Carissa Sevar: "No. It would've been a good idea, but I could feel I was - getting emotional - it felt like such an impossible task, if all the ilani stuff wasn't even true, if we couldn't even test theories, if the answer to every proposed test I put to him was always going to be 'reality already proved me right' - and he hates it when I don't conceal my feelings well enough - I think it's not actually just that he doesn't take it into consideration, I think he sort of anti-takes-it-into-consideration - like, if you have feelings, about him destroying the universe not even to stop Hell but just because he thinks it's what the plot said to do next and he thinks if he doesn't do it the plot will give him even more incentive, then that definitely means you should be ignored, so, I didn't say any of that, I just said, 'You taking six months vastly improves the possible outcomes here!', I was, trying so hard, to be ilani,"

lintamande: "You can - ask to pause, you know, when it seems like he's saying something horrifically immoral, ask for both of you to cool off -"

Carissa Sevar: "Should've done that. But instead - uh, instead, when I said the thing about improving the possible outcomes, he said 'Nnnnooo, my being unable to take the blatant hint presented by the storyline about needing to resolve this before my children get ensouled, causes the story to be even harsher about giving me a time limit.  Retroactively, I'd expect, but that doesn't make a difference here.'

- and I - it just felt so clear, that, he'd already made up his mind, that he'd already made up his mind about this thing that was insane and not true, that he was not processing it as some probability that could update - you can, you know, be a coherent mind that cannot change its mind in response to any evidence, the math's not hard - and I could just see it, him going ahead in a couple of weeks because it was impossible to convince him that that wasn't what the story told him to do, and then Pharasma crushing him like a bug and Rovagug eating the world, and, and even if his plan is a good idea, we won't succeed without throwing some serious resources and effort at making sure the version of it we're doing is a version that has any hope of success, if we've consulted with entities that understand what we're trying to do, if we've, I don't know, Wished up more smart people smart enough to look over the wordings and understand the physics -

- it just felt so clear that for this not to be hopeless, for us to have even the slightest shard of a chance of success, it couldn't be something we were rushing blindly into in a couple of weeks. There are no victories down that road. I don't know, am I insane?"

lintamande: "I would definitely expect much better results from a plan that we spent years working on than from a plan that we spent weeks working on. Though the countervailing factor is of course the element of surprise. Right now, lots of people suspect Keltham might have a crazy plan to let out Rovagug or something, but they mostly figure that even a very rich, very traumatized, very creative teenage boy who is a first-circle wizard can't actually let out Rovagug, and so they're not immediately throwing unprecedented resources at stopping him. If he starts demonstrating capabilities that suggest he's not at all best modeled as a first circle wizard, then they'll react very quickly."

Carissa Sevar: " - oh. That'd be - the problem with my first pass plan to solve this, then. 

- I was thinking about how to cut this knot, and I realized, if Cheliax is destroyed, then no deadline. That's it; it's that simple. No babies, no war with Osirion, no Project Lawful trying to invent superweapons of its own. We have the three Wishes Keltham didn't use, and Osirion has their own Wish scroll. Instead of trying to argue Keltham out of something he cannot change his mind about - no Cheliax, no deadline. And Keltham, you know, he trips himself up on all kinds of complicated questions about whether destroying Cheliax is really and truly in his own not-threat-shaped best interests, but I just don't want the universe to be destroyed, and I could Wish a hole in the world where everyone I love lives, and then the universe is less likely to be destroyed."

lintamande: "Iiiii think probably changing Keltham's mind about things is not actually literally impossible."

Carissa Sevar: "I was trying to do it!! By every rule I know about!!"

lintamande: "Yep! And still, you failing does not very strongly suggest that it's impossible."

Carissa Sevar: "- you know, if you were Chelish, you would hurt me, when you said that, for being stupid, and I think I strongly prefer that."

lintamande: "Too bad, kid. Look, I think convincing Keltham to take more time is a good plan. I suspect it is not actually impossible. If convincing Keltham to take more time actually requires destroying Cheliax, then yes, we should do it. But - you two talked for...about an hour and a half."

Carissa Sevar: "But what if I can't convince him and then trillions of people die because I was not good enough at convincing people of true things."

lintamande: "It sounds like you are so, so, so scared, all the time, and that's why the slightest thing going wrong talking to Keltham drives you to extreme panic, because when you're this scared it's hard to deal with any additional scary things happening. Because you genuinely might have to destroy your home country where you grew up, not even to save the universe but to save a couple more months we can spend on trying to save the universe, and that's awful."

Carissa Sevar: "How do you - be this scared, and keep going -"

lintamande: "The Church of Iomedae is actually kind of useless on this topic because Iomedae, being a paladin, even as a human could not feel fear. And most of her followers are paladins and also can't feel fear. I've mostly been just, you know, imagining, if we have to explain ourselves, later, to Iomedae, to our grandchildren, what extremely reasonable questions will they have."

Carissa Sevar: "...probably Keltham's going to tell me I am 'not allowed to get paladined for the fear immunity' because that's 'just as stupid as the plan to blow up all of Cheliax today just to be on the safe side' but I am suddenly tempted to Atone Lawful Good and pay Abadar to paladin me."

lintamande: "Prayer is disallowed on base, yeah. I wonder if a useful habit for you, talking to Keltham, would be saying 'clever tempting solution that probably doesn't work', before presenting your strikingly clever ideas you come up with on the fly which are quite good, as ideas you come up with on the fly, but still usually don't work, as is predictable for ideas you come up with on the fly, so then you and he don't get drawn into debating blowing up Cheliax."

Carissa Sevar: "He actually handled that very reasonably, just suggested we take a break and said he didn't want to be in a role of shooting down every idea I had. ...I just wish he'd been acting like that about my ideas to test if we're in a story that wants us to rush ahead while manifestly unready."

lintamande: "If he had been, what would he have said?"

