end up somewhere else, like I did, and I can see all kinds of possible excellent reasons why the Keepers would not tell everyone that."
"In dath ilan we pay children who are still young enough to give into threats, every time we threaten them into doing something, every time we have to slap their wrists or threaten to slap their wrists, it goes into their bank account for later in life, so that we'll never do it lightly and will notice it every time."
"In dath ilan we have to persuade our dissidents who want to end all life, to voluntarily go into early cryonic suspension instead of hanging around trying to end all life, in exchange for a bargain the terms of which I do not know, because we don't have the kind of Civilization that would just kill them."
"I am not terribly well acquainted with Golarion, but I know that this is so far advanced ahead of anything you have here that, yes, I can see why you just wouldn't believe it. But then say you don't believe it! Say that you think I was just trapped inside another Conspiracy lying to me my whole life! Don't take the world I'm describing to you, that is obviously far ahead of Golarion on tolerance of dissent, and try to redefine it as tyranny!"
Prince Fe-Anar: "Dath ilan actually doesn't sound ahead of, say, Absalom on tolerance of dissent to me. There are no things I'll be arrested for shouting in a public square in Absalom, and a lot of things I would be arrested for shouting in a public square in dath ilan. There are no books that I will be prevented from writing and distributing in Absalom, and a lot of books I'd be prevented from writing and distributing in dath ilan. Absalom does not violently suppress Rovagug cultists. Osirion wouldn't suppress people who were just trying to have lots of children who'd agree with them the universe should be destroyed and not actually planning the actual release of actual Rovagug. It wouldn't negotiate with them because there'd be nothing to negotiate because they could under our laws just go living their lives as long as they weren't actually trying to do a violent crime.
You just said 'If the gods are real then, yes, you'd want to remove all works of fiction that would let somebody contact them. This also seems like a totally reasonable thing to do' and that is a degree of social control that no Golarion society except perhaps Nidal attains. Rahadoum bans all the gods and all their followers, but they don't ban works of fiction in which the gods are described.
In many respects dath ilan sounds lovely. I have conceded that perhaps the degrees to which it is an unusually oppressive tyranny is in fact better than many other possible ways it could be - for example, if you do have a problem with aliens sending you mind-viruses. But I am not redefining anything, when I name it an unusually oppressive tyranny with unusually little tolerance of dissent."
Keltham: "What, exactly, is an example of something you think would get you arrested in dath ilan if you shouted it in a public square where shouting was otherwise permissible, rather than a place where the people living there had designated it as quiet?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "'Iomedae is a powerful alien entity which can be contacted by shaping your thoughts towards Her in the following fashion'. 'Before we screened off history, there was a war in which thirty million people were killed, I have the documentation proving it'. 'There is a secret government project to' - followed by the details of any government secret projects."
Keltham: "Right, so, I sure would get the heck out of that square, and then, yes, I'd want that person removed from my city, or rendered psychiatric assistance, as appropriate depending on whether what they were saying was {true, false-but-lying} or false-but-honest."
"I think you have a fundamental presumption about governments acting in bad faith by default which dath ilani straight-up do not share. The thing where I don't rush out of the public square is if they shout, 'There is a secret government project conducted in bad faith which you can verify by looking at the following details...' and then, they're probably crazy, but you maybe hang around and look up those purported details on the Network, so that your society can maintain its theoretical ability to remove bad governments. Somebody shouting about a secret government project that the government was trying to keep secret for a good reason is just an asshole, no different from telling somebody about a surprise party their friends were going to hold for them, or the ending of the book they just started reading."
Prince Fe-Anar: "I agree that the reason dath ilani would arrest and exile this hypothetical person is because of the presumption of dath ilani that the government is operating in good faith. Would it resolve our disagreement if I said that dath ilan has unusually little tolerance of dissent and unusually much tolerance of the exercise of power to crush dissidents, compared to Golarion societies which are trying not to be tyrannies, because of the presumption of dath ilani that the government is operating in good faith?"
