Road: "Of course."  He passes it back to her with a friendly smile.

Pilar : This isn't exactly a normal conversation, but it's fun, and... honestly this is more normal than any conversation Pilar has had in a while.  At least that went on any longer than 'Pass the butter.'

"Any interesting gossip in Ostenso?" says Pilar.

Road: "Depends.  What does somebody like you find interesting?"

Pilar : "Good question... do you know whether or not there ultimately turned out to be any disguised ancient dragons hanging out in town just in case Keltham passed them by?"

Road: "Sounds like I'm missing some gossip myself, actually."

Pilar : "Well, it's known, now, that Keltham was somewhere around Ostenso, before he left Cheliax, but not in Ostenso, so one of the speculations was that there would've been disguised powerful entities hanging out in Ostenso in case Keltham passed them by.  Any mysterious powerful adventurers wander into town about four months ago, and then suddenly disappear about five weeks ago?  That'd be the indication, there."

Road: "Not that I know of."

Pilar : "How boring.  Well, do you know any gossip, then?"

Road: At this point in the conversation, he does not wish to give the appearance of needing to be asked twice.  Sure, he knows some gossip about the state of things in Ostenso.

Pilar : What a normal conversation she's having!  It's great!

Road: ...he'll eventually observe, in the tone of somebody who isn't drawing any inference from the fact, that the horses do look a little more tired to him, now.

Pilar : Pilar will cheerfully hop off the cart and start walking again.

Road: He would, in fact, sell her a ride all the way to Ostenso for five platinum.

Pilar : Nah.  She's had her rest.

Road: The carter drives off, doing a great job of not being too overt in glancing uneasily behind himself, nor giving too much visible sign that he's wondering how close he came to dying.

Pilar : It's - strange, that Pilar is thinking to herself that she was Evil, there, and enjoyed it.  Why should that be surprising?  Pilar has been a faithful Asmodean all her life, hasn't she?

That couldn't have happened that way in Elysium.  The stakes wouldn't be real, the carter wouldn't be really scared.

Why is Pilar surprised that - part of herself would be sad, if nothing like that ever happened again.  If nobody got to be sadistic like herself, or under real pressure like the carter.  Pilar has always believed it would be terrible if everywhere was like Elysium, there'd be no place for Pilar there.

Curse of Laughter: It's not literally, but very nearly, Pilar's first time enjoying being mean to somebody, and not just enjoying other people being mean to her.

Pilar : That -

That can't actually be -

Curse of Laughter: Pilar learned it from Carissa Sevar.

Pilar was cruel to the carter, but only after he started trouble, and in a way that didn't break him, and gave him a story to remember afterwards of how he was strong and handled himself well around a mysterious threat.

Before Project Lawful, Pilar had only seen mean people who liked breaking things.  Or were trying to act in a way that would look Evil to others or to themselves.  Or who had excuses for doing things they enjoyed that other people weren't enjoying and that would not in fact make people any stronger.

It is a very narrow path to walk, to find a way of Lawful Evil that isn't about being forced to cast Acid Splash on prisoners.

Pilar : Pilar had thought - that Snack Service was playing a long game to make Pilar renounce Evil.

Curse of Laughter: In the end, Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, are definitions made up by an ancient entity that didn't care very much about a lot of things that mortals do care about.

Snack Service has never tried to steer Pilar towards becoming Good, or Evil, or Lawful, or Chaotic, or anything else but Pilar Pineda.

Pilar : Pilar walks on in silence towards Ostenso.

She's gone back to not thinking about things.  It seemed like a wise order to give Pilar.

Road: Some more carts pass Pilar on the road going the other way.  No other carts pass Pilar going her own way, until she reaches the city.  It wasn't much further on, at this point.

Ostenso: Ostenso is a thoroughly walled city, and Pilar's road takes her to a well-guarded gate.

Pilar : Pilar doesn't feel like dealing with questions.  She closes her eyes, blacks out, and finds herself inside the city.

Ostenso: Ostenso's streets seem smaller, somehow, than they did when Pilar ran them as a child, before Authority told her to become a wizard and Pilar obeyed.

The streets seem smaller, even, than they did on cautious excursions from Ostenso wizard academy, not very long ago at all.  Cheliax is a Lawful country, and Ostenso a Lawful city, but not so Lawful that a wizard academy would reasonably let their apprentices out to wander the streets alone and unguarded, and have no fear of misplacing them.