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: "I genuinely feel terrified at the idea of testing what happens if we ignore the children-based incentive to move quickly. This is already a situation where one of my deepest oldest and most important values, my own personal children not being born into a nightmare universe where they may end up eternally tortured in Hell, has mysteriously turned out to be at stake. I find it terrifying to imagine what might show up next if I prove unable to be moved by those stakes. The experiment would totally give us valuable information but it might well give it to us in a format so horrible I don't want to contemplate it, like 'now Carissa is in Hell and being tortured to insanity by Asmodeus personally and I have to act while there's something left'."

Carissa Sevar: "...worth it, though, if it improves our odds."

lintamande: " - I think in some important respects you're a very admirable person, Carissa, but if that were to happen the odds of this going well are just worse."

Carissa Sevar: "Because of Keltham's own personal shortcomings! - that's not fair but I wanted to say it anyway to make myself feel better."

Carmin Isandre: "Every person I've ever met has fracture points, Carissa, at which they can't keep moving forwards no matter how much they calculate that they ought to."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't. - also not fair, also just said it to make myself feel better."

Carissa Sevar: "But if Keltham's too scared to experiment on the story thing, and I in fact think this definitely won't go well if we rush it, what do I do."

Carmin Isandre: "I don't know. But putting the question to him when you've both had some time to cool down seems worthwhile. And if you don't get anywhere, then we'll talk about what we can do instead, which might include stabbing Abrogail Thrune, probably doesn't include blowing up her country, and doesn't tip our hand about Keltham being much more than a first-circle wizard."

Carissa Sevar: "Why don't you just talk to Keltham, you'd be better at it."

Carmin Isandre: "We've talked some. I think I am missing a lot of context that is helpful for arguing with Keltham about anything complicated, and I am not, fundamentally, a person who explodes the world even if I've encountered an impeccable argument for doing so, which makes it hard to entertain arguments for doing so."

Carissa Sevar: "There was something else Keltham wanted you to explain to me. Uh, he said, 'I've never killed anyone'. I - I fundamentally don't understand what he was trying to get at, beyond 'I have feelings about losing my virginity', which - I realize that's really uncharitable -"

Carmin Isandre: "...he's going to take psychological damage from doing something like blowing up Cheliax and sending everyone there to Hell, if it does end up necessary, so it's a cost to his functioning as well as a benefit, and he doesn't have any idea the magnitude of the cost but thinks it might be large?"

Carissa Sevar: "...maybe? I guess?

That means I should not suggest my other bright idea, which is that he go to Axis, kidnap someone there, and feed them to a daemon, so he understands a trillionth of what he plans to do."

Carmin Isandre: "I don't think you should suggest that idea. Would you even want him to take you up on it?"

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah? I think it'd reduce the odds he destroys the universe by more than one in a trillion."

Carmin Isandre: " .... it's okay for humans, who aren't gods, and who don't have godlike abilities for what they do not to change who they are, as well as not having godlike abilities to assess situations, to be unwilling to do awful awful things that math suggests are justified. It is usually correct."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't see why I should be held to a lower standard than Iomedae. It's fair to say I'm actually worse than her, and so shouldn't do what she'd do because of my own actual failures, but I don't think the bar should be any different."

Carmin Isandre: " - well, that's not a reaction I've ever gotten before to the 'why you might not want to follow the math that says you should do something appalling' talk. ...if you want to, you can try to be exactly like Iomedae, but Iomedae also wouldn't go kidnap people from Axis to feed to daemons because She wouldn't learn anything from doing so, and I think Keltham probably aspires to also be the kind of person who wouldn't learn anything from doing so."

Carissa Sevar: "And he might well be the kind of person who wouldn't learn anything from doing so but I don't think he can be 99.999% sure he wouldn't!"

Carmin Isandre: "...and yet, I'm pretty sure Iomedae, if She could show Keltham something, would definitely not show him that."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, okay.

Do you just not personally want to hurt me or do you actively recommend against my getting hurt for some reason."

Carmin Isandre: "I think we don't have a ton of time and you aren't going to be using it very well if you try to get tortured every time you handle something badly. And I think that part of being an adult is to - screw up, and know you screwed up, and have nowhere to look for forgiveness or for punishment, and keep going because there is very nearly as much to fight for as there was yesterday."

Carissa Sevar: "You know, I'm kind of starting to think Iomedae got a raw deal in Chelish propaganda."

Carmin Isandre: "I'm sure Her church can just write Abrogail Thrune and get that straightened out in the next edition."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa turns herself into a bird and flies around in case Nirvana's on to something and that helps you have more universal human compassion, writes a list of arguments for delay and strategies for delay which she will make if Keltham seems like he's in fact possible to persuade about that, and then soothes herself with Abrogail assassination plans until Keltham comes out of his tent.

Keltham v3: He comes out!  Lookin' great!

Carissa Sevar: "Hey. You are right that probably it does not advance our goals to just blow up Cheliax, and I appreciate you not responding to that by telling me I was too much of a child to be here and letting me figure it out myself. I know that it is really hard for you to work around the ways I am unpredictable to you."

Keltham v3: "Well, don't expect any forgiveness for it.  Both of us are under too little stress and have had too much time to relax already; cutting each other any slack would only make things worse."

Carissa Sevar: She stands there blinking at him for solidly several seconds. 

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: - he's joking. And he made it really really blatant so you couldn't possibly miss it.

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, okay. I have some ideas related to buying more time but I think there's some confusion I need to resolve first about why it feels like my ideas for delay are - not landing, or are threatening to hear -"

Keltham v3: "Sorry.  I worked that out, once I had time to stop and look back.  It's because I want so much for all of this to be over and done, and I'm glad that the story gave me a time limit because it means there's only so long I have to hold myself together."

Carissa Sevar: "Oh. Well, maybe you want to see Carmin about that or something, if it's - not the kind of thing that stops being true once you notice it."

