dath ilan: Are there... 5+6+6+6+3... at least 26 groups like that, in the City of Brass?

City of Brass: Yes, there are.

But you'd have to walk around quite a bit, passing many more shops looking to sell you one Wish conversion, and skipping any 5-noble-Efreet groups already marked as 'tried' by a nearby Arcane Mark from one of your companion groups.

You might, at some point, have to grit your teeth and start trying to pull together a new group of 5 noble Efreet who weren't already advertising that combined service, maybe get a 2-group willing to cooperate with a nearby 3-group.  Though this will be a lot more annoying, and run a much higher risk that this is externally visible.

If the natives combine information and figure out you were buying more than one quintuple series of Wishes, that is going to point a lot more interest in your direction, if anybody catches on that far.

The ideal and hoped-for outcome is that you went around visiting a lot of shops and swearing them to secrecy, and maybe the City of Brass can figure out that part; but they don't know all those negotiations concluded successfully; and the larger City just guesses that this weird party was trying to negotiate too hard, or had some weird extra secret condition that most noble Efreet groups turned down.

Carissa Sevar: This is about how Carissa expected everything to work. The important thing is that they're not weirder than other things that happen around here frequently, and that they can get their delicious delicious Wishes.

City of Brass: Oh, they're definitely not weirder than the weirdest thing to happen in the City of Brass in the last week.  So long as nobody actually infers that they have unlimited Wish diamonds.

- does Carissa want an Armillary Amulet equivalent that somehow provides a +7 bonus to Spellcraft instead of a mere +5?  It'd be only the equivalent of 20,000gp, and she could try paying in spellsilver to make the real price to them be a quarter of that, maybe, if she's good at haggling.

Carissa Sevar: - yes, yes she does, and she's not even all that interested in saving Keltham money. She has yet to run across a problem other than imitating Hell-forged artifact headbands that seemed to require more spellcraft than she already has - the trickiest parts of Keltham's simulator lie elsewhere - but that doesn't mean she doesn't want MORE.

City of Brass: Well, Keltham hasn't seemed all that interested in saving Keltham money either!  But Carissa doesn't have an infinite quantity of spending money with her on this trip, unless you count unlimited Wish diamonds that can only be spent if conditions of secrecy can be created around that and you know what a noble Efreeti plans to do with them, and you may need that money for other things.

Like an IOUN STONE.  Does Carissa Sevar want an IOUN STONE, a vibrant purple prism that stores up to 3 total circles of spells?  Nobody in Golarion has been able to make an IOUN STONE for a long long time, but maybe they just didn't have enough Spellcraft and weren't soon to be INT 29 and didn't have a magical simulator of magic physics and weren't trying hard enough!  Also her cult members would probably be pretty impressed if she walked in with an IOUN STONE orbiting her, at least those of them who knew what an IOUN STONE was.

Carissa Sevar: - okay yeah maybe she kind of wants one of those too. 

She could totally figure out the lost Azlanti art of ioun stone making if she wasn't going to die in a month.

City of Brass: The proprietor of this store is a noble Efreeti who stands tall even for a noble, currently bargaining with an even larger Brutalis devil over a heavily magicked sword that Carissa couldn't lift with a Bull's Strength.

Serving as store assistant is an Azer - a brass-skinned dwarfoid native to Elemental Fire, whose hair and beard trail off into solid flame.  Almost all of Azerkind are enslaved by the Efreet, for the Azer's citadels were distant and had poor relations with one another, so that the Efreet armies could fall on their cities one by one and enslave them, without the next city becoming any the wiser.

The Azer assistant will inform Carissa that the price of the Ioun Stone proudly displayed in the store's window is -

- well, Carissa can either blow her whole remaining budget on that one Ioun Stone.  Or she could try to meet Keltham's conditions of secrecy and known use, to trade a Wish diamond.

Carissa Sevar: ....she should in fact do this AFTER she is smarter and not before. If she feels on some level like her greater Wisdom will lead her to not buy the ioun stone, that's because she actually shouldn't.

And if she should, she will. 

City of Brass: Before Carissa can go, the Azer will inform her in a low confidential voice that if the Ioun Stone orbiting in the store display caught her eye, there's an Orange Prism Ioun Stone that can be brought forth for the truly discriminating buyer.  It would increase the power of all her spells by about half a caster circle, including when it came to determining what sort of spells she can Permanency.

Carissa Sevar: Well, how does this shop feel about Keltham's confidentiality agreement.

City of Brass: The huge malik (noble efreeti) and the huger devil don't seem to be coming to terms on the enormous +2 keen wounding sword.

The giant devil, of dull-golden hide, whose head and shoulders are both crowned and crested with many horns, turns away finally from the bargaining counter.

"He overcharges, even more than do most of his kind," the devil says in Infernal to Carissa Sevar.  "It seems he has some prejudice against Hell and Hell's."

The devil's voice sounds exactly like Carissa's father.

And Carissa feels a surge of hatred towards those awful price-gouging lol no Carissa has a Mind Blank up.

Carissa Sevar: "Maybe," she says dryly. "Or maybe he overcharges everyone, or maybe it's just you; we'd have to observe some other transaction to see."

This is dangerous, this is really genuinely dangerous, but Carissa Sevar, these days, is fearless; the worst thing that can happen by her values is nothing on this trip going wrong.

City of Brass: The devil's eyes linger on the artifact crown of this woman, as seems to be the make of Hell; who replied to him in Infernal, who perhaps has bought fair form of some Hellish fleshcrafter, who seems to have absolutely no fear of him at all.  Even her surly tiefling attendant is equipped surpassingly well, though without any artifacts of her own.

