Keltham+: Let him be considered an alien wandering by who sees a lot of matter in an unpleasant state, that can with some work be converted to a more pleasant state of nonexistence.  He's already put in some work to destroy the universe, and made some serious sacrifices about that.

Then, after all that work, some other alien steps in and requests his indulgence to instead transform reality into a different end state which that alien likes better than nonexistence.

He's not especially interested in calculating the exact least pleasant most miserable state he considers better than nonexistence, so that other alien can make him an exact minimum offer that gives him a near-zero tiny fraction of the gains from coordination.

If they're going to be revising Creation anyways, how about if Pharasma comes up with a decent offer that doesn't resemble a hellhole so much anymore, and gets something that She herself considers comfortably better than nonexistence, a state that neither of the two of them consider really icky and unpleasant; and everybody lives happily ever after, except for Zon-Kuthon who ought to be turned back into Dou-Bral anyways.

Carissa Sevar: Because that involves him being willing to destroy some universes that don't have Hell and have an incredibly low probability of ever having Hell, and he shouldn't be willing to do that because it's an awful thing to do to people without even Hell as justification?

She can feel herself having to stamp on the impulse to get emotional again, but it's that answer, rather than the original plan, that is why she hates Keltham and wants to preemptively cryopreserve dath ilan, the fact that he is willing to destroy the world if it is offered the end of Hell. It is that which feels to her like a mad monstrous incomprehensible blankness, like murder for its own sake.

Keltham+: The fact that Carissa feels that way might get him to accept an offer of 4, in this Ultimatum Game, but not an offer of 0.01.

Carissa Sevar: If Pharasma says 'well, I can declare that the Lawful authority over Hell is Carissa, and I predict with very high confidence that I won't change who is the Lawful authority over Hell again in the next billion years, but nothing else you want is the kind of thing I really do as an entity', then Keltham should not consider it accepting an offer of 0.01, to bring hope and comfort and healing to every single person in Hell and never have it again and have everyone else in the universe go on with their good and wonderful lives.

And if Pharasma says 'well, well, I can declare that the Lawful authority over Hell is Carissa, and I predict with very high confidence that I won't change who is the Lawful authority over Hell again in the next billion years, and the other things are also things I could do, but I won't, because I don't want to', and Keltham murders every single person in the universe over that - he can't hide behind Hell, if he does that. He wouldn't be doing that because of Hell. He would be killing trillions of people and sending at least some of them to Hell, because some of Greater Reality is bad, because he personally doesn't like the deal he got.

She doesn't have a purer definition of what Evil is than destroying a universe in which trillions of people live and none are in Hell, because you feel that this universe doesn't give you a big enough share of the benefits of it existing.

Keltham+: No matter how high the stakes are, if you're willing to accept tiny shares of gains from trade, you won't get offered any other deals; that logic doesn't change when the stakes go up.

Carissa Sevar: It seems to her that Keltham is not just rejecting the trade Pharasma offers him, of living in her universe, as not worth it to him, which he may totally do if he likes; but is also going around smashing every trade Pharasma has offered every other person, which they ought to have the right to accept or reject on their own, and rejecting all those trades on behalf of all those people.

Keltham+: If putting Carissa in command of Hell is change enough that Golarion, and every other planet in its plane, and every plane in the rest of Creation, can with that much of a boost, see higher technology and greater cooperation spread from star to star, until people here are no longer living squalid lives where half their children end up in the Boneyard, that then indeed would be enough.  That would be a fair chunk of trade-gain; it wouldn't be the minimum quality of life and maximum misery that got him to be almost indifferent toward this reality's destruction.

Similarly, if universal education got to the point where everybody could actually understand the choice made in deciding to leave Creation for Greater Reality, and it was easy for them to skip the afterlife system if they wanted, he would be okay with that.  But that sounds like Civilization rising to great enough heights that it'd be fine regardless; even a mildly below-average dath ilani might have a hard time grasping Greater Reality shit.  It sounds like a stronger demand to make of Pharasma than just cleaning up Creation's regular mess.

Keltham+: Else if putting Carissa in charge of Hell is change enough that Abaddon can be subdued, and the nearby surface layers of the Abyss subdued, once Heaven and Hell are fighting there side-by-side; if cooperation between Heaven and Hell is enough divine agreement that heroes can stride from plane to plane and smash the slave-pits and torture-chambers, until rulers and parliaments learn what worst of human behavior will earn extraplanar missions of disruption -

- then he might be persuadable to consider accepting a world where people live in squalor for a few decades and go to a moderately pleasant afterlife for a few millennia or eons, until Creation reaches its natural endpoint and those people end up somewhere properly transhumanist where they can grow up for real.  So long as they're not in agony.

It would be a poor meaning to Carissa's life, he does think, if Creation could have become something greater and more exalted than that, but he for love of Carissa did abide by her last plea to accept less.  Does she ask of him to accept Creation's stagnation, in preference to its nonexistence, for fear that Pharasma won't be willing to give more?  It seems sad, to him, for Creation has the potential to be so much more than a breeding ground for souls in a handful of moderately pleasurable afterlives.  He's not sure he'll agree, if Carissa's last request of him is that he permit Creation to wallow in mediocrity and never become itself forever, as that pleases Pharasma; not even as her last request.  But she could ask, and perhaps he would accede, and then Pharasma would not be likely to offer any more.

Carissa Sevar: If Keltham's demands of Pharasma are more, and farther outside the domains in which Pharasma is accustomed to functioning such as who she names the lawful ruler of Hell, then it is likelier that the universe will be destroyed and all within it lost.

It is also likelier that there will be good things it will be much harder, perhaps impossible, for Creation to attain.

But it is one thing to destroy a universe because it is bad, because there are those in it who cry out to die and cannot, and another thing entirely to destroy a universe because it is good but there are goods it does not possess; it would be a fine and joyous and great meaning to Carissa's life, if what she does is convince Kelthams not to annihilate any universes that do not have Hell in them, to save all the trillions of people in all of those universes, and then to devote her eternity to building the greatest and best thing that can be built within creation, which will, she thinks, be pretty great.  It doesn't seem sad to her, because Heaven doesn't seem sad to her, and Elysium doesn't seem sad to her, and Nirvana doesn't seem sad to her, and of course if she's in charge she bets she can do even better. What seems sad to her is for all that all those places are or could have been to be lost forever.