Keltham v3: "Carmin is not able to help me on issues like that.  Nor Fe-Anar, nor she who calls herself Minor Character, nor Sarcini, nor Ione Sala when I see her.  Help me think about plans, yes, about other people, yes, internal issues no.  If I cannot solve them myself they are not solvable by their advice."

"I will at least decide consciously how much risk I want to take of unnecessarily destroying the multiverse in exchange for doing this faster, including as a selfish bargain within myself, rather than making that decision unthinkingly."

"I realize this is a mode of thinking you're uncomfortable with, but given that the story is forcing you to work by persuading me, anything genuinely important that you need to persuade me about, is something I can probably be persuaded of.  It is not the slightest bit uncommon for the big villain of a dath ilani story to get talked out of it, there just has to be some clear reason the villain didn't think of the argument himself.  And tropes aside, it is very hard to get a dath ilani to just shut you out and stop listening by making one mistake at him, when we already have an established relationship like this one.  That element of the story may come with time limits for you to think of the right argument, but it won't be sudden-death."

Carissa's imaginary Keltham: Exactly what he said except replace 'dath ilani' with 'me, Keltham'. 

Carissa Sevar: "I think - that if you find yourself wanting to let your selfish priorities rule at substantial expense to plan success, that would be completely fine and understandable, and in that case we should give the million diamonds to the church of Iomedae and go hide somewhere until it's all over. If you are going to be selfish, be selfish enough to not do any of this to yourself; don't be just unselfish enough to decide you owe it to the universe to try and not unselfish enough to give it the kind of try that can actually succeed."

Keltham v3: "Sadly these kinds of internal emotional arrangements often lack the kind of clear-cut structure that would make that a crushingly valid argument, and not every optimal strategy is at an extreme of the action space though they usually are.  Congratulations anyways on making the sort of argument to a dath ilani that even Ione Sala would not have known how to make."

"To check, because it's something that I'm nervous about, what did you understand about why not to destroy Cheliax immediately?"

Carissa Sevar: "Lots of people have probably had the thought you might want to destroy the world, but they know you're a first circle wizard with a little bit of alchemy and so they're not very scared of you. Once you do something big, they'll recalculate, and that probably reduces how much time we have. You already threatened to destroy Cheliax, and Abrogail might've believed you, but other powers in Golarion didn't, and the gods don't know you're capable of it. We don't want them to know until it's too late. They might do what Otolmens did about Nidal and just steal all the diamonds, or change physical law, or squish you, or something.

...also we're almost definitely underground in the Ostenso nonintervention zone and I might hit us by accident."

Keltham v3: "Heh.  Yes, that was the overriding reason not to do it in two hours.  Lrilatha sent me a message swearing that Otolmens wanted me back in the nonintervention zone, and demanded that I go there in Otolmens's name, guaranteeing my safe-conduct in Ostenso if I did and that Cheliax would not act on Lrilatha-derived knowledge about where I was.  I negotiated some on what I could get in exchange from Otolmens and Asmodeus.  Everybody here shares my diplomatic immunity if they want to visit Ostenso, and Otolmens has up some kind of further noninterference field around this mini-vault."

"I still keep up Mind Blank at all times and so should you per agreement."

"Did the Iomedaen or Fe-Anar manage to explain to you why it mattered that I still hadn't killed anyone?"

Carissa Sevar: "She thought that it'd affect you quite a lot, and you didn't have any way of knowing how much, and so I shouldn't think that we'd get more functional Keltham-time out of killing people, especially not out of something like killing everyone in Cheliax and sending them all to Hell."

Keltham v3: "That's... not exactly it.  You know, on second thought, I should not have hoped Carmin could explain that, I forgot how much nobody from Golarion can explain anything to anybody even when they do know."

"It's that - when Cheliax is destroyed, that's - throwing away all hope that Golarion is, glad to have known me, in an unmixed way.  Even with Cheliax taught to refine more spellsilver, there's still a chance that it'll end up okay, if the gameboard can be changed to make it winnable for Good.  I could think of something when I'm much much smarter and not need to release Rovagug or destroy Absalom at all."

"It's - the saying out of dath ilan goes - don't be swift to throw away your deontology.  Don't rush to break the Light, shatter the alignment of - all the different ways that something can be Good, all lined up on the same side.  They can't always be aligned, but while they can be, you keep them together."

"You don't always wait until literally the last minute to kill.  You don't wait literally as long as possible if that comes at a huge cost in failure.  You don't take any other plan no matter how terrible.  But wiping out Cheliax early, so that, you think, my mind will be more focused on long-term planning - that is not reason enough.  You can't be that eager.  You don't, go looking for, plans that make you do something like that, and then go, oh, well, that's what the expected utility numbers say, better go do that then."

"Your self who erased her memories might have understood that, when she sent you to buy back the souls of the Project Lawful researchers, especially if she knew that Peranza or Asmodia needed rescuing.  Or she understood how her Keltham would have thought about it, at least."

"You keep the last threads of the Light alive for as long as you can."

"That would be true even if we weren't in a story."

Carissa Sevar: "I....don't have a hard time imagining believing that. I have a hard time imagining believing that and also thinking that unusually unpretty bits of Greater Reality should be scrubbed out of the face of the universe. 

I can't imagine any planet that, knowing everything, would hope to have you land on it. I understand preserving - the state where that's not true - in the same way as wanting the people who worked for you, Peranza and Asmodia, to be better off for it. But once you've thrown that out anyway..."

Keltham v3: "I won't throw it away until the very end."

Carissa Sevar: "I am not actually sure that makes any sense as a decision procedure but I appreciate you explaining it. I have in fact already killed people and will do so again if it seems like the best thing for me to do."

Keltham v3: "The negative utilitarian is usually the honorable one.  Never wanted to hurt anyone at all.  That's what makes them such tragic villains."