Keltham: "Think I'd first like to see how a woman selling sex was treated in those extremely free Golarion societies, maybe inquire of them how they'd handle knowledge of the Outer Gods starting to propagate, count the ratio of people imprisoned to people free and interview some people who'd actually been arrested about what they'd been arrested for, maybe offer them a truthspell about whether somebody had demanded a bribe from them. I am frankly skeptical that Golarion can get freedom right when it is too poor and too stupid to get anything else right."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Is the argument that while, in principle, Absalom's laws are much less restrictive, in practice Absalom is sufficiently underresourced in enforcing its laws, and sufficiently unpredictable in a very weird case, that it's easier to end up exiled unjustly from Absalom than to end up exiled from dath ilani cities? That seems true, though it still seems to me that it's important that Absalom is not the only city that does not have laws about evangelism and bookwriting, and it'd be very hard to end up unjustly exiled from all of them, so the problem somewhat reduces to making travel cheaper."
Keltham: "You know, now that I think about it, I'm sure on reflection that somewhere in dath ilan there is a city full of people who are just excitedly analyzing all the markets and figuring out all the secret government projects and slapping hands with each other as they figure them out, because the people there want to hear about it, and their access to the markets and so on has some kind of monitored trading condition that prevents info there from leaking out to the rest of Civilization, which doesn't want to hear about it."
"But, like, if they're calling down the gods on the rest of us, then yes, that is a condition under which I'd agree with a secret government project to go in and preemptively cryopreserve them all and hide that fact from the rest of Civilization. In fact, I think that's a much more important capacity for a society to have, now that I've seen a society where gods are running loose. Before I would've said that was an unreasonably-improbable-hypothetical."
"Civilization is doing fine without gods."
Prince Fe-Anar: "As far as you know, not living in one of the places where people know what the government is doing."
Keltham: "If the government was doing something wrong they'd obviously tell the rest of us and collect the huge bounties we'd pay out retrospectively for their assistance in having done that! I project with great confidence that this is, like, totally that city's motto, that they're a check on Governance that way."
Prince Fe-Anar: "You don't even know if they exist! You should not feel sure they're being a successful check on the government!"
Keltham: "If they don't exist it's because all the people like that decided that any other people advertising themselves as that would be obvious traps and did their own homework instead! But mostly I'd guess with great confidence there's a city like that because they'll think some people ought to check collectively rather than individually, even given the surety that assuming Dark Governance half of them are Governance plants, and they'll generate a random number and look for a city of fellow - 'conspiracy-theorists', would be the obvious Baseline term to coin - with 80% probability."
"Like, there's some cities you realize will exist as soon as you think about them, and they actually exist, like, 90% of the time, or so."
"To be clear, this is not how the actual checks on Governance work, those are designed by Very Serious People and Cunning Masterminds Having Way Too Much Fun."
Keltham: "There is a saying out of dath ilan about conversations like these. It goes, 'Some conversations have no natural endpoint, and so you can only decide to say, "It is complete because it ended here."'"
Prince Fe-Anar: "Oh, I was assuming at some point my son would send in his guards to drag me off you, but that works too." His Baseline is more or less fluent, at this point. "A pleasure meeting you, Keltham of dath ilan. I hope dath ilan is not secretly Evil, and also I hope we grow up to surpass them."
Keltham: "No, we should hope they were secretly Evil. 'Bad news about the past is good news about the future.' If you learn that some hidden problem obtained about the otherwise observationally fixed past, that's good news because the past's quality level is not thereby changed so you can fix that problem and get a better future than previously expected. If dath ilan was secretly Evil, surpassing that quality of living standard in Golarion will be much easier, because dath ilan had that standard of living despite being handicapped by being Evil."
