Merenre: "I hope that is sufficient to resolve the confusion."

Keltham: "Anyways.  There's a lot of obvious things we can review to make sure we're on the same page about how obvious they are.  Weapons research restricted so Cheliax stays further behind on that, focusing on large explosives to use in key moments, because if we make a lot of smaller weapons Cheliax can capture those and copy them.  Scry defenses, truthspells.  Medical techniques, which Cheliax may care less about developing for itself, they may not come with immediate military payoffs but they can be sold to countries and individuals to fund the Project."

"Things that aren't obvious... I require you to not restrict access to me by, say, an emissary of Razmiran, you can truthspell them to check malicious intent to harm your valuable knowledge-source, but I need to be able to talk to them and establish Asmodean trading relationships with them.  If no Lawful Evil countries offer to work with me, then I may need to step outside the Dome long enough to use a Sending, and you can guard me while I do that if you think that's in your own interests.  I'm going to need some resources for doing my own thing, and you cannot be my trading partner on those or be helpful about it, just, not hinder me."

"I did not write Project Lawful's contract with Cheliax with this exact outcome in mind, but I did write it with the thought that I might have to leave and set up in another country, and while I tried to be fair to them under those circumstances I did not want to let an adversary be unfair to me.  Cheliax needs, for example, to set a consistent value on the spellsilver produced using Project-derived technology, to be credited to Project earnings, some of which I control; and if they set that price too low to reduce my apparent earnings, I can buy spellsilver from them at a fixed premium to that price, up to a fraction of the total amount produced.  Same with headbands produced on Carissa's assembly line.  We need to check if that aspect of the contract actually goes through, and get started on holding them to it; if they argue, we are supposed to agree on a priest of Irori to judge the dispute, or if we can't agree on a priest, the highest priest of Irori in Golarion, whoever that is, is supposed to send us a judge.  They will try for all contractually allowed delay, which makes this a potentially critical subpath, I should not have delayed two days on setting this in motion."

Merenre: "We've already checked all your contracts; I'll have the lawyers who looked at them write up a demand letter to be submitted to Cheliax."

Keltham: "There were things I wanted to do for the women of Osirion, but - I'm not sure there's time, now.  If it doesn't slow down the Project, it would be nice to have some new industrial or manufacturing centers be made out of Osirian women who want to own their own property and not be part of the current gender system.  If it would slow things down, it might have to wait."

"My sense is that the policy prediction market for ideas like these is, in fact, 'Merenre', which I'm not sure actually invalidates the basic civilizational guidelines about steering using policy prediction markets.  But if the policy prediction market thinks it helps Osirion's women, and doesn't end with more of them in Hell or the Maelstrom - then, I might ask for things like that, not that help myself, but that help others.  If they can't have a refuge where they can go to own their own incomes - then, something about Intelligence scans and literacy or, some other promise like that, when and if Osirion has money."

Merenre: "We'll send everyone to school, once we're rich enough. I think once women can earn their own income sufficient to support themselves a lot of things will change that would be very hard to change before that."

Keltham: "I - it's not really urgent, but I'm going to say it, now, because now is when I'm thinking it -"

"You cannot become a Civilization like this, Merenre.  I'm not even sure you can stay aligned to Abadar like this, once you realize what you're doing that's not Abadaran, though since I'm still a cleric of Abadar myself the rules are apparently laxer than I would have believed."

"But - even if you fixed that, made Osirion the way Abadar would have you make it, if He understood you, if He could tell you how to do it according to His math -"

"I've come to suspect, that maybe there isn't such a thing as a Lawful Neutral dath ilan that still holds itself together.  Not only because of what I learned of Cheliax, but also because of what I saw of Osirion.  Maybe in Axis, with Abadar holding it all together more tightly, and people transforming themselves to not be quite so human, a Lawful Neutral civilization could work.  But in mortal dath ilan, in someplace like Golarion -"

"The part where people care about each other, is actually important."

Merenre: "There are - goblins, and ghouls, and drow, and stranger things still, and I don't - think we can build a Civilization based on caring about each other, when we don't, in fact, all care about each other. If there were only humans it'd be different. 

But - I'll keep that in mind."

Keltham: "...as will I."

"I should not be presented to other countries as being reliable on account of being a cleric of Abadar.  I think I've already warned several people about this, but consider the warning repeated:  I am not sure how long my cleric bond with Abadar is going to hold up.  I do not, necessarily, object to having cleric powers while I am a guest in Osirion carrying out my part of a deal with Abadar, it keeps me safer while I'm here and I can just - not use those powers for anything except Project matters - but I'm surprised that I am still a cleric of Abadar, and I'm not sure I'm going to be one at the end of the week or even when the Project kicks off tomorrow.  If I am, fine, but don't represent me to those countries that way."

Merenre: " - if they ask me a direct question I will not lie to them but I can explain that you do not want to be regarded in that fashion. 

I think Abadar expects mortals to - have a lot that's not-Abadaran in them. What matters is how you choose to conduct yourself, not what you - realize, or think of, or wonder."

Keltham: "Then it may have lasted this long only because I am still unsure of some matters and have not, really, chosen them yet."

Merenre: "I, uh, hope you give yourself some time to recover and rest and make sure you're not acting out of - pain and rage at what was done to you by Cheliax, righteous as that pain and rage is."

Keltham: Keltham will continue to iron out details for a while, though not so long that his glibness runs out.

He will then stagger off to his bedroom, looking like he is trying to rush everything under time pressure while not even remotely recovered from his Cheliax Adventure.

It's even true.  He's not recovered, he is trying to rush.  Keltham is very much drawing on real emotions, real horror, real distress, to give the impression he gives; when he excuses himself, he goes to cry real tears.  When he wants to find something angry-sounding to say, within himself, he does not need to look hard.

The part where stress-induced entropy is invoked to make sense of his seemingly suboptimal decisions, as if they were random noise requiring no further explanation except his upset-ness and a handful of apparent verbal explanations stitching them into a purported reasoning pattern?

The part where he's apparently just rushing to conclusions out of pain and rage, and ignoring all the obvious thoughts about better meta-level process that a reader would be rolling their eyes and thinking about, if they read a book character like that?