"Not really how I thought of myself, before I came to Golarion, but there you go."

"...I continue to think that you did not understand at all the point about why you go 'let's die in a fire together' to conditional Zon-Kuthon who will build Xovaikain unless you pay him 5 gold pieces.  It's not about that part of reality being unpretty, it's about that counterfactual branch being one that you didn't want to end up in so you don't give agents retroactive incentives to create it.  There's an entire philosophy of decision theory which says that the very act of making a decision is annihilating all the branches of logical possibility where you made different decisions, and that the principle of rational choice is to choose so as to unmake all realities except the one where you get the best outcome -"

"You know, maybe let's just pick that up again at INT 29."

Carissa Sevar: "Sounds good. Right now I feel - threatened by decision theories put forwards by people who don't share many of my values, I feel suspicious that tucked into the justification somewhere is an assumption that I find horrifying. Probably when I feel competent to derive most of it myself I won't feel that way about it anymore."

Keltham v3: "If it's not the same decision theory used by all the gods, they screwed up, or we screwed up, or dath ilan didn't teach me real decision theory because it was too dangerous."

Carissa Sevar: "Yeah. Any of those seem kind of plausible."

Keltham v3: "I wouldn't say it's that plausible that dath ilan screwed up.  I - still don't think you properly grasp a difference of scale between Civilization and me... nevermind."

"Do you have anything promising for plans to allow us more time to work?  Especially if there's resources we need to gather now, or decisions we need to make soon rather than at INT 29?"

Carissa Sevar: "So, one, I think that you should be willing to wait until the point where Cheliax tells you that there's a child ensouled, you don't have to preempt that. You intend to either destroy the world or fix it; if you destroy it, there's no reason to think that the child will wake up somewhere else, since there's no - thing that you care about, there, just because there's a soul, there's no mind with continuity of memory. That buys a week or two. 

And two, well, I may in fact have a bias towards plans that involve assassinating Abrogail, for personal reasons. But I think that Cheliax without a Queen - or, uh, with me as Queen, if we see a way to swing that - would also not invade Osirion immediately."

Milani: I must say, that went rather well, all things considered!  Apparently We put Keltham over some critical threshold of being slightly less traumatized, where he doesn't just accept the Wishes from Carissa as reparation because that's the utilitarian thing to do; and Carissa figures out his real plan before handing over the Wishes, but does so anyways; which utterly changes the dynamic between him and Carissa; which causes the resulting conversation to be absolutely nothing like any possibility that Nethys showed Us!

And Carissa even seems to be talking Keltham into waiting past his calculated ensoulment time, which completely throws off all of Our schedules for everything according to what We previously thought was the plot!

Cayden Cailean: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA," screamed the god.

Milani: Cayden Cailean, I genuinely modeled You as having more tolerance for spontaneity than this.  You literally became a god on a drunken dare.

Cayden Cailean: And as I've tried to explain many times to My followers, often in Elysium, when I managed to pull Myself together as a god afterwards, My very first thought with My vastly increased intellect was that going for the Starstone while drunk had been an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA, even IF it had happened to work that one time.  The concept of doing stupid things while drunk does not prohibit the concept of regretting them afterwards.

A lot MORE people are going to die if We don't know how to time evacuations, but We can't exactly ask Keltham to set a hard date and deadline, while We are carefully not encouraging him in any way whatsoever to do any of this.  They're still on a time limit and still going to make mistakes but now neither they nor We know exactly what their time limit IS!

And even that desideratum completely pales next to what happens if We've fucked up the main story logic on any number of possible levels, or if this is happening because Nethys lied to Us about the real goal of His walkthrough.

Milani: Indeed.  So now it's time to shift to improvising everything that remains to be done!  Flexible schedules for all the new plans!

Cheer up, Cayden Cailean!  If nothing else, this gives Pilar Pineda more time in which to eat You.

Cayden Cailean: It's not like that between Us.  Seriously, it's not.

Milani: And yet it's still a beautiful young thing who ends up consuming that much of You.  Somehow.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa spends the next several subjective days building a wall of sorts so she can keep all the considerations in her head at the same time. Here's how we might try to take Avernus; here's how we might try to use my compact and other forces in Hell to side with us in taking down Asmodeus; here's how we might finagle the release of Rovagug so there's a chance of survivors; here's how things might turn out if we go home and leave this to Iomedae.

To her enormous irritation, there's a strong argument for the threaten-Pharasma plan. It's not one anyone thought of, possibly because it doesn't matter to anyone but her. In any plan for a war with Hell or in Hell, billions of the current inhabitants of Hell will die. Keltham thinks this is good, since they want to die. 

Carissa...grudgingly acknowledges that they get to consider that an improvement over their current situation if that's how they feel about it, but it's still an almost-maximally-bad outcome for them. The man she interrogated about rumors in Egorian hoped for Abaddon, and he wasn't wrong to hope for Abaddon perhaps, but that doesn't mean she'd have been doing right by him by giving him Abaddon. She'd have been doing right by him by giving him other options he in fact preferred to Abaddon.

If they get Pharasma to give them Hell, they can make things better for the entities in it, instead of giving up on them. If they do anything else, probably several layers of Hell get destroyed. 

Devils don't particularly want to live. She can see why, now; it has to do with Aspexia's favorite concept, corrigibility. Something that really really wants to be alive is a notably worse slave than something without any such strong wants. 

Obviously, a great horror was done, when they took the shattered formless soul of someone like Carissa and shaved away the part where she wants to live. But she doesn't think all the horror was done there. Some of it has not yet been done, and will be done when they in fact kill that person using the fact they no longer want to live very much as justification. 

If they do the Pharasma plan, she puts on her wall, they should arrange to be able to fix the devils and the paving stones. It is worth some risk - not, in Carissa's calculation, very much risk - but some risk of losing everything, for the chance of saving those souls too.

