Keltham: "...so it's a conspiracy by the women themselves, to prevent competition between women and maintain sex at an artificially high price, allegedly for the sake of raising children because otherwise why would any man pay to raise a child, and the men are also trapped in that, it sounds like to me.  The husbands beat the wives.  The wives, I assume, beat any woman who tries - what I'd consider normal dating.  Check?"

Zakiya: " - you don't beat someone, if she's gone around sleeping with men, you just stay away from her. It'll ruin her life, but not because anyone did anything. I guess you'd tell your sons not to marry her, because she has terrible impulse control and is probably infertile?"

Keltham: "And then she ends up in an awful 'afterlife', which is, I suppose, what underpins the whole system, what Pharasma arbitrarily defines as 'Evil' or 'Chaotic'... Calistria is 'Chaotic Neutral', not because she's doing something contrary to decision theory, but because decision theory itself as correctly applied by female sex workers is opposed to Asmodean/Osirian power relations which are 'Lawful Evil' and 'Lawful Neutral' respectively..."

"You know, Cheliax tried to sell me on a bunch of sexual behaviors like that being 'Evil', but apparently that was a false advertisement for 'Evil' and they were actually just 'Lawful'?  I guess that makes sense, Abadar wouldn't have 'clericed' me if he wasn't on board with my 'sadism'."

Zakiya: " - no, sir, whatever they do in Cheliax is definitely Evil. Marriage is Lawful, it's - structuring your life around a promise made to protect the long-term interests of both parties. Cheliax doesn't have that, because they don't want people promising to protect and care for one another."

Keltham: "They were pretending not to be Evil, or rather, they were pretending about what Evil was.  Supposedly, Carissa was going to obey me and wanted to obey me, and - wanted me to be in charge, wanted me to be cruel to her and hit her, I'll have to check the transcripts for what she said under Osirion-verified truthspell but it sounded like - maybe that part was not a lie - and I had qualms about this - 'qualms', a sense that something violates your deontology, 'deontology', simple rules you obey instead of calculating out the exact consequences of things - which is why I did not buy her from Cheliax when Cheliax offered her to me and now I do not have her, which, I don't even know, now, if that was good or bad.  But it sounds like basically the same thing you have in Osirion, except that, at least the way they presented it, Carissa wanted to be hit, and wasn't trying to corner me into that relationship via a monopoly on sex enforced by ostracizing women who try to go on dates and preventing them from fleeing your country by not letting them earn money or own things."

Keltham can now talk about this without having a crying fit.  Good for Keltham!  He will probably be fairly recovered by tomorrow at this rate.

Zakiya: "I don't think that's the thing we have in Osirion, sir. If you retain the option to get bored or meet someone better or get angry with her and leave her as soon as you feel like it, then that's nothing like marriage. Osirians would have told you that you could take this woman as your wife, if she desired it and you desired it, and that she would obey you and be faithful to you, and if hitting your wife worked out well for your marriage then by all means you should do so, and in exchange you would be committing to protect her, to see that she didn't go hungry, to arranging her shelter and medical care and supporting the children."

Keltham: "I would have done that anyways."

"It would not need to be enforced upon me."

"Fe-Anar, and - your name was on the price-list sheet but I don't remember it - please excuse me and leave me alone for a few minutes, I will come out when it's okay for you to come back."

Never mind that part about not having a crying fit!  But nobody could blame Keltham at this point!  He is still definitely doing better than yesterday.

Zakiya: They'll step out into the hallway, then.

Keltham: It's a bad one.  Keltham wants to scream, or maybe just let out a thin wailing sound, but he does not have a Silence spell chambered and the area does not look particularly soundproofed.  Possibly he should start carrying around a Silence scroll?

Keltham: "Sorry about the delay.  Let's resume?"

Zakiya: "Yes, sir."

Keltham: "Fe-Anar, what's 'sir' mean in Osirian?"

Prince Fe-Anar: "It's a generic, uh, title used to indicate respect and importance."

Keltham: Not worth arguing over.

"So I think I have a basic model of what went wrong."

"I am very sure, going on how my whole society worked, and also the way I feel, that I would not need this -"  Baseline, of course, does not have a word for blasphemy.  "- awful setup, to be convinced to take care of my kids."

"Why?  Because, though we don't know our history any more, dath ilan would not have had this setup.  Dads who didn't take care of their kids, just had fewer kids, until there were fewer dads like that."

"You set up a situation so that men who didn't care about their children could be forced to take care of their children anyways, you set up a way for men like that to be reproductively competitive with men who just cared, and that, in fact, was a mistake."

"Over in Absalom, where, as I understand it according to some things people have said in Osirion, men and women are not forcing themselves to behave this way, do you know how many surviving children the average man or woman has, on average, including all the men and women who just don't have kids in the first place?"

"Two."

"And do you know what the number in Osirion is?"

"Two."

"Any other number and the population quickly goes to zero or infinity.  But that's not what actually happens, if the number goes up or down, what happens is that there's fewer people working better land so that fewer of their children starve, or people more crowded in cities with more epidemics, until the number goes back to roughly two."