Nobody out of dath ilan would buy it for a minute.  They can't train perfect reasoning but they can at least train not that.

Golarion, hopefully, doesn't know any better.

Asmodia: Keltham, when he wanted to stop and really think about things, had the luxury of writing notes to himself in code.

Asmodia does not dare do that.  She has some shielding from Detect Thoughts; it doesn't mean she can evade truthspells if somebody gets concerned enough, if Security pokes in and wants to know what she's already written.  All she can do is close her eyes, and try to think in an organized way.

With Project Lawful taking on so many new attempted recruits (mostly by Avaricia), cognitive enhancement spells are at even more of a premium than before.  That's good, in a way, because it means that Asmodia has at least one Cunning and Splendour hung of her own.  She doesn't need to make a possibly revealing request of Security, or wait to call over one of the resident third-circle Enhancer Monkeys (as they are not-so-affectionately called by their users).

Asmodia can cast Cunning and Splendour on herself, and for a few minutes she will be almost what she was before, wearing the Crown of the Most High.  More so, if she really thinks and tries to use such ilani technique as she possesses, instead of using that time to work only on problems outside herself.

Greater Asmodia: It is clear, looking back at her own actions, that she has been behaving in a way that Sevar would call 'muddled'.  And there's a very obvious explanation for it, which is that she does hate Cheliax, didn't want Cheliax to win, that everyone in the self-proclaimed 'Church faction' distrusting her on that account was in fact being pretty reasonable about that; and Asmodia herself did not face up to that, did not know her own reason for staying and could not clearly optimize around that reason.

She wishes, in retrospect, that Pilar had demanded from her earlier, to know Asmodia's reason why she'd do good work for a country she hates, and pierced past her first answer.  Asmodia might have respected the question, the demand, if it came from Pilar.

Greater Asmodia: Cheliax does not, in fact, need roads right now, according to the Queen and Most High's actual probable priorities.  There's a version of the story Asmodia could tell, did tell, about how she's trying to figure out something genuinely new that Keltham didn't know at all, to challenge her own ilanism.  But the real reason was that her mind considered medicine and electrical motors and explosives, and flinched away from everything that could help Cheliax win a near-term war.

Greater Asmodia: ...it's not, in a way, the wrong meta-level decision, to think in such a confused way, if you're still afraid of truthspells and letting something slip outside your mind's shield.  It gets the job done of not helping Cheliax too much, while still lying to yourself enough to survive another day in Cheliax.

But the time for that is past.

Greater Asmodia: Even the part of the story she told herself at first, that she was staying in Golarion to be with Korva, to protect Korva -

(for Asmodia does not know anything of plans by Abrogail Thrune, Korva has not dared speak of any of those to anyone, has never dared say aloud to Asmodia that the Queen claimed to have given her protection)

- is simplistic and facile; it is impossible, in retrospect, that Asmodia's goals would make sense even given that.  She never once asked herself if there was some other way to be with Korva, or protect Korva.

It is not that past-Asmodia was chasing a different goal, coherently, without knowing that goal to herself.

She was just muddled.

Greater Asmodia: What was really in the muddle?

Some real loyalty to Sevar, the first person to ever make a bargain with Asmodia and keep it and protect her literally at all, from Cheliax, to offer Asmodia anything that wasn't pain that was anything she really wanted even if that thing was to help find an approved way for herself to stop existing.

Some real pride in her job, that she chased, blindly, by appearing to herself to continue to do that job.  Some real pride in her position, her role...

...maybe mostly it was something like inertia and continuing on where she was, not putting in the effort to think of things, change things, that she just kept on reacting to them as they came.  Trying to hold onto everything she had and wanted, all at once, defending it in local reactions as it was locally threatened.

Maybe past-Asmodia even feared, on some level, that if she reconsidered things, she would conclude that she should not stay in Cheliax and help it.  And then, past-Asmodia feared, if she concluded so, she would lose her job and her Korva, and confront a remaining terror about whether she would not receive the Gardens again when she went back to Hell.

Fearing instinctively the outcome of her own thoughts, she did not think.  And this is muddled, for if Asmodia came to the conclusion that she must do something she really should not do, Asmodia could always just not do it; or, if she really should do it, she ought to think of it and know it.

It is the kind of muddle you get into, when the pieces of yourself do not trust each other in the way that Lawful gods and ilani trust each other.

Greater Asmodia: But even muddled past-Asmodia must have known, even before Pilar told her it was her last piece of cake and Asmodia accepted that oracle's prophecy knowingly, she must have known that it was time for her to die, at the point where Pilar offered to protect her, and Asmodia told Pilar to protect Yaisa and Korva instead.

Obviously Asmodia doesn't care about Yaisa, she was just trying to conceal the real point, which was to get Pilar to protect Korva.

She has done, then, what she needs to do, before she goes; is this Asmodia satisfied with that new strategy's cognitively-reachable-optimality, if not happy with it?

Greater Asmodia: Is there any better way than this?  Has Asmodia missed some way to protect herself, to win this whole awful game for the Sevar loyalists and emerge triumphant, at the cost of a day of pain?

...Asmodia still isn't seeing it, and this obviously isn't the first time she's thought about that topic at +4/+6/+4.  If Elias Abarco did know a way for her to win, he obviously wouldn't tell her; and if Ferrer Maillol knew, he probably would.

Greater Asmodia: Is there remaining fear, remaining hope, remaining thoughts left unthinked?

Greater Asmodia: Should she try to - escape within Golarion, rather than to the Gardens?

Should she try to sabotage the Project before escaping?

...if she were Good, perhaps, but that way lies too much prospect of pain if she fails.

Asmodia does not like pain.  She does not like submission.  That is not a good combination of traits in Cheliax, when the only way to reduce the pain is submitting.  She was reprieved of that choice, for a time, by Sevar's experimental mercy; and now Asmodia has grown unused to pain and submission, and also suffering and horror and despair.

That, in a way, is why all of this is happening.  Asmodia could maybe remember the person she was in Ostenso academy, find it within herself to give up and lose hope and endure, if she had no Gardens to flee to, but Asmodia - does not want to hurt any more.