She doesn't talk to Keltham about Cayden Cailean and Nethys, but her guesses about what they want make it onto the wall too. They encouraged her cult on purpose. Why? How does ascension even work, does it matter if she has a cult? Should she be encouraging her cult? Would Pharasma care who all the Lawful Evil humans think should be the Lawful Evil god? Can Pharasma even see that?  Why would Chaotic Good want a Chaotic Good god eaten by a Lawful Evil one? What are they getting in exchange for that, or is it more that - only in that manner can any compromise at all exist between Hells Keltham will permit to exist and Hells that Asmodeus will?

What is Asmodeus, at His core? What are the most essential features? He's not, actually, the god of torture; are there Hells without torture He'd abide?

What is the minimum guarantee from Pharasma they'd need to be confident they'll get to keep building Civilization? Can Abadar be trusted to look out for that? If He's handed a specification? How could Abadar not know something important to His domain He's been trying to understand for a long time, what kind of limitation is that anyway? Is it fundamental? If it's unknowable to Him presumably He wouldn't be trying to learn it, right?

How important is Golarion in the multiverse? How much do they lose if it's lost? Are there alternatives to destroying it? Are there alternative distractions that'd let an ascending god slip through? ...Zon-Kuthon's in a vault, right? Can Iomedae be persuaded to let Him out? Is that even worse than Rovagug?

What would Hell be like if it wasn't stupid? Forget what both alien entities hostile to human values - Keltham and Asmodeus - want here, what would Hell be like if it was a place for Lawful Evil as it abides in human hearts? What would the place Maillol should go be, if it wasn't Hell? If he'd turn down Nirvana, not wanting to be smoothed away into something Good?

It is actually only the second most complicated Wall she's dealt with recently but for the first one she had Asmodia and Korva. They're thinking that resurrecting Asmodia, even if Hell let it go through, would be a giveaway about who Carissa works for now. Carissa is less sure that going to the Gardens is impossible, especially since they still should talk to Erecura about anything related to Pharasma-negotiations. Most importantly, Erecura stole divinity from Pharasma and Pharasma doesn't seem notably weakened by it. Is She a different kind of thing than everyone else? If so, what about Rovagug made Him a danger to Her? Was it something about prophecy not working around Rovagug? Can they get them some of that?

Keltham v3: He spends most of the time alone, wearing the +6 Splendour headband and using no other enhancements, even as spells.  If the nice comforting deadline has been removed on how long he needs to hold himself together with solder and duct tape, then he needs to recover and put himself together now that he's in time dilation...

Is his will failing, here?  Possibly.  Being able to keep up a storm of work for three months on Project Lawful when everything is going great and you are having fun and in a lot of supportive relationships and your problems are fundamentally way way easier, is not the same as being able to work continuously under his current conditions.  Even with a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution.

He will, if he gets a look at Carissa's wall or checks in with her on what she's thinking about, remind her that she cannot plan to threaten Pharasma by proxy.  If she expects him to threaten Pharasma successfully, and prefers that outcome, she cannot help him with that in any way.  Carissa can try to reduce associated harm to herself and Pharasma, maybe, if her method doesn't hinder his plans, but she can't plan to threaten Pharasma.  That is the whole reason why Good couldn't do this earlier.

The fact that she came up with her plan to delay Cheliax's invasion and give him more time to work, while still in utter horror at his plans generally, is helpful.  That shows Carissa wasn't threatening Pharasma by proxy, in trying to give him more time to work.

But if she's started thinking there's a case for being less than utterly horrified with all this, that is going to require him to be much more careful in considering Carissa's further suggestions to make sure that they benefit Pharasma as well as himself.

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, yes. I promise I still want you to stop all this and go home. But when I'm working on alternatives I need a calculation of exactly how bad your plan is so I only present you with alternatives I genuinely think work out better by my values in expectation."

Keltham v3: The old saying 'why trust what you can verify' out of dath ilan seems to apply with some small degree of additional force when one wrong thought not even inside his own mind potentially destroys the multiverse when it could otherwise be saved.  So he is, in fact, going to be doing some extra checking and reminding here.

Carissa Sevar: She does not, actually, mind. Keltham trying to make sure they don't accidentally blow up the world is the most sympathetic remaining thing about him. ...that and his smile when he succeeds at casting a complicated spell.

Keltham v3: After some recovery time with only Splendour boosted, he tries getting a Fox's Cunning, which takes him to +4/+0/+6 (over baseline 18/16/14, innate +3/+4/+5).

When nothing bad seems to happen to him after a few minutes, he applies an Eagle's Splendour to himself, and takes off the +6 Splendour headband, which takes his stats to 25/20/23.

It... does not appear to send him back to the way he was before... his emotions weaken but do not vanish...

So he puts on the +4/+0/+4 headband, before the spells run out, to stabilize his stats at 25/20/23.

You can't really get much done with only INT 21, is the problem.  He doesn't know, in retrospect, how dath ilani who are only +2sd Intelligence get through life.  He sure didn't get far on +0.8sd... well, probably it's that nearly all dath ilani never try to do anything really complicated.  Or if they do, they take a lot more time to do it.

And he goes back to work, or tries to.  He is still, tired, inside.  The lack of a concrete deadline on how long he needs to keep this up, is not helping.  Especially at only Splendour 14+5+4, which, he suspects, does not end up the same thing to a dath ilani, as Splendour 14+5+4 is supposed to be to most Golarion natives.

Keltham v3: But INT 25 is enough for him to go back to his MSOM (Magical Simulation of Magic) crafting attempt.