"Your Baseline is functionally perfect in syntax and pronunciation, it's just missing vocabulary size, non-rule-controlled intonation, common phrasings and proverbs, and, if you genuinely wanted to be able to pass as indistinguishably native, making the sort of technical arguments that dath ilani would make. Vocabulary you can get off Tongues or from Share Language (Baseline) that I tap somebody with, common phrasings have to come from me and I don't have them mentally stored in a format that lets me rattle off a complete list, perfect intonation is going to require at least listening to me talking for long periods and possibly continued active correction, and argument form is full-blown being as 'Lawful' as we were. How do you want to play this?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "I'll pay for your time at today's prices if you think of more things you want to teach me, or argue about, up to a total of 40,000gp, which is all of my money."
Keltham: "You seem kind of noticeably intelligent compared to most people I've met in Golarion and for that matter me. Counterproposal, what if you followed me around while I was teaching things and tapped people with Communal Share Language (Baseline), so I could teach in Baseline, which would converge towards you being able to share the whole language, because every time I said something in Baseline not covered by your version, you or other people would query it and then you'd also know that part?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "I would be delighted."
Keltham: "Am I correct that you're the sort of person where, if I asked whether we're friends yet, and the answer was no, you'd just tell me no and not feel particularly uncomfortable about it either?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "There's only any other sort of person because most people are not very smart."
Keltham: "Right, so, I'm pretty massively traumatized by the Chelish gaslighting operation and rather a large part of me does not think that anything on this next layer of reality is real. It seems to me like inside that layer of reality we are forming something like a friendship, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to let myself feel that, because my brain is constantly firing warnings of the form 'Hey if you start liking this guy he's also going to turn out to not be real, and then that will hurt when you inevitably find out that this layer of reality was also a lie and you have to leave it.'"
"Wanna try forming a friendship under those somewhat adverse conditions?"
Prince Fe-Anar: "That doesn't bother me. The more significant barrier is that I don't have a confident read on whether I respect you intellectually yet. I really enjoy talking to you, and you frequently surprise me in intelligent and interesting ways, but I don't know how much of that is you knowing lots of things I don't know and how much is going to persist once I understand the world you're from. I'm also slightly worried you're going to declare war on Hell or something and it'll be politically complicated for me to participate in the war on Hell in light of how my son is an aspect of Abadar, who I bet is constrained in going to war with Hell though it's actually possible He's just patiently waiting for us to make Him an offer."
Keltham: "...good point. I am probably going to be all kinds of theologically and politically complicated, yes. And thank you for appreciating the point where I am just a punk kid waving around a lot of knowledge developed by a Civilization greater than myself."
"I'm not going to expect you to participate in the destruction of Asmodeus if there's prior political constraints about that, it's not a requirement of friendship with me. Frankly I mostly expect, at this point in the development of the story, that I end up having to do it alone, in the end, because if not then it's weird about the story development that ripped away all of my previous friends, and I can read the foreshadowing in the Good gods talking about decision theory being complicated."
"See you around, Fe-Anar, I've hopefully tired myself out to the point where I can eat something and then sleep again. Perhaps we'll end up as friends eventually."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Oh, I absolutely plan to participate in the destruction of Asmodeus! I wouldn't miss it! I just expect there to be a bunch of annoying intermediate steps. Also, I've decided I do like you, on the strength of your having concluded you're going to have to defeat Asmodeus on your own, even though I think you're wrong about that.
See you around, Keltham."
Iarwain: Day 91 / Egorian
Abrogail Thrune II: When Abrogail Thrune turned 16, shortly after she became a second-circle sorcerer, she looked at the Chelish Empire, which she intended to rule someday, falling around about herself; the provinces of Andoran and Galt, that should have been hers, already lost by her incompetent uncle.
Abrogail knew that as a second-circle sorcerer she could not take the Crown of Infernal Majesty from Infrexus. Even executing a compact with Asmodeus would give her two more circles at best. Infrexus had held five sorcery circles in his late forties, won of the Worldwound and a few years' adventuring, when he executed his own compact and took the throne.