"That's what all of this awfulness bought you, in the end.  Two surviving children per man, two surviving children per woman, on average."

Zakiya: "...but in Absalom, sir, that number is bought with tons of dead children, and abortions, and in Osirion it isn't, and that seems much better."

Prince Fe-Anar: "Osirion's population is actually growing, and has been since independence. It's three, close to four surviving children per woman."

Keltham: Keltham did not understand why woman-whose-name-he-forgot was mentioning 'abortions' in the same breath as 'dead children', unless Fe-Anar has a contagious misapprehension about the Baseline meaning of the term and she is trying to say 'dead infants', since neither fetuses nor infants have qualia.  Or maybe she was expressing 'abortions' to include dead infants, and distinguishing dead children?  That would make sense, but why is abortion even a bad thing on these relative scales?

Keltham is in the middle of expressing a different important-seeming thought, and fails to chase down this slight note of confusion because he does not know exactly which slight notes of confusion are important and he has been feeling them almost constantly throughout this conversation!

"I'd say 'good for Osirion' except for the part where that's not actually a figure of merit, Civilization could easily have ten kids per couple if we wanted there to be five billion people in twenty years, but that is not in fact a desideratum."

"So I can guess where the next arc of the story is going at this point.  Turns out, everywhere on Golarion is awful in different ways, 'Lawful' is not, careful reasoning, and 'Good' is not Light, Golarion probably doesn't have a concept for that, and somehow I'm supposed to build Civilization out of that from scratch rather than being given an overly convenient existing base to build on anywhere.  The gol ilani need their own territory, aren't able to fit into any existing system, they're recruited from the misfits of all the existing regions -"

"What's horribly wrong with Lastwall?  Iomedae seemed cool.  For that matter, the god I prayed to is not a god who would countenance anyone not being allowed to keep stuff they make it and trade it with others."

Zakiya: " - what's He supposed to do about bad husbands, sir, smite them with lightning? So then their families starve?"

Keltham: "Let people escape.  Consider that your personal favorite system does not work for everyone.  There are always weirdos and they need to have a right to exist.  Build an exception handler - a way for weird things to not be total errors inside the system - into your region's clever regulations.  That's step one.  Any woman who wants it can go get herself registered as Not In The System, and maybe that means she can never have a husband inside Osirion, any man who wants to date her maybe has to go get registered as Not In The System and can never have a wife from inside the system, fine.  You can protect your closed system of people for whom that system works, they have a right not to be around people who aren't part of their favorite system.  But if someone doesn't want to be inside the system, let them out."

Zakiya: "You can petition to be the head of your own household, including as a woman, though you have to actually be financially independent, you can't do it if someone else is feeding and sheltering you. And you can get on a ship to Absalom, if you want, it's not illegal to leave."

Keltham: "No.  No rules like that.  Just let them out of the system.  In dath ilan, yes, this is as simple as just getting on a vehicle to a different city.  If the nearest different cities were on the Moon, meaning, even in Civilization most people couldn't afford a ticket there without a lot of saving, you'd need an escape option that people can actually reasonably take before regions could be allowed to pass fun clever regional regulations about perverted marriage arrangements where the women can't have money."

Zakiya: "Well, sir, I expect you'll get what you want, but I don't really expect anyone'll thank you for it."

Keltham: "If nobody would thank me for it then nobody would invoke the newly installed Exception Handler and everything would be exactly the same - am I missing another Golarion doomfact here?"

Zakiya: "I don't know, sir, but it wouldn't surprise me, if we follow all the people who get declared the heads of households they have no means to support, if almost all of them regretted it immensely ten years later, and if they mostly didn't make Axis, and if their children mostly died."

Keltham: "Doesn't Osirion have - no it recently developed predictionmarkets, 'prediction markets', and there's still one guy Merenre whose guesses are just better than the markets."

"Are you running experiments.  Has anyone at any point said, 'I'd like to set up a tiny piece of Avistan inside Osirion and collect a bunch of men and women who strongly want out of the current system and see what happens with them, and we'll run Early Judgment on all of them in ten years, and we'll pay to turn the ones who aren't heading towards an acceptable afterlife into statues pending Keltham and/or Iomedae doing something about the Evil afterlives.'  That sort of thing."

Prince Fe-Anar: " - can't afford that, but we do household and population surveys, and then scry a sample after they die to see where they ended up, to try to have a better understanding of what laws and social conditions work best to get people to Axis."

Keltham: "Is this entire planet some kind of ass-forsaken moral homily about how the only important thing in life is money because without that you're too poor to do things?"

Zakiya: "I really think you'd do better, sir, if you stopped trying to look for morals and the next arc of the story and tried asking people what would make their lives better if you want to help them."

Keltham: "Yes, and the answer I got back from you is that somebody who says, 'Keltham, please stop helping the Osirian government until they let me earn and spend wealth, like the god you thought you were addressing would have wanted' is making a terrible mistake and if I help them they'll end up in Hell or the Maelstrom."

Zakiya: "No, sir, that's not at all what I'm saying. If you find that person and do what that person asks you'll be doing much better than you are now."