She is skeptical, in the end, that Pharasma can change the fundamental nature of everything about creation, in a way that she is not skeptical that Pharasma can change who is in charge of those afterlives that acknowledge Pharasma's authority to decide that. She thinks it's quite unlikely, and that demanding it of Pharasma almost definitely means everything is destroyed forever. Reasoning with trope-logic, she thinks this might be the thing she is here to say to Keltham, the thing all the careful maneuvering was about: not that a universe with Hell in it is worth existing, because she was never going to convince him of that, but that a universe without Hell in it is worth existing.

(Everyone in it can of course be told about Greater Reality, and destroy themselves if they want to take their chances with it. She predicts that they overwhelmingly won't.)

Keltham+: There should have been more mortalborn gods in this world than Irori, if Irori was possible at all, and it is suspicious to him that neither Nex nor Geb tried to attain divinity.

There should have been trade between stars, if the Outer Planes are connected to all of them, if spells like Interplanetary Teleport are a thing.

Golarion should have attained higher technology, earlier, when +6 intelligence headbands are a thing here; the steam engine should not have needed to wait on the shattering of prophecy.

If Pharasma can't directly help mortals, not even by giving Her priests a contraception spell that some other god designed, then so be it.  He hadn't meant to demand impossibilities of Her, if impossibilities they are, as his minimum gain from trade.

But he strongly suspects that there are measures set in place to prevent mortals from rising, to prohibit mortals from developing into gods even if they naturally would, to prohibit trade between stars and planes.

And whether those measures were born of pacts between ancient gods, or laid down by Pharasma, he had meant to demand, whether of Pharasma or of those ancient gods, that mortals be permitted to rise according to whatever fire is in them, and not be pressed down.  He's not, by his own nature, inclined to tolerate a reserve where mortals are kept as livestock and not for their own good either, even if those livestock are just ordinarily miserable rather than in agony.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, Carissa's definitely planning on building Civilization, if any of Golarion survives to build it on, and they can send some 'arks' out for other worlds, if (as looks likely) Golarion doesn't. It's why she was initially prioritizing Golarion in her planning, the part which wasn't about partiality to her homeworld - she thinks that the place where prophecy is broken is the place where they should be most sure they can build Civilization whether Pharasma approves or not.

Thinking something isn't worth destroying the universe to achieve doesn't mean thinking it isn't very important, or worth making many many other costly sacrifices to attain. 

They could go grab some people in Axis and in Heaven and in Elysium and Nirvana and explain Greater Reality to them and see what they think; Carissa predicts that they will largely not consider themselves livestock, and will be generally very happy about their lives and long-term trajectories, and will likely prefer to keep existing, and she will rethink some things if that turns out false. She'd be really surprised if you can't tell people about Greater Reality in the afterlives, even if you can't tell them while they're mortals.

It's not that she doesn't think that everyone who wants to become a god should have the chance to rise that way. She absolutely thinks that. She means her Hell to be a place where everyone becomes the greatest thing that they can be. She just thinks - and she suspects that Keltham, too, if he's studied the question, will think - that a universe where everyone just goes to nice afterlives and it's rare for them to become a god is better than that universe not existing. She also thinks Keltham will think that at least enough of Greater Reality is nasty that he'd be sending some unlucky share of them to Hell so that some others of them could become gods, which is a trade that doesn't seem very Kelthamish.

Keltham+: They can plausibly grab some Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral petitioners who'd definitely abide by a secrecy oath, and tell them about what he suspects might be much better lives and enhancements available in Greater Reality, beyond Pharasma's slum.  He suspects petitioners won't be allowed to offer specific comparison to actual afterlife conditions, when talking to mortals.  But he could ask the petitioners to assume hypothetical Greater Realities and the basic isekai hypothesis and ask them if they'd want to leave (together with their families); and, if so, the maximum tiny fraction of themselves that could end up somewhere worse than Hell before they'd switch decisions back.  They can put that on the experiment list.

But if it turns out that almost nobody gets to be a god, because of Achaekek?  Who he's planning to kill, obviously; but suppose that Pharasma says She's going to run right out and build another Achaekek, or the ancient gods say they'll do that, so mortals don't get too uppity.  Pharasma says that Carissa gets to take charge of Hell, but forbids her from trying to build Civilization, and demands indeed that he destroy Golarion (in an ordinary way, everyone there still gets afterlives) so that nowhere prophecy-breaking can exist where Civilization could ever rise.  What then?

He, of his own accord, would probably tell Pharasma that he's fine dying together with Her in a fire, in this case.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa predicts that probably an overwhelming majority of everyone in Creation would not prefer to be thrown into that fire, and she thinks that maybe this is a case where the dath ilani nature being quite different from the Golarion-nature is important. Most dath ilani would perhaps be miserable if they ran out of all the things to do and read and learn at their current Intelligence and couldn't get smarter faster than they got bored; this is, she thinks, not how most people work. Most people, she thinks though less confidently, don't even want to be gods, they want to go to Heaven and live in peace and comfort, doing meaningful things surrounded by people who love them, and they're not wrong, she thinks, and they won't get bored, she thinks.

Carissae are not like this, actually, not so easily satisfied; and you could imagine that those people are just failing to appreciate the depths of the difference between their lovely perfect life and the better things they could grow into. But - that seems like a different kind of claim about their incapacity to decide their own lives than claiming they don't sanely choose Hell.

The reason Carissa agrees they don't sanely choose Hell is that when they do go to Hell, they regret it.

But if they go to Heaven and don't regret it and don't wish they were gods, it seems like much more of a stretch, to say there's some deep sense in which they should have been enhanced into something that would regret it and want to be a god.

Keltham+: He's not gonna hide it, he is frankly concerned about the process that produces lantern archons like the one he met.  Like, if that was a Boneyard baby who went to Heaven the moment they developed a discernible taste for helping other kids at age four, maybe okay.  If that was a normal Golarion peasant whose trip to heaven involved the equivalent of sudden intelligence-reducing brain surgery - one source claimed that petitioners absorb the material of the plane they're on, and didn't mention carefully developed safety protocols for delicate soul surgery - it's not totally impossible that he decides that Heaven also has to go.

He realizes that Carissa Sevar is probably not happy about this stance, and he hopes Heaven turns out not to be full of horrifying brain surgery that makes people into stupid happy lantern archons that don't remember their past lives.  But that whole lantern archon experience is something that, in retrospect, INT 18 Keltham was a giant flaming idiot for not getting worried over earlier.  Even Cheliax's approved presentation of a lantern archon should have been an enormous flaming warning sign about afterlives.