The prospect of staying and trying to sabotage Cheliax terrifies her, if she's caught; she will hurt, then.  Asmodia does not want that, and so she will keep an implicit bargain she made within herself, to be able to think at all, to trust herself to think and be trusted by herself, and not force herself to do that.

And are there more thoughts left unspoken inside herself?

Greater Asmodia: The terror that she is failing her sponsors, and for that will be cast out from the Gardens of Erecura to be pained and shattered in Hell.

The terror that she is failing her sponsors, who are trusting her and relying on her for purposes she doesn't know.

The terror that she is betraying someone, somewhere, who cares about her, who helped her.

Greater Asmodia: And the thought comes to Asmodia, then, that when she first encountered this great mystery, in the Gardens, she had almost nothing out of dath ilan within herself, knew so much less about even the general situation than Asmodia knows now; and past-Asmodia took it then as a Great Mystery into herself, and never really reconsidered that decision.

She should ask the question again.

She should list out all the possibilities, the way Keltham did, the first time he really tried at all to pierce the Conspiracy - well, to be fair to him, the first time he tried to pierce the right Conspiracy, having narrowed possibilities far down enough and been prompted by his environment to ask a solvable question instead of unsolvable ones.  She should categorize, analyze, as best as she can without paper -

Greater Asmodia: And just as it was with Keltham, Asmodia doesn't get very far into listing possibilities, before she sees, now that she knows so much more than she did then.

It's obvious if you understand decision theory.

Greater Asmodia: There's so much else she doesn't understand, like everything to do with Snack Service, Asmodia does not know at all what Cayden Cailean is doing here, or how this all ends.

But she knows who both cared about her and had the power to rescue her from Hell, and she knows what else that Will wills: to protect everyone on Project Lawful - well, maybe not Avaricia, possibly, or Maillol or Subirachs, or a fair number of Securities.  But most of them.

And Asmodia too.

It would not want her to suffer, that Will, to live on in Cheliax in terror, unless there was a lot she could accomplish by doing that; and Asmodia doesn't see it.

If anything, the further effects of her departure, if she does it right, will protect them all better than anything she could possibly do by fighting on here.

Greater Asmodia: She is content with her decision, then.  Is there still fear?  Of course there is, because all of this is uncertain, and she is only a small mortal thing to face Reality with nothing but her own mind to help her decode it.  Terrible things could still happen to her if she makes one wrong move.

But you never stop having that feeling while you are still in Cheliax at all, and Asmodia is well capable of acting despite that.

And it feels obvious, on an intuitive level, that she is not going to have any better ideas.  So she may, perhaps, prepare more spells tomorrow and think this through again; but she feels -

- finished.

Asmodia: Asmodia opens her eyes, and ever so slightly, smiles.

Keltham: Keltham goes back to his bedroom, tired, not able yet to sleep.

He - should probably go ahead and think of things, now, he is getting past the point where he feels like he can navigate sensibly while avoiding thinking in words.  Keltham is past the Commune and will not use that spell with Abadar again, which was a danger point; he's had the conversation with Merenre, which hopefully goes some way towards Governance arriving at the desired wrong explanations for things -

- he can't not think in words, any more, this is too tiring; and also once he starts talking to foreign delegates tomorrow, he will actually lose some of his ability to back up if he makes a mistake.  Everything he's told Governance so far could be backed out tomorrow morning; if Keltham starts signing contracts he can no longer do that.

It's time to think explicitly.  Was arguably already time to think before this, right after the Commune.  Arguably Keltham should have done the Commune earlier - the trouble with not thinking in words is that then you can't be very strategic, including about when it's time to start thinking in words again.

Keltham: If you forget all of the supposed reasons for things, and look only at Keltham's apparent behavior, it looks like this - if you are looking at only the important things, and not being distracted by anything else:

- He does not want to come into unfiltered contact with people with high Sense Motive.- He does not even want Iomedae reading his mind.- He has warned them to expect his bond with Abadar to be broken.- He is avoiding friendly trading relationships with Osirion, and only trading with Lawful Evil counterparties warned to expect Asmodean behavior.- He tried to establish plausible-sounding reasons why he might want to shift alignment to Neutral Evil.

dath ilan: On the plus side, if Keltham has actually gotten away with this, it settles a long-standing literary debate in dath ilan - about whether dath ilani dealing with aliens, who exhibit apparently elaborate reasons to like totally break off friendships and warm trading relations with aliens they now need to invade or sabotage or something, so as not to betray warm relationships, could in fact plausibly fool aliens that way!

Where the two positions are roughly:

(1)  "There's lots of plausible reasons for behaviors!  Look how hard it is for humans to decode other humans sometimes!  The aliens aren't going to zoom in on exactly the right thing unless their own psychology is configured in a way that zooms in on the same answer to the same question!  They haven't read our books, and wouldn't know it was a standard trope!"

(2)  "Don't tell me the aliens haven't read our books, aliens you could have warm trading relationships with in the first place would come up with the same trope in their own books!  They'd see it immediately just like we would, and be like, 'Well there's a very standard tropey behavior you're trying to come up with a smokescreen to hide.'  Stop postulating aliens who are stupider than you are just so the plot goes through!"

Keltham: Anyways.

Keltham did not invent his 'literary symmetry' theory about being forced to betray anyone who was nice to him, out of sheer trope-reading.  Or rather, not out of trying to read that trope.

There's a much more object-level trope that started to seem, after slightly more research, like it might really obviously apply here:

Needing to destroy all of the ancient gods, and leave only the formerly-human/formerly-mortal gods - who are currently enslaved by their past bargains, and not allowed to help Keltham in destroying their masters.

Possibly, needing to destroy all of the gods period, if even Iomedae has sworn the wrong oaths; or just, there not being any good way to destroy only some gods, if there's some clever way to kill them all at once, and no clever way to leave Iomedae out of it.

Keltham: It doesn't make things fit, doesn't cause everything to click perfectly into place, does not cause everything Snack Service did (in the light of other information Ione already knew out of Cheliax) to make perfect sense.

...Sometimes you go with the wrong theory that is making some right predictions, if that theory suggests precautions you need to take right now before doing anything irreversible.