It's not that the streets are safer.  Pilar has always felt safe in Cheliax.  There really isn't very much bad that can happen to her, here.

But they are... less challenging, in the ways that the world could have presented her with some little challenge before.

There is a foreign sailor-adventurer swaggering down the street in expensive leather armor with a blade at his belt, and Pilar doesn't have to be clever to evade him and whatever little trouble he might bring.  If he pointed his trouble at Pilar, she could laugh and dance along with him, and if he made too much trouble for her, he'd die.

Ostenso's streets seem smaller, and it isn't really a mystery why they do.

Pilar : She should... probably get something to wear that isn't an Ostenso wizard student's uniform.  Here in Ostenso, it doesn't stand out too much, but a single unescorted wizard apprentice is a slightly anomalous sight even so.  And outside Ostenso, it screams 'Project Lawful' and maybe even specifically 'Pilar Pineda' to those rare people who keep up on that sort of news.

Does Snack Service has any comments on that?  Pilar is here because Snack Service told her it was time to go.  Pilar does not actually know what she's supposed to do next or if she could use different clothing for it.

Curse of Laughter: Pilar should get high-quality but otherwise standard adventuring equipment for wizards!

It'll be easier if Pilar gets a Bag of Holding first, though.

Pilar : ...the smallest available size of Bag of Holding tends to be pretty expensive, even by the standards of Pilar's new wealth level.

Dare Pilar hope that Cayden Cailean is paying for this?

Curse of Laughter: He sure will!  Sort of.

Turn left at the street intersection up ahead.

Pilar : Pilar is... okay she just dared to think 'pleasantly surprised' and now has a feeling she should not have dared think that.

But perhaps she will be pleasantly surprised again by the consequences.

Pilar turns left, and then right, and then right, and then left again, following Snack Service's directions.  Say what you like about Ostenso, nobody could possibly accuse the street layout of being boring.

Ostenso: Then Pilar will come at last to an abandoned-looking shack wedged between two rows of dirty cottages, near the outskirts of the town furthest from the water and docks, not quite wedged up against the city walls but near to them.

Curse of Laughter: Snack Service needs to run this part, if Pilar can yield her body for a bit.

Don't worry, Snack Service won't do anything with Pilar's body that doesn't ultimately serve Asmodeus's interests.  Hopefully, Pilar has now seen some amount of evidence about that.

Pilar : ...all right, Pilar will hand her reins to Snack Service temporarily.

Curse of Laughter: Snack Service lifts up Pilar's hand and knocks on the door of the shack, not hard.

Ostenso: ...eventually, as if some process was taking place that took a lot longer than 'come to the door of a tiny shack', the shack door opens and a scarred tiefling girl in a ragged maid uniform looks out from behind the door.  Her gaze is not a friendly one.

Curse of Laughter: "Hi!" Snack Service says in a super cheerful perky version of Pilar's voice.  "Do I have the pleasure of addressing Mister Doomlord's maidservant?"

Pilar : ...oh no.

Ostenso: "What do you want?" the tiefling girl says in a harsh low voice, after the sort of pause that might be associated with somebody making a quick but obvious deduction.

Curse of Laughter: "I want a Bag of Holding and I want you to put inside five thousand gold pieces and three of your leftover divine Plane Shift scrolls and the Bracers of Shadow Armor you've got in inventory that none of you are really going to need and a scroll of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah holy shit that's expensive blah blah blah blah and I want you to not tell Mister Doomlord about it!"

Ostenso: "Uh huh.  Out of pure grim curiosity, if I asked for a reason I was doing that..."

Curse of Laughter: "I'd say that, if you did it, you'd get this delicious cookie!"

Ostenso: The scarred tiefling girl takes the cookie without changing her distantly angry expression, and eats it without changing her expression much either.

"Fine," she says after a pause.  "I suppose a cookie like that is worth that much of Doomlord's stuff.  Hold on while I go fetch it."

She shuts the shack door on them.

Pilar : ...Pilar is torn between asking 'What really just happened there?' and 'Who's Doomlord?' but on concerned reflection Pilar is going to ask the second question first, because the answer to that may influence how loudly Pilar needs to mentally scream the first question.