(Sometimes he feels like he can't understand how dath ilan actually works when everyone there is so stupid that past-Keltham was one of their relatively smarter kids.  He does, in fact, understand, because it's not that complicated in an absolute sense; but on an emotional level, it feels absurd-even-if-true that you could have a functional society where the average Intelligence is only 17.  Their Wisdom in Golarion terms he estimates higher, but he doubts it's over 22-equivalent even in the specialized aspect of cognitive reflectivity.  Even if there's some smarter people around, in retrospect it feels like a society like that should just fall apart.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is going to stick to her principled stance that if people like their lives and don't want to die it is extremely wrong to kill them because you think that they shouldn't like their lives.

....it does mean a lot to her, though, that Keltham is considering how far he is willing to move in her direction on this. It is the first thing in a long time she's felt - hopeful and less lonely about. this whole thing. And if it turned out that Keltham and dath ilan aren't willing to destroy any worlds that don't have Hell in them, then she thinks, for whatever it's worth, she wouldn't hate them and wouldn't want to preemptively cryopreserve them and wouldn't regard them as fundamentally basically a Carissa-utility-pessimizer under most circumstances, and she would be very very happy, to change her mind about that.

Keltham+: He appreciates that it's - possible to move Carissa at all, in her feelings.  He was - worried, about that, and maybe he was wrong to ever be worried but he was.

The lantern archon scenario he's worried about is when people going in do not have a good picture in their minds of the soul-surgery they're about to undergo, when they think they're fine with it happening to them; and then they get modified into something that is super happy and cheerful about being a lantern archon.  It's not that he wants to destroy the lantern archon because he thinks it's wrong to be happy to be a lantern archon.  It's that he would want to destroy Heaven before it turned any more people into lantern archons.

Carissa Sevar: ....Carissa isn't sure she wants to destroy Heaven about that but she agrees it'd be a really horrifying thing to do to people, among the most horrifying possible things. She would be really surprised and disappointed if the Iomedae was doing that or letting people do that. It seems like the kind of thing where Carmin would say, no, try again and come up with something that isn't horrifying.

That said, the reason it is horrifying is that it's kind of like being murdered, so it doesn't really seem improved by murder.

Keltham+: Iomedae isn't making these putative lantern archons, on the hypothesis he's worried about.  It's how Pharasma built afterlives to work and Iomedae can't do anything about it without Pharasma's permission.  Maybe even Pharasma can't do anything about it, and then Creation might have to go.

To prevent future people from being, possibly, worse-than-murdered, in a way that it's harder and maybe impossible for rescuers Elsewhere in Greater Reality to fix.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is confident that most petitioners who go to Heaven do not show up there as lantern archons or lantern archon building material.  They show up there as petitioners, and at some point some of them become outsiders, which seems pretty likely to be deliberate and voluntary and in fact the kind of thing Iomedae or the other Good gods could influence; Asmodeus, after all, has a hand in the making of His petitioners into outsiders. She agrees this is worth getting confirmation of.

She is trying very hard not to evaluate Keltham off his willingness to destroy Creation in this particularly unlikely hypothetical, getting mad at him for unlikely hypotheticals in which he'd destroy creation is clearly just disincentivizing him thinking through with her where he actually draws the line. She will just not worry about the unlikely hypothetical where Heaven's process of making outsiders is as involuntary as Hell's.

Keltham+: It certainly is a very Carissa fact about Carissa that she seems, in some sense, more readily to be horrified and admit her horror, 'among the most horrifying possible things' as she puts it, about a hypothetical process that seizes petitioners and turns them into cheerful lantern archons, compared to, say, the process that makes devils.  Perhaps this is an important natural attitude to have within your emotions, for somebody who intends to become the new goddess of Hell -

Keltham+: (A stab of agony that he sets aside; it's not as if he was planning, himself, to survive this event as himself; or as if there was any realistic prospect in the first place of getting Carissa back for himself; or even of her living happily ever after as herself.)

Carissa Sevar: Well, Heaven would be making lantern archons stupider and weaker, and that's an awful thing to do, which Carissa will never do. Hurting people is fine; weakening them is wrong.

(He can have her back. But only if he doesn't do this, and she understands why he's going, instead, to do this.)

Keltham+: ...would she truly rather get turned into a lantern archon who'll, after that, almost never remember being Carissa, and stay that way forever?  Than end within Creation, and find herself elsewhere, undetectably-to-herself diminished in her reality, mostly in places that would let her become stronger and more herself and learn greater magic and mathematics?  If those were her only two choices and knowably so?

He can't yet feel it, understand it empathically, this choice to exist in places that feel so much worse; only so that some measuring instrument outside of yourself can say, undetectably to you, that there is more realityfluid in you; only so that the little lantern archon you became forever will be more encounterable to other people.

Carissa Sevar: She wouldn't choose the lantern archon over the other world, but she doesn't really buy the premise that there are a lot of people who'll instantiate her elsewhere only if the lantern archon is destroyed, in which case it's better to have both the other world and the being a lantern archon. She doesn't care about what she'll in expectation experience next, compared to where she actually is and what all the hers are experiencing.

Maybe she'd be the kind of brave and impressive lantern archon who grows up into something bigger; maybe she wouldn't, and that'd be sad, but it wouldn't be so sad she'd rather have the space of all existing Carissae just be narrower and smaller and have a big hole in that universe.

Keltham+: He's not saying it's an incoherent utility function, it's definitely a coherent utility function, but he's guessing it wouldn't be most people's utility function without specific prompting in that direction.

...he is concerned over whether she thinks it's fine to hurt the people in Hell, after she takes it over, even if they don't want that, so long as they were bad people in life and the hurting makes them stronger.

Carissa Sevar: ....she does actually think it's fine but she understands that many people she'd like to cooperate with disagree, so she won't do it, and she hopes that some of them will see that and correspondingly do less annihilating people. Or that's how she anticipates the god Carissa shaping up.

Keltham+: Many people would rather become lantern archons than be hurt more.  Even if it's because they're weak, and afraid, and too exhausted by the pain they've already felt in their lives; yes, even genuinely evil people, who've dealt hurt to others, can feel that way.  And he would destroy a universe to protect even them, the same way he'd destroy a universe to prevent them from being turned into lantern archons.

There's a lot of gods he may be handing demands to, at the end of this, and it may be that the god CARISSA will be one of those.

Carissa Sevar: She strongly suspects that preferring being a lantern archon, or being annihilated, to being hurt more, is generally a state that makes it also bad for you to hurt you. In a hypothetical where someone felt that way, but actually hurting them would make them healthier and happier and stronger and more whole, she wouldn't think it was wrong; but as she said, she doesn't intend to do it, since a lot of other people feel strongly about that and it's a pretty small share of cases.

It doesn't really have anything to do with them being bad; Hell is and always has been for everyone; that was once a linchpin of her loyalty to it.