Keltham would, obviously, try to spare Abadar from the slaughter of the ancient gods, if that didn't come at great cost to mortals.  But if you can extrapolate from the kind of story this is, it could definitely be the kind of story that requires him to kill Abadar, trading partner of Asmodeus.  That sure is a kind of story that Keltham could be in, given how his life is going.

It's not certain, hardly.  In fact it would be surprising if the story let him decode things correctly and that quickly, unless the character viewpoint has now shifted off him entirely and the rest of this story is about Carissa.

But sometimes you have to operate even a wrong theory that makes some right predictions, in order to avoid doing things that might be wrong and irreversible according to that theory.

Keltham: It's weird how Rovagug cultists are still a thing, given that you'd expect the gods to cooperate on stomping them.  Mortals are just opaque to gods unless the gods spend lots of effort?  Why not pay Nethys to tell you about them?

Suppose, though, that something about Rovagug isn't just a Prophecy blindspot, but some sort of greater attentional blindspot for the gods.

Also in terms of trying to read ahead in the plot, Asmodeus letting Rovagug out of Its vault, under some circumstances, suggests that Rovagug can be directed, possibly, yes, in exchange for being let out of Its vault?  If Rovagug is a kind of thing that can do trades at all, then it's a good trade to be let out of your vault, eat all the ancient gods, and then go back into the vault.  It beats not being let out of the vault at all.

Keltham is not doing that tomorrow morning, very very obviously.

But he is setting up possibilities in advance for moving to within one alignment step of Rovagug so Keltham can be Its cleric.  If, to be clear, that later starts to look like a good idea.

Keltham: Obviously, a plan like that, if that's actually how things look after more research, would stand a fair chance of destroying this multiverse.

dath ilan: This about dath ilan:

They think their negative utilitarians were pretty neuroatypical people, and possibly committing some sort of reasoning error in several cases if not all cases, for wanting to destroy dath ilan.  Sure, it's got some problems, but the problems aren't that bad, most people are retroactively glad they exist; it would be worth doing this forever, even if the Future never got any better.

It's considered mildly infohazardous, and you have to go onto the Ill-Advised Network, to find anybody arguing about how bad a world would have to be, exactly, in order for 'well let's destroy that world' to be the correct tack according to whoever is talking.

Sort of an odd thing to debate, in a way, considering that a lot of opinion differences probably have to do with differences of utilityfunction.  But sometimes, after all, people end up valuing different things after arguing about them.  So the debates continue and of course never ever settle; and do moderate amounts of psychological damage along the way, on average, except for the 15% of people who actually come out of it feeling better, not in a particularly predictable way.  Hence the Ill-Advisement.

dath ilan: Nobody would bother having debates about Golarion.

dath ilan: 30% of the population going into endless-torture afterlives is way, way, way, WAY over the line even BEFORE considering how many of them were children.

dath ilan: You would obviously prefer to fix Golarion, especially if you weren't sure where any isekaied people would end up.

dath ilan: But if you are a mortal put into a position like this, by something like Pharasma that didn't bother to consult any mortals about it, because She thought the mortals' objections couldn't hurt Her, and you have a chance to kill Pharasma and no particularly better options than that, you kill Pharasma.

This is a very short sentence in Baseline, metaphorically speaking.  Not literally so, but if you read a lot of dath ilani fiction, it's very obviously where the plot of the story is being blatantly pointed, foreshadowed, on the surface of things.

Could it be subverted?  Yes, obviously, but you can't rely on that; quite often, dath ilani stories don't subvert a very obvious trope, because the actual plot twist is somewhere else.

Keltham: And Keltham?  What does he think of it?  He is not a typical dath ilani.

Keltham: Given his sort-of-utilityfunction, the way he feels about things, it legit takes noticeably more extreme problems to get Keltham to endorse destroying a multiverse, compared to the average dath ilani.

Keltham: Children in Hell will do it, though.

Keltham: It's not really a story that Keltham wants to be inside.

Keltham: If he decides that it is, in some sense, just a story, or if Keltham decides that he is selfish to the end and this is not his story, there's three obvious signposts marked in this story for exiting it:

Death, for exiting mortal Golarion, going to the city he saw in Early Judgment.

The Test of the Starstone, for exiting mortality itself, and maybe heading away from Golarion after.

Abaddon, to exit this whole multiverse.

...where, to the extent Keltham believes that tropes govern here very exactly, which is something that Keltham is now always tracking as a possibility, he does not feel like the deepest darkest depth of the Trope Hypothesis really endorses the Axis-lets-you-terminate claim.  That was only just now introduced as a possibility, and Abaddon is the multiversal exit he was first told about in the beginning.  On object-level causality, yeah, going to Axis is probably better; but then if Keltham is walking out on this world in the first place, it will probably be because he's decided it's just a story.

Or on the side of ordinary death, it's even been hinted to Keltham that he could still repay his debt to Abadar if he went to Axis, by going to Abadar there directly and explaining mortals to him.  Though, obviously, that's something that Keltham would check.

And Keltham would need to believe very strongly that Golarion wasn't real, for him to not first try to give Osirion more knowledge than he gave to Cheliax, before leaving it.

...he would need to believe it very very strongly, that this was only a hallucination and one where nobody else was real at all, for Keltham to exit this plotline when he hadn't yet aborted his probable child with Abrogail Thrune.

Keltham: Keltham goes, then, to read the transcripts, of what his girlfriends, what he thought were girlfriends, what were maybe actually girlfriends even under truthspell, what they said to him, and the woman who he'd thought was his.  It's a reason to still be here, if he might be able to get some or all of them back, at some point.

It's stressful and he's tired, but tomorrow everything starts and he should - do this, before then, because he hasn't done it yet, and there might be clues there -

Keltham: Keltham does not weep, rereading what they said.  He has cried enough, that part of him is tired.

"Super duper not allowed!  Plus you're going to figure it out anyways yourself before that long."

Really.  Keltham does not particularly feel like he is close to having figured everything out, at this point.

"The Most High let me borrow her crown, her artifact headband, for two hours, to see if I could figure anything out.  It did send me manic afterwards, but I told Security to light my hand on fire for five rounds and that solved it.  The mania wasn't permanent, that part was an excuse for my getting a +6 Wisdom headband and to try to get you to not use headbands yourself."