So Abrogail went to Hell, living.
She compacted with Hell to set devils to fight her, and heal her when she fell, and put her to sleep when she had no magic left and needed to regain it; and punish her for failing, for losing, to make sure that when she fought she did so desperately and in that state of stress that is conducive to absorbing magic.
She wanted to make it to seventh-circle, so she could be ninth-circle after executing her infernal contract.
Abrogail tried. She tried really really hard.
But when even her will broke, Abrogail was only sixth-circle still, and so is only eighth-circle now.
It's a very efficient way of leveling. If you ask why not everybody does it, it's because that would shatter almost any mortal's mind like glass. The Thrunes have a touch of Hell in their bloodline, from which their sorcery comes, but even among them, the reason why only Abrogail did that is that only Abrogail could.
Abrogail Thrune II: Carissa Sevar, probably, is not going to be fully functional until she has a +6 intelligence headband. There are not any of those going spare even when you are Abrogail Thrune. They have owners, from whom a headband like that cannot be taken without killing them.
So Carissa Sevar has now been tasked to make herself a +6 intelligence headband.
With a slimy devil wrapped around her, not at all like a lover's caress, a devil summoned and bound by Abrogail Thrune.
The devil is of a kind that Hell sometimes tasks to forge magical items. It cannot advise mortals on how to craft. The devil is not forbidden however to monitor them in their crafting, assess their general level of performance, or apply motivation.
Carissa Sevar is being hurt, quite badly, at the end of any thirty-minute period in which she has not exceeded her previous best performance in crafting. Any time she escapes punishment, of course, that sets the bar higher for next time.
When Carissa's magic fails her, she is put to sleep; when woken, set back immediately to work. Her Ring of Sustenance means she needs no food, no water, no other surcease.
It would shatter most mortals like glass, but then, Carissa Sevar is not most mortals.
It will hopefully prevent Carissa from thinking and feeling for a time.
It will hopefully be punishment enough that Carissa stops feeling unpunished.
Failing that, Abrogail is curious about whether Carissa can be brought to her fifth or sixth circle this way before even her will breaks.
Carissa Sevar: It would have been entirely reasonable, when the project Carissa has been heretically running for the last three months exploded due to Carissa's inadequacies, for Abrogail to have her sent to Hell, to have her mortal frailties scraped away for as many thousands of years as it required. Abrogail is not more merciful than that; wanting more mercy than that would be unAsmodean, and offering it would be very unAsmodean.
Carissa is grateful, for whatever not-merciful impulse has her here, instead. Her mortal mind, which is very stupid and pathetic, does not fully comprehend how much worse it could be, but that is an error, the kind of error she can actually feel herself growing out of when she has time to work on being more ilani.
She is also grateful that there is no opportunity for her to think, or feel, or grieve. In the absence of space to process it, the part of her brain that believes that Keltham loves her and won't let anyone hurt her has taken up residence in the back of her head, where it occasionally whimpers sadly, like a kicked puppy. She has mostly successfully pushed his blank, lost, bewildered face out of her memory. It is over; it never was; it was always pretend. Maybe someday it will be real, but if it is, it will be real the way Hell is real, the way pain is real, the way nothing else is really real.
She's making fast progress on the headband. She would not say that this is because she is in peak form. She keeps having auditory hallucinations, usually of Abrogail, sometimes of her mother, sometimes just of people screaming. Abrogail says that she is not good enough to become half the things she wants to be. Her mother says that she should've worked harder on baby Carissa, that maybe she could've turned out better. The screaming people don't really have anything to say. She thinks she's not constantly screaming, her voice would give out, so probably that's a hallucination. She's developed a habit of hurting herself to focus; it's barely even pain, next to the punishments after each section, but it helps. it makes the world a little more stable, a little clearer. She wishes, sometimes, that Keltham had never come to Golarion, that she'd never left the Worldwound, though this is a stupid thing to wish because these weaknesses were still a part of her and would still have to be burned out of her, and it could, in fact, hurt more than this.