Curse of Laughter: Mister Doomlord is a True Neutral entity from outside Golarion's plane!  Mister Doomlord didn't come to Ostenso hoping to run across Keltham; he's here because of the divine non-intervention zone!

Pilar : This seems like the sort of important fact that Pilar should possibly be reporting to her superiors in Egorian.

Curse of Laughter: The negotiations for Mister Doomlord coming here were mostly carried out with Asmodeus and Otolmens, but Contessa Lrilatha has been informed and isn't allowed to tell anybody else!

Also the negotiation ended up with Otolmens telling Asmodeus that Asmodeus wasn't allowed to look directly in Mister Doomlord's direction, or at anybody around Mister Doomlord in the place he was dwelling, and Asmodeus agreed to that, so Pilar shouldn't pray to Him about it either.

Pilar : Pilar is actually going to have some trouble screaming loudly enough to do this situation justice.

Tarnish: The shack door eventually opens and shows the scarred tiefling maid again, now bearing a Bag of Holding, which she hands over to Pilar / Snack Service still without much of an expression.  "You got something I'm supposed to say to Doomlord if he notices the anomaly in inventory?"

Curse of Laughter: "I don't think he'll notice before things reach a point where it'll be obvious to him what happened!  But if he does, you can just say that you gave it away for a cookie!  Also, here, you should probably have these on hand around the place."

Snack Service slings Pilar's student bookbag off Pilar's shoulder, undoes the thief-resistant layers of buttoned flaps, and takes out the two headbands.

Pilar : Pilar's hand freezes on the Hell-wrought lesser artifacts as she realizes what Snack Service is doing.

Curse of Laughter: Serves Asmodeus!  And is kind of important actually!

Pilar : Pilar, with some effort, allows Snack Service to control her body enough to hand the two headbands to the scarred tiefling.

Tarnish: "Huh.  Those look expensive.  You got instructions to go with them?"

Curse of Laughter: "Don't let anybody else see them until you see Mister Doomlord strutting about with his fancy new artifact!  After that, I'm sure you can figure out what to do."

"The +6/+6/+4 headband is on indefinite loan.  But we'll need the +4/+6/+6 back after the trip to the City of Brass - which we'll be joining you on!  And then we get the treatment that Mister Doomlord plans for himself once we're there!  You can consider that the price of the headband's loan, I suppose, though really I'd just call it being mutually friendly about a matter of mutual interest."

"Also after that trip, besides taking the second headband back, we'll want a couple hundred of big shinies from Mister Doomlord's hoard, just in case we end up needing those on hand."

Tarnish: "Sounds like the sort of thing that key people will agree to.  Any else?"

Curse of Laughter: "Well, don't tell anyone about this part, but matters have gone sort of weird and unpredictable so we might turn up at any point screaming about something you need to do right away!  Hopefully not, though."

"And that's all!"

Tarnish: The tiefling maid actually does smile at that.

"Pleasure doing business with you," she says, and shuts the shack's door.

Pilar : AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Curse of Laughter: Pilar can't actually mentally scream loudly enough to do this situation justice and there's no point in trying.

Pilar : Fair.  What next then?

Curse of Laughter: That was a pretty fast recovery!

Pilar : Pilar has now been a Project Lawful girl for several months.

Curse of Laughter: Well, next, Pilar goes to the Ostenso market and buys some other adventuring equipment that Mister Doomlord didn't have on hand.

And then, Pilar goes on adventures just like those she's heard tell of in legend!

Pilar : Pilar is not completely disinterested in, or unhappy about, this.  But Pilar hopes that she is not being asked to do things the same way as the adventurers of legend.  Pilar thinks that the way legendary adventurers did things was stupid.  Pilar has thought this ever since she was a little girl.

Curse of Laughter: Pilar is totally welcome to try doing things Pilar's own way!

Pilar : Right.  What's first up, then?

Curse of Laughter: How would Pilar feel about going to the former Chelish city of Korvosa, which is still on good terms with Cheliax, and preventing its inhabitants from being horribly sacrificed in somebody's mad blood ritual seeking immortality?

Pilar : Sure.  Can Snack Service tell Pilar who's going to do it, and then Pilar can sweep in with an army company and twenty high-level adventurers and kill them?

Curse of Laughter: Snack Service both won't, and can't, be any more specific than what Snack Service has said already.