It went mostly past him, the first time Keltham read it.  Not this time.

"But I didn't lie to you about wanting you, or about having a good time in your company, and I worked so hard on the shapeshifting in significant part because it was incredible fun and the best sex I've ever had. 

Not that the bar for that is very high, to be clear, but still."

In significant part, huh.

He should've asked - each of them - if there was anything they weren't saying.  Except, obviously, the answer would've been 'Yes' for everyone.  He would've had to have known the right questions, and even then could not have forced an answer from them.

"It seems to me that it was incredibly stupid to make your project of rebuilding Civilization also your project of having lots of kinky sex with admiring employees."

Yup.  Keltham has by now worked this out, that if he - wasn't thinking of this world as his afterlife, if he was trying to get shit done, he would've been bringing in a lot more existing experts than one alchemist.  Keltham was working on reflexes for - how to run a startup in Civilization, and not revising those to Major Governance Project - and to be fair to Cheliax, the moment Keltham updated to Major Governance Project everything fell apart for them, so it's not like they were wrong.  But Keltham was being, not just wrong, stupid, because you can test hypotheses, and Keltham should have tested the cached thought that you can't teach forty-year-old experts new tricks.  Maybe it was different in Golarion where, among other things, there's a superheated radioactive spell called Age Resistance.

Now he is planning to just teach people industry, as quickly as possible, not try to create - a long-term cultural base of Civilization - he is being a little too hard on his past self, his past self was genuinely trying to do a different thing, in part, build something in Cheliax that was right from the beginning and would serve as a foundation, and bringing in dozens of experts from other countries to oppose Cheliax is not that same thing.

Doesn't change Gregoria being right, in some fundamental sense, Keltham was thinking - not even in tropes, it is not a prediction out of tropes that things would go well for a protagonist like that - he was being, comfortable.  Having fun.

It was supposed to be his thing, that he was selfish, and it's clear why Cheliax didn't call him on it, but.  But.

"I never really tried to explain myself to you, you know, as a person. You never really asked. I'm kind of assuming you don't really want to know, it's not really the point, and it's not really the point on my end either, so I'm not, like, mad about that?"

He was supposed to be selfish.  It was supposed to be his thing. 

"Peranza wasn't in love with you.  She could've fallen in love with you, given the chance, but she was in circumstances she found pretty stressful and didn't have the energy, really."

Their lives weren't supposed to be his problem.  Carissa told him so.  He trusted her.

"Honestly, I really wish that I could tie you to a chair until I was done breaking down every single mistake you made and how ridiculously wrong you are about so much of the world around you, and also get it through your skull that there are hundreds of millions of people around you who are living stories as real and as genuine as yours, and that everything isn't fucking about you, even though the gods, for reasons that are totally unrelated to your actual impressiveness as a person, or to anything you've ever actually done of your own power, appear to be obsessed with you. But I doubt your escorts have the time for that, so if you want to know what you're missing, you're going to have to grow the fuck up and look the fuck around you this time."

"Asshole."

Are there hundreds of millions of people around him, actually as real as him?  It's something that Keltham has never, in fact, been sure of, nor should somebody in his position be sure of it, and Korva is not being entirely fair about that; which, to be fair to her, she said she wasn't.

To say that is to also concede that, for all he knows, those hundreds of millions of people, and more souls than that in Hell, could be as real as himself.

He is not quite sure - how to handle the math of that, in this very strange case, to prevent the old problem of your decision theories being dominated by claims about huge amounts of realityfluid somewhere outside you.  Most of the Greater Reality could, must if you define some terms correctly, involve people who don't have much huger amounts of conscious realityfluid around them whose fates uniquely rest on their own decisions.  You don't want all those people screwing themselves over, if they're mortal and uncertain about how there might be huger amounts of conscious realityfluid at stake.  Bad enough to believe in the position dath ilan found itself, where it was just one planet and there were apparently thousands or millions of Galaxies within their reach, waiting to be colonized by them - and the story of dath ilan's universe was far more compact and internally consistent than this one's.

He shouldn't just - throw away all of himself, Keltham doesn't think, on the possibility that the hundreds of millions of people in Golarion might be as real as himself - it doesn't feel, to him, like the math ought to work out like that -

(He was supposed to be selfish, it was supposed to be his thing -)

"Cheliax is the only place I've ever heard of where I can exist as myself, Hell is the only afterlife I can imagine myself going to, Asmodeus is the only god who fits me in any way.  I was similarly honest when I described to you the kind of sex I like, that keeps me in my place.  I've always enjoyed being forced into sex, I was never actually in denial about it, that was a lie to see if we could get you to force me into bed without my saying yes to anything."

"I went to Elysium because of my curse.  They showed me what Hell was actually like for the people in it, and spent a lot of time apparently trying to talk me out of things and telling me how much Asmodeus didn't deserve me.  I came back to Golarion willingly, to serve Asmodeus in this world, and then in Hell."

Because tropes sent him an incredibly improbable person or because a lot of people are actually like that??

It - probably doesn't change anything, unless almost everyone, is like that, but - if at some point it sounds at all reasonable, that any of this could come down to numbers, he's going to need that number.

And swear a cleric of Iomedae to secrecy and ask them about the probability of Iomedae ending Hell anyways in a reasonable amount of time.  Though Keltham would've needed to decide to destroy the world before then based on his guess, and only be considering undoing that decision, in order for him to be not using that information against the people who provided it.

There's a lot of numbers he Ought To Gather, if he was going to risk destroying the world in a rigorous fashion; and he can't gather any of them using somebody else's assistance, that would be turned against them, unless it first works out to him risking destroying the world anyways if he has to proceed on just his own guesses.