Keltham: "Fair enough.  If you tell me to go collect evidence first I'm not going to not go collect it."

"Fe-Anar or - can you actually just tell me your name again - do either of you know what I'd be liable to find horribly wrong about Lastwall or Mendev?  Like, what's their own variant of horribly perverted gender relations that can't be altered because something very bad will happen if anybody tries?"

Zakiya: "Zakiya, sir."

Prince Fe-Anar: "There are some paladins here to see you if you want and you could ask them about Lastwall."

Zakiya: "I think Lastwall just tries to encourage everyone to be celibate, is that objectionable?"

Keltham: "Depends on how they do the encouraging, and what happens to anyone who defies the system, and if there's any realistic way out for people who don't fit."

"Iomedae seems cool, but I would have thought the same about the god I tried contacting, and look at Osirion.  And now I'm wondering if Asmodeus is nicer than Cheliax... imaginable but improbable, since you'd expect afterlives to move in the direction of gods' preferences compared to their influenced Golarion regions, eg the putatively Axis city I saw in Early Judgment seemed like a brighter place than Osirion, and putative Hell in my vision did not look nicer than Cheliax."

"I'm about to head into Sothis.  Do you have recommendations on evidence I should gather while I'm out, according to you, in order to understand things better?  Do I just randomly sample women on the street and ask them if they'd prefer to be able to own property, get uniformly 'no', maybe try verifying one case with a truthspell to make sure they're not being forced to lie, and then that proves your point?"

Zakiya: "What I would do, sir, is tell them you're a priest of Abadar collecting information on how women in Sothis engage in commerce and trade, because then they won't be bothered you're talking to them, and they won't be as tempted to lie to you. And then I'd ask them, in your household, who does the finances? Why? Would you want your daughters to do the finances in their marriage?  Do you earn money? Does your husband spend your money on drink? If you'd had the right to form your own household and be independent, before you got married, would you've done that? Do you think that would've worked out well? If you had the right to all the money you earned, and your husband had the right to all the money he earned, do you think that'd make things better or worse? If you could change one thing about your husband, what would it be?"

Keltham: "I'll have to think about whether I consider that introduction true and also not misleading."

"I'm also going to have to do that at one remove, like have Fe-Anar ask or something, if you don't want it to be really obvious that I am a priest of Abadar from another dimension.  Because otherwise that's going to be pretty obvious, there's no way I look native even with Glibness running.  I suppose I could say I'm not from anywhere near Garund and have that be true."

"That also brings up another topic, though I suspect it's more of a Fe-Anar topic.  I intend to pay back what Abadar invested in me in all good faith, but do arrangements fall apart in Osirion if I'm no longer a cleric of Abadar?  I'd still be happy to take any number of truthspells if that brings my continuing reliability into question."

Prince Fe-Anar: " - you don't have to stop being a cleric of Abadar if you think we're fixing Osirion too slowly. Many clerics of Abadar think that, and they write papers arguing for how to fix it faster. If you declare you want nothing to do with the church because it's insufficiently committed to fairness and trade, then Abadar will keep giving you cleric spells, that's - breaking from the church in rather the right direction.

I would try to keep in mind that - Osirion is a much, much better place to live than it was a hundred years ago, for everybody, and it's a hard problem we're trying to solve, and everyone has been so excited for your arrival here because you can help us fix it faster."

Keltham: "And I will help you fix it faster, regardless of whether it looks like the ancient inhuman god-thing is something I should go on trading with."

"But the story sure seems to be heading in a direction where I end up having to do all of this while being very alone."

Zakiya: "There's not a story, sir, and if you alienate everybody you won't be able to fix everything."

Keltham: "Asmodia said, under Osirion-supervised truthspell, that the tropes were probably real, that she'd been temporarily turned into a dragon, that a god gave her a permanent +1 Intelligence boost, and that she was in fact asexual - someone who doesn't experience sexual desire - and had ended up as the one who stands back and watches it all."

"Nefreti Clepati said she'd explain things to Ione once they were offscreen."

"And no matter what the in-world rationalization, the fact remains that Golarion contains damage-resistant 'masochists'."

"You'd need some context to get all that.  But I think there's a story."

Keltham is still trying to figure out how to make use of the fact.  Most stories where the characters know they're in a story resist being easily manipulated by the characters, and sometimes the story makes an example out of the first character who tries, or warns them off in a way that discourages anyone from trying again.  'Do not mess with tropes' and all that.

Zakiya: "Was Nefreti trying to convince you, sir, or trying to convince Cheliax?

But that's not the important bit, actually, not really.

You remind me of the Pharaoh. Not this one, his predecessor, his grandfather. He was a good man, as far as that goes. Osirion grew wealthier under his rule, and that's what matters. But no one else was ever properly real to him. When they spoke, they were just delivering the latest development in his story, the story of his rule; when they wept, it was a test to see if he was compassionate. When there was a famine, the gods had cursed him to try his commitment. When his baby died, he was paying for his hubris. 

I suppose I don't have a counterargument, if that's how you want to see the world."