"Have you need of some little service while you are in this City, perhaps?" the devil inquires smoothly.

Carissa Sevar: Odds it's a trap or a game of some kind - what is she talking about odds. Of course it is. "My business here is so secret that I will speak of it to no one who hasn't sworn me confidentiality, on not just what I'm buying and what I'm paying but of every matter they learn in the course of our transaction."

City of Brass: "And if I promised confidentiality from all the inhabitants of this city, but not from my superiors in Hell?"

Carissa Sevar: "No deal."

City of Brass: "Fascinating.  I hope it's not a problem if I report this discussion to my superiors?"

Carissa Sevar: "As they please."

City of Brass: "Is there a name, then, under which I should report of this matter?"

Carissa Sevar: "Carissa Sevar, Dispater's. Should I have yours, in case some future business of mine on the Material could use it?"

City of Brass: There's no sign he recognizes her name.  "Barbulbumalphas, of the Platform of Searing Irons in Stygia."

The devil turns from her, and exits the store without further speech.

City of Brass: The noble Efreeti (that is a 'Malik' of Efreet, in their own tongue) has been watching all this with an aloof expression, like a father watching the squabbling of two children, neither of them his own -

- well, until she claims to be Dispater's, and then, possibly, his face twitches a little.

"Your business here?" he inquires in Infernal, in a voice that sounds like heated brass feels to the touch.

Carissa Sevar: "Well, do you agree to swear to confidentiality, about the content of our negotiation and anything that might be learned in the course of it?"

City of Brass: "I can so swear, if you intend to make a purchase here."

Carissa Sevar: Yay!!!!!!!! She's going to have so much magical bling -

Carissa Sevar: - when she dies.

Carissa Sevar: Her face is not expressive, obviously. "I do so intend."

City of Brass: "Then so long as your intent proves true, I swear to keep secret the content of our negotiation and all that I learn from you in the course of it, save what I must answer to officers of our city to prove to them that I obeyed our city's laws."

Carissa Sevar: "If we are unable to arrive at a purchase agreement, the confidentiality must still hold."

Tarnish: Tarnish receives a message back from Ri-Dul, relayed of Keltham, who can't be in the Telepathic Bond because of Mind Blank.

"It must also apply to anything you learn from me, whether by speech or by purporting to read me.  It applies to anything you may have already learned or guessed from watching us.  All that passes within this store, as we now occupy, while we occupy and occupied it, is of the negotiation.  Your servant will also swear and must be sent out during the remaining proceedings.  You represent that you neither know nor suspect of others listening to us.  You may swear to the officers of the city no more than that you have obeyed the city's law."

City of Brass: The Malik's eyes narrow, and from his throat comes a brazen laugh.  "Stringent conditions indeed, if I may not report on what I've already learned and what a devil already knows.  Do you, perhaps, offer me some token of payment, to cover the event where we do not arrive at a purchase agreement after all?"

Carissa Sevar: "No. I desire to reach an agreement, and expect to, but I won't pay if we don't."

City of Brass: He stares at her in silence for a full six rounds, weighing the probable value of being able to tell other Efreet the bare facts so far, as she didn't seem particularly eager to conceal from that devil who was eager to do her service; the crown on her head, Dispater's name; the loss to his pride and the effect on future bargaining if he concedes this much; the possible loss of profit if he scares off this customer.

...what decides him, in the end, is the number of other shops in the City of Brass; it would be all too easy for her to leave.

dath ilan: YES well that's what HAPPENS when you institute price floors in the most naive possible way, without actually doing any of the further coordination steps that would let you act as an ACTUAL monopoly!  You get excess entry until all of the excess profits are being dissipated by the seeking of that excess profit, and buyers are doing sellers an implicit favor which gives buyers more negotiating power that they'll use on unregulated side frills!

City of Brass: "I accept," he says, and swears to her conditions.  His servant does likewise and then leaves.

Carissa Sevar: Great! She wants allll the ioun stones and she wants to pay in Wish diamonds.

Tarnish: ...but the Malik has to state and swear to the use of those Wish diamonds, as must be agreeable to his customers; there are many non-destructive uses of Wishes that they'll be happy to agree to.

City of Brass: How many Wish diamonds does she have to trade?

Carissa Sevar: "Two I'd considered for purchases here; some others, for some other purchases, which I'd consider if you have more than I'm aware of."

City of Brass: He has but the two Ioun Stones, but there is much else about his shop that might interest one who pays in Wish diamonds.  Since he has bound himself not to say anything of it, he admits himself quite curious what might lead Dispater to open out His treasury so.  Perhaps, if he knew her purpose, he could point her towards more appropriate items.

Carissa Sevar: She's starting a cult. She mostly wants to look really cool and conceivably at some point overthrow some governments.

City of Brass: ...

The Malik shows her a variety of items, none of which are truly tempting except for a Robe of the Archmagi.

It's gray.

Neutral-aligned.

Carissa would have to Atone to Lawful Neutral to use it.  But she keeps up a Mind Blank, so Hell wouldn't find out, right?  "I wanted to be able to wear a gray Robe of the Archmagi" is something that any reasonable deity should understand as a just reason to Atone.

Carissa Sevar: ....she is briefly tempted, but, no, she thinks that there is absolutely no way a visibly Lawful Neutral person could serve the specific role that Carissa Sevar is serving. She could disguise it, obviously, but some people cast True Seeing, in situations involving her. 