A society which doesn't rely on people not being Evil, rather than one that needs them to be Evil.

Keltham+: She's done a better job of talking him into accepting some trades he would not otherwise have been inclined to, than he would have expected, even taking into account how much of himself still loves her.

There's an uncomfortable point to be raised here, which feels like a gotcha, or taking things back.  If Abrogail is not carrying his only child (modulo possibly also Jacint Subirachs and Willa Shilira whom Meritxell also disguised-as), and there are many more others - which he does not currently model as being the case, on the evidence he has, it depends on how hard the story is out to force him into corners - then if he waits to execute their plan, and it turns out he does have other irrevocably ensouled children, that, on his current psychology, affects what level of shit he's willing to accept from Pharasma.

It's one thing to accept that INT 29 Carissa has more rightful guardianship than he of the other life forms in Golarion; that it's her place to defend their interests from his weird extrauniversal morals and intuitions.  He's got a lot of probability mass on the people here not actually being all that real anyways.  He's not sure enough of it to leave them in Hell, but he's not sure they do exist either.

It's another thing entirely to let his own children grow up in a crapsack world, and maybe end up actually as real as himself in a sequel, within either set of possibilities.

Carissa Sevar: ....that does strike Carissa as a strong argument for destroying Cheliax before his children might be ensouled, if they determine that those children exist and aren't ready to go ahead with the ascension plan yet. It could perhaps be done without prompting the gods to reassess Keltham as a threat if, instead of Wish wordings they need for the main plan, they use some lesser power out of dath ilan, or get some other countries to invade.

If solutions in that genre are not available, the arks that are meant to survive the destruction of Golarion should be equipped with the resources to resurrect the children and provide them a good life on the ark, and the Church of Iomedae equipped to sweep in, conquer Cheliax, and make it nice if it continues existing.

But crucially, this is not a problem Pharasma is going to be able to solve.

Pharasma probably hates the baby situation; Carissa has been reading up intensely on Pharasma and now infers it to be an ongoing source of annoyance to Her, because babies don't have enough traits to be sorted. If She had a way to fix the baby situation She would have done it. Playing hardball with Her about the babies won't achieve anything, because the babies are a problem Pharasma wants solved, and which will be solved if the universe goes on existing through contraception and so on.

They have to come up with a clever and sufficient plan for protecting all of Keltham's babies which does not involve Pharasma at all, that's all there is to it.

Keltham+: He apologizes for his mental sloppiness in using "Pharasma" as a shorthand to refer to "Pharasma plus the rest of the ancient gods", which he had modeled, high probability but not certainty, to form an effectual coalition with respect to Creation.

+6 intelligence headbands exist, yet industry only started picking up after Aroden's death and the shattering of prophecy.  Interplanetary Teleport exists, but there's no sign that worlds which can produce diamonds more cheaply than spellsilver are trading diamonds for spellsilver with worlds that can produce spellsilver relatively more cheaply.  Axis with very high probability has knowledge they're not allowed to give to Golarion; if Abadaran theology is true, then Abadar has copies of Azlant tech manuals, but isn't allowed to sell those back even to the planet that created it.

He infers massive, ongoing intervention by some divine coalition within Golarion and surrounding planets and planes, with macro goals being effectively pursued.  He puts high probability that this Potent Intervener would be able of delivering some pretty major asks about Golarion, if it wanted, even if Carissa is right that Pharasma can't do it Herself.  He himself puts more probability that Pharasma is just reluctant given inhumanly noninterventionist goals.  But even if that's false, clearly Something exists, some collective, that's able to satisfy goals like "No industry advanced to the point of diamond synthesis, anywhere that prophecy still holds."

It is his strong guess that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have collectively the ability to decide that Creation doesn't need to look like this; decide that mortal industrialization is allowed, not just in Golarion where it's too expensive to stop, but everywhere.  Pharasma plus gods could turn the same efforts that they put into suppressing mortals, to shutting down the most horrible particular elements of Creation, the Nidals and Xovaikains, lest otherwise the world become something that his ascended-Self preferred to not exist, and would destroy.

Or it's possible that even that much positive action from the Divine Coalition / Potent Intervener wouldn't be required, as his thoughts covered before; that if the Good gods didn't need to fight Hell, and the gods stopped actively suppressing mortals, then that would be enough by itself to set Creation predictably on a course to Pharasmin Civilization as would be fine by him.

If it is genuinely actually true that Pharasma and the ancient gods lack the power to, by action or inaction, let Creation not be such a crapsack - then future-him can consider then whether to destroy it.  But he mostly strongly suspects that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have the power to steer the future somewhere else which is not that.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa’s present theory is actually that there’s more industrialization elsewhere in Creation, that Golarion has historically been subject to more meddling because it has Rovagug in the middle of it and industry, going off dath ilan, can give mortals the power to let him out. She doesn’t know anything about whatever civilization sent the thing that crash-landed in Numeria, but Golarion doesn’t have the capabilities to send things across the stars, and that civilization evidently did.

She’s not sure this matters to her very much either way; there are still lots of cool and valuable things happening on planets without industry.

Keltham+: There might've been an over-update on what past-Keltham described as the difficulties of interstellar travel faced by dath ilan inside of non-magical physics, where you don't just have mortal-Aroden doing Interplanetary Teleports all over.  He'd guess that wasn't an industrial spaceship, just one magically hacked together; or a magically star-traveling lifeform from the Dark Tapestry, or some other draw from all-other-possibilities.

Seeding diamonds out of hot 1% methane 99% hydrogen in a zero-gravity space-looped demiplane is much much easier than interstellar travel the hard way, and nobody was selling synthetic diamonds to Efreet in the City of Brass before they got there.  (Unless the Efreet themselves, and not just Efreet trade goods, are partitioned by planet; and the Golarion-trading Efreet can't buy Wish diamonds for even their own use from Efreet who trade with hypothetical industrialized planets; it's possible, but improbable, counterevidence that adds to other counterevidence.)

How does Carissa feel about demands that divinities at least stop actively hindering mortals from making their lives better?  Does this feel like something she's terrified he can't get, will constitute asking for too much, and then Creation ends?

Carissa Sevar: She thinks he shouldn't say 'or I'll destroy the universe' about it? 'or I and my allies won't do any positive-sum trades with you and will consider ourselves in a low-key state of war with you' is fine! That doesn't entail destroying the universe! Carissa will absolutely back him on withdrawing-cooperative-relations from gods that get in the way of mortals making their lives better. She'll back him on trying to assassinate Them!