He's gathered, by now, that Baseline is not the key to wording Wishes, that there is something that takes language and goes from there to a spellpattern and that is why Wish phrasings matter so much.  When he gets to INT 29 he will cast Arcane Sight and Haste and watch his other stats getting Wished-up by efreeti, possibly get efreeti to cast some other standard Wishes just to watch those, and maybe at INT 29 he'll be able to make a standing leap to some understanding of how Wishes turn into spellforms.  Hand-building an emulator of magical physics, or even trying and failing to do that, seems like it is plausibly on the critical path towards his being able to do that later, if anything is.

Building his Magical Simulation of Magic would probably be any degree easier if he had Carissa Sevar's kind of Spellcraft.  But not that much easier, to be honest.  He's got his own Armillary Amulet now.  Most of the challenge, fundamentally, is coming up with any system of magical physics with a visible subsystem that emulates an isomorphism of magical physics.  Not making the process happen, coming up with any process with that property.  Crafting ad-hoc supports for holding the systems together...

Well, he could, in fact, go a lot faster between trials and errors, if he was better at crafting spellsilver into magical supports and then tweaking the crafts.  But the item-crafter he has on hand, in his base, is somebody to whom it takes longer to explain what he's trying to accomplish, each time and tweak, than it does for him to try the tweaks himself.  At least this way he's learning himself, at INT 25, and speeding up at the exact form of crafting he needs to do.

...he gets another Eagle's Splendour and swaps to his +6 Intelligence headband, and, yeah, with stats of 27/20/23 it feels like he is able to make real progress on a couple of his current challenges, for the few minutes it takes before the Splendour is about to run out, and he has to put his +4/+0/+4 headband back on.

Keltham v3: Changing abilitystats, he suspects, is not actually good for him.

Not as bad as swapping Wisdom up and down, forming new mental skills and circuits that depend on a certain kind of boosted reflectivity which then abruptly vanishes just as his brain was getting used to it.  Bumping Wisdom up and down is probably literally the worst idea.  (The worst idea inside the realm of practical abilitystat manipulation, to be clear, not the worst idea in full generality.)

But even Intelligence going back and forth between 27 and 25 is maybe not as good for a dath ilani brain as he would have liked, in an ideal world.

It's time for a conversation that he's really dreading, and if he was significantly less calculating, or less reflective, or had less force of personality, he wouldn't be able to bring himself to say it.

He is going to try to explain that he thinks all the changes of abilitystats are really not good for him, and then, ask Carissa for her headband... more or less for the foreseeable future.  She can have all of his own augmentation items, they can spend even more money on Wisdoms and Splendours, but - if the time she's bought is going to mean anything, and if - it's considered a good thing that he holds himself together - he needs a constant statblock, and he needs that statblock to have INT 27.  There's not, really, any other obvious way to achieve that, unless he's missing something.  It's not even - obvious - that it would be an especially good idea for him to take off the headband - her headband, Carissa's headband, for which she sold her soul - while he is sleeping.

...he'd tell him to get lost, but Carissa has surprised him before; she is stronger than he.

Carissa Sevar: "How's it going."

Keltham v3: He will lay out the situation: he needs INT 27 not INT 25, he could probably benefit from more Wisdom but bouncing Wisdom up and down is likely to be bad for his brain, dropping to Splendour 19 isn't likely to be good for him either, bouncing abilitystats up and down in general seems plausibly to have not been good for him.  Possibly very not good for him.

Here are some expected utility calculations his INT 25 self tried to do from the Carissa / Pharasma point of view, double-checked for a few minutes of INT 27, though this is more of a Wisdom-laden task and he has not dared to augment Wisdom yet.  The primary point is that he can in fact get to INT 27 using his +6 Intelligence headband, and get work done that way, and would have to do that, and would do that, to get the basic capabilities he needs.  He would just, probably, damage his emotional and mental stability in the course of doing that.

He will keep his voice very dispassionate and his face expressionless, as best as Splendour 23 can boost a dath ilani doing that.  Showing any emotions to Carissa would be emotion-bombing her, under the circumstances.  The underlying extent to which he is holding his sanity hostage against her, even as not technically a threat, is horrible enough already.

Carissa Sevar: "You want the headband."

Keltham v3: For the foreseeable future, which is now less foreseeable after extending their intended work time.

He has a complete set of individually +6 headbands, a +4/+0/+4 headband, a +2/+2/+2 headband, he can pour any non-project-torpedoing or non-hand-tipping amount of resources into acquiring more scrolls of Owl's Wisdom or Eagle's Splendour, Carissa Sevar is not as restricted as himself if she wants to try renting the Pharaoh's +4/+4/+4 or finding somewhere to buy a +6/+6.

Carissa Sevar: "Okay, some considerations. One, I want to show up and encourage my cults in Vudra and in the Kelesh Empire and in various other places, I suspect it improves the odds of Pharasma working with you or the odds I don't get squished mid-ascension or something in the genre. I think I need to be wearing the headband for that for maximum credibility. I could conceivably do that right now and give it to you later today after 20 hours of cult-cultivating, or I could conceivably do it while you sleep if you're all right with me having it while you sleep, but it'll be bad, I think, if I don't get to do it at all.

Two. I do think things will go better if you're smarter. I also think they'll go better if I'm smarter and separately from benefits of me being smarter I think they'll go better if I, uh, am someone you respect and listen to? And I think we're kind of already on the fringe on that front and if you're notably lots smarter than me you won't in fact listen to me at all, and I'm scared that'll make things overall go worse. 

I'd agree in a heartbeat if you'd agree not to go ahead with the overall plan without my say-so - not expecting you to agree to that, just, trying to figure out sufficient conditions and might as well name the obvious one. 

I think I'd agree if you agreed to - let some worlds live that seemed not quite worth it to you but close enough you weren't sure, some marginal ones - I don't know what agreeing to that would look like -

- and, uh, most of what I'm using Wisdom for is not getting really mad at you every time you open your mouth so if you were able to do that on your end maybe I could just do the headband of intelligence and it'd be fine, but I know it's hard on you when you feel like you're the only one reaching across the divide, and I really wouldn't be able to do much of that, without the Wisdom headband, it's hard even wearing it."