Keltham: "Doesn't sound like a happy character, does it?  But this story is not apparently setting up for me to be happy, and at that point, if you're to go on playing at all, it makes more sense to speedrun the story as quickly as possible, and hope it ends with me and Carissa together again, than drag it out by futilely trying to be happy during the Osirion arc -"

"I guess I don't know that's the obvious strategy the way it would be inside a dath ilani story.  This sure isn't a dath ilani story medium, we couldn't send True Dead people to places where a-priori-unlikely events would happen around them, and the tropes - are not quite right.  A-priori-unlikely: things you wouldn't have expected before you saw them.  There's a more precise technical meaning but it takes math to explain."

"Anyways.  There's only one possible answer to that argument, in dath ilan or anywhere else, if you're reasoning validly - in a way where conclusions follow from premises."

"If the world is a story, I desire to believe it is a story; if the world is not a story, I desire not to believe it is a story; let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

"Whether the belief will make me happy, or unhappy, does not enter into it."

Zakiya: "In a Golarion story, sir, the person who is treating everyone around them as interchangeable faces and every major event that affects billions of people as a message from the gods for them personally isn't just a sad character, they also lose, because when it matters they weren't paying attention to -

- which of the servants stole a princesses jewelry to pawn for a Remove Disease for their sick baby -

- and which of the King's advisors is glad they're here and which is unendorsedly resentful of how much money he lost on the betting markets about them -

- and who has a crush on them and who is painfully reminded of their dead brother and who overheard them talking about contraception and is resisting the urge to immediately shake them down and get an explanation of how to do it, and who wants to help them whatever it takes and who wants to help them so long as it doesn't destroy Sothis and who will keep going with or without them -"

Keltham: "My reluctance to think like I was in a story, my wanting to believe my apparent world was real so I could be happy there, is why Golarion is now facing down a Cheliax which, thanks to me, is scaling up the ability to produce spellsilver and intelligence headbands at a tenth of the current cost."

"Your people are alien to me, I am here with you trying to understand them and when I try the message I get back is 'This is huge and broken and full of children torturing each other and those children don't want you fixing them' and if reality is going to throw tiny detective stories at me on top of that then this so-called reality can burn.  Pick a different protagonist, because there are limits to how much I'm willing to suffer for a world that might not be real at all.  I was supposed to be selfish, it was my thing."

Zakiya: "I see, sir."

Keltham: "I apologize for inflicting my overt emotions on you.  I don't need to be yelling at you, I need to be plotting out a path through time to destroying Asmodeus."

"I think I should be getting along to Sothis, now.  Do you get to keep the five silver or does somebody grab it away from you as soon as I'm not looking anymore?"

Zakiya: "- actually in this specific case I go talk to the pharaoh and then he compensates me whatever the difference is between the five silver you pay me and what I would've charged if I'd known what this was going to be like."

Keltham: "Uh huh.  Well, I'm not going to offer to pay you more, though I got more than five silver worth of value here on my own end, because if you predictably pay upwards then people just bid downwards.  But you get to keep the money?"

Zakiya: "Yes."

Keltham: "Recalculating recent evidential updates in light of this important fact."

"I'll take your advice, and head into Sothis to see if I can talk with a female that Osirion considers a woman, and I will ask them what they'd have Osirion's fate be."

Cheliax: You might, possibly, get an overly rosy picture of how happy and functional a place Cheliax was, on average, if (a) you were inside a fortress being run by Carissa Sevar and (b) you were all carefully presenting a happy functional face to a dath ilani who might notice any subtle departures from that picture.

It is now full two days since both of these conditions abruptly ceased to obtain inside the Fortress of Law.

Ferrer Maillol: People are being idiots.  Would it kill them, would it damn them to Abaddon, to wait a few weeks until Sevar gets back from her punishment, to make any changes to this perfectly good status quo?

Unfortunately, as Maillol knows all too well, if you are not literally at the Worldwound then there are limits to how useful it can be to try to clamp down on friction between your subordinates.  If you let dominance challenges resolve themselves, your subordinates resolve themselves into a stable low-tension arrangement where everyone knows who's stronger and the stronger ones are in charge.  Anything you do to influence affairs away from that creates a higher-tension arrangement which you, as superior, will have to do ongoing work to maintain.

Maillol can foresee Sevar not being incredibly happy with this unfortunate bit of project manager wisdom, nor feeling fully answered by the observation that they are supposed to be less heretical Asmodeans henceforth.  But if Sevar didn't want this to happen the moment she stepped out, she should have spent three rounds casting to prepare for it, frankly.

Jacint Subirachs: The slave population in the Fortress of Law has been forced into unnatural arrangements for quite some time now.  Some minor strife now will provide both a natural release of those tensions, and an excuse to correct any unfortunate qualities of the resulting arrangement when Sevar returns from her recovery vacation with the Queen.

Besides, it will probably be good for Sevar, a start on her new Asmodeanism, if she returns to a situation that requires her to correct her slaves with fire and lash.

Cheliax: Maillol and Subirachs seem to be inclined in different directions about this?  Fascinating.

