dath Keltham??: The man's voice grows sharp, then.
"One. Pharasma's apparent level of power, nonintervention, and incomprehension is constrained by numerous apparent observations including that She has clerics and that She could benefit from the cooperation of other gods in defeating Rovagug and coordinated with them about it. I am concerned that Pharasma may not be what She appears. What She appears as looks manageable."
"Two. I do not, when thinking at this scale, care about the Worldwound, an issue of one planet. I in fact don't care about the Worldwound emotionally either because I didn't grow up here."
"Three. It should be obvious that I don't care about the Worldwound and that it simply wasn't a valid consideration at scale. Your failure of perspective-taking on that reflects a general type of reasoning error where, if you commit it with respect to Pharasma and decision theory instead of myself and utility functions, you will potentially get everybody in the multiverse killed unnecessarily. If I think you're not able to reason at a grownup level better than you just did, I will say under truthspell that I consider you a danger to the survival of the multiverse and invoke the relevant clauses of our compact until I can get you enough intelligence augmentation that it's worth trying again."
"I did not damage myself just by being a teenager who got traumatized by Cheliax and you. I also damaged myself by needing to constantly strain myself to think in the right patterns so as not to unnecessarily destroy the multiverse, and the one time I made an exception to that, I did something with you that I worry went off-plot and will lead to Pharasma destroying the multiverse, because you knew too much and the wrong things when you decided to bargain with me."
"Do not bother comparing this to whatever you suffered from having the Queen reading your thought transcripts. You were not trying to do something this difficult or precise and, I expect, could not do any thinking this precise while being the Carissa of Cheliax."
"I'd forgive you for having no practice, but Pharasma will not and therefore I am shutting down my capacity for forgiveness."
"This is me caring about the survival of the people of the multiverse. Thinking carefully. Not making mistakes like the one you just did because I got emotional and wanted the argument to go a particular way. I am not going to suggest that you don't care, because you do, but that you care means nothing if there is no pipe going from the caring bucket to the precise thinking bucket."
"I don't own you and can't give you orders, so I cannot order you to grow the ass up, but I can state as a nonthreat that I will act as I must to preserve the multiverse if I see you endangering it with generalized sloppy reasoning of that level. That may be fine for surviving in Cheliax under constant threat of Hell but does not cut it for being a mortal trying to participate in godnegotiations."
Carissa Sevar: "The reason that I think we need the Worldwound closed in addition to Hell handled - and I'm optimistic we can close the Worldwound ourselves without relying on it as an outcome of god-negotiations, but I do think that negotiations which don't ensure it if it hasn't already happened leave us much farther from a good outcome - is that it's the non-Rovagug avenue by which entities interested in destroying Golarion, the planet, could do so in a way that's vastly cheaper to do than to prevent, and possibly unpreventable if the gods are all exhausted from fighting Rovagug.
The reason I think that is an important consideration is that I think building Civilization with industrial knowledge and cheaper spellsilver, on Golarion, is basically a necessary step for the universe being on an improving trajectory from here. The gods are very unlikely to be able to do it, no matter what agreements exist among them; the best it seems remotely likely we'll be able to get from them is an agreement not to stop us from doing it. A lot of the things that make peoples' lives good and interesting and valuable aren't actually things that can be granted by divine miracle anyway. And this is not going to be the last threat to the multiverse, and we can't plan on solving every single situation with someone trying to personally ascend and threaten to destroy the universe, I doubt we make it through three more crises that way.
So - Civilization. I could be wrong that Golarion is by far the strongest contender for where to do it, but I don't think I am. We know a lot more about where to start building a Civilization of humans than a civilization of anything else. Golarion has a bunch of ascended formerly human gods; from what you said earlier, it sounds like they're pretty sharply local. I should expect once I ascend I'll be at least somewhat local, at least for the first few thousand years, as will Pilar if she ascends, as will anyone else we ascend if we kill Achaekek and it turns out to be the case that with Him dead there's a substantial waiting store of suitable people for it. Losing Golarion makes things much much worse on the scale of the next couple thousand years, and I think likely means something bad happens to Creation before we can dig ourselves out of that trough and get back to where we'd have been if we didn't lose Golarion.
That is, of course, also an objection to the Rovagug plan, but I actually am immediately coming up with enough ideas there to be tentatively optimistic. I think if we play our cards just right, we make Asmodeus commit Himself fully to destroying Rovagug in time to save Golarion.
I think it's interesting that, when I said I thought the Worldwound was important, you instantly assumed I couldn't comprehend the stakes and had just decided reasonlessly to worry about a minor problem on a planet you intended to have eaten anyway, instead of, you know, asking me 'under what assumptions does the Worldwound matter'? I think you did that because you have never fundamentally respected me, never fundamentally respected anyone on this planet, believe that you alone are capable of reason.
Your failure of perspective-taking on that reflects a general type of reasoning error where, if you commit it with respect to Pharasma and decision theory instead of myself and utility functions, you will definitely get everybody in the multiverse killed unnecessarily. I didn't promise not to give you orders, so, grow the fuck up."
dath Keltham??: "Perhaps. You're entirely right that I don't consider any other mortal on this planet capable of thinking at around the same level of coherence as me. If you've learned how to do it after a few hours of being allowed to actually think with a headband more impressive than mine, I'll be surprised but appreciative."