Pilar : Cool.  Pilar's going to find whoever's in charge of the city, identify herself honestly to them, and tell them a self-fulfilling prophecy about how they're going to successfully prevent their city from being sacrificed.  Then, instead of trying to do everything herself, Pilar is going to solve the problem in full cooperation with the authorities, obeying any reasonable orders they give her along the way.

Curse of Laughter: Pilar can totally try that and see what happens!

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does feel terrible once she takes the headband off but she decides to ignore this; if she's might only have weeks to live it's some kind of unimaginable horror to spend a minute of them sulking. She looks over her to-do list, instead, to see how many of the items on it still seem doable. 

She wants to reach out to Osirion and see what they know about the current status of Cheliax and Project Lawful. She suspects it'll be less than she hopes, because probably they were spying directly through Abadar, but conceivably Abadar's still at it, or they have other channels. She wants to talk to Erecura and maybe Dispater. She wants to figure out if confidential negotiations with Abadar and Iomedae are possible. She wants to publish cult pamphlets for drop-off in promising locations. She wants to pressure-test her Abrogail-assassination plans and maybe run them by Ri-Dul, who seems like the kind of person who has contemplated how he'd assassinate Abrogail Thrune. 

She wants to write a long angry letter to dath ilan about how they are the worst, in case this is actually a work of dath ilani fiction and she can influence them that way. 

She wants to play with sixth circle spells, even though she's never, ever going to grow powerful enough to cast them herself. 

She wants to write a letter to the children she would someday have had if they'd gotten to exist, which they won't. 

After that, whatever, she'll make headbands or something. 

Keltham v4: Golarion's conventional view on Intelligence and Wisdom:

Intelligence is useful for learning how to read and doing figures and learning more complicated work; at higher levels, you can learn complicated math and be a wizard.  It has little or no effect on personality; you can be good at math or bad at math and have pretty much the same underlying personality.

Wisdom is perceptiveness and self-control; at higher levels, closeness with the divine.  Wisdom has a more pronounced effect on personality than Intelligence; it's associated with maturity rather than cleverness.  Golarion languages with curse-words for 'stupid' tend to mean low-Wisdom rather than low-Intelligence, albeit in the end the term mostly means low-status, of course.  The actual abilities associated with Wisdom, if not always the measured abilitystat, tend to increase with age instead of go down as Intelligence does.  Sudden stress episodes can increase apparent wiseness some time afterwards, though usually not the measured abilitystat.

From the perspective of dath ilan, that uses mental calculation for things Golarion does not yet know how to do - well, mostly dath ilan's perspective could not easily be translated out of their worldview at all, and would make mention of notions like 'RAM and processing speed' or 'cognitive reflectivity' or 'frontal cognitomotor cortex'.  But to translate it back into Golarion terms:  Intelligence is calculation and all that dath ilan can do with mental calculation, but Wisdom is the ability to control that calculation-power and listen to the results of that calculation-power.

INT 27 and WIS 20 makes you a dath ilani who's exceptionally talented at math even by their standards.

INT 27 and WIS 26 makes you something else entirely -

Tarnish: "Here's two more artifact headbands.  The +6/+6/+4 is on indefinite loan.  The +4/+6/+6 has to go back after the trip to the City of Brass.  Somebody else will come with on that trip and get what you were planning to get for yourself... so full upgrades, I suppose.  They also want a couple of hundred Wish diamonds afterwards and asked for some other stuff I gave them."

Keltham v4: "Right.  Well, take Carissa's artifact headband back to her, then, I don't need it anymore.  Presumably that's the point and the implicit bargain, They can't help me."

He quickly removes Carissa's headband and successfully ignores the resulting massive sense of loss and disorientation while he pops on the +4/+6/+6, because yes, it's obvious that if he tries to rebuild himself a personality it's better done at INT-25/WIS-26/CHA-25 than INT-27/WIS-26/CHA-23.

Keltham v4: ...and then he puts himself back together again.

His own opinion is that you couldn't really call the result 'Keltham'.  If you take a short lifetime of experience at INT-18/WIS-16/CHA-14 and pour the result into a mind of INT-25/WIS-26/CHA-25, it's a bit like pouring the contents of a four-year-old into an eighteen-year-old container.  The numbers skip over a lot of important detail.  Golarion's abilitystats may not really be thinkoomph but they sure are some major subdimensions of it.