Also she doesn't actually want to go to Axis. If all this ends, somehow, with nothing fixed or improved or destroyed, with all who trusted her betrayed, then she should burn eternally; that would just be correct. 

Not that she even could go to Axis, but it seems like if you don't even want to you probably can't Atone.

She'll just get the two ioun stones.

City of Brass: He'll try for a while to bargain her up to three Wish diamonds before grudgingly settling on two.

These gems, he'll swear to use only for increasing his own abilitystats.  But he desires not to do so this day, for he has hopes of coming across a further Wish diamond sometime in the next millennium, by which means he might increase a stat by three rather than two.

Tarnish: She'll purchase the Robe of the Archmagi for a friend, if he agrees to use those three Wish diamonds tomorrow, but not today, and to swear to total secrecy the Maliks whom he pays, or offers to pay, to help him cast three Wishes in succession.

City of Brass: ...that Robe of Archmagi is really worth two Wish diamonds.

Tarnish: She has less patience than does Dispater's.

City of Brass: Do they by any chance have a fourth Wish diamond they'd be willing to exchange for... basically anything reasonable he has?

Tarnish: If it'll save them bargaining time with other Efreet who'll otherwise waste that time, she's willing to look over any easily-portable valuables he has, such as would be readily accepted as currency within the City of Brass, that they could later spend in place of the last Wish diamond, and not need to repeat all this bargaining.

City of Brass: They get out of there eventually, Tarnish having sold a fourth Wish diamond for noticeably less than it was worth as of today, and rather a lot more than it might be worth later.

Carissa Sevar: There are some people in the world who'd know Carissa Sevar well enough to infer, from how much she doesn't look happy about her ioun stones, that either she has gained a lot of skill at bluffing or she thinks something incredibly awful is going to happen very soon.

Next up, the Wishes, then?

Tarnish: Yes, they do in fact have Things To Do and people to become.

City of Brass: Walking through the City of Brass with a lesser artifact crown, plus two fucking IOUN STONES orbiting your head like you're fucking Felandrial Morgethai, attracts more stares and avaricious glances than just the artifact crown.

Nobody tries it; at least, not yet.  Everybody in this part of Fommok Madinah is a few millennia old at least, and didn't get to be that way by directly attacking unreadably Mind Blanked adventurers with a lesser artifact and two fucking Ioun stones.

In time, they succeed in coming across a larger building, a mighty brazen slave-market, which also advertises in passing that it grants Wishes, or even five Wishes in succession; as is one indirect way of advertising that this business is worth the attention of at least five noble Efreet.

In retrospect, you wouldn't actually expect to find a shop that was just five noble Efreet waiting around to perform a service whose custom they might receive once per year if they were lucky.

Carissa Sevar: Is there anything good in the slave market? Carissa is in the market for ways to piss off her ex.

Carissa Sevar: Five Wishes, please.

City of Brass: It's a little more complicated than that but, yes, she can get to that point under Keltham's onerous conditions without spending too much time.  Two fucking Ioun Stones orbiting your head commands a lot of commercial respect.  A devil-wrought lesser artifact is something you get by being on sufficiently good terms with Hell; Ioun Stones take money.

The interior of the building is over-warm by Golarion standards and very temperate by Elemental Fire standards, replete with air she could breathe without even a Planar Adaptation.  There are mortal slaves here, drawn from the Material, who require more favorable living conditions.  Though Carissa was only permitted to see a single chamber of slaves drawn from Golarion and the other planets of its star-system, for some reason or other; still, she could have had a Shobhad slave-warrior of Akiton, or a pliant and broken Lashunta of Castrovel, did she wish to piss off Keltham by buying such a person and then, presumably, mistreating them.

Mentioning that she wants to engage in secret negotiations with the noble Efreet owners will garner some looks even more arrogant than usual; and the Malik brought forth won't, in this case, agree to secrecy only on the basis of intended purchase.  But statement of intended purchase, and 'token' payment of something worth around 2000gp, will do.

A sixth Wish diamond is sufficient to pay for the casting of five Wishes, even under the condition that the Malik must state and swear to its use:  One of their number will hoard it through ages until he has assembled enough diamonds to raise the final abilitystat he requires to ascend into the next rank of Efreet nobility.

She will eventually end up in a windowless inner chamber of this place, as fiery as the rest of the interior was temperate, orange flames replaced by white flames shot with blue; hot enough that Carissa will feel it through the Planar Adaptation.

Carissa Sevar is obviously a very wealthy person, by the way.  And now she's in a windowless chamber with five noble Efreet who might, possibly, be tempted by walking away with six Wish diamonds and two Ioun Stones in profit, rather than just the one Wish diamond.  Five Malik acting together in a surprise attack - not that much surprise, but unannounced, at least - and supported by their subordinates and slaves shortly after, might take a victim unprepared even if they were relatively mighty for a mortal.

Keltham v4: That person at INT 27 and outlining a dozen possible worlds will have considered Carissa's death to Hell and its mind-reading as something Carissa might want consciously and subconsciously.  Carissa Sevar won't have been allowed to come on this trip and augment herself without a promise that she'll try by sincere effort and wit to stay alive, however much she might hope to die.

That person will not have asked of Carissa that she not hope.  But he'll have required that Carissa not act to bring about her hopes, that she if necessary act to prevent her hopes from coming to pass.  He's put himself together in a way where he can hurt about that, about demanding things like that from somebody he still cares about; he no longer tries to avoid that hurt by taking refuge in calculation.  But the reasoning will be clear nonetheless, and he will have demanded of Carissa what he must, to ensure that this universe can still be destroyed if necessary, for there's people hurting more than her.