"Unless you know something I don't about the Worldwound, it's not a real issue even for Golarion. I expect the reason the gods haven't shut it down already is that either none of the ancient gods care, or that it's Golarion's own personal Rovagug equilibrium where Cheliax and Mendev needing to cooperate on that, or expend a lot of resources on that, is considered advantageous by a weighted majority of the ancient gods compared to what mortals here would get up to otherwise."
"Golarion is valuable to general Civilization, so far as I can tell, only because it's somewhere prophecy is broken and the gods can't intervene. Aside from that, and if enemy gods are prevented by negotiation from shutting things down, I'm not seeing how it sets Me back by a thousand years to lose it."
"It's possible that you were reasoning clearly in attaching importance to your personal home planet of Golarion and even its little Worldwound. I'm not convinced either of the object-level thesis or that you're demonstrating meta-level clear reasoning, and if you want to prosecute that further I should swap to +6 Intelligence and augment Wisdom. My latest attempt at having a personality while doing all this just fell apart anyways."
Carissa Sevar: "If there are a bunch of ascended formerly-human gods on some other planets, that'd change my thinking about how much Golarion matters in the next thousand years. I expect there aren't; what I've heard about the Starstone makes me believe it's unique within Creation. If Iomedae, Cayden, Irori and Norgorber are by far most able to intervene on Golarion for some reason that won't apply to me and Pilar and anyone else who ascends if we kill Achaekek and blow away the Starstone protections, that'd also change my thinking. I don't understand precisely why you think the Worldwound would be easy for the gods to fix, but I have no specific opinion on that either way and it's not decisive in my reasoning: even if it's easy for them to fix, it would also be easy for one of them to use to destroy the world while everyone's exhausted from the godwar you propose provoking.
I am not very invested in arguing either specific question, which I am uncertain about and which I might better put to those history researchers you mentioned and/or to Dispater, but if arguing the object-level point while you wear a fancier headband would help convince you that there exist people in this world who can reason more clearly than you then that seems well worth the time."
dath Keltham??: "Information about other solar systems seems nearly impossible to come by, including by trying to buy it from Abadar; I've tried. Irori's nephew supposedly ascended by writing a perfect book, which if it's true or metaphorically near-true suggests either that Achaekek only prevents duplicated ascensions, or that ascensions use up some conserved resource of local divinity specialization. There are other members of the Vudrani pantheon who come with similar stories of mortal ascension and which are equally, let's say, subject to potential doubt. If we take those stories at face value then they predate the shattering of prophecy, and are probably a sort of event that's allowed by ancient gods. However we are not going to settle object-level issues on this level quickly, and there's an unknown curve of increasing danger before we use your Wishes in Hell."
"I am largely expecting you to end up reasoning more clearly than myself. From a standpoint of dath ilani tropes - which, to be clear, haven't always worked for analysis - this story would obviously be shifting to have you as the protagonist. Along with a contrived reason why you've got to work by poking me along highly constrained directions, and can't simply go off and solve everything yourself using your own solutions. I am an average punk kid from another plane, and you are the incredibly driven person that I noncoincidentally landed on at the Worldwound. I'm effectively certain the abilitystats here don't capture all underlying capabilities of thinkoomph, but the Intelligence abilitystat still counts for an awful lot. It's not just possible but probable that, driven as you are, you can spend a week of subjective time having higher boosted Intelligence than anybody in dath ilan and rederive more effective thinking skills than anything they were able to teach me at INT 18. I wouldn't bet on you against a higher-rank Keeper but I'd bet on INT 29 Carissa against INT 29 Keltham in the limit and maybe even a week later."
"That I do not, right now, have confidence in being able to navigate the Pharasma-looking-through-me aspects of that - or for that matter, confidence in not just having you talk me out of destroying the multiverse because you can talk me into anything - is why I'm not okay with you boosting to INT 29 before I do."
"Right now, however, you've been free to actually think for a matter of a few hours, busy ones. You still thought initially that most people in Hell didn't want to stop existing. Your entire cache of theology comes from Cheliax and needs to be invalidated. I have been thinking about this for a month and you have not been. All of your reflexive cognitive cache about whether Carissa knows more or less than Keltham about Golarion, comes from having spent three months keeping me trapped in a false reality while having 4 higher Intelligence than I did. And you definitely don't have a Keltham-comparable understanding of decision theory, and we may be playing in sudden-death mode about one wrong thought at any point destroying the multiverse."
"I could swap to Intelligence and we could argue this. No, actually, I think I swap to Wisdom and spell-buff Intelligence."
"Or we could wrap up this part and boost my stats, before using your Wishes in Hell gets too much further along a curve of increasing danger whose slope is unknown to us."