He is putting the traumatized pieces of that four-year-old back together as best as he can, improvising psychiatry skills that he was never taught because you can just do that at 25/26/25 if you have enough of the underlying knowledge.  (He could have reinvented psychiatry eventually, as he was before, but not quickly.)

But it's still a four-year-old being poured into something much larger than a four-year-old, with rapidly cascading knowledge and insights that contradict a lot of what did go into that four-year-old.  At some point there's not that much difference between making the new person out of Keltham-who-was and just making them out of a generic dath ilani with the same abilitystats.

...he still tries as hard as he can to make the new person be Keltham+, not just the + of a generic dath ilani with the same abilitystats.

There's a lot of reasons to do it that way, and no particular metareason to single out any particular reason as the justification.

Keltham v4: He should not try to really talk with Carissa like this, he doesn't think, even if she has her +6 Wisdom back.  Not until she has her own abilitystat increases to go with her headband.  It would damage what's left of their relationship, and Carissa is one of the only things left in Golarion that still felt real to Keltham.

He types Carissa a letter, and doesn't need to retype it afterwards.  It includes among other things the notes that:

- If Carissa wants to assassinate Abrogail, she needs to do that before his child with Abrogail is ensouled; which may interact in a complicated way with other plans to kidnap Abrogail and/or see if Carissa can don her crown as a way to impede Cheliax's invasion of Osirion.

- He will strongly push that Carissa wait until she's INT 29 to actually negotiate with Dispater or Erecura, but she can potentially plan that now.

- If Carissa has copious free time left over, he thinks she should help him develop his Magical Simulation of Magic because that'll be the key Skill for Wishcrafting.  If she can't help with that or speed that up, so there's more total time to do it and make it safe, then what was she buying time for anyways?

- He's getting better now, sort of.  But until Carissa gets her own abilitystat boosts, his new improvised psychiatric skill strongly suggests that they should only talk dispassionate strategy or engineering with him wearing the +6/+6/+4 headband, and not say anything about their relationship or their conflicting goals.

Carissa Sevar: - having more time is obviously good under a wide variety of assumptions about where precisely from here - yeah. Not talking about that kind of stuff with Keltham right now. And she's happy to help with his Magic Simulation. 

Carissa Sevar: Her scenarios for assassinating Abrogail, a dispassionate letter back to Keltham reads, are as follows:

- assassinate Abrogail, raise her immediately. Don't take her headband. Explain to her that Keltham knows about the children and that Carissa may have just prevented him from blowing up Cheliax, but if he ends up considering it too likely there are more children, he might still do it. Suggest that Abrogail sign a peace with Osirion, as would credibly indicate that Abrogail's was the only pregnancy and Cheliax doesn't anticipate acquiring leverage against Keltham soon anymore. Abrogail removing children/relocating them does not reduce incentive to destroy enough of Cheliax to prevent invasion of Osirion. Abrogail might be able to credibly promise there are no more children. Abrogail might call the possible-bluff and say that she won't sign a peace with Osirion and if Keltham decides to destroy Cheliax, so be it, in which case Carissa will regretfully depart and maybe go to step 2.

- assassinate Abrogail, take her crown, tell her security that Carissa owns options on their souls and they should consider reconsidering their loyalties. Aspexia will be suspicious. Carissa plans to show off the souls she's been buying to assuage Aspexia's suspicions but there aren't that many, and Carissa doubts she'd be able to stall the invasion of Osirion too far, and it means she'd be out of time dilation and busy during important stages of planning.

- assassinate Abrogail, take her body and her crown, hope the succession crisis in Cheliax delays the invasion of Osirion by months.

- kidnap Abrogail, possibly via briefly killing her but the intent in this scenario is to have her alive, take her to doombase, hope the succession crisis in Cheliax etc etc and that Abrogail can be persuaded to help overthrow Asmodeus and take His job. Unlikely but would be very valuable if it worked.

Keltham v4: Abrogail might refuse an immediate resurrection, making it unsafe to kill her as part of an intended kidnapping plan.  She can still have the child aborted via Baleful Polymorph to male.