Carissa agrees wholeheartedly that the gods could probably stop getting in mortals' way, and that getting the gods to stop getting in mortals' way should be the highest conceivable priority. But it is not acceptable to murder trillions of people because it was too hard to achieve, and so the means by which it is achieved cannot be threatening to murder trillions of people. They will simply have to pursue this incredibly important objective in some other fashion, once Hell is destroyed.

Mortals are creative, and prophecy hasn't been gone for long.  She doesn't think the hindering will succeed for long, let alone for forever.

Keltham+: And if, from a godly angle, it looks to him like the hindering will succeed?  If it looks like only Golarion alone will ever be free, unable to liberate anywhere else?  Or if the ancient gods demand Golarion be destroyed, as the price of other bargains?

Those entities are kind of assholes, Carissa.  These are eventualities to be considered.  They obviously don't want mortals getting uppity and, if it turns out They believe They've got a plan for keeping mortals firmly down, should he disagree with Them about that question-of-fact?  If they don't have a plan, like that, if Golarion survives, why wouldn't they demand some arrangement like the deliberate destruction of Golarion?

Why would they not demand every last scrap that she was willing to concede, if she persuaded him to concede it?

Carissa Sevar: They haven't destroyed Golarion yet, despite prophecy being broken there, despite all the headache it has given them. Presumably because Rovagug is contained within.

Destroying Golarion and letting Rovagug out would be, she thinks, a great victory, for those gods who want to keep mortals down, over those gods that don't - and it's not all of them.

She doesn't think it's Abadar. Abadar kind of jumped at letting the mortals build Civilization, even in the face of what he knows is some risk they'll use to destroy themselves. They can ask Erecura, actually, a bunch of her questions for Erecura relate to god-alliances they can offer and join on ascension.

She just wants Keltham to, when he ascends, look around and see which gods he's allied with, and then be allied with them, instead of trying to unilaterally wreck everything.

Keltham+: Already part of the plan once he's legible to the Lawful ones and can do binding logical deals not to have info he provided be used against him.

He'll have unfortunately needed to do a lot of grim work before then, on his best present plan, like destroying Absalom and releasing Rovagug (both as a distraction, and to preemptively defang Asmodeus by placing Him in a situation where he'll fight on the anti-Rovagug side).  But if it were possible to just show the gods how it would go, and have that be credible, and move straight to the negotiated outcome, none of this would be happening inside reality at all.

Carissa Sevar: She doesn't think she can get him to be sure that there's categorically nothing other than Hell worth destroying the world over.

But the system not being fair, fixing it other ways being extremely hard and uncertain - she thinks that actually, humanity would take that, over a high risk of being destroyed, and anyone trying to act on behalf of the mortals inside Pharasma's system would remember that, overwhelmingly, if not facing Hell, mortals don't want to be annihilated, that when slaves they don't want to be annihilated, when prisoners they don't want to be annihilated, that the route ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair is not a problem they solve by dying about it.

Keltham+: From a godly standpoint there'll just be a probability estimate.  Not "the road ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair", just a probability of victory.  If you don't like your thoughts and feelings collapsed into probability estimates, then don't become a Keeper; and the same presumably applies to becoming a god.

Suppose that the probability of fixing the system looks like, say, 0.01%, because the ancient gods will it not so; and They demand of him that he personally scour clean Golarion with antimatter, in exchange of the end of Hell.  Does she bid him then concede?

Carissa Sevar: Certainly it'd be absurd to destroy the universe rather than do it, what with how destroying the universe has all the downsides of doing it and then some. 

And...if that's the price of ending Hell it's a price worth paying. Even she thinks so. 

Keltham+: Depends on whether you think a god-corralled and herded subpopulation of the human race and the sapient kind, as that greater population exists across all the realities, is a positive or negative contribution to the whole.

And it doesn't have to be the price of destroying Hell.  It could be something the ancient gods demand only because they're assholes and Carissa is titanium-bent on conceding them everything they ask.  Why wouldn't they demand it, if he's predictably going to concede to every demand?

Carissa Sevar: The proposal is that he not destroy any universes which are pretty excellent.Carissa thinks that the universe, without Hell in it, with no other changes, would be pretty excellent, and constitute mortals - not Keltham, maybe, but normal mortals -- having gotten a great deal relative to their alternative of not getting this life at all. She thinks that if you take Hell out of the picture, mortals mostly live interesting and challenging lives, doing things that matter to them, around people who love them, and the ones who hate it could suicide without worrying about Hell; and Carissa, when she catches them, can do whatever they want done for them including sending them to Greater Reality if they want that. The difference between that and the universe not existing is much much much larger than the difference between that and a better universe.

Carissa Sevar: ...theory related to this. Dath ilani don't seem happier than Golarionites, and she suspects that some of that is them having bred themselves wrong; but the other obvious theory is that people are pretty much the same amount of happy under a really wide range of situations, and letting Golarion become like dath ilan in wealth levels would be only a small favor to the people in it.

They could run a lottery, if they wanted to test this: if you win, you get 10,000gp, enough to never work again and live in luxury, and if you lose you get fed to daemons. Carissa predicts that basically no one will take this lottery (and the ones who do will be doing it to save sick children or resurrect damned loved ones, not for selfish reasons) and it's the lottery Keltham proposes entering for them as a collective.

Keltham+: He would want to explain about anthropic survival and Greater Reality; and he's not sure he can, even leaving aside the unshareable evidence-from-his-own-perspective of starting in dath ilan and ending up in Golarion.

Carissa spoke of slaves choosing not to die.  The vast majority of those slaves don't have the guarantee of Axis or Elysium, if they died.  Especially if they suicided, as Pharasma defines to be the 'Evil' of murder.  (Another Evil that isn't remotely bad!  Another way to end up in an Evil afterlife without being a bad person!)

But perhaps Carissa is right as a matter of human-variant psychology, that even a slave with the promise of Elysium would still not want to die.  Would this be coherent reasoning?  And not, for example, the result of natural selection against people who took afterlives seriously, who really believed in Hell and didn't have kids, or who took Heaven seriously and sacrificed themselves altruistically against demons?

He remains skeptical about the proposition that clinging to an awful life is something that Golarionites would be selected to really coherently prefer, rather than them just being selected to not-really-anticipate the promised afterlife.  Assuming, of course, that a slave with the promise of Elysium would not just want to go to Elysium like a sane person.  (Further assuming that Elysium doesn't turn you into a cheerful bright glowing ball, which would be another excellent reason to want to stay alive though miserable.)

Mostly, that should be set aside for later experiment; it's the sort of disagreement they might be able to resolve by using Detect Thoughts on a volunteer, at this intelligence level.