Carissa Sevar: "I agree that you know a lot more than me about the world and I - appreciate hearing - that you don't think I'm going to be lastingly stupider than you. I did, actually, infer you were quite likely right, when I realized that you were assuming Golarion's not particularly remarkable, because it's a question you'd have had more time to look into than me. I just resented - you know what, never mind, this isn't about us. Let's go do the Wishes. Fair warning, I'm expecting that one plausible good strategy for me from here involves, in fact, attempting to conquer the world, so that when you unleash Rovagug Asmodeus is willing to expend far more than He otherwise would to stop It, so I'm going to be playing to that, for the pit fiends."
dath Keltham??: "I'm going to do Greater Spell Immunity: Trap the Soul, Malediction, to be determined. Protection from Evil, cloak of Spell Resistance, swap to Splendour headband, invoke your Glibness, and then not say or do anything. If we don't think that's enough to avoid my giving things away, then I've got a scroll of Dominate Person you could use on me -"
"Actually we should maybe head out of the Rope Trick and over to the whiteboard area to plan this out. People with access to the demiplane Forbiddance are people with full clearance, or they're supposed to be."
Carissa Sevar: "I bargained for safe passage, you should be fine, but that all sounds good. ...do you happen to know your present alignment."
dath Keltham??: "I got re-Atoned to True Neutral a few days ago, don't know if it's still holding. I've got a scroll of Early Judgment I could use to check. Why?"
Carissa Sevar: "It'll get back to Cheliax. If you were Lawful Evil they'd be more likely to believe I was playing a long game where I'm still on their side. Also, you seem pretty Lawful Evil" what with the plans to in expectation murder tens of billions of people to improve your negotiating position "so I thought I'd check. It's fine; I don't even know if I'll end up doing this plan."
dath Keltham??: "I'm not risking Lawful anything, in case I do something Evil and die at the same time. We could hit up Absalom's temple to Norgorber, and see if they can do a quick Atonement to Neutral Evil before we go."
Carissa Sevar: "Don't think that helps. Also can you just....do that? Atone to wherever you want? I thought you had to, uh, repent. Maillol figured an Atonement wouldn't go through for him."
dath Keltham??: "I'm currently in a mental state where I can regret virtually any of my life choices by putting in twelve seconds of work."
"If it doesn't work, I'd have learned something about myself, Pharasma's sorting system, or Atonement spells, I guess."
Carissa Sevar: "Okay. In that case I guess let's put protective spells up and go. - do you have Planar Adaptation? Hell's going to bother you."
dath Keltham??: "So I've heard. I was otherwise getting ready for a trip to the Plane of Elemental Fire, so I've definitely got the scrolls, but they were relatively hard to get - how much bothering are we talking about, is this a grit-my-teeth situation or 'you're already kinda psychologically damaged and shouldn't risk it' situation?"
Carissa Sevar: "Well it'll, uh, help with any problem you might be having where you're considering not blowing up the universe."
dath Keltham??: "I'll use the Planar Resistance once I'm there if Mind Blank isn't enough. This is definitely not a time to do anything that could look remotely like strategic self-modification."
"- I say again, should we actually head over to the whiteboard."
Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, all right."
She jumps out of the Rope Trick, again.
Minor Character: "Holy shit. That's Carissa Sevar? All right, if that's what Mister Doomlord considers to be 'well above average pretty but not exceptional' then I can see why he's not sleeping with any of the women here."
Carissa Sevar: "To be fair to Mister Doomlord, I got prettier after we broke up."
Minor Character: "Oh, like, started using makeup and dressing sexy again once you weren't in an established relationship? I guess that would entirely account for the discrepancy."
Carissa Sevar: "Green glowing glitter," she says, and crosses the Forbiddance. Wonders idly if her earring would stop her from saying it wrong and letting the Forbiddance fry her. Probably. "Is there a list of spells and their cost to the Project in millions-of-expected-murders-passed-up somewhere I can reference for decisionmaking?"
Minor Character: "Does that mean you're joining the anti-doom faction here? It's my considered opinion that you've made the right choice, we've got the cooler slumber parties."
dath Keltham??: "Green glowing glitter," he says as he climbs down. "We use gold pieces for accounting around here, I'll see about getting you a price list."
Carissa Sevar: "You know, I thought I'd never in my life see anything as doomed as Project Lawful but a project to utterly soul-annihilate everyone on it, everyone they care about, and everyone else in the universe, populated mostly by people who are against this but under oaths to try to do harm reduction, surpasses it."
Minor Character: "I KNOW RIGHT? And since Mister Doomlord is the only thing those two projects have in common, it follows that all of the doominess is completely his fault. Wow, seeing what he gets up to entirely on his own must be a very exonerating experience for you."
Carissa Sevar: "- no. He is quite conceivably the most horrible person ever to walk the face of this world, but I made him, and I'm not less guilty where he's more monstrous."
Minor Character: "See, that is a general sort of life attitude that I associate more with the pro-doom faction. You may need to watch out there."
Carissa Sevar: "I swear to you, I would suffer an eternity as a paving stone in Hell before I assented for a single person who wanted to live to permanently die."
Minor Character: "Hm. 'Intense Lady'? Doesn't have the same ring as Mister Doomlord. I'll have to think more about what to call you."
Carissa Sevar: She'll just look through the resources on offer and make sure they're prepared for their trip to Hell, then.