Kidnap Abrogail, via:

- Route 1, luring Abrogail outside the Palace Forbiddance not under a Mind Blank, via fake intelligence leak suggesting an assassination attempt, which Abrogail may be willing to play along with in hopes of luring Keltham into complacency;

- Route 2.1, hitting that Forbiddance with a Dispel from somebody as powerful as Rugatonn, or 2.2 successfully obtaining a scroll of Mage's Disjunction;

Then, have multiple noble Efreet in rapid succession cast Wishes to try to kidnap her until Abrogail fails a Will save.

This may plausibly not work even then, based on Keltham's research into levels of magical resistance apparently granted by the Crown of Infernal Majesty, in the light of purchased reports on past assassination attempts against Crown-wearers.

Ideally, Cheliax should be allowed to think Abrogail permadead and out of the game for good, as by statuing her or soul-trapping her, and having Carissa attempt to claim the throne herself.  This forces them to deal with the succession crisis rather than Rugatonn just appointing a regent.  If the successor appears to be getting organized enough for an invasion, this would be a fine time to send Abrogail back, possibly with visible gaps in her own memory just to complicate things.

Carissa Sevar: Yeah, the reason Carissa thought they'd assassinate Abrogail even in the course of a kidnapping is that kidnapping an alive Abrogail seems very hard. Assassinating her isn't; Ri-Dul could presumably walk up to her with a Contingent Antimagic Field that triggers when in Abrogail-range, at which point nonmagical ilani weapons should suffice. Getting out is the complicated part, but you can always just not try to; kill yourself too, have a True Resurrection already reaching completion. 

If they were to try kidnapping an alive Abrogail Carissa would honestly be templed by just saying to Abrogail 'I swear I think this reduces the risk of Cheliax or Egorian being destroyed' and Plane Shifting with her. Any plan that involves displaying lots of implausible capabilities seems likely to make someone realize that Keltham is better armed than the typical sulking teenager Rovagug cultist aspiring mass murderer person they're modeling him as. 

Keltham v4: It just has to look like something that an angry, vengeful teenager could pull off using way too much money, maybe with Carissa as the real mastermind nudging his choices.

Does this mean she's giving up on closing-the-Worldwound plans?  Though Keltham is somewhat doubtful that his Wishcraft is going to reach that level in time, regardless.

Carissa Sevar: In her current estimation Golarion looks certain to be destroyed. That makes it not worth bothering. She's hoping she's missing something she'll see when she's thought about this more and Wished on more bonuses and gotten drunk on Nefreti Clepati's wine and tried literally anything else there is to try. 

Keltham v4: (Then she should go on playing for log-odds of success, right now, as she waits for that missing insight... this should not be said to Carissa at the moment.)

Does Carissa have any suggestions for highly stable and predictive magical dynamics?  He has a computationally-complete set that he's trying to use for the current Magical Simulation of Magic; but he still has less total experience playing around with spells, and there's a proverb out of dath ilan: just because it's possible to compute anything in a computationally-complete-system doesn't make it easy.

Carissa Sevar: She's mostly just tried setting aside Golarion and thinking about the rest of the universe, the destruction of which is less certain. She doesn't see how Rovagug will be contained in time to save Golarion even with Asmodeus interested in doing it, but that's still a lot of other planets, and all the afterlives, to try to save. 

If Carissa were trying to develop a structure for describing the behavior of magic she'd have approached it very differently; she'd have picked the spells that are the oddest-feeling in your hands, the ones that feel slippery or tense like they're barely holding together, the metamagics that feel the most like they strain the original spell, and try to figure out what tolerances, exactly, those are straining, what invisible dynamic they come close to breaking. She's not sure she has anything she can translate into Keltham's terms, yet, but that's what she's attempting. 

Keltham v4: Hopefully without any offense, he can't figure out whether she just said something relevant whose complicated relevance he missed, or if she wholly missed the relevance of what he asked.

Restating background, in case a piece of it wasn't shared:  He's not trying to build magic structures whose visible parts mimic particular invisible structures.  Somebody would've already tried that, to build a visible model of the invisible.  Instead:  There's a bunch of mathematical theory describing, for very simple cases, or particular interactions, the parts of magic that people can't see.

He is trying to build a system that encodes those known or guessed mathematical laws, where you'd have to look at the visible magical part of what he built, and then apply transformations in your own mind to read off what it was describing; it doesn't need to look like the spell being modeled, as is a thought that might be more obvious to a computerprogrammer than to a Golarion wizard.