Keltham v3: "I could do the marginal thing.  Don't expect to run into many marginal cases, but - if I do - sure."

"It's funny how, now and then, and despite a lot of things, I get the feeling that you are in some deep sense a better person than I am.  I mean, Carmin probably wouldn't even think it was funny, she'd just say, sure, Carissa would have grown up to be a much better person than you, given better circumstances, and now that's starting to shine through."

"I - would not be very surprised if a good solution here, ends up looking like, my staying mostly out of your way, for the next ten days subjective, pending a trip to the City of Brass where you get your baseline Wisdom wished up.  After that point we'll both be INT 29 and it will be quite a subversion of my expectations if we - end up talking to each other the same way, after that."

"I don't trust my brain to be okay while I sleep, if transient scaffolding for my cognitive reflectivity gets erased while I'm doing that.  Let's frontload the Vudra and Kelesh visits."

"Do you expect to be okay with 6 points of sudden Wisdom loss?  I can try to locate a +4/+4/+0 artifact headband on an emergency basis while you're touring the local meetups of your fan club, but you'd be at less than max Intelligence so I don't even know if you would."

Carissa Sevar: "I think I'd rather have Intelligence. Wizards usually go much harder on Intelligence and it works fine so long as you can also be kind of an emotionally insensitive jerk, and you generally can, if you're a powerful wizard.

I'm not - trying to be Good, here, I'm just trying to survive. I'm just in a weird situation where they're the same thing."

Keltham v3: "I'll let Carmin be the one to call bullshit on that.  You'll probably believe it more coming from her."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. I'm going to go do cult cultivation, then. ....I'm going to burn something like 50,000gp in scrolls on looking cool and you are not allowed to complain about this at all."

Keltham v3: "Wasn't even slightly considering it.  Off with you, you need to talk to some of the people correctly relying on you for salvation, non-Good person."

(Notably missing from Carissa's compact with him: a specification saying that, if he does release Rovagug, Carissa shall not at this time be prevented from escaping to Elysium or the Maelstrom.  Both of those planes are supposedly infinite, and the Maelstrom in particular is supposed to ultimately head off into the chaos outside Pharasma's bubble; which would make it much more likely that you could escape Rovagug, starting from there.)

(He's not suggesting this clause, if she hasn't thought of it; because Carissa might, at that point, demand that clause in order to not fight it out with her own self-image, which clause would then potentially hamper her actually saving the multiverse and also force her to think of herself as a worse person.  It's just funny because, Carissa's real emotional priorities being what they actually are, she hasn't thought of it.)

Carissa Sevar: Well, you can't risk the entire multiverse for the sake of being more likely to survive its destruction!! If she were literally any of the other trillions of people in the multiverse she'd be so mad at herself for even contemplating that trade! 

Carissa Sevar: ...anyway. Teleport and Fool's Teleport and Dimension Door and Damnation Stride and Firefall and lots of Vision of Hell prepared, check.

Scrolls to cast: Telepathy, Overland Flight, Spell Resistance, Programmed Image, Cloak of Winds, Getaway, Life Bubble, Contingent Teleport, Mage Armor, Spell Immunity, Greater Spell Immunity,  check. 

Some of these are necessary for her plans, some just sounded like fun and when is she going to get the chance to use the most bizarre spells Keltham's shoppers could find anywhere on the planet, if not now?

"Is there anyone here who's been to Vudra - I guess whoever did all this shopping must have gone -"

Ri-Dul: That would be him.  Keltham has made his services, hired on a monthly basis, available for this little trip.

Carissa Sevar: Great. Does he happen to know anything about her cult in Vudra? She's happy to just be taken to a major city but if he knows where to start they can do that.

Ri-Dul: He has not particularly been looking into that, no.  Among many other reasons not to, it's suspected by Keltham of being a Cayden intervention and therefore nobody is to talk to him about it.

Carissa Sevar: "Fine, where's your Teleport to."

Ri-Dul: "I can do Indapatta, the capital.  Niswan in Jalmeray.   Sumadhadra, the most important port city for their trade with Tian Xia.  Those seem the most promising places to find your cult.  I could also, for example, teleport you to the undead-haunted Palace of Ivory and Bone, but I do not imagine that you are interested in such more exotic destinations, on this trip."

Carissa Sevar: "Let's do Indapatta. I think the undead are probably an unreceptive audience for pitches about how if you help me conquer the world you'll have eternal glory in Hell."

Ri-Dul: Ri-Dul sets aside his distaste at the thought of a talented wizard embracing this nonsense; it is his foolishness, not hers, if he imagines that Sevar ought not to take advantage of such ready offerings.

Teleport to Indapatta.

Indapatta: Indapatta as it appears to the casual visitor is not the largest city Sevar will have seen, for she has seen Dis; it will not be the prettiest single place she's seen, for she's seen Abrogail's quarters within the Imperial Palace.

Nonetheless, Sevar will have seen nowhere larger and more beautiful than Indapatta.

Indapatta is laid out like the concentric petals of a lotus, in circles of diminishing wealth.  The innermost blossom, called also the ninth circle or Flower of Indapatta, is the Imperial palace.  Ri-Dul's Teleport location is a discreet nook between two fine brick buildings in the sixth circle of Indapatta, the north-northeast petal of that ring of the lotus.  In the sixth circle of the city there are, if not the fabled palaces and menageries, at least fine gardens and streets of gleaming white stone.  Here you would find successful adventurers, expensive inns open to foreigners, homes for the higher tier of merchants short of the princes of merchant houses, shops that trade some of the more expensive things that can be bought with ordinary money.