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: A story you could tell about Project Lawful - not the only story you could tell about Project Lawful, certainly, but a story you could tell about Project Lawful, goes like this:

A man arrived from another world, that had a bizarre math-inspired form of social organization and also a really extensive knowledge of chemical processes and how to improve them. He believed, apparently with complete sincerity, that the two went hand in hand, that the chemistry was a byproduct of the math-inspired form of social organization, though it was invented back in his society's screened-off history. As a result, Cheliax set its people not just to learning chemistry but also to trying to master his world's math-inspired form of social organization.

This was a mistake.

It's not that being interested in the math-inspired form of social organization was a mistake. Hell seems interested; they all serve Hell; that is enough reason to try to grasp it. 

But you can also just take the parts that are about how to iterate on chemical processes, and then get really rich and conquer the world. And in terms of order of operations, that one is really the important one. Especially since no one has figured out how the math-inspired form of social organization is compatible with Asmodeanism, while getting really rich and conquering the world is entirely compatible with Asmodeanism.

Asmodia, not that the Lady Avaricia would contemplate criticizing her in the slightest, is obviously one of the major drivers of this mistake. She was the subject of some kind of divine intervention, cementing everyone's sense that she's Very Important. She's not particularly talented at improving industrial processes. She was utterly necessary, while they had Keltham around, because the math-inspired form of social organization was important for lying to people who rely on it. But she's from the beginning conceived of the whole project as being about ilanism, instead of as being about getting rich and conquering the world.

(Much the same could be said of Sevar, but Avaricia does not say it, for it is said, don't criticize your superiors without a plan to take their job, and she has noticed that Sevar's job involves a lot of being personally tortured by the Queen of Cheliax.)

Cheliax: Did Avaricia say that she was organizing a new faction inside Project Lawful, comprised of the real Asmodeans who clearly deserve to be running things while those open heretics burn in Hell or at least suffer a little under their natural superiors?

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: That's a touch unsubtle, really.

(Yes, yes, commoners have to be idiots, but do they have to be as idiotic as they always are?)

She might say, though, that Sevar did suggest that open heresy was going to be less tolerated, going forward, and Asmodia does not seem to have fully comprehended that reprimand, which suggests the Project might be wanting for competent, loyal, non-heretical leadership.

Who correctly understand the primary objective of the Project as conquering the world for Asmodeus, and who have justifiably been chafing under Asmodia's heretical and also incompetent direction.

Cheliax: Okay!  You're now the 'Church' faction!  Which would make Asmodia's faction the 'Crown' faction!

Ferrer Maillol: SHIT.

Asmodia: They prefer the term 'Sevar loyalists', actually.

Asmodia is not in charge of the Sevar loyalists.  They are sufficiently intelligent to compute their own best interests in unison and move in coordination.

They may not be ilani, as yet, but there is no point in letting themselves fall that far short of ilani.

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: That's an interesting, not Asmodean, not-at-all-functional way to run a project.

She wishes them good luck at it.

Asmodeus's loyalists will be following orders. They'll punish heresy, because actually, heresy is bad, and heresy on this project has distracted it from what should be its singleminded aim on improving chemical processes. Those of them who are officially Asmodia's subordinates will obey her, because that's what Asmodeans do, until such a time as they can arrange a transfer to work under a real Asmodean and not a heretic.

Asmodia: It's an excellent bet that when Sevar returns to define what new behavior patterns on Project Lawful will be considered heretical, she will not walk back what she previously said about needing an Asmodeanism based on truth in order for Cheliax to successfully compete against the non-Asmodean rest of Golarion.  Sevar may impose new tyranny, possibly walk back her old edict about torture, but she's pretty unlikely to withdraw the project of an Asmodeanism based on truth.

The Sevar-loyalist ilani, then, will come right out and say the truth here, as Avaricia no doubt considers terribly boorish.

Actual truth:  Avaricia is making a play to steal Project resources from Sevar.

Actual truth:  Sevar is the Chosen of Asmodeus and the favored of Abrogail Thrune, and anybody loyal to the Church or Crown would be loyal to Sevar.  Asmodia is in fact loyal to neither, but she does feel that she owes Sevar a lot of loyalty, for now and unless Sevar changes.

Actual truth:  This sort of internal backbiting - erupting the instant there is, not a power vacuum, but a power slight depression - will, if the chel ilani can't get it under control, cause Cheliax to lose.  Or are they under the impression that dath ilani projects behave like this?

Asmodia would be pretty willing to sit back and eat cookies about this, so long as Avaricia and her faction of power-hungry lunatics didn't do anything to interfere with the real work being carried on by Sevar loyalists.

However, Avaricia having now wantonly divided the project's loyalties and created internal conflict to serve her own purposes of gaining power, Asmodia rather suspects that some time-wasting conflicts will be inevitable.  She will document every instance of those to be charged against the account of Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer upon Carissa Sevar's return.

They could have done Something Else Which Was Not That, but alas, it takes two to Cooperate in a cooperation-defection dilemma.  And if Cheliax cannot manage to cooperate with itself internally, well, it is a moot point whether Cheliax could have won; because what Cheliax will do, then, could not really be called trying.