He's also not trying to find visible interactions that directly mimic invisible ones, even via isomorphism.  He's trying to build up pieces whose interactions can be compounded together in ways that would mimic arbitrary mathematical rules.  When a piece of magic gets sticky because it's interacting with 11 other pieces in 5 dimensions, he builds a visible thing with five number-levels and 11 other pieces affecting the five number-levels additively, to simulate additive forces in 5 dimensions.

He was asking Carissa what sorts of very predictable, very regular magical interactions she knows about, as he might be able to use as additional pieces in a process that mimics very regular mathematical rules.  Including things that wouldn't ever appear in a spell, but if you put them together in a weird way where one piece stabilizes another, or forces it to flow along a narrow channel, it then becomes highly regular and predictable.

Carissa Sevar: Possibly they should not in fact attempt to collaborate on this either right now, but once you've tried accounting for the very obvious regularities in magical interaction that are apparent in any spellcasting, the thing she would try, if she were building the thing he's trying to build, is to look at apparent irregularities, places that feel like they violate the intuitive rules that every wizard learns for the behavior of magic, and figure out what's actually going on in those cases. Which is what she's trying.

Keltham v4: ...continuing communications breakdown; he still didn't see at all how that suggestion interacted with what he's trying to do.  He's not trying to figure out hidden dynamics for particular spells, or even complete/repair current theories of magical physics.  He's looking for very stable, predictable, and above all precisely interacting, pieces, with which to build a magical 'computer'.

Carissa Sevar: She thought that his aim was modelling magic so that he understands what parameters need to be specified in a Wish for it not to go catastrophically badly.

Keltham v4: Correct, but he's not trying to do that the way previous INT 27 casters would have in earlier centuries, by finding current magical anomalies and poking at them until he figures out what's going on.

He's building a thing that can simulate possible things that could be going on, so that he can, for example, feed in 30 different possibilities, and see if any of them reproduce the behavior of reality, and think analytically about how they fell short.

He's doing that by building a general toolset for simulating continuous processes, which he can then adapt to simulate possible laws of magic as a special case.  In principle, he could calculate out the possibilities himself by hand, given infinite time, but he doesn't have infinite time, so he's making a thing that does the calculations for him.

To do that, he needs pieces that interact in precise ways, so that they can model precise hypotheses; and they need to go on interacting in that precise way even when there's a lot of them, which is the hard part with magic.

Ideally, he needs small regular tiling parts which can be spun off by other stable magical structures, so that he can spin off a hundred thousand of them that will last for ten minutes apiece in a regular pattern whose resulting internal forces will allow it to be stable.

Carissa Sevar: Magic doesn't really come in pieces. Does he have, like, one of what he's calling a 'piece', so she can see it and point out more?

Keltham v4: Sure.  Here's one of his earliest prototypes, which will probably be easier to understand: an 'adder' which takes in three inputs and produces two outputs, as can be repeated and tiled together to make a system that does binary addition.  In this case, he had to do a huge amount of hammering and tweaking forces with other forces in order to make the things-isomorphic-to-bits interact in the right way for each adder, and then he had to specialize some of that work for every adder in his system being chained together to make an additionizer.

It'll probably be clearer what this system is trying to do if he sketches out on the whiteboard how it adds 1110 + 1101 = 11011 (14 + 13 = 27).

First a 1, a 0, and a fixed 0 enter this adder, which outputs a 1 to the final sum's 0th column, and outputs a 0 to the carry bit entering the next adder...

Carissa Sevar: Okay, yeah, she thought he was trying to input candidates for laws to test, and wanted things to narrow down the range of tests to run. She...might be able to help with this - there are magic items that need to be able to do limited internal computation - but she's less sure where to start. 

Carissa Sevar: It is very pretty, though. She will acknowledge this very grudgingly because it'd be much nicer if people who want to kill you lost the ability to make beautiful things or something.

Carissa Sevar: It feels like they should. It feels in Carissa like the impulse to make beautiful things, to invent, to discover, to test the laws of magic and twist them to your own purposes, to send little pieces running and swinging until blindly they do math, to step a little closer to godhood, cannot coexist with the impulse to annihilate people, any more than the sun can coexist with the dark. It feels like all that is wonderful about Keltham, all his fascinations and habits and playfulness and curiosity and quirks in what he notices and cares about, cannot coexist with the goal he's set himself.