Iarwain: They include at least the results of sending somebody with an unreasonable (though not literally unlimited) budget through Absalom, Quantium, Isfahel, and probably some other places, with instructions to buy at least one of whatever low-level scrolls they didn't have already; or any higher-level scrolls that might be useful to a Project that might need to enforce oaths, go to the Elemental Plane of Fire, hold somebody prisoner and prevent them from escaping, avoid detection, prevent mind control, undo mind control, provide an unstoppable means of committing suicide, avert known methods for trapping souls, or render somebody difficult to torture.
A lot of people here look like they'd want to talk to Carissa Sevar if not for the part where she's clearly quite busy right now.
Somebody wearing Nethys's holy symbol is observing to Keltham that Mind Blank probably stops even a pit fiend from reading your alignment.
Carissa Sevar: She's going to shut down all lines of thought about what Keltham's told these people about her, which she's very curious about and which doesn't matter, and pick out some spells for surviving Hell.
"I'm ready when you are."
Iarwain: As many as several people in this crowd seem to be of the opinion that Carissa Sevar and Mister Doomlord should consider catching their breath for a few minutes and possibly have a refreshing drink or tasty snack before they literally go to Hell.
Some strategies of harm reduction are more straightforward than others.
Carissa Sevar: ....sure. Fine. Does anyone want to make conversation while she has a snack.
lintamande: "How did you get that headband?"
Carissa Sevar: "Sold my soul for it."
lintamande: "....why?"
Carissa Sevar: "Had a soul, wanted a headband."
Iarwain: Did she ACTUALLY invent the +2 and +4 headband assembly lines while also running the Conspiracy while also making geas earrings while also being Keltham's second on science research while also being Keltham's girlfriend?
Carissa Sevar: "Well, he didn't know we had Rings of Sustenance, and he had a lot of girlfriends. But yes."
Prince Fe-Anar: "Can I read your soul contract? There's not a lot of attested non-standard Infernal contracts out there."
Carissa Sevar: "...sure. Why not."
Iarwain: What's IONE SALA like? She knows Ione Sala, right? Is she as cool as all the stories say?
Carissa Sevar: "Honestly she was kind of a bitter, traumatized teenage girl."
Iarwain: Besides the thing with using spellsilver from six feet away, what's the coolest feat of Spellcraft she's ever pulled off in her own opinion?
Carissa Sevar: This interaction is profoundly disconcerting for reasons Carissa really really cannot put a name to at all. "I.... made the geas earrings while I was directing the Conspiracy in Absalom and while they were in my pocket, without looking at them; they'd been narrower, but I'd realized that'd look suspicious. I guess most people would've had to look."
Iarwain: Is there some subject Carissa Sevar would actually prefer to talk about by way of letting her brain cool down before she goes to Hell?
Carissa Sevar: "You could tell me about yourselves."
Iarwain: There's a sharp divide between the people Keltham brought on board before, and after, he started worrying about whether being in his presence or being important to the story might cause people to have more realityfluid. People from after that tend to be cheerfuller, happier, and to be headed towards afterlives they're comfortable with. The earlier hires have grimmer stories, which they can't tell Carissa Sevar about, because once Keltham realized what he might be doing wrong, he ordered everybody present to not talk about any bad things that had happened to them in the past so those bad events wouldn't get more realityfluid retroactively. This is known as the No Tragic Backstories Rule.
This person wearing the holy symbol of Nethys has led a peaceful life for a Nethysian. He's in the pro-doom faction. He's only a first-circle cleric, and only uses his divine spells for harm reduction even so, in case doing otherwise would risk Pharasma looking through him to see Nethys. He's on the Project because he has an incredibly encyclopedic knowledge about spells, items, monsters, all the magical details of the world; and since that isn't Nethys's power he can use that wholeheartedly to assist Keltham.
Carissa Sevar: Okay actually the reminder Keltham thinks he's in a story is just really upsetting.
Carissa Sevar: She wants to YELL AT HIM that JUST IN CASE this is NOT A STORY doing anything that INCREASES THE ODDS OF THIS GOING BADLY BY ONE IN A MILLION IS KIDNAPPING LOTS OF PEOPLE STRAIGHT FROM AXIS TO FEED TO DAEMONS AND THE STAFF HERE BEING SAD CANNOT POSSIBLY MEASURE UP TO THAT AND HE SHOULD FUCKING HIRE FOR COMPETENCE
Carissa Sevar: - but it will just make him declare that she hasn't read enough books about this, and also maybe if he hires really incompetently that actually makes him less likely to stumble across any way of destroying the universe in the first place.
Carissa Sevar: She will just smile and nod at Keltham's prisoners and cultists, then. This is such a relaxing break. She can't wait to go to Hell where people aren't horrible.
dath Keltham??: "It's been observed to me that you smiling and nodding under your actual present circumstances may perhaps indicate that you are not, at the moment, having fun."
"Shall we go to Hell together?"
Carissa Sevar: "Let's."
dath Keltham??: Onward and out of the Forbiddances, then; he'll audibly repeat the Forbiddance passwords for each area, naming them as he goes. Time-dilation Forbiddance is part of full-clearance aka 'core', you obviously don't tell the password for it to anybody; he is only saying it out loud (relatively quietly) because it's quite bad if Carissa forgets or gets it wrong.