"I don't like Hell. I'm Lawful Evil, I obey Asmodeus, I don't mind hurting people, I don't get worked up about how, oh, no, torture, I'd still rather endure a hundred years of it than the twenty minutes of Chaotic Good we've just been subjected to. But I don't like feeling like people are weaker, instead of stronger, when they get hurt, if you don't hit them just right, I don't like the ways that the fear of Hell makes them more pathetic instead of less so - I'm very pathetic, right now, so you can't take any of this as particularly criticism of other people, understand, but I can see it, very clearly, how pathetic everyone is all the time, and I want it to stop, I want people to be like Her Majestrix who it's absolutely illegal to casually call 'Abrogail' by the way, I want to be like that myself, or at least like, a piece that fits in with that, strengthens it, instead of just falling short of it. And Cheliax doesn't produce people like that. It's not really trying, honestly. As long as they go to Hell - and they do go to Hell - it doesn't matter. But it matters to me, and as soon as - we started - I was thinking about how to fix it. I wanted to understand you, I wanted to be like you, it felt like not just everything I'd always wanted from my life but also everything I'd always wanted for the world. Something beautiful, instead of something that we were all - buried under, flinching from."

"I talked with Subirachs, at one point, about how awful it felt to - be doing this to you - I explained that I'd been conceptualizing it as - service to the Lawful Evil Keltham we were hoping to awaken from his Lawful Good upbringing, hoping to make able to understand everything without it breaking him and willing to take it, once he had it. Iiiiii think that like many of my plans was running on willful self-deception but it was how I was thinking of it. I tried - to make as much real as I could - they didn't tell me when you were planning to attack me and drag me off - I ordered everyone else to not pretend with you -

- uh, I did, at one point, on a day you were petrified, have sex with Elias Abarco, I didn't want to, I tried to stop him, and I'm sorry, that I did it and that I didn't tell you even though I couldn't tell you without blowing the whole thing open. Aside from that I actually tried to do what you asked of me, the best I could, and to make sure no one you were sleeping with was - the thing you were so scared we all were -

- I'm not trying to convince you I wasn't incredibly Evil. I was incredibly Evil, I hurt a lot of people. I'm just trying to convince you that I love you, not just in a way where we have feelings we don't know how to describe but in a way where - I tried, to make the thing I was doing bring you joy and not hurt you secretly, except I was lying to myself about everything. 

And to be clear, I still am, probably, lying to myself about some things. Since I'm still Chelish, and this is still my project, and I can only achieve any of the things I want to achieve if I manage not to steer myself off any cliffs of heresy in the meantime. I wouldn't - take the things I'm saying right now as particularly right, about what happened. When you come back - if you come back - I think I'll understand it better, and I'll be able to give you a proper confession. 

In private. Because this is ludicrous."

"But, uh, the parts I'm sure about are - you were what I needed, and I was very happy, and you were making me stronger, and I loved you, and I still love you, and I'll probably always love you, and I hope some day once you've made whatever determinations you need to make, about what's real and how the world works, you'll come back for me."

He doesn't cry, even then.

Mostly because he was paying attention the first time.

"When I ascended to this throne, I promised myself I wouldn't die of old age on it.  That, after all, would mean that I'd played my reign far too safely, and lost out on most of the fun."

"It would be fitting for me to lose my head and crown to the person you could become.  Someday.  Sometime in my sixties, perhaps."

"Not this Keltham, though.  That would be absurd and embarrassing."

Not spoken under truthspell.  Plausibly true anyways.

Either way, Abrogail Thrune can die and rot.

"I'm going to miss you. Don't - hurt yourself - and, once you're ready, come back for me. If you take too long about it I might send additional presents so I can at least rest assured you're not lonely and miserable without a single overengineered sex toy to keep you company."

I'm sorry, Carissa, his brain autocompletes the dialogue of this movie.

Keltham: Stop.  Rest.  Recover.  There is not that little time.

The 'Scientific Revolution' needs to start tomorrow morning.  It is not the same concept as Keltham not being able to take five minutes to rest, after reading through all that.

Keltham: And when he is done resting, Keltham turns, then, to look at the magical item on loan from Osirion, the +2 Splendour headband.

After the first day, he hasn't made much of use of it.  Keltham didn't want to risk getting addicted.  There's - pretending isn't quite the right word - there's showing your emotional upset more than you usually would, hoping people don't ask too many questions about your exact pattern of actions, but without signing any contracts based on that, while you try to not maneuver yourself out of later options; and then there's running unnecessary risk of addicting yourself to personality-altering magic while you're recovering from a major disaster...

...was what Keltham had been thinking.

But there is so much less time than Keltham thought, even when he already suspected there might be a clock ticking; he guessed it would be three months, to get the second Project started, for symmetry with the first plot arc, if there was a time limit like that.

And -

"The Most High let me borrow her crown, her artifact headband, for two hours, to see if I could figure anything out.  It did send me manic afterwards, but I told Security to light my hand on fire for five rounds and that solved it.  The mania wasn't permanent, that part was an excuse for my getting a +6 Wisdom headband and to try to get you to not use headbands yourself."

Keltham: It wouldn't end there, of course.  Once you accept the basic logic, you use your money out of Chelish Project revenues to buy a +4 / +4 headband - from some Lawful Evil merchant, under current theories wild guesses of harm reduction - and get whichever stat you're missing enhanced by scrolls or hired wizards on a regular basis.

And the price?  However much of yourself changes, is lost, as the result of an abrupt and addictive enhancement like that.

If Keltham wanted to stop being this Keltham, if he despaired of being too small and too stupid for a world this harsh, it would be a more appealing option.  But Keltham has always been fond of his self, see, rather fonder than most dath ilani; that's part of what being selfish is, in his own philosophy of that.  Sort of an anti-Pilar, really; Keltham has some internal dissatisfactions, but he does not particularly have any part of himself that he'd want burned out of himself with fire, at all, let alone because he thought that he deserved it.

Three exits from this world.

One exit from himself.

(Though the Starstone probably also exits himself and even more so, which ruins the literary symmetry, as is actually important if there are tropes governing these things.)

Keltham: Some points, then, that with his skills out of dath ilan fully roused, Keltham no longer needs Owl's Wisdom to face.  For he has been hurt rather a lot more than he ever has in his life before now; a trial like that changes people in many proverbial ways, not all good and not all bad, but proverbially among them is that you start to take the Way more seriously.

Point:  Even seeing the world as a story, it's not a story he looks set to win, as he is.  That's even taking into account protagonist-logic, what's ahead of him is too hard, and he is too small, as he is, for the unaugmented Keltham to succeed at this would not fly even as a story.

dath ilan: (Dath ilan doesn't particularly go for stories about outclassed protagonists triumphing over complicated situations and smarter more diligent antagonists, by dint of punching a few things and feeling a lot.  It's not a genre.  It's not even an ironic deconstructive genre.  It just never occurred to any significant number of people that this would constitute good writing in any form.)