City of Brass: So what preparations are about Carissa, then, against the greed of these Efreet?  Especially any visible preparations, as might discourage their greed from being acted-upon in the first place?

Those preparations cannot involve too many protections or displays that are both expensive and temporary; their pair needs to repeat this task eight more times at least, before the trip is done.

Carissa Sevar: Intelligence is coming up with a ridiculous stack of Moment of Prescience and Contingent Gaseous Form and Anticipate Peril and Foresight and testing in advance that she can Banish herself using her crown when on other planes and making Greater Slaying arrows for the efreeti-bane crossbow Tarnish is conspicuously carrying.

Wisdom is realizing that all of that has at best an eighty percent chance of working given the known capabilities of the efreeti, and that the efreeti too might have unknown capabilities, and just negotiating up front for their safety during dealmaking. It makes her look slightly less invincible, but it also makes her actually safe. 

City of Brass: The Malik will of course act terribly insulted and disdainful, but eventually give in about this.

(Carissa is the only one on the expedition who has a hard version of this problem; Keltham can just have an "alchemical dead-man-switch suicide bomb that would destroy the diamonds" about his person.)

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa made an attempt to persuade him that the efreeti would not especially believe him about this and so it was likely to be tested, but eventually gave up. If Keltham wants to melt himself and his possessions in an acidic slurry who is she to object, really.)

Keltham v4: (It's not his only precaution!  What makes Carissa's side hard is that she's the one who has to actually not die.  He can explode himself and come back again to find more sensible Efreet.)

Keltham v4: Anyways!  By a similar token, Carissa Sevar has sometimes been known to undergo great cognitive shifts when under importantly different cognitive conditions.  Perhaps at INT 29 she will decide she is a different person not bound by past oaths.  Perhaps at INT 29 she can configure her thoughts in a way that sidesteps the geas earring without that ever looking on a first step like a forbidden intent to defeat the geas.

It would take both Intelligence and arrogance to imagine you'd come up with a plan to defeat that possibility at INT 27, to raise up a more powerful Carissa and then contain her.  It would require more than just believing in your own Intelligence's power; it would require respecting your own INT 27 but not her forthcoming INT 29.  It requires thinking that you exhaustively searched every option Carissa Sevar would see, using not just a more powerful INT 29 but also her own different ways of thinking.

You could call the alternative Wisdom, but in dath ilan they'd just call it thinkoomph or maybe security mindset.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa totally bets at INT 29 she'll be able to think of a way to betray Keltham. Maybe even one that leaves her options more appealing than pleading with Otolmens to squish him. 

She'll take off her beautiful wonderful headband and replace it with an Intelligence headband while she gets Wisdom, and then take it off entirely while she gets Intelligence.

City of Brass: One after another, the five Malik cast five Wishes upon her, using the exact wordings that she gave them and bound them to with oaths, that she be made forever Wiser.  The five Wish spells are differently worded in the sequence, to match at some invisible edges, to tile to a greater Wish spell that settles into Carissa and makes her something more.  If there was a sixth possible spell in this sequence, it has been lost, and gods are forbidden to return the knowledge to mortals.

Carissa Sevar: It is, in fact, doing something a little different than the headband. 

She likes it, whatever it is. She imagined at some Wisdom level she'd be able to comprehend Keltham's attitude towards enhancement, if not agree with it, but she suspects now she'll never share it. The more she is, the more of her there is, the better; she is moving towards herself.

Next, then.

City of Brass: Finding the next target goes faster now that they've realized they're looking for huge buildings and businesses of many nobles, which will incidentally advertise Wish-sequences as sidelines.

Carissa Sevar: The next such building makes Foresight prickle against her mind like it can no longer do in Golarion where prophecy is broken; she instantly Dimension Doors them out.

The one after that doesn't feel dangerous. 

Five Intelligence, please.

City of Brass: These fucking rich people.  These Golarion-filtered shops could only even offer Foresight scrolls for sale because somebody sold them to the City of Brass centuries earlier, before prophecy broke.

Anyways, yes, it continues to be more complicated than that, but five Intelligence, sure.

Carissa Sevar: It doesn't make anything new click into place; it wouldn't be expected to, until she puts the headband back on.

...how about five Splendour, then.

City of Brass: Splendour!

Carissa Sevar: Among the many complicated feelings Carissa has, as she continues on her shopping spree, is a sense of intense grief that she cannot enjoy it; that this is a beautiful thing, a fascinating thing, an incredible thing, something she wants to extend to every person alive and every person ever to live, and yet all she can feel is terror that it won't be enough, that no matter how intelligent she gets she won't see a way out.

She gets strength and dexterity and constitution enhanced, too. There are cognitive effects, which she expected, and they're not subtle, which surprises her. Humans are, it turns out, a body as much as a soul, and having that body respond more quickly to your instructions, move more effortlessly, have more energy, is like the difference between being struck with a flu and being in perfect health. 

(If she figured out an assembly-line setup for belts of Constitution, no one would ever get sick....no, doesn't matter, they're all going to get annihilated...)

She wants her headband back. She wants to know if her despair is an error or just correct. She wants to put her head in Carmin's lap and cry. 

"You done?" she says to Tarnish, more irritably than Tarnish, who hasn't done anything wrong besides being the kind of loathsome person who wants to destroy the world, deserves.