She does not wish to be turned into a statue, not even briefly. She is pretty sure she won't even if, when she finishes the headband, they give her another one. She is pretty sure she won't even if there is nothing else for the rest of time.
She's only pretty sure, though.
No.
She's entirely sure.
This is the road to everything she wants, everything she's ever wanted; she is not so weak that, with that road laid out in front of her, she will fall apart rather than walk it, just because it hurts. If she wants to change things, she will have to be stronger than anyone has ever been; this is the way to get there. Abrogail will have set her a task that makes stronger those Carissae who could ever, possibly, be strong enough to get anything they want. Abrogail has never made her weaker; Abrogail is not, at what must be unimaginable expense, setting her to this path so that she'll discover her weakness and collapse of it. Abrogail is doing this so that she will grow strong.
Abrogail Thrune II: ...it's not actually an unimaginable expense? Binding a devil to do this is straightforward, it's just that, for most people you'd want to temper, they'd be too weak to benefit from a devil's help. But if imagining that she's worth a great expense helps Carissa, Abrogail hardly finds it in her own interest to correct the misapprehension.
...Though, actually, having the Queen of Cheliax take ten minutes of her own time to bind a devil for you is probably 'unimaginable expense' by most people's standards.
Anyways Carissa seems to be doing fine. Abrogail will turn visible so she can whisper in Carissa's ear that she's being a good girl and Abrogail is proud of her, and then head back on out.
Shouldn't be more than a week or two on the +6 headband, it looks like. Though, at the rate Carissa is burning through this task, she might need to be given another crafting job afterwards to see if she can be brought to fifth circle.
Iarwain: Day 92 / Osirion
Keltham: Keltham wakes up and remembers where he is.
He puts on his Splendour headband so that he can cry, and hopefully maybe get that part done with for the day.
He doesn't pray. Keltham has hardly used any of the spells he got yesterday, though he got them identified. And also -
He's not thinking about that right now.
Keltham will go to the library, and read more catalogues of magic items, and send word to see if Merenre and Ismat want to have breakfast that morning, when dawn is past and clerics are done praying for their spells. Does Keltham need some sort of etiquette waiver?
Also Keltham isn't quite sure where Prince Fe-Anar falls into the Osirion scheme of things, but to be explicit, Keltham is fine if Fe-Anar wants to join the breakfast and Share Language (Baseline) people and have all Keltham's and Fe-Anar's conversation be in Baseline.
Merenre: Merenre and Ismat would love to get breakfast, and they're fine with Fe-Anar, who is Merenre's father, being present. Keltham can have an etiquette waiver. (Osirians are at this point under the impression that etiquette waivers are an important dath ilani political technology).
Ismat Alnahhat: "I guess the only thing I'm really touchy about is Khalil, who will be disappointed if the alien can't be polite but he'll live, and I don't have to bring him up in detail when he won't even be at this particular breakfast," Ismat remarks to Merenre on their way.
Merenre: "The etiquette waiver does not oblige you to invite him to breakfast again if you can't stand him. I think you'll like him, though. My father does, and my father's not overawed very easily."
Ismat Alnahhat: "He's the only speaker of his language on the planet! If it can be done easily that's how!"
Prince Fe-Anar: "I do like Baseline and was prepared to put up with practically any personality to get it but he has other positive qualities too! He's very arrogant and very stubborn and very mad about all of Golarion all the time ...also more traumatized than I'd have thought Asmodeus would've been allowed to do. Didn't we pay for a not-traumatized cleric of Abadar to teach us."
Merenre: "Asmodeus transmitted the terms to his followers who are too Chelish to really comprehend that you can damage people if you don't even torture them, is my understanding, from speaking to Abadar of this. It was in the outcomes-distribution specified."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Well, that was a fucking stupid specification."
They arrive at breakfast.