People inside this Forbiddance, the 'inner' Forbiddance, don't know what this place is about; they cook and so on. The 'inner' Forbiddance has the rec room and library because uncleared people need a rec room too. People in 'inner' don't know that people in 'core' know what he's up to - they don't know 'core' folk share his secrets.
This 'outer' Forbiddance is for dealing with people who don't know what the project is about and don't live here either, like Ri-Dul.
Occasionally one of the doomist women here will deliberately wander into the outer Forbiddance area where Ri-Dul can see her, wearing relatively less, with correspondingly false implications about what goes on inside the inner areas. This is to prevent Ri-Dul from ever desiring to sneak inside.
To be clear, he is not expecting Carissa to do that, and Ri-Dul would probably be suspicious of it anyways.
Carissa Sevar: "Geas seems to think I can't even look kind of scared because I'd be doing it in the hope someone asked themself 'what makes Carissa Sevar scared?'."
dath Keltham??: "If the geas forces you to hold yourself to your own terrifyingly high standards we may have a problem, yeah. Is this part manageable?"
Carissa Sevar: "I am not noticing substantial impairment."
dath ilani: They pass an invisible guard at the outer Forbiddance, and are into the un-Forbidden (but still Mage's Private Sanctumed) area.
He activates his glibness pin on himself and then passes it to Carissa. He swaps out his headband for Intelligence to boost scroll-casting, casts from scrolls, swaps to Splendour headband.
Carissa Sevar: She'll take a Glibness too.
And then she'll close her eyes and look inside her own mind and open a Gate to Hell.
Carissa Sevar: It really says something about her mental state that her reaction to the blast of hot sulfurous air and the distant screams is in fact 'oh, it's good to be back'. Once they're done with everything time sensitive she needs to - take a break and reflect, or something, figure out which parts of her are running mostly on spite and the yearning-to-be-hurt and run them on something better.
For now she needs to go to Hell. She steps through the Gate.
dath ilani: He also steps through the Gate. How's the pressure of Hell on his soul doing through the Mind Blank and Protection from Evil?
lintamande: It's not too bad, really! Mostly the effects Hell has on you if you're behind a Mind Blank and Protection from Evil are not supernatural.
dath ilani: He doesn't cast Planar Adaptation.
Probably this person is fine; he already knew this was true, had already seen the effects from closer range than this during Vision of Hell. This doesn't represent new information, so there's no reason this person would be updating on it if he were thinking coherently.
dath ilan: (It doesn't actually work like that, and obviously he knows that, but sometimes it helps to remind yourself of it anyways.)
Carissa Sevar: There aren't, actually, many tormented petitioners lying on the ground in this area of Avernus; even a very tormented petitioner would probably move away from a grandiose fortress full of pit fiends, if they could.
It's possible Hell is warned of her betrayal and is willing to spend the intervention budget to inform the Most High. Time is precious. Carissa knocks on the gate with a Magic Missile, for lack of something cleverer.
lintamande: And these gates fly open, with none of the deliberate slowness of the fortresses whose duty is to defend the boundary between Avernus and Dis; this fortress is meant to be an imposing and suitable home for its hosts, not a bulwark against the invasion of the second circle of Hell.
"What business brings you here?" asks a hissing, hideous thing.
Carissa Sevar: "I have fifteen Wishes mine by right, out of Hell, and intend now to use them, in Asmodeus's service and Dispater's and my own."
lintamande: There's a moment of silence.
Carissa Sevar: Likelier in the world where they know, already - where Dispater has in fact already withdrawn his favored possession status - although, would He, or would He amusedly wait to see how it played out - devils don't want to die but they also don't want to live, Keltham said, she needs to think about that claim more at some point -
lintamande: The pit fiends teleport in. Fifteen of them, of course, because each can only cast Wish once per year. Mind Blank is holding back the fear auras, but that just means that anyone present will feel only the ordinary instinctive human fear at a being much larger than you and much smarter than you glaring down at you with contempt and distaste, surrounded by fourteen of its allies.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is surprisingly unterrified. Feeling incredibly confused about who you want to win is great for that, it turns out. If there was some error in her bargaining for safe passage out, she couldn't win this fight in a million years, so she didn't grab Keltham's scrolls with the intent of winning it at all; just of being memorable, and clearly powerful, and clearly in control. Her Unseen Servants are busy about her feet, shining the floor where she stands; her Dancing Lights have scattered to the ceiling to provide the most cinematic possible lighting.
lintamande: "STATE YOUR WISH, MORTAL," one of the pit fiends booms.
Carissa Sevar: - she's going to read the standard wording off a piece of paper with large blocky letters, impossible to misread. She has a very close to perfect memory, but being cinematic is not worth a one in ten thousand chance of saying something slightly wrong.
Keltham?: "+3 Intelligence, +4 Wisdom, +5 Splendour, reserve three," he says rather suddenly and before she can begin actually reading.
Carissa Sevar: - that's fine and reasonable, and has the substantial advantage they'll have Hell-interpreted Wishes later if they need them, but she wishes he'd told her earlier so as not to mess with her cinematography.
(Does it matter? There's a set of possibilities under which it matters, but she hasn't actually had time yet to think how likely they are. She may in fact just be doing this because it is better than feeling like all this is just happening to her without her steering.)