Tarnish: Keltham asked Tarnish under Detect Thoughts and also truthspell, if she was confident that her commitment to do Literally Anything in exchange for some mortal finally holding Pharasma to any kind of account, would stand up to increasing her own Intelligence, Wisdom, or even Splendour.

Tarnish's reply, which in its own way revealed more wisdom than many who detect as Wiser, was approximately, 'lol no how could I possibly know that'.

She's fine waiting on all cognitive enhancement until later, and is just here for Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution boosts.

They can head back, now, though it would also be okay if Carissa wanted to shop around more and buy more amazing magical items that Tarnish can watch her not enjoy.

Or even magic items that might help Carissa in not destroying the world, if she's got any ideas for that.  Tarnish is not very against destroying the world, but she does have dreams of her own: she wants the world to be fixed, in part by her own deeds and acts.  That way she can go around ever after being awful to Good people, and then telling them she's done more Good than they'll ever do, and she wants them to suck it up and take it in partial repayment.

Carissa Sevar: They can do a second trip later if she thinks of anything. She doesn't, actually, think that saving the world is going to involve clever overpowered magic items; just the people with the power to kill everyone deciding that actually they should only destroy Hell or something.

Keltham v4: He does worry that they won't be able to make a second trip, the City of Brass being too interested, by then, in the question of whether those mysterious visitors Actually Had That Many Diamonds, especially if they hear from Golarion about who that probably was and the concept of 'chemistry'.

But then, he also worries about that because he is still on the lookout for 'tropes', and it would be tropey if they only got to make one trip and had to buy everything they needed on that one trip or else fail.

Carissa Sevar: "Let's windowshop in the slave markets for a bit and then head home."

Tarnish: "Hey, bitch?  I don't mind destroying the world but I do slightly prefer it get fixed instead, and I don't trust Keltham to actually achieve that while he's trying hard not to think about it as a possibility.  I'm definitely not smart enough to do it myself.  And you won't be smart enough either, if you stop hoping.  So buy literally whatever it takes to cheer you the fuck up, we've still got shopping money and I'll approve spending another five Wish diamonds if I have to."*

(* Lit.  "Mistress?  I don't mind master's slightly worse outcome, but I do slightly prefer the better one..." etc.)

Carissa Sevar: To her own astonishment Carissa feels something, then. It's a surge of fury and loathing and terror stronger than she's ever felt before and, wow, it is not helping at all.

"Of course Keltham isn't going to think of it. He's a fundamentally despicable person from a broken and nightmarish world which treats actual human values - the desire to live, the desire to endure, the desire to grow - as horrible dangers everyone must be carefully twisted out of contemplating."

"He is broken in a way that no enhancement can repair, because they are twisted so as to ensure every bit of humanity remaining in them is lost in favor of the broken blankness of their civilization when they get smarter. He will not come up with anything. He is fundamentally not the kind of mind that could come up with anything."

She would not be saying this if she had her headband on, because it's not even quite true, it's a sideways articulation of a thought she did need to think but can and should sit on until she can say it better, and she knows it, but it turns out one of her enhancements or some combination of them, or maybe some other feature of the situation, maybe just the adrenaline from all these high-stakes magic negotiations, gave her stronger emotions, and suddenly Tarnish is rather too much to bear.

"Whoever he might have been, if he'd been born in a better place, if he'd been born in a place with humans, he strangled it and replaced it with what he calls 'dath ilan' and which is blank emptiness opposed to everything that humans are. At least he understood enough to grieve it. If anything goes well, if anything goes less than maximally badly, it'll have to be because I think of it. And I'm not going to think of it without the headband on, which means it's bottlenecked on the-disembodied-spirit-of-Darkness-and-betrayal-and-horror my boyfriend gave himself over to thinking about whether It can trust me with that.

The idiot running this project thinks we only get one trip because of tropes. I don't know how he decides which tropes to take seriously but I'm going to come back here once I have my headband on and a concrete plan, because tropes could just as easily have meant we got ambushed on this trip, or ambushed on this trip unless it was only the first of many, or we could have been ambushed while I was out cult-encouraging, tropes are not actually narrowly enough understood we can evade them like that.

You are right, though, that I should do whatever cheers me up, which is going to the slave markets and fantasizing about how if I'd listened to Asmodeus when he told me to be Eviller, I could have, when I realized what Keltham was planning, leveraged that to squish him like the blot upon humanity he is and conquered Golarion and lived happily ever after for all eternity and everyone else would be better off too."

Carissa Sevar: Her heart is pounding like she just fought several Worldwound demons. 

"Some of that was probably incorrect," she says, slightly more calmly.

Tarnish: "Who cares?  Not me, that's for sure.  I liked it."

"I'd help with the slave market appreciation but I vastly overstretched my innate abilities by trying to cheer you up literally at all."

Keltham v4: His own shopping trip is both easier and harder than Carissa's.

Easier, because he doesn't fear death that much; he found ways beforehand to verify that he seemed to have a soul.  (Casting Magic Jar from scroll, for example, and wasn't that an interesting experience.) 

Harder, because Ri-Dul cannot accompany him into the real negotiations; and by himself he doesn't look, doesn't feel dangerous the way Carissa does, even with his own Hellwrought lesser-artifact headband.  With Mind Blank up they can't read him and don't know him for a wizard below third circle; but 25 Splendour and Glibness is not quite enough for a dath ilani to fake being dangerous.  At least, dangerous in a way that things like Efreet understand.