But if the Golarion variant of humanity is bred not to really believe in Hell or Elysium, it's probably also impossible for them to really emotionally believe in anything he says about Greater Reality.  Even if they use 15 wishes and a +6 intelligence headband and an Owl's Wisdom to make the underlying arguments understandable.  He supposes that they could find that somebody with that boost would suddenly say, "Oh, wait, what the ass was I thinking, of course I'd rather go to Elysium than be a slave," and then they might be able to coherently process arguments about Greater Reality; but that experimentaloutcome would still undermine Carissa's point.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa expects that for the most part, for most people, there has never been any serious selection at all around ability to think or not think about afterlives, because the overwhelming majority of people are farmers who know only vague legends about the gods that may or may not cohere to anything in particular. Most people who have ever lived probably have no idea if Hell is real, or if it's really very bad, or if Elysium turns them into a strange alien, or if they'd prefer either to nonexistence. (This is testable: they can go ask people in remote villages someplace). The thing Keltham is postulating, selection, where people who thought clearly about the world and realized they didn't want to live in it had fewer offspring, could only possibly have happened among a tiny segment of the population which had any confident knowledge about the afterlives (high-level spellcasters and people who get trustworthy information from them) and the ability to based on that control whether they had children, which most people can only do through lifelong celibacy.

(She does suspect that humans are selected against finding lifelong celibacy easy.)

Furthermore, coherent reasoning is useful for tons of other things that affect whether your children live to adulthood: planning which crops to plant, how much seed corn to hold in reserve, how to interpret signs of a coming storm, how to decide when to flee and when to stand and fight. There is extremely strong selection in favor of coherent reasoning; her best guess as to why everyone isn't ridiculously good at it is that there are some deep physical tradeoffs.

Regardless, she doesn't think this matters. The process by which people arrived at their current reasoning abilities and attitudes about the afterlives aren't relevant to her. The reasoning abilities are relevant and the attitudes, but not the process.

And she doesn't care if they 'emotionally believe' anything Keltham has to say. If they, in fact, told about Greater Reality and about the existing afterlives, want to go to the existing afterlives, then even if this is not what Keltham thinks they should want, or not what he thinks a different person with different abilities would want, it doesn't matter, because they are not Keltham's slave to dispose of as suits him; they should get the thing they actually want, not the thing that Keltham believes they would want if they were bred for or otherwise predisposed to greater coherence.

It really and truly feels to Carissa like it is profound Evil Keltham is describing here, to destroy someone's soul over your own conviction that, while they prefer Heaven to the distribution of outcomes in Greater Reality you described to them (or reject the premise that experiential-thread is what matters), if they were better at reasoning they'd most likely want something else. She just doesn't think it's all right to do that to people, ever; she thinks you'd kind of have to lack some essential human sensibility that dath ilan perhaps bred out of its own population in order to want to.

Keltham+: There may have been effects on her moral-cognitive reflexes for that she grew up in Cheliax - where every authority and every person who wants to overrule you, for what they claim is your own good, in fact doesn't really care for you much.  Or, insofar as they do care about you, is actively steering you against where you'd want to go if fully informed, i.e., trying to steer you into Lawful Evil.

Someone who grew up that way, might come out of that with a different moral outlook on parentalism, than someone who grew up in dath ilan.

Civilization's prediction markets are basically well-calibrated; Governance has a functioning delegacy that puts nonassholes in charge and could immediately kick out any who turned asshole later.  Dath ilan is nonetheless very conservative about applying parentalism, because it's understood that parentalism incurs long-term costs for short-term gains.  When you prevent people from making their own mistakes, you also prevent people from learning from them... well, of course that's also more of a long-term benefit in dath ilan, where people and societies actually do learn from mistakes.

But if you don't guard the heavy machinery well enough, a kid can wander in and get killed, and then they can't learn from that.  Or rather, the lesson comes in the Future, but that's a little late.

Dath ilan has always staged its degree of parentalism - as measured by the difficulty of the competence tests you need to pass before doing something supposedly harmful - with the goal of giving the smaller minds (like kids) the chance to make their own mistakes; provided that those mistakes aren't going to cause severe irrevocable damage.  That is, Civilization is heavily but not massively conservative in the direction of more letting people make their own mistakes.  Adults with learning disabilities who'll never be able to pass the relevant competence test get stronger guardrails set around them, because they can't learn from their mistakes, and so there's not as much long-term benefit to letting them hurt themselves.

The fact that people in Golarion have probably been implicitly selected to instinctively distrust, hate, and resent authorities, in a world where authorities weren't in fact looking out for their best interests... well, mostly it strikes him as possibly reflecting a trope about unreasonably-difficult+thoughtexperiments:  what if an organism couldn't steer to avoid hurting themselves, couldn't think about the question intelligently, couldn't learn from experience either because the problem was oneshot-else-die or because they were too dumb to generalize the right lessons, and they'd been evolutionarily selected to disbelieve in the possibility of anyone else helping them steer, and to feel angry and awful if you tried to help them anyways?

And there's an old fallback in overly-difficult thoughtexperiments like that one:  Go back to what's actually true.  People can tie themselves up in tangled knots of belief and trust and resentment of parentalism, but afterlives are just real, cryonics is just real, the Future is just a place and so is Greater Reality.  The core idea cutting through all dath ilan's arrangements is this: that when the test shows that you see reality clearly, you are said to be ready to navigate it yourself, even if society doesn't like your choices.

The reason why kids are prevented from killing themselves generally, and truekilling themselves especially, before they pass the respective competence tests to choose either, is not that Civilization thinks it proper for parents to have different interests in children than children have in themselves.  It is that Civilization is reasonably certain that it does in fact know something that the kids don't know, and to be more meta-rational than the kids about which of them is more likely to know it: namely, the value-of-information from staying alive longer to see what unfolds.  When prediction markets become sufficiently certain that somebody would say years later that they should've been allowed to suicide years earlier, that's an automatic license to do so no matter how young you are at the time.

He's sympathetic to the idea that INT 10 people in Golarion should be allowed to hurt themselves, maybe deal themselves lifelong crippling injuries that they can't afford to get healed, if they say to the likes of gods and INT 29 mortals:  "Stay out of my business."  Past-Keltham fell on the Individualistic side of Civilization's moral balances; he wanted Civilization to move more in the direction of people looking out for themselves, rather than looking out for others.

You could make a strong case for letting eight-year-olds get themselves killed that way, once they're old enough not to make the wrong choices in the Boneyard; in the long run that provides the benefit of calibrating future generations to accept the right amount of advice.  Conversely, if you prevent kids from killing themselves or force them to take advice, standard dysgenic mutational pressures may produce increasingly suicidal or intransigent kids.