Also Avaricia isn't one of Keltham's fated love interests and favored of the tropes, so, kind of a foregone conclusion here anyways.

Asmodia will close by noting that if Avaricia was actually doing a better job of serving Asmodeus she'd have Pilar Pineda on her side, so, nobody go pretending that what they're doing over there is really serving Asmodeus in any way.

Pilar : Leave Pilar fucking out of this.  She can't do anything unusual unless it serves Cayden Cailean's and Asmodeus's interests simultaneously, and somehow Pilar doubts that will be the case here.

Curse of Laughter: Not actually true!  Pilar doesn't need Snack Service's agreement to use the powers of her oracular curse!  It's Pilar's curse, after all.

Pilar : Since fucking when?

Curse of Laughter: Since fucking always!  That one time with Sevar you did try to plan your own parties, you could tell whether they'd go through or not, remember?  Pilar just got too angry at her curse to try using her own powers for herself.

Pilar : Does that mean Pilar can now sweep up paladins without having to throw them a going-away party -

Curse of Laughter: No, that requirement is part of her curse!  It wouldn't be much of a curse otherwise!  But the part where Snack Service only invokes the curse's powers when that simultaneously serves the interests of Cayden Cailean and Asmodeus - that part is all Snack Service.  Pilar can act on her own, if she chooses.

Pilar : ...great.  Well, Pilar is going to report all this and then do whatever her superiors tell her about that.

Curse of Laughter: Maillol or Subirachs?  Which orders Pilar gets will totally depend on who she asks for orders!  Just saying!

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: Lady Avaricia is very busy with training her chemists and doesn't really have time to be ranted at by an idiot child, but if Asmodia thinks that something to do with how the chemistry project is running is undermining Asmodia's authority, that seems like a very serious problem, and Lady Avaricia will of course obey any instructions from her superiors to cease doing whatever it is they assess as undermining Asmodia's authority. The way in which Asmodeans - which is what they are, of course - do Something Else Which Is Not That is that they obey their superiors. 

If Asmodia is having trouble persuading her superiors that Lady Avaricia is doing something wrong, she should consider the possibility that her superiors don't think Lady Avaricia is doing something wrong, and even the possibility that her superiors think that Asmodia is doing something wrong and this will be a useful corrective.

She can't really think what Asmodia's superiors might think Asmodia is doing wrong, though there was that time, two days ago, when Asmodia told an audience of dozens of foreigners she was not an Asmodean and was a potential defector. 

It seems like maybe, to whatever extent Asmodia's authority has been undermined here, it's by the rumors about that. Maybe Asmodia could lay the rumors to rest by pledging herself to the service of Asmodeus and repenting of her past idiocies.

And then, of course, they could do Something Else Which Is Not This.

Asmodia: Avaricia is obviously being given enough rope to hang herself, probably on Sevar's previous orders to Maillol since neither of those two are stupid.

Asmodia is happy to go back to work.  She is just making it very clear that the inevitable explosion which follows this, did not need to happen, and is Avaricia's fault.  It won't be Avaricia who does it with her own hands, they will obviously try to engineer matters to make it appear to be the fault of Sevar loyalists, but it'll be Avaricia's fault because that part was utterly predictable.  Witness Asmodia predicting it right now.

Everyone knows in the reality-handling section of their brain that this is actually true, and the Queen and Most High will know it, right?  Great.  Now let's go continue with what we were previously doing, until the conflict Avaricia created starts causing delays and wasted time, beyond what Asmodia and Avaricia have spent already.

Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer: There is, actually, something dath ilani about assuming that All People Capable of Reason will agree with you and your assessment of a situation and therefore you don't need to be loyal or remember your place or even deliver an actual victory on the one task you've been assigned.

She doesn't mean that in a complimentary way.

Asmodia: Go back to hanging yourself, tropeless side character.

Security: This Security has not gotten laid in the last two months, ever since he was pulled onto the Project as a very reliable-seeming Asmodean to monitor girls at risk of defection.  Maillol thought his sex partner was too much of a liability with Keltham around.

So he asked the moment Keltham was gone!  Is it now acceptable for him to have Raise Dead cast on that very special person, where he spends most of his salary on Malediction and Raise Dead to keep them in Hell whenever they're not being used by him?  He's currently paying to have Gentle Repose cast on their corpse once per week, so he doesn't have to pay even more for Resurrection.

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol acknowledges this Security has been doing a competent job, unlike many of his fellows.  Maillol would usually accept a request like that from a subordinate like this one.  But things like that are not deserved, in a tyranny; and the unfortunate fact is that Sevar still has some lingering issues about men and women that might be triggered by being around a situation like this.

Security: This Security has thought of that!  Once he understood the situation on Project Lawful, he had his last partner's corpse disposed of, they can stay in Hell forever now, and he got a new male partner Maledicted so he could have a non-Sevar-triggering male plaything whenever Keltham finally left!