Noble Efreet try harder to take advantage of what looks weak; he has to negotiate harder and longer to arrive at acceptable prices, and they are still unreasonable compared to Sevar's.

...He doesn't try all that hard to avoid being taken advantage of.  None of this, from beginning to end, is a fair trade.  He's doing it in the City of Brass, and not some other place with noble genies, because the Efreet have a reputation as hard and unfair bargainers.

He carries about himself a briefcase he had made.  He has made much smaller pellets of the contents that he can use to demonstrate, if they don't just believe his word that, yes, he can make entirely nonmagical explosions that would be dangerous even to beings of Fire if scaled.  Do they press him, he will consume all about himself in fury and destroy his trade goods alongside his attackers.  He will come back from that.  They won't.

City of Brass: The noble Efreet do call him coward and weakling, and try to goad him about it.

Keltham v4: He's at 27 Int and 23 Splendour, even to start.  The Efreet are dumber than Keltham was when he first arrived in Golarion.

He cannot improvise true talk-control, that takes neuroscience he doesn't have and can't infer that quickly without doing experiments, for he's not a god as yet.  But the Efreet feel to him more like mechanisms than people.  Dangerous mechanisms, imperfectly predictable, not navigable to arbitrary outcomes as a talk-controller could manage; but not, really, people, except in the sense of having qualia.

He patiently negotiates their conversation graphs and pathways through time at minimum risk to himself.  As is, of course, still some risk; but he's arranged for the 'risky' outcome to still be acceptable and that's not really that much risk.

Ri-Dul: "Be warned that I'm having some trouble figuring out exactly what you're trying to accomplish here, in terms of decoding the false message you're trying to send somebody.  Whoever you're trying to confuse by it is going to end up very confused except in the extraordinarily improbable case that they are smarter than myself."

Keltham v4: Ri-Dul does not look to him like only a dangerous mechanism.

He treads carefully, here.

"Your guess?  I may not confirm or deny, even if you say it, but I want to know."

Ri-Dul: "You had me send out feelers for smaller diamonds, too small for Limited Wishes and too ugly for jewels, and wished to make it appear plausible that you were purchasing those in larger quantities than you actually were.  Your negotiating rules here are designed to make it look possible that you are spending more Wish diamonds than exist in all Golarion to be bought."

"If I had to guess, it would be that you desire Cheliax to believe that you have a chemical method for aggregating small diamonds into larger ones."

Keltham v4: "If that would be what I wanted Cheliax to believe, what doesn't fit?  Why isn't it straightforwardly a good deception?"

Ri-Dul: "You also have me leave the room during those negotiations, for one thing.  For another, you would be trying harder to conceal the truth, if that was the truth, and Cheliax would be expected to know that."

Keltham v4: "Cheliax when they were running the Conspiracy on me didn't seem that smart, until near the end, and they've lost both of the two people who I taught to run games on that level."

"But yes, there's games underneath games going on here, including my not wanting to look to hypothetical smarter opponents like I'm running an exact particular first-order game, and real agreements I'm making in some cases underneath the secret negotiations that create the appearance of a possible diamond-aggregation method.  None of which you have any need to know."

Ri-Dul: "Cheliax thought you a child, correctly.  Do not underestimate Abrogail Thrune once her attention is fully roused."

Keltham v4: "I apologize for playing a fascinating game against Abrogail Thrune and forcing you to watch me play a bunch of obviously suboptimal moves from your perspective.  I sincerely would let you step in and do it, but I am not quite sure our interests are that aligned."

Ri-Dul: "Hm.  I do appreciate that you correctly understand your sin, here."

Keltham v4: "Can I ask your probability that I actually have a method for aggregating diamonds or synthesizing them outright?  You didn't mention that as a possibility, so the probability you assign to it is either very small, or large enough that you decided not to mention it in case I would arrogantly believe you hadn't thought of it."

The Ordinary Keltham who does not have unlimited diamonds, but wishes to appear so, would ask that question, and therefore so does Conspiracy Keltham.

Ri-Dul: He smiles slightly, at that.  "It's the second one.  I admit, I'd feel a little hurt if you had unlimited wealth, but paid me so little.  Five Wish diamonds when my employment was done would make up for my hurt feelings, or thirty-one if they were truly flowing without limit."

Keltham v4: "You don't have anything of especial urgency on which to use the thirty-first Wish, but you're thinking that the Keltham who has unlimited diamonds is more likely to ask you what the thirty-first diamond is for."

Ri-Dul: "All right, fine, I'll be a little less obvious in the future and reluctantly concede that you may actually be making some move against Abrogail Thrune that I don't understand."

Keltham v4: It's not a good outcome, that Ri-Dul respects him a little more; but the other possible mental states that Ri-Dul could enter, down this conversational graph, were worse in expectation.  Some losses are inevitable even if you play your best.

He goes into the next building that looks affluent enough to afford five Wish diamonds and offers Wish purchases, and trades five Wish diamonds for rather a lot of platinum.  If they do have to send somebody back to the City of Brass to buy more things, they won't need to pay with Wish diamonds, if somebody suspects those prices are about to drop.  He can return the money later, under many of the possible cases where anybody survives long enough for diamond prices to drop.

Keltham v4: After finally finding his first building that advertises up to 5 Wishes, and getting his Wisdom to 27 instead of 26, and checking himself to see if he's being stupid in any obvious way he can now see...

...it does, finally, occur to him to pay a native for directions to more places where up to five Wish-conversions can be bought.

Some thoughts are just way more counterintuitive to some people than others.