She'll tell the devils to give him +3 Intelligence, +4 Wisdom, +5 Splendour.
Keltham?: He doesn't outwardly react.
Carissa Sevar: - okay not to be an embarrassing stereotype of herself but HOLY SHIT WISHES ARE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING SHE HAS EVER SEEN
Carissa Sevar: In the time it takes them to cast the twelve Wishes Carissa has come up with a spectacularly clever rationalization for why the way to win from here involves her becoming a ninth circle wizard and casting all required Wishes for the project herself.
It's not true but it's so convincing. She'd be so good at it.
How could anyone possibly think a universe was worth destroying that had such beauty in it?
Carissa Sevar: When the magic has settled around Keltham and the air no longer glows she channels Abrogail, and gives him a little bit of a condescending smile.
And then departs the fortress with him, her path cleared of dust by her Unseen Servants, and opens the Gate to go back.
Keltham?: The man goes through first, expression still unchanging while the Gate is open.
Carissa Sevar: Her expression, too, changes considerably once the Gate is down. "Why three???"
Keltham?: "I don't know if it was the right thing to do. I realized - mostly from meeting you, only a little from Hell - that I am not holding myself together well enough. More balanced stats for a time might help. Planning for next round of augmentations to be slower. More Constitution than 19 may not be dispensable. Strength and Dexterity may mean things. Would need to take risk and visit City of Brass anyways. You might have a plan that only works with Hell-intepreted Wishes. If the Wish-resource method fails, we have three Wishes for the last step of the current plan even if the pit fiends might pitch a fit about keeping the deal. It costs extra time at INT 27 instead of INT 29 and maybe that difference will ruin everything but -"
"Sometimes you throw out the calculation and go with your intuition. It's just important to understand the calculation first."
Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, all right. I - failed to explain all my reasoning, here, which is on me." And they're not in the secret area, so she can't explain it now either.
"Uh, that aside, I think enhancing yourself more evenly and more slowly sounds like a good plan, and I'm glad you agree that you're not holding yourself together well. ...no offense."
Keltham?: "I apologize for the sudden surprise. It came to me at the last minute. I'd have spoken earlier if I'd thrown away my calculation earlier."
Carissa Sevar: She starts heading towards the more secret base sectors so that she can ask the rest of her questions. "Shall we, now that nothing's time sensitive on the scale of hours, take some time off and then reconvene? Do you have a summary I can read of your plans and reasoning relevant to them?"
Keltham?: "Taking time off sounds like a good idea. And, no, I wasn't - expecting you to come back to me, before the primary plot had reached a climax. Other people here for harm reduction - or even assistance - were not ones I considered worth arguing with about the core plans."
They pass through the 'inner' Forbiddance, then the 'core' Forbiddance, continuing to head to the demiplane.
Carissa Sevar: " - I find it kind of terrifying and infuriating that you haven't argued the core plans with people but I guess I will work on getting into a state to argue about them without just sniping at you! I feel like if I were even considering doing something like this I'd have argued the core plans with a couple hundred people before deciding on it!"
Keltham?: "I'm not saying this well. And, mostly wrongthought, I was speaking, angrily at myself. I argued with a lot of people about individual details and everybody wanted to argue different details to the point where there was no unified explanation I could save time by writing. In my defense, the - actual macro strategic calculation - is not something where Golarion natives think in that format -"
"I think my emotions are actually coming back online through all of the damage at Splendour 25 instead of Splendour 20, and it's incredibly superheated odd that dath ilani are wired in a way where Splendour 20 wouldn't be enough."
Carissa Sevar: Are you sure that's a dath ilani thing and not a you thing - not worth it.
"I wonder if there's a way to get Peranza and Asmodia. Just so there's people around who you taught and who speak your language and who, uh, didn't wrong you like I did."
Keltham v3: "Ione Sala has been filling some of that role, though she doesn't try to talk me into or out of anything. I'm also worried that if Asmodia was around I'd be, moved by her in an uncalculating way, and then that's one more person where Pharasma can look through me to Asmodia... I'll think about it."
Through the portal and into the time-dilated demiplane, murmuring "Green glowing glitter" as he enters. The Forbiddance edge is marked with green paint on the ground; nobody has put up an illusory curtain across it as yet.
"Everybody out, unless you want to quickly make the case that your work is time-sensitive and near a critical path," he says loudly enough for it to fill the small demiplane.
Iarwain: People take one look at Mister Doomlord in Intense Lady's company and quickly get out of the demiplane.
Carissa Sevar: "Do you need anything from me before we take a break?"
Keltham v3: "I don't think so. Uh, random in case you end up trying to do mental planning, we already have unlimited diamond dust for Permanencies given somebody to cast it, I don't think I mentioned that, and I'm obviously not going to complain if you want to spend a hundred thousand gold pieces on anything at all important."
Carissa Sevar: "Where're you getting your money? I know Cheliax was stalling..."