Of course, isn't that what Keltham was telling her all along, that they can't coexist, that none of what makes him him can exist in a mind that is plotting to annihilate her and everyone else, and that he's decided to do it anyway for some reason.

There's no point in saying anything, so she doesn't say anything. She works on trying to make the magic do what he wants. 

Elsewhere and Later

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Your Infernal Majestrix."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Most High.  I've called you here to inform you that our former colony, the city-state of Korvosa, has overthrown their previous ruler, Queen Ileosa Arabasti, and seeks a closer relationship with Cheliax henceforth.  They're not willing to submit themselves directly to our rule, nor adopt any policies aimed at the damnation of their populace.  But they have appealed to us for a Chelish appointee at their court who can, in the words of the revolutionary council, keep an eye on their next Queen and let everyone know if the new Queen is doing anything batshit insane."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I'd say that sounded encouraging.  If not for the part where you apparently think this merits an urgent report to myself, and you haven't told me yet what batshit insanity the previous Queen was practicing."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Nothing apocalyptic, just killing everyone in the city in a mad bid for immortality.  Doesn't matter, one of your proteges shut it down before it could disrupt our shipping with Varisia.  Fortunate it played out that way, really.  Queen Illeosa was a Chelish expatriate.  If it hadn't been one of our own to stop her, it could have been quite bad for relations with Korvosa, or what was left of it."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "One of my proteges?  They are all within Cheliax so far as I know."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Oh, you didn't send Pilar there, then, and conceal the fact from me?  I'd wondered."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "No, actually."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Mm.  Good to know.  I would have considered that a Crown matter more than a Church affair."

"On other topics.  I don't directly receive reports about heresies against Asmodeus, and I understand why you're not forwarding those on to me.  But given the political relevance to Chelish diplomacy of what Carissa Sevar is doing in various countries with her 'Sevarites', I have not actually avoided hearing about Sevar unconcernedly summoning a devil to purchase souls, casually executing a paladin who opposed her, or offhandedly daringly rescuing a captured inquisitor of Asmodeus.  Is there possibly something you're not telling me about Carissa Sevar's current standing vis-a-vis Lawful Evil and Hell?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "It's a matter on which I haven't deemed it wise for you to know everything I know.  If you're thinking of raising your hopes about your ex-lover, I'd consider that premature."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Mm.  It is somewhat of a Crown matter as to whether or not she's liable to try taking the Crown.  Do I need to make sure my throne room is properly clean beforehand, so I'm not embarrassed if Carissa Sevar strolls in expecting it to be ready for use?  That sort of thing, Aspexia.  That sort of thing.  The stability of the Chelish state does require me to keep track of that sort of thing."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Given my current knowledge, Abrogail, I will be very, very pleasantly surprised if I find myself willing to back Carissa Sevar in an attempted assumption of your throne, does she deem it important enough to be worth taking from you."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Does Sevar know that would be your reply?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "That, I don't know."

Elsewherer and Laterer

Pilar : "I admit, I wasn't expecting to meet you here."

Ione Sala: "Can't exactly say I know the feeling.  At least, not recently."

"I can cast Plane Shift, these days, so I'm your ride to the City of Brass."

Pilar : "I have scrolls for that."

Ione Sala: "You might need those for later, no point wasting them.  Also I have a Teleport scroll, and I actually know where we need to be."

Pilar : "Right then.  I don't know if you're Lawful these days, but how about if you promise me anyways that you're taking us to the City of Brass, and not Plane-Shifting or Teleporting me to anywhere you don't expect me to come back from in a timely fashion.  A couple of days tops, say."

Ione Sala: "I so promise."

"We're on the same side, Pilar.  On this particular trip, to be clear, not in general on all matters of morality."

Pilar : "Because otherwise 'Mister Doomlord' wrecks Avistan, or some such?"

Ione Sala: "Noooooo comment."

Pilar : "I can't believe I used to find you relatively pleasant to be around."

Ione Sala: "Not commenting on your character arc either."

"Shall we go?"

Pilar : Pilar sighs, takes a very deep breath, and extends her hands to Ione.

Ione Sala: Resist Energy (Fire) x2.

City of Brass: Plane Shift.