(This Security most enjoys sex with very broken people who can't talk, who can barely manage to do anything, but are absolutely desperate to please him in any way they can still manage, so they won't get sent back to Hell again for longer.  Sue him, okay?  Everybody's got their special thing.)

Ferrer Maillol: Okay, fine then.  Make sure you keep it where it won't make a mess or disturb the girls.  If one day you find it gone with only a cookie left behind, don't say Maillol didn't warn you.

Security: Yay!

Ferrer Maillol: Yes, even Maillol is slightly skeezed out by this.  He doesn't have moral objections, obviously, it's just, this kink is not his kink.

But if you ask Egorian to send you extremely reliably loyal Asmodeans, you're going to get some people like that.

Cheliax: Yep!  Project Lawful definitely now has some people like that.

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Rise, and be seated. 

What did you think of him?"

Zakiya: "We have a problem, your majesty. I don't know what problem, exactly, and it'd be much less of a problem if I did. If he were one of the girls I'd reassign him to the winter palace and get him something - small and concrete, to take care of, maybe a songbird - a familiar, if he had the knack for reading a scroll....."

Merenre: "He said he thinks he'll be recovered by tomorrow."

Zakiya: "He doesn't really feel that anything is real and I don't think I even see that improving. It's not exactly something one can persuade him of. Maybe tomorrow he'll be in more of a mood for strategic planning, but the thing that feels wrong....I would be very surprised, if it were no longer wrong tomorrow. 

He's not a cruel man. Maybe Cheliax was trying to make him Evil that way but if so that's a fact about them, more than about him."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "How would you do it?"

Zakiya: "How would I make Keltham Evil, your majesty? Not with girls he could hit. I - 

- I'm not sure I should speak of this, actually."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Because it's critical of Our office? We'll bear it."

Zakiya: "He wants to be surrounded by happy people who are grateful for him, and not damaged people who desperately need things from him. He wants things to make sense and happen for reasons. He doesn't want to do his best and be hated and resented for it. 

He wants something that his world, maybe, really could offer, but Golarion, when it offers it, is lying. 

He said, 'if reality is going to throw tiny detective stories at me on top of that then this so-called reality can burn', and reality does, in fact, do that - keep having more detail, where you don't want it, where you aren't grateful for it, and so he's going to decide that it should burn."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Well, then, we'll pay him to not burn it."

Merenre: "With what treasury."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I don't know! Cheliax's, if necessary! But We're not going to - not going to let Asmodeus have permanently destroyed something this important."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Is there - some thing we could do on the women's policy front, that'd be helpful -"

Zakiya: "I think the things that Osirion might contemplate, your majesty, are very different from the things Keltham might desire. Part of that is that he's accustomed to a society where, I think, there aren't really any women, just people who like dressing up as them. And part of it is - it felt like there was some important disconnect, when we were discussing the differences between Osirion and Absalom - like he thought that in the long run if you didn't make men care for their children it wouldn't make any difference in how many children died - I should've asked, I didn't understand -"

Merenre: "I think it's some kind of heredity-theory, like, say the propensity to abandon your family is heritable, and say you spent ten thousand years letting men decide whether to abandon their families or not, and say men's children starve if they abandon them, then eventually you'd have a population descended entirely from men who of their own free and voluntary will don't abandon their families."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "When you find yourself making a face like that just speak your mind, Zakiya."

Zakiya: "I don't think Keltham, when he said what he said, was proposing that we spend a thousand years doing that. He's too impatient. - your majesty, I'm afraid that it could be done in two generations, if you were harsh enough about killing all the babies whose fathers abandoned them, and that Keltham'll propose that and you'll do it."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Well, We probably will, if Keltham asks us to; I'll offer you no false comfort there. But I doubt that the first answers of a young man to a puzzle he's never encountered before are also where he'd put money on a prediction market, once he's recovered some."

Zakiya: "What if he doesn't recover, your majesty! Not tomorrow, not the next day, not in a year! What if he'll only ever see us as an annoying set of puzzles where everyone's horrible for no reason!"

Merenre: "You can bet yourself it won't work, if you think it won't work."

Zakiya: "I don't know if it won't work, my lord, I just don't want you to do it."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "It strikes me as an increasingly dangerous situation, that I haven't spoken with Keltham, that he won't speak with me. There's - some confusion here, and I don't think it'd survive a real effort to uncover it."

Merenre: "He seemed firmly opposed."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I have to say, I thought once he was no longer the prisoner of the forces of Hell things would get easier.

I also thought they'd invade. Especially with Keltham presently very unstable, it seems a better time than next month will be. Why haven't they? - you're dismissed, Zakiya."

Zakiya: "Yes, your majesty."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Nobody's going to kill all the abandoned children until I've sat down with Keltham and ensured that he and I make all the exact same predictions about what will happen and why."

Zakiya: "I'm glad, your majesty."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Do you have odds for me, that Keltham will be all right in a couple of weeks?"

Merenre: "Predicting things about people is terrible, you know that? I don't know what class of people to use for comparison. I don't know how much to weight what he says, or that he's an alien, or that Father seems to get along with him. And I haven't the slightest idea what he'll find when he asks the people of Sothis what should be done with Osirion. 