Keltham v3: "Early on, by accepting fees from Evil entities attending lectures or wanting to use my knowledge without getting me angry about patentgratuities. Buying headbands and spellsilver from Cheliax, which they're obliged to sell me up to a fractional limit of production, and which they can't price too high because that affects the accounting on what they have to pay me later over internal production; reselling some of those goods to Evil entities. Taking out some relatively small ultra-high-interest loans backed by my share of Project Lawful from Evil entities like the Church of Norgorber."
"Somewhat more recently, I decided I hadn't been taking things seriously enough and was repeating the mistake I'd made in Cheliax when I hadn't asked for serious resources earlier. Given the diamond synthesis trick and how far I'd come in establishing Lawful Evil purchasing lines and my own lair, I was very likely going to be able to do something. I was going to try to do it before the probable deadline on Cheliax attacking Osirion. I decided that my having more time to think things through would constitute harm reduction even from the extrapolated fully-informed perspective of people who disagreed with me."
"So I took out high-interest loans from Isfahel backed by the prospective income from Cheliax, started buying from the Kelesh Empire, and paid the Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae to put up the temporary time-accelerated demiplane."
"Golarion is not so primitive that it has no large financial entities to propagate probable future income backwards in time."
Carissa Sevar: " - okay. I'm going to - try to figure out how I think morality should work, and what kind of person I am, and assuming I don't end up deciding I just want you to have an emotional breakdown, I'll let you know in a couple hours when I'm ready to talk."
Keltham v3: "Right, well, my plan is to go have an emotional breakdown and rely on Splendour 25 to just make it through on sheer force of will, spend long enough like that to go to sleep that way, and hope when I wake up that I'm in a state that's stable at Splendour 23 so I can swap to the +4/+0/+4 headband..."
"I am actually kind of scared to augment Intelligence or Wisdom again, or go underneath Splendour 25, but that is something I can think about later."
"Any harm-reduction comments on that?"
Carissa Sevar: "- I do notice that you're having way more problems with identity-consistency than most people I know of who wear headbands or get cursed into losing half their intelligence or whatever. Some of that might be dath ilani techniques which make the stat boosts affect more aspects of your thinking, but some of it might be that you're changing how your brain works all the time? If I were you I'd try changing my mind around less.
I'm - not you, though. Osirion knocked me down to INT 9 and I was still me, just me who couldn't quite remember why I was doing what I was doing."
Keltham v3: "The - angry scathing remark that comes to mind, such as does sometimes come to mind about Golarion, and I am not sure that it's false - is that people here do not use their mental abilitystats for much. Do not have skills that deeply matter and scale to use more of those abilitystats."
"I checked around to see if Golarion knew anything collectively about side effects of rapidly changing around abilitystats to handle particular problems, and Golarion's collective wisdom seemed to be that people were usually just the same if you added +6 Intelligence points, only smarter. Which was such an absolutely alien concept that, again, the scathing remark that came to mind, was that Golarion did not have any experience relevant for grownups, only for primitive untrained children who only use their mental abilitystats for stereotypically abilitystat-laden work problems. I am again not sure this scathing remark is wrong."
"An alternative hypothesis is that dath ilani are configured to be more internally consistent in general and tolerate less variance. People in Golarion seem to vary much more in personality from day to day, even when not swapping augmentations, than I am used to. Much more visibly so, now that I'm out of Project Lawful and not around people putting up consistent Chelish fronts. It would've been a dead giveaway to anyone not from Cheliax or, unfortunately, dath ilan."
Carissa Sevar: "I think dath ilan breaks something in people. But I would think that, and probably we shouldn't argue it until we've both had time to think."
Keltham v3: "It is common wisdom everywhere that is not Cheliax that Cheliax breaks everything about people, and I did not think to recruit in advance anybody who could help you with that. Maybe don't set your own new personality in 'concrete' before you've talked with... our Iomedaen wizard, possibly?"
"Fe-Anar of Osirion, the one who was reading over your Hell contract, is closer to being able to keep up with you in a conversation Intelligence-wise. But I have absolutely no idea if the two of you would get along."
Carissa Sevar: "It might be awkward how my current theory of what to do from here involves letting Cheliax invade Osirion. I'll talk to the Iomedaen, She seems - like a kind of Good that I might not hate with a passion." Especially if the reason Iomedae's not with Cayden Cailean is not being okay with the risk of ending the world.
Iarwain: There's a new adventurer's-tent set up, in the demiplane. This one is presumably for Carissa Sevar. Somebody left a plate of chocolates outside the tent's entrance by way of welcome.
Carissa Sevar: She's not really in the mood for chocolates.
She's in the mood to collapse dramatically on the floor and wonder if she should, in fact, have, immediately betrayed Keltham to Otolmens who would crush him.
This is not an important question to answer, in one sense. She can't do it now. The error, if it was an error, was made due to intense time pressure and incomplete information about her past self's plans and panic and the risk of being mindread and love for Keltham and guilt over having harmed him so badly and existential horror at the thought of him being casually annihilated for a thought he might not even in fact be thinking, and she doesn't exactly think she'll make similar errors in the future. She's sure never ever ever going to love anyone again.
The obvious analysis here is that yes, she should have immediately betrayed Keltham, or at least have refused to step out of the Dome until she had his promise she could oppose him if she saw fit, which he wouldn't have given, at which point she'd have betrayed him to Otolmens.