Keltham: ...actually, when you list out that point, it already kind of settles things, doesn't it.  Keltham had other points, on this list, like, point, it maybe made sense to think he could be a Protagonist in Cheliax when it was possible he was in that kind of story but he's clearly not actually in that kind of story.

Point, one month is just not enough time and if he wants to have any chance of pushing Osirion hard during that time he's going to need all of the headband and all of the augmentation spells and Nefreti's wine and whatever exists in the way of magical memory aids.

Point, Cheliax was withholding those aids from him due to their lack of true cooperation with him, because it would have let him pierce the Conspiracy.  If you don't seize advantages like that for the side of Coordination, then how is the side of Light supposed to win, exactly?

Point, Keltham has noticed how harshly he's been punished for, trying to suspend judgment, delay investigating, not reason ahead as fast as possible; and for the last two days he's been trying out the virtue of Speed in place of the opposed virtue of Caution.  But - but Keltham is not sure that it is working.  He's held off on doing anything irrevocable, for any conclusion he's jumped to, except for giving superweapons under oath-seal to the cleric of Iomedae, and that decision followed from considering this layer of reality to be real at all.  But there are contracts to be created tomorrow, and too much of his theorizing is tropes running ahead of any observable causality underneath, and theories that do not feel like they have snapped solidly and terribly into place.

All of which only goes to say, in the end, that if the benefits of cognitive enhancement were costless, you sure would want them, yep, they're not trivial, nope they are not.

Keltham: ...no, it says something starker than that.

If Keltham is trying to do this at all - to abort his offspring before it becomes ensouled - to raise up within one month a power to hold back Cheliax ascending -

- to investigate further and without alerting any opposed forces whether all the warnings in books are lies out of Golarion, if all along it was as simple as executing a true-oath with Rovagug to blow up its Vault and have it eat only the Evil gods in exchange for freedom, and the ancient gods did not wish this known -

Actually, no, that flatly doesn't fly.  Ione in oracle-mode warned him directly that the original Rovagug war happened because Rovagug broke prophecy and even the Chaotic gods who fought with it couldn't negotiate instead of fighting.  Nevermind.

And also, UGH.  If there's going to be a lot of tiny hints like that, Keltham sure could use an Intelligence headband and magical memory aids and Nefreti's wine, probably.

...illustrating once again the general point:  There's no sane version of this story where Keltham tries anything, at all like that, without cognitively augmenting, and it flies.  His choices are either cognitively augmenting and trying whatever seems like a better idea once augmented, or not cognitively augmenting and not trying that stuff.

The protagonist who Keltham thought he was, in the sort of story he seemed to be in, could maybe do such grand things, just as he already was, correctly and without causing a lot of collateral damage; but that was not his real story.

Keltham: And against all that?  Only the point that Keltham doesn't want to do this, that he is afraid of how this changes him, that it is maybe the abrupt end of Keltham and the abrupt beginning of someone else, a kind of death that ending up in another world can't fix; that Keltham never signed up for that or agreed to it and doesn't, really, owe it to anyone; he did not ask for any of this, he did not ask to be here.

He's supposed to be selfish.  It's supposed to be his thing.

Carissa would tell him that he, doesn't have to, and - and she might not have been saying things like that, only to try to corrupt him and damn him to Hell, only to keep him weak and easily fooled by Cheliax.  There is also that Carissa, who Keltham thought was his, who he believed in, who he loved, and that imaginary Carissa made sense as a person and a philosophy, when she told him that he didn't owe some things to anyone.

Keltham: There was a boy once, out of dath ilan, who alone in his classroom declared that he would take the extra seconds to take off his expensive shirt before he jumped into a pool to save a drowning child, if there was otherwise no prospect of the child's parents' insurance paying for his expensive shirt.

Is Keltham still that boy?  Or has he now - just like everybody around him was very clearly thinking, though not saying it out loud, because that would be impolite, and also, who even needs to say it when it's obvious what you're thinking - has Keltham now grown out of it, just like his parents almost certainly secretly hoped he would?

Keltham: ...actually, can Keltham even do that right now - take that exit - the Splendour headband is on loan from Osirion - he does have a scroll of Fox's Cunning from Absalom by way of Cheliax, which he can use freely, but the Owl's Wisdom he never used during his last day in Cheliax is given to him of Abadar -

Keltham: It would be a lovely excuse, wouldn't it?  But Keltham has training out of dath ilan in noticing the tempting feeling of Just Not Being Able to do something you really would rather not to be able to do, and he knows to be suspicious of convenient obstacles like that.

If you actually let yourself try to solve that ethical puzzle, it's not very hard.  Keltham could decide what he'd probably do, if he couldn't augment himself right now; and then not do anything to Osirion/Abadar's disadvantage beyond that as a result of being augmented earlier, or follow any cleverer strategies to their disadvantage, until such time as Keltham can obtain augmentation items and scrolls for himself, by way of resources he acquired by trading only with Lawful Evil partners without Osirion's help.

Keltham: Keltham spends a few minutes, then, thinking of his best strategy and writing it down in a simple cipher that he trusts the Osirians not to try to break without asking him; they would treat an Asmodean the same, Keltham thinks, if that Asmodean were here as part of a bargain with Abadar to teach them, so he is not taking advantage there.

He would, mainly, be gathering resources to use in augmenting himself, is what he'd be doing without Osirian help, along that pathway.

What goods does Keltham have to sell, that he can definitely think of to sell right now, before being augmented?

There's Major Images of dath ilan, things like zoomouts and music and music videos, those are luxury entertainment goods but one where you can easily imagine some eighth-circle casters dropping by for a day to see, and some of those would be Lawful Evil.  Hopefully.

Keltham spends some time listing things out...