He won't make the same mistake again, not even once over the rest of his life.  It's just, he's lived his whole life with global positioning satellites and network searches and cars that automatically go places...

Well, it's promising for his having overlooked other possibilities, maybe.

Keltham+: 1 point of Wisdom and 2 points of Intelligence continue to be a lot.  Boosting Strength and Dexterity and further boosting Constitution does less than that - but it does something, the increase of these strange weights in Golarion's conceptualmagic ontology, that seems to think them words speakable in the same breath as Wisdom.

It would be a little easier to become a god, like this, it feels; there is more weight to his person.

Keltham+: He spends six Wish diamonds and buys a Belt of Physical Perfection, +4/+4/+4, as you can find somewhere in all the City of Brass if you try a few shops and pay for directions.

It's not for himself.  It's for Carissa.  She'll need it more.

He gets her a black Robe of the Archmagi too.  Though she'll need to not wear Belt and Robe and Ioun Stones where Ri-Dul can see all that, she must leave Ri-Dul behind on future trips a-culting if she wants to wear it all.  Ri-Dul would know, if he saw.  They can get some fake versions of at least the Belt and the Robe made up with Greater Magic Aura, so that Ri-Dul will have an alternate explanation to hand for any rumors he hears later.

Keltham+: In time, a slightly different man returns to the Doombase, so that Carissa Sevar can put her headband back on and hopefully undergo positive changes of her own.

He did not, at any point, enjoy seeing her like this.  It's not the kind of cruelty a distant past Keltham was slowly learning to enjoy.

He doesn't know if Carissa Sevar will find a path to a better world than she feared, though he does surely hope it.  But Carissa Sevar should have Wisdom enough now to make an internal decision, and enforce that decision, to stop hurting herself within whatever world she comes to believe herself within.  So he greatly hopes, and somewhat less greatly predicts.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar, inexplicably even to herself cheered by wandering through the slave markets of the City of Brass or possibly by saying mean things about Keltham, Plane Shifts from a scroll back with Tarnish and then Teleports them to the base. 

Keltham+: The way he would have ideally liked to do this is with him running Detect Thoughts on Carissa as she ascends, and Carissa having access to his own thoughts in turn.  So that she can see what he thinks of what she is thinking, and so that he sees if she outgrows the geas at the same time as she stops believing in the value of oaths between people with differences.

He has fallback options if that would be really bad for her, in her own opinion.

Carissa Sevar: "I think that'll be uninformative because I won't have thoughts while you're observing them. That's how I was able to pull off the whole project of getting Asmodia and Peranza's souls in the first place, I knew I wouldn't think until I was alone."

Keltham+: He's aware.  He modeled that process in sufficient detail to think of it as one possibility among others, and prompt her removal to a scry-screened area after she got an artifact headband, timed for when she wouldn't have prepped spells yet.

He knows that what she thinks while under Detect Thoughts will end up not being something that can bind her real self.  She doesn't need to think about whether or not her real self is a being that will keep oaths.

What he might hope to accomplish, by this, is, first, to see if she's directly outgrown the power of a geas to bind her without her even trying; and, second, more importantly, that Carissa have obtained a true understanding of his model of the universe and herself and himself as he truly sees those things, based on her seeing his thoughts, and his seeing her seeing his thoughts.

If she decides to betray her oaths and him, after the Detect Thoughts ends, she'll at least be doing it based on true information that would pass an Imitation Game test.  She'll be doing it based on correctly knowing the structure of oaths, and what's at stake there far beyond Pharasma's Creation.

Her thoughts of him have seemed to him, from time to time, not just unjust but inaccurate.  If she betrays the Algorithm on the basis of a wrong model, that's a farce and not just a tragedy.  That's what he'd be hoping to prevent.

He wants her to have the option of seeing reality, himself, and herself, as he would see them.  He wants that understanding to be inside her, when Detect Thoughts ends, and she actually grows into herself.  If she throws it away then and shatters her vows, then that's how the story ends, he supposes.

Carissa has not - as he understands all this - read his mind directly since she met him at the Worldwound, let alone with INT 29 at which level she might begin to understand what she saw, if he was also watching himself and thinking thoughts meant to help her understand.

Carissa Sevar: - is - is he planning to give her the option of throwing away her vows to save the universe. Or is this all about the chance she'll think of some way around them while disallowed from thinking about them, or disassociate from the Carissa who made them or something, and how likely is he considering that. 

It....matters, kind of a lot. She's not entirely sure that it should, but. 

...on Carissa's own concept of this, which she knows is flawed enough she should not act on it, would not act on it, until and unless she understands it better, on Carissa's concept of this, if someone is enforcing your vows with magic, and you find a way around the magic, that's just fair play. If they trusted you -

- and she's not, actually, sure she ought to be trusted in that way, she isn't a Lawful being yet, she isn't sure she grows up into one -

- but if they trusted you then it's much much more important, to be someone they were right to trust.

Maybe that will all seem insane when she's smarter.

Keltham+: He does not in fact think that it's possible for INT 29 himself to keep INT 29 Carissa contained, short of continuously monitoring her with Detect Thoughts every minute and forcing them to sleep at synchronized times, and maybe not even then.  Once the Detecting Thoughts stops, she's definitely being trusted.

There's some things he can do to try to reduce the expected damage from incorrect trust, like try to detect if she cannot stop herself from visibly-to-him shutting down a thought about how she no longer believes in oaths or conditionally cooperating in the cooperation-defection dilemma.  He can't avoid needing to trust her promise; he can try to make sure that she's still the kind of person who he's correct to trust.