(Why does it even come to her to betray him to Otolmens? How is Otolmens not carefully watching the situation already! Wasn't Broom supposed to be handling this?)
(Broom, who Osirion freed because they don't enslave halflings. It would serve everyone right, in some sense, certainly serve Otolmens and Cheliax right, if Broom, freed, decided to go travel the world or buy a house or something. Or maybe he's here, and just hoping he won't have to stab Keltham. Either way, if Keltham isn't worrying about Broom Carissa won't bring the possibility to his attention).
The less-obvious analysis here is that this way, she might be able to talk Keltham into a version of his plan that is actually better than the status quo, and it all depends on the probabilities, which she's poorly equipped to even begin to estimate. But Snack Service thought something good could happen here, something for which Carissa mattered and Carissa's status in Hell mattered, and -
- she thinks everything Cayden/Nethys has done has made this harder for Keltham to pull off? Otolmens picking Broom in the first place was a response to Pilar and Ione being picked; She's paying the situation closer attention. Nefreti said that the deception would've gone on longer without Cayden/Nethys's interventions, and if that's so, then when Keltham departed he'd have been richer, and Cheliax been less impaired in pursuing him, and he wouldn't have had the prospect of his children rushing him to solve this prematurely, they'd already have existed.....
If Cayden and Nethys were aiming at the destruction of the world they could have probably done it, from this starting point. So they're aiming at something else. And - she's not sure this logic is valid, but it does feel like probably if she were the kind of person who Nethys knew would instantly report Keltham, then some other person meets Keltham where he lands instead, some person who doesn't feel so strongly about the world not ending -
This is, perhaps, a question to return to when she's a god. If she's a god. She sure is making a lot of plans premised on her godhood, lately, for someone who does not in fact possess godhood and is actually just a fifth circle wizard with more money than fifth circle wizards usually have.
Perhaps she is staring at this because for all that it hurts, it doesn't hurt as much as staring inward and figuring out who she is and what she isn't and what she's done.
Carissa Sevar: About half an hour later she concedes that she should eat the chocolates and sends for the Iomedaen wizard.
"Do people go to Hell for practicing Acid Splash on their classmates?"
lintamande: "That's a good question. Trials are secret, of course, but.... we don't think so, not directly."
Carissa Sevar: " -'s what I thought. It's not about damning you. It's about - you believing that you are, fundamentally, the kind of person who'd do that, that everyone is the kind of person who'd do that, about drawing that outline around the muddle in a way that is the shape of a damned person - if Pharasma couldn't see anything you did before age 20, at all, they wouldn't do it any differently.
Some people find it upsetting, though. I didn't."
lintamande: "You do not strike me as a person with particularly high empathy or instinctive aversion to hurting people. I don't know if that's innate - people do vary in that innately - or learned."
Carissa Sevar: "Probably learned. I'm a very quick study.
Three days ago I spent six hours torturing a man nearly to death for fun and to impress a girl I liked."
lintamande: "Is there something we can do now to get him into a safe situation?"
Carissa Sevar: " - hmmm? Oh, I don't think so. He'll - the girl thought he'd recover. I did not ask what definition of 'recover' she was using. He's not being hurt now. And I'm going to have to be very careful operating in Cheliax from here on out.
Do you, every time you hear about a bad thing, stop to think how to fix it -"
lintamande: "...I think it's important, when thinking about bad things, to keep almost all of your attention on where the badness is located. And the badness about having tortured a man for six hours is located in him, first and most, that he suffered and is suffering, and meaningfully coming to terms with it is something that usually ought to start with him.
You can fix your own flaws through introspection; you can't fix having tortured people by looking inside yourself."
Carissa Sevar: "He did, uh, sincerely attempt to have my family Maledicted to Abaddon because I said something mean to him at a party!"
Carissa Sevar: "I don't actually have the slightest idea what the Iomedaen answer is, there."
lintamande: "Did torturing him save your family in some way?"
Carissa Sevar: "....no. It's just why I picked him."
lintamande: "Well, torturing people is bad, and having peoples' families Maledicted to Abaddon is also bad, and deciding to hurt people who do bad things to deter other bad things is an approach to problem-solving which humans have a tendency to err at in many different directions, so it's best done systematically and transparently as part of a just institution, and if you find yourself just wanting to hurt a bad person in a way that doesn't make anything better, you shouldn't. Why did you bring it up, if we can't help him now?"
Carissa Sevar: "I don't want to just go, well, I did all those bad things, I can't fix them now, I won't do it again, I guess I'm done here. It doesn't feel like enough."
lintamande: "What would feel like enough?"
Carissa Sevar: "...burning eternally in the fires of Hell?"
lintamande: "Eternally? You don't think after a couple of years you'd go, wow, actually, I think that was enough?"
Carissa Sevar: "....depends whether Keltham ends up destroying the universe because I fucked him up so badly? Burning eternally in the fires of Hell really wouldn't be enough, for that."
lintamande: "So, comparing the worlds where Keltham destroys the universe except you and your loved ones, and you and your loved ones have a nice eternity somewhere, and the world where Keltham destroys the universe except you and your loved ones, and you burn in Hell forever and your loved ones have a nice eternity somewhere...what seems better to you?"