If you want to bet he'll be fine, though, I'll give you 4:1."

Keltham: Next event:  Looking at Sothis.  Going really outside, in his new world, for the first time.

Have they got an Amulet of Proof Against Detection for him, yet?  Actually they should just have some very high-level caster throw Nondetection on him, if he's going outside the dome, but separately Keltham wants such an amulet loaned to him while he is inside Osirion teaching its people and holding up his end of Abadar's implicit bargain.

lintamande: Yep! They have an amulet, they have a powerful Nondetection, they have had eight decoy Kelthams wander the streets of Sothis so far today and none of them have been kidnapped, and he'll be shadowed by enough guards to likely get him to safety or death if anything happens. 

Prince Fe-Anar: "Do you want me to come along? I should be disguised, if so, as I'll throw off all your experimental results."

Keltham: "If you're interested in being along even if I'm not speaking Baseline - then yes, although -"

"You'd throw off my experimental results, if you were not disguised, because people would be scared of you, and would expect you to report them to Governance which would then - carry out threats against them, punish them, if they said something critical of Governance?"

(It's a much longer sentence in Baseline than it would be in Taldane; words like 'punishment' are not just long but jarring and ugly in their internal rhythm.  Whoever designed this language evidently didn't want people thinking thoughts like this; or maybe just wanted people to notice when they did.)

Prince Fe-Anar: "Well, they might be scared of that, but even if I were carrying a big sign that said 'there will be no retaliation for insulting me', they'd hesitate to speak critically of the pharaoh in front of me, because it'd seem rude. I think for most people the rudeness would loom much larger than the risk they'd get into some kind of formal trouble, really. It's not illegal to criticize the pharaoh, and we don't punish things that aren't against the law, but it's still generally not done, to speak ill of someone in front of their relatives."

Keltham: "...I am still going to need some promises protecting the people talking to me.  That either their words are not being passed on by any route, or that they are not being identified and that no effort is being made to identify them after the fact.  Plus an explicit statement about nothing bad happening to anybody who talks to us, as a result of their talking to us, period.  If we're using disguises to make people feel like they're safe, by hiding facts they'd otherwise worry about, they need to be very very safe - if we're ripping that decision and calculation out of their hands, and putting it in ours."

Prince Fe-Anar: Fe-Anar beams at him. "Yes, yes. You'll want that from the church, really, not from me, or I suppose I can say it too if you'd like but it's not like I'd be badgering them afterwards. Nothing bad will happen to people who talk to us. If somehow something does happen as a consequence of them talking to us we'll pay them back for it, assuming we reasonably can, like if Cheliax teleports in right that moment and blows up the whole square we won't be able to afford to resurrect everyone but we can give their family survivors' benefits. I won't identify them, or try to identify them afterwards."

Keltham: "Funny, isn't it, how Cheliax presumably knows exactly how Abadaran theology works, or at least, they can read your books, and yet - didn't pose like this, to me.  I guess they must not have understood - or maybe just didn't think they could pull off that pose."

"All right, let's get some explicit assurances and then have a look Outside.  At what passes for reality."

"Oh, and is there - any sort of explicit subset of Osirian that I should be using for talking to Intelligence 10 people?  I really don't have any idea how that works."

lintamande: Sothis in the middle of the daytime is miserably hot. Everyone who can avoid being outside has done so. This leaves rich adventurers and merchants who can afford Endure Elements, and people who are poor but don't have the affordance to make it to shade for the day. Almost everyone is in full-coverage fabric, except small children, who are generally naked. There are a lot of stray cats. 

Keltham: Keltham will seem calmer, maybe even a little friendlier, while he's wandering around outside carefully not inflicting his emotions on other people.

Keltham will furthermore note to himself internally - especially now that he's got the higher-powered Nondetection layered over his amulet - that the real him seems to be calmer, now that he's trying to give the emotional impression of a calm person.  Being outwardly upset and wounded is hazardous to your insides, apparently, even when the upset and wounding are drawing on something real; there may be more wisdom than he understood at first, in dath ilan's usual practice of not showing off your injuries.

As for Sothis, yes, Keltham has grasped the difference between rich people who can afford Endure Elements and non-rich people who can't, since it's so visually distinct.  Keltham's not going to try a nonrich woman until he has experience talking to people that Osirion considers full human beings, though.

Any non-busy merchants selling something cheap enough that Keltham could trivially buy it, and the profit on the item would be enough to repay them for some idle chat while Keltham shopped?

lintamande: Plenty of those! Does he want fish? Live animals? Crocodile leather? Bread? Sandals? Newspapers?

Keltham: ...newspaper, sure, let's try one of those.  If he ends up not wanting to cart it around, he can always throw it away and buy another one later.

What's this newspaper shop like?

lintamande: It's got a teenage boy maybe Keltham's own age manning it, periodically dumping water from a barrel on the corner of the stand on his own head to keep cool.

The newspaper appears to mainly report on the chariot racing results and the adventures of a foreign correspondant in the Wild Mwangi Jungles Battling Savages. There's also a personal ads section.