(One of those items is that he can Major Image himself a spectroscope and burn a 'diamond' to check its chemical composition, just in case it's something that Keltham can figure out how to easily synthesize all on his own without Osirian aid... although the only clear hard crystals that Keltham already knows synthesis pathways for are 'industrial Al2O3' and 'literally just the tetrahedral crystal of Element 6', neither of which seem like particularly plausible candidates for something as expensive as 'diamond'.  Those crystals should appear as ordinary mining byproducts even if you can't synthesize them, if Keltham recalls correctly, and the synthesis pathways for both chemicals are easy enough that even Golarion's alchemists should've worked them out, they're objectively much simpler than refining spellsilver.

Still worth checking with a spectroscope, in case it's like 'Al2O3 plus a spellsilver contaminant' or something like that...

Arguably Keltham should've tried that earlier too, there's just so many possible things like that to check.  This case is distinguished for his current attention only as being something where Keltham might reserve it to fund his supervillainy, instead of, like metallurgy and most other knowledge Keltham has, being something that only yields profits when shared with Osirion.

If 'diamond' the critical expensive spell component is literally just Element-6 crystals, and also Element-6 crystals are expensively rare in mining operations on this planet, and also Golarion's alchemists have never tried just growing seed diamond crystals in an atmosphere of 1% methane / 99% hydrogen at 800C and 3.9psi - as is objectively a much simpler chemical pathway than spellsilver refining - then Keltham will have no explanation for this state of affairs, except the story authors deciding to drop in a blatant plot device, so that there's a not-actually-plausible story about how Keltham could figure out how to synthesize something very compact and valuable all on his own in less than 2 months.)

And Keltham moves on to the next item, and the next, on his brief ciphered list of ideas that he definitely thought of before he augmented himself using an Osirian-loaned item and an Abadar-given spell.

In time he doesn't have any good ideas left, and then he knows he's just delaying the decision itself.

dath ilan: (It will not occur to Keltham at any point that there is anything at all odd about continuing to follow his friendly-trading deontology, never using the trades of a friendly trading partner in a way that they'd hate, while he is plotting to destroy all the Evil gods / all the ancient gods / all the gods / possibly the multiverse.

Negative utilitarians don't particularly violate deontology?  Dath ilan's negative utilitarians negotiated honestly, held to their bargains, and quit the field in an orderly fashion.

Negative utilitarians are famously scrupulous about that sort of thing.  High scrupulosity appears to be part of the neuroatypical package.  That they're even more honorable than average is part of what makes them such tragic literary figures.

If a dath ilani novel depicted a world-destroying supervillain as violating deontology in the course of doing that, everybody reading it would have been outraged at this enormously unjust straw caricature of negative utilitarians.  The book would have been promptly condemned to the furthest dark corners of the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods store where they keep things as awful as biased political depictions.)

Keltham: Keltham picks up the +2 Splendour headband, weighing it in his hand.  It's time to decide.

There was a boy once, out of dath ilan, who alone in his classroom declared that he would take the extra seconds to take off his expensive shirt before he jumped into a pool to save a drowning child.

Is Keltham still that boy?

dath ilan: This about dath ilan:

Some dath ilani are more chaotic than others, but...

...but that doesn't mean they are more chaotic than the average Golarionite, say, or the average person from Thellim's own isekai-world of Earth, or the average person in the average planet quantum-descended from a 10,000-year ancestor state of dath ilan.

By Golarion's standards, an unusually chaotic dath ilani is at most as chaotic as a totally average person in Golarion, and probably not really as chaotic as that.

dath ilan: some dath ilani are more selfish than others, but

dath ilan: some dath ilani are so selfish, even, that they will not at first try to be perfectly altruistic about large numbers of people in trouble far away from themselves, that they'll care much more about the people who are right in front of them, the friends they know, the people they love

but

dath ilan: it doesn't really make them all that unusually selfish by the standards of anywhere else

Keltham: even if, at first, they think that's who they're supposed to be

Keltham: he is still the same boy

he would still spend those seconds to take off his expensive shirt, before jumping into a pool to save a drowning child, if the child's parent's insurance wasn't going to repay him

it's, it's just, if the child is going to Hell

dath ilan: it's not even something where anybody in dath ilan would claim to have been right, about anything, because a case like that is so extreme and absurd that there isn't any moral to it, any valid literary lesson

Keltham: What a time, and what a way, to find out that there's potential for Goodness inside of him after all.

Keltham: Keltham casts Early Judgment, then, which he still has chambered, his emergency spell for restoring emotional equilibrium, in case that makes a difference to his emotional state, before he does this thing.

lintamande: He is, still, Lawful Neutral. Axis is, still, glittering and tall and magical and beautiful, full of aliens mingling and flying and dancing and swimming and teleporting and boarding golden gondolae. Some portals are permanent; some open and close, depositing travellers. In a rooftop garden a whirring ball of gears is doing watercolors of the skyline.

Keltham: He does know enough now, about Golarion, even if only from flipping through library books, to note that some of those races are not known to Golarion; unless they come from far below Golarion's surface, of which little is known except that some things live there.

...it does restore him, strengthen him, but it doesn't change anything about the decision that he's being forced to.  It's not, really, underdetermined.

Don't hurt yourself -

I'm sorry, Carissa.

Keltham: At the last, Keltham sends up one final prayer, not to Abadar at all, but to his hypothetical simulators or authors; if, in fact, none of this is real enough that there are actually billions of people as real as himself, suffering in Evil afterlives, then he wants out of this, now, he wants this character viewpoint to fade out and for the real Keltham to wake up somewhere else, in a nicer story than this, with a less complicated harem and, him not believing, that the stakes are any larger, than they really are.  He wants that to happen now, and before he endures any more of this for the sake of a larger world that supposedly exists around himself; before he experiences, with any significant amount of realityfluid underlying that experience, a form of personality alteration that death and waking up somewhere else perhaps cannot fix.

Iarwain: If you were watching - though nobody is, at least within Golarion - you would see then that Keltham puts on the headband of Splendour, and goes out to request a Fox's Cunning be cast on himself; the scroll of Cunning is a resource he should reserve, and also he might not cast it successfully within the Black Dome.

Iarwain: When that is done, Keltham would be seen to return to his bedroom, and cast his Owl's Wisdom.

Iarwain: By the time the spells have run out their duration, Keltham is no longer a cleric of Abadar.