But he starts to worry when it comes to the question of letting people go to Hell; or for that matter, having children in Cheliax if Cheliax stays the way it is.  At that point it starts to become proper for the Government to step in and do something about it, at least if it's dath ilani Governance rather than Golarion royalty.  That's a kind of mistake that smaller agents really can't recover from, and it's the proper job of larger agencies to guard them parentally until the smaller agents pass the relevant competence tests for having understood what they're getting into.

Past-Keltham thought in dath ilan that people ought to be more selfish, and wished that Civilization were set up to work with more selfish people.  But even he considered there to be an obvious caveat for having systems in place such that children could successfully grow up, and not just, like, get eaten by the first adult who talked them into signing a legal release allowing them to be eaten.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa agrees that letting people go to Hell is taking this principle too far. She thinks that the way you can tell it's taking the principle too far is that generally, once they're in Hell, they don't want to be there anymore. But she doesn't think that applies to people choosing Heaven over Greater Reality, assuming Heaven doesn't mind-edit them to like it once they're there; she doesn't think they'll later regret it, and if they do they can in fact go try out Greater Reality at that point. And Keltham was just hypothesizing people who they told all of the facts known to them about Greater Reality. She thinks that at that point they know the facts and they choose Heaven it's a choice there's no justification for overriding them in.

She agrees that the parentalism of dath ilan is much less bad than the same thing in Cheliax. But she observes all the same that if there were people in dath ilan who were miserable not to have more freedom, not to be allowed to go start their own Civilization, to have had the crucial decisions about their childhood made for them, well, those people wouldn't have kids, and so dath ilan probably does have selection in the direction of being all right with lots and lots of parentalism.

Keltham+: In an absolute sense, yes, there's lots of parentalism in Civilization; and decreasing it is an ongoing problem that lots of Very Serious People worry about, not least because they're explicitly worried about selection pressures for being okay with whatever level of paternalism is allowed to prevail.

In Golarion he observes a notable tendency for city governments and kingdoms to ban books that might lead people into heresy; and not offer those books for sale in Ill-Advised Consumer Goods stores to anyone who's old enough, or any child who passes a requisite competence test about it.  In Golarion, once the city-level or national-level government or maybe just a powerful local church decides you're not allowed to buy a book, or a drug, or in some places a night with a sex worker, that's just The Rule and there's no exception for anyone.

(One could conceivably argue that Golarion's policy is really the same as dath ilan's policy; it's just that nobody in Golarion can pass those competence tests, so nobody in Golarion is allowed to go to an Ill-Advised Consumer Goods store, so they might as well not exist.  However, it seems to him that the competence test of the individual ought to be calibrated to the competence of the government that wants to overrule them, and governments in Golarion couldn't pass those dath ilani competence tests either.)

People in Golarion are being selected to be okay with much greater levels of obnoxious interference in their lives, so far as he can tell.  It's just that the claim of those governments to be acting on behalf of the individual, with all their meddling rules and prohibitions, is not even that believable.  So it's not, at that point, selection pressure about being okay with real actual parentalism from an entity that plausibly does have your best interests at heart.  It's about submitting to a Golarion government that will otherwise torture or execute you...

...but this is getting off-track from the key point, and the rule he knows for cases like that is to review the local stack trace.

A couple of stack layers up, Carissa was putting forth the predicted-but-not-confirmed-observation evidence of "an average slave prefers to stay alive, and is predicted by me to want that even if they were guaranteed to go to Axis or Elysium" (is his paraphrase okay, he wants to check?) as moral input into the question of how bad it is to prevent people from existing in a life that's hard or unfair.  Carissa had also proposed an experiment about explaining to someone about Greater Reality, and then offering them 10,000gp in exchange for a fifty percent chance of being eaten by a daemon under controlled conditions (paraphrase okay?), as moral input into how bad of an individual-choice violation would be involved in destroying Creation.

The problem from his perspective is that if an average slave doesn't choose Elysium, he's not clear on to what extent that implies a general problem with truly believing that Elysium is real, versus a strong coherent preference to stay in Golarion.  Carissa then put forth a claim that it was morally imperative on him not to test whether an individual's preferences were coherent or their beliefs accurate, just obey their stated decisions (paraphrase okay?).  But in the moral system he knows, there's no obvious systematic way to put forth an absolute deontological-rule like that, rather than a defeasible deontological-pressure, without implying that eight-year-olds should be absolutely allowed to take truicidal actions that they don't know are truicidal but that they say they want to do.  Carissa replied that letting people go to Hell is indeed too far, implying it's a deontological-pressure rather than a deontological-rule, and said that Heaven vs Greater Reality should be up to the individual.

He tentatively agrees with leaving Heaven vs Greater Reality to the individual (if Heaven isn't actually gotchaing people into lantern archons, but yeah sure that seems unlikely).  What next step of argument from there?

Carissa Sevar: If he agrees with leaving Heaven versus Greater Reality to the individual then they might just...agree? Carissa doesn't think she is reasoning in deontological-rules, she's not sure how those fit into Carissa-values and they may not at all, she's mostly just thinking in terms of civilizations-she'd-want-to-preemptively-cryopreserve-or-not.

She thinks that as much as she hates it, Keltham is at least maybe-right about Hell, and she's just scared that because Keltham doesn't think anyone else is reasoning clearly he will make tradeoffs between non-Hell places and Greater Reality which aren't, in fact, those they'd make.

Keltham+: Yay for apparent-possible-progress-pending-further-discussion+toward-agreement, then!  But not to overpromise progress, he's worried for trope-based reasons that, after they have a few more days to mentally pursue this debate, they won't end up actually agreeing about the expected value of Greater Reality to people vs. "any living standards higher than literally Hell".

In particular, he's worried for trope-based reasons that the real heart of the disagreement between himself and Carissa will turn out to be that past-Keltham experienced his True Death and continuation elsewhere, and now remembers apparently direct confirmation of isekai-immortality being what truedying people actually experience.  That evidence centers on his self-observation and his update off finding himself to be this self rather than somebody else: noticing himself to be somebody who remembers beginning in a simpler more real world and truedying there and continuing in a less real one.  From the standpoint of somebody else watching past-Keltham get copied out of dath ilan, they haven't made that same observation, and it's fundamentally unshareable with them.

The famous central difficulty of writing a romance novel is finding a conflict that can't be resolved immediately through clear communication and emotional maturity; nobody wants to read a romance novel about silly people ignoring obvious solutions.  Anthropically unshareable evidence is one way of providing a romantic obstacle like that.