Within sight of the nook, a robed monk sits chanting verses, beneath a well-tended tree growing up from a deliberate gap in the stone streets.  There is no begging-hat set out before her; the nearby places of business are paying her to chant those verses, as another land might hire a skilled singer to play a harp.  The monk's presence shows that this is a wealthy and Lawful place, where a refined traveler might safely seek to do business or find rest in a nearby inn.

Carissa Sevar: Huh. 

Cool.

(If you'd seen the world, Keltham, maybe then you would know that on every corner of it there is a fully sufficient reason you shouldn't destroy it.... but of course, that's not how Keltham works, and not, if she's scrupulously careful with her own internal muddles, precisely what she thinks, either; she would take some chance of destroying this city, to fix Hell. You do actually have to be able to trade things against one another, if you want to have anything at all.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa will cast the last of her scrolls so that she can have more spells about her as she enters the nearest inn. She's told her Sleeves of Many Garments to imitate Keltham's clothes, except tailored to her; dath ilan may be horrible but they sure can do textiles. She's not concealing the crown. 

Indapatta: All conversation halts, naturally.  She's a foreigner, she's wearing an obvious crown, she's the prettiest person anybody there has ever seen; any of these qualities alone would halt all conversation.

One man, possibly dressed as a monk - it's hard to tell, as a foreigner entering this land for the first time, who's dressed as a 'Vudrani monk' and who's just dressed as a Vudrani - is staring at her crown, and then leans over and whispers something to the man sitting next to him, whose eyes widen.

Carissa Sevar: Oh good. That's the reaction she was hoping for, but she didn't want to count on it. 

Who appears to be in charge here. 

Indapatta: ...Possibly the overmuscled man - folding sheets of food? into more complicated structures of food? - in a tiny kitchenette visible to the bottom floor of the inn.  At least, he's the only person who looks like he works here, and he does not, by jewelry about himself, look poorly paid.

Carissa Sevar: She wants to eat all of the foods of the world, and learn all of the customs, and ask so many questions and meet so many people -

Carissa Sevar: Not the time. 

She'll walk over to the man who seemed to recognize her. Not terribly close, both because that might seem threatening and because she doesn't mind if this conversation is heard, but close enough she's unambiguously speaking to him. "Forgive me," she says, "but I am new to this city, and know only in the vaguest of terms who I seek within it; may I ask you to help me find it? I cannot say that I am not dangerous, but no one of any land or any faith will be weaker for coming to my attention, in the long run."

Indapatta: "Meaning no offense to the great lady, we have our own business to be about," says, cautiously, the man sitting next to the one who stared at her crown, the one to whom the starer whispered.  "You look like great wealth, but also like great complications to one's ordinary daily life."

Carissa Sevar: "I am that." Does the one who maybe recognized her have a different opinion.

Indapatta: His eyes are flickering about the other magic items that Sevar wears, looking impressed.

Possibly this is somebody who can see magic?  Anybody like that would rather notice her crown of mithril, a lesser artifact shining with magic as though a full moon reflected from every part of it.

Carissa Sevar: She'll speak to him, then. "I am looking for My faithful, those Lawful Evil followers of Carissa Sevar, who think that Hell could be something more. If they have exercised enough initiative to have a temple of their own, I want to find it; if they do not, I want to rent a public space, a courtyard or an amphitheater or a stadium, where I may spend the day, and they may come and find Me if they dare."

Indapatta: The language spoken in Indapatta does not distinguish god-pronouns, as Sevar may realize as she speaks the words.

"I don't know much about the Sevarian faith, except that it's very new," says the man she addressed.  "Maybe the seventh ring would have an ashram of her followers, if there's one in Indapatta?"

Indapatta: The other man, who can't see magic, ahems and speaks in a lower voice.  "The city authorities are unsettled about the Sevarites, as a Lawful Evil faith claiming to be subject to Hell.  I believe it was announced recently that they are permitted to gather, but only under the supervision of priests of other recognized faiths.  Particularly Irori, as it's said that Sevar was herself a priest of Irori before renouncing him as Irorians do.  I would ask of a temple of Irori in the seventh ring, did I seek them."

Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. But my ignorance is even greater than you imagine. Which way would I go, to find myself in the seventh ring?"

Indapatta: "Were you that new to this place, I'd seek a guide," says the one who can see magic.  "I don't know where a guide might be found, in this ring, they keep these streets free of urchins.  The owner may know."  He indicates the man running the kitchenette of folding food-squares.

Carissa Sevar: Sure. "Do you know, sir, where I could find a guide in this city?"

Indapatta: To her Sense Motive he seems nervous, but perhaps that's only natural in her presence.

Most guides, even upper-class ones, would usually be hired in the city's outermost ring, the Orison, about one of the entrances.  By the time you come to his inn, it's assumed that you know where you are.  Leaving his inn, a block to the right there'd be a merchant's bank; a block to the left, a hiring-office for miscellany including of adventurers.  Either of those might know where to find a guide.

He could also try his own hand at giving directions, if the place she seeks is not far, and she could ask of any monks she sees, if she becomes lost.  Relatively few people dressed as monks are fakes who will try to guide travelers into traps.  Even fewer would dare try it on herself and her dire-looking escort.

Carissa Sevar: She is looking for a temple of Irori in the seventh ring, if he thinks he could give directions there.

Indapatta: There's nine turns in the directions he gives; not something difficult to Intelligence 18+6 (as her headband boosts Intelligence), assuming this guy got all the turns correct.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, no problem. Probably, unless it's an assassination plot or something, in which case she should still be fine; there are beings who could assassinate her before Ri-Dul and she can Teleport out, but not many, and anyway if she gets assassinated she prevents the destruction of the universe so while she can't work towards it she can't actually make herself fear it. 

Nine turns, if they're where they're supposed to be.

Indapatta: The guard posted about this entrance to the seventh circle of Indapatta does respectfully inquire of this wealthy-looking, magical-looking, incredibly beautiful foreigner, what she seeks there.