He's hoping that Carissa can grow up into a Lawful being where he can see that.  And if that was only a lie that she put on to fool his Detect Thoughts, and the real Carissa deep inside herself wells up and shoves that aside and discards it - then that deep Carissa is the person he's trusting, and has no choice but to trust; given the promises he's already made to not just statue her, and to augment her to match himself, which he knew then would lead to this point.

He just wants - to make sure that the Carissa inside Carissa - knows what Lawfulness is, what promises mean.  See in her mind that at least some part of Carissa understands.  Before Detect Thoughts ends, and the deeper Carissa makes her real choice.

If it will help, he can take off the earring that forces her to speak truth to him and keep her promises, after the Detect Thoughts ends, if by then she appears to him as one who understands the Lawfulness the inner Carissa would have to cast aside.

He does not want to play with Carissa the game that Cheliax played with her.  He does not want her calculating the entire time whether he'll later ask her a question she'll be forced to answer truthfully, and on that basis censor her thoughts - which is why he has not already been asking every day up until now, whether she's been plotting to betray him in the back of her mind.  He does not want Carissa, herself, wondering if her choices to coordinate were made out of fear of the geas.

He does - hope - that they will reach a state with each other where nothing is hidden, anymore, where their minds can just meet.  But he can promise beforehand, even, that he won't ask for mutual Detect Thoughts again, or any truthspells, will wait for her to offer it, if it matters to her that she doesn't need to fear it.  He believes INT 29 Carissa could defeat measures like Detect Thoughts or truthspells, even as used by him; so he's already required to trust her, and if it helps that he trust her more visibly, he can trust her a little more in reality and much more visibly.

Carissa Sevar: Oh.

Carissa does not know, if she'll grow up into a Lawful being. But - but it's not that there are very many things that could conceivably be more important than being someone people are right to trust. 

She - isn't sure, if she was right to trust Keltham, if he was right to trust her. But - she'll do the mutual Detect Thoughts, if he wants, if he'll take the earring off afterwards, if he wants them to try to walk the road ahead where they don't betray each other even though they want to. 

She didn't know that he was still trying at that.

Keltham+: They've been reaching out hands to each other from the beginning.

He'll never not reach back.

They may not always succeed in clasping hands, because reality and mathematics aren't so kind; but he'll never stop trying to reach out towards her while she's still trying to reach out towards him.

Shall they?

Carissa Sevar: Yeah. All right.

Pilar : Pilar watches Ri-Dul the Necromancer - not that she believes this is his real name, this does not feel like the vibe of a man who uses his real name often - walk away down streets of fire.  Trailing Keltham, who seemed normal, in the way of somebody who is carefully constructing a seeming about himself and chose normality that day and that's horrible he used to be so open.

Then she turns to Ione.  "So what are we doing here, exactly?"

Ione Sala: "The same thing everybody does in the City of Brass, Pilar."

Ione Sala: "SHOPPING."

Pilar : 'SHOPPING,' apparently, as distinct from normal shopping as practiced by normal sane people, starts with Pilar donning her disguise cloak, and prestidigitating her hair back to its natural color underneath that.

Because, apparently, Cheliax and Hell are going to be analyzing this event later; and Pilar visibly being part of it would unacceptably mislead Aspexia Rugatonn about the degree to which this whole event serves Cheliax's interests.  They should not hinder Keltham, on this shopping trip, but they absolutely should not help him, if they're to avoid hindering Asmodeus's interests.

Ione Sala: "...where obviously I hate Asmodeus and want Him to die as painfully as is possible for a god.  But things are decision-theoretically complicated and we're in something like a cooperation-defection dilemma.  I don't need to grab after every possible short-term advantage of 'my side' against Asmodeus, because that's not what grownups do, hint hint.  It's just like how Keltham is bringing us here, and letting us go shopping here at all, because he correctly trusts that we'll only serve our interests in ways that don't hinder his interests."

"To put it another way, I know Nethys wouldn't allow us to be here, if it was going to mislead Cheliax and injure Asmodeus because I hadn't warned you to disguise yourself.  Not that I'd need Nethys to enforce it, in my case.  I just - wouldn't upset a multiagent cooperative arrangement where somebody trusted me, even if I could benefit from doing that.  But even if I wasn't that type of person, I'd know that Nethys was good at predicting me, and that choosing to upset the arrangement is like choosing not to be here in the first place."

Pilar : "That sounds like Keltham is doing something here that goes against Asmodeus's interests."

Ione Sala: "He sure is."

Pilar : "And I should not stop what he's doing, because..."

Ione Sala: "Snack Service wouldn't have arranged with Keltham to bring you here, as does separately benefit Asmodeus relative to the default course of Keltham coming here and you never hearing about it at all, if that action hadn't been beneficial to Cayden Cailean and Asmodeus.  You shutting down Keltham would benefit Asmodeus but injure Cayden Cailean."

Pilar : "And if I were to note that I don't remember agreeing to this compact?  Snack Service seizes my body?"

Ione Sala: "Nope, Nethys correctly predicts how that plays out and Snack Service doesn't bring you here in the first place."

Pilar : "I'm already here."

Ione Sala: "Were you not paying attention to literally anything Keltham told you in decision theory class?"

Pilar : "I was.  I'm just complaining."

Ione Sala: "Oh, grow up.  Did your remaining superiors in Cheliax stop hurting you for minor acts of pathetic whining and now you've forgotten how that works?"

Pilar : "Possibly."