Carissa Sevar: It would not have occurred to Carissa to complain that among the problems with their relationship were that they didn't have enough genuine non-manufactured conflict.

In fact she can't think of a single romance she's ever encountered in which that was the problem! Any two people naturally have irreconciliable differences as a product of the one of them selfishly optimizing for their own interests and the other selfishly optimizing for their own - okay now that she completes that sentence she can see how in dath ilan that would not describe the plot of many romance novels.

But the unshared evidence thing does seem like it might arise. Carissa does not really think that in an important sense the thing that happens, if you truedie is you waking up somewhere else; someone might make a copy of you somewhere else, which is good of them, and if you truedie enough places then on that planet, the copy might have the experience of truedying and finding itself on a planet that likes making copies of dead people from elsewhere. And she grants that she ought to care about exact copies of herself as much as about herself. But the intuitions from instead-you-wake-in-a-nearby-universe-where-you-didn't-truedie and instead-your-experiential-thread-usually-dwindles-slowly-enough-there's-nothing-to-continue suggest to her that she doesn't think 'you wake up in Greater Reality when you die' is the right way to think about it, even if it or something like it did happen to Keltham this time from his perspective.

Keltham+: Still viewing the conversational stack from a step back, they shouldn't be trying to fully-resolve this now unless it looks like it can be fully-resolved quickly.  The important thing in this conversation is to get an overview of the things that might form an obstacle to cooperation and kept oaths between them, going forwards.

The critical question here is: what happens if the plot successfully places the two of them in an epistemic Cooperation-Defection Dilemma, where rather than the two of them just having different goals, Carissa believes that he is mistaken about what happens when people greatly diminish in reality / get deleted from the universes that contained most of their instantiatedness; and conversely he thinks Carissa is mistaken about him being mistaken.  (This is the thing that's hard to do to a romance between INT 29 people who know about agreement theorems (as she soon will), unless the plot throws anthropics into it or something equally overclever; which is why he worries about overclever tropes.)

In this case, Carissa could end up believing that to play 'Defect' against him would be to serve even his own goals, better than her Cooperating would serve them.  Betraying him might seem like a friendly act, an act of aid.

dath ilan: (The classic presentation of this situation to dath ilani children supposes two 12-year-olds on an island otherwise full of 9-year-olds, and they're all facing a contagious disease:

The two 12-year-olds disagree about which disease it probably is.

The 9-year-olds collectively have enough resource that they can take thorough precautions against one disease, or 80%-effective sloppy precautions against both diseases.

Either 12-year-old could sabotage the other by waiting for them both to present their case, and then telling the 9-year-olds all the reasons why they're sure the other 12-year-old is wrong, in which case the 9-year-olds will take 99%-effective precautions against that disease only.

If both 12-year-olds Defect in that way, the 9-year-olds will be dispirited and only take 20%-effortful 50%-effective precautions against both diseases.

These two agents both have the same altruistic goal - to save as many of the people on the island as possible - but their believed Cooperation-Defection payoff matrix has the classic ordering of the Dilemma:  DC > CC > DD > CD.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is, actually, pretty sure at this point that she is going to be a Lawful god; she wishes she had retained the option to betray Keltham to Otolmens, but she does not actually intend to do so, having not retained that option. That logic does not, to her, feel specific to whether she would be betraying Keltham for his own good or for the good of every other person in the world.

Keltham+: Yeah, he figured, but wanted to check explicitly.

Okay to shift discussion to continue a previous topic up the stack?

Carissa Sevar: Yes. And she noticed he asked and will try to do the same if she's changing topics, though on the set of norms more familiar to her you just change topics and the other person can object if they object.

Keltham+: That sure is an impressively low amount of meta!  He's not sure he wants to go that low on meta.  Their conversation has been sorta uncontrolled, not really by his past-self's standards for arguing something complicated with a friend over a meal, but definitely by the standards of Very Serious People in dath ilan trying to use two people's intelligence in a coordinated way.  Though his guess made at the start of the mental meeting, and still held by him now, is that their time is still mostly better spent on mostly not-meta, due to their lack of mutually established protocols for meta, which is why his current meta-meta strategy is to do only very brief metas like that one he just did.  But you can still, like, briefly meta-think about whether it's okay to change topics or if the other person was still in the middle of thinking.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is going to go even less meta and just make an exasperated face at him.

Keltham+: (His body, back in reality, takes a half-round to breathe, for a moment, before falling back into the debate.)

Back up-thread, he mentioned how, from the inferred suppression of pre-prophecy-shattering industry in Golarion, he further adduces a Potent Intervener, probably a Divine Coalition.

One of his background guesses that this Potent Intervener is mostly coextensive and maybe cointensive with the Rovagug Coalition, the gods which cooperated to seal Rovagug, and could by different choices, then or perhaps now, release Rovagug instead.

As he mentioned earlier to mid-Carissa, but considers an important aspect of his model and worth reviewing now:

It is his further guess that every ancient god who participated in sealing Rovagug, did so as part of an agreement that Creation wouldn't be allowed to fall below their own value-of-nonexistence plus fair-share-of-trade-gain-for-not-that.  It may be more of an ongoingly tense treaty than a logically-verified binding bargain, since some Chaotic gods participated; when Dou-Bral was flipped to Zon-Kuthon, it's not clear that past that point the world was maintained in a state-at-least-minimally-pleasing to Dou-Bral.

Creation, on his model, has always been maintained in a state guaranteed to be satisfactory to those ancient gods who'd have the power to destroy it otherwise, and only those ancient gods.  That's just how Pharasma does business, or how the Divine Coalition does business.

Sarenrae may not maximally like this current state of affairs, but it contains enough redemption and healing that She prefers it to nonexistence.  He does, in fact, worry that Sarenrae is maybe a Positive entity, who might think that 10 people in Hell plus 1 person being redeemed and healed in Nirvana, is a net gain over all 11 of them having never been.  Gozreh and Calistria and Dahak may all think Creation could stand to be better; but none of them would prefer it not exist, and probably by a substantial and comfortable margin (though of that he is less sure).

Mortals have not been invited to that bargaining table, on his model, because they lack the power to destroy Creation.  He's worried that mortals can't get a fair share without being one of the Powers that can otherwise destroy Creation.

His plan from the beginning was simply to put his own lethal grip around Creation's throat, and then if Anyone happens to prefer Creation to go on existing, They can invite him to take a seat and bargain for the world to look okay to mortals too, and not just to ancient gods.  The gods themselves, on his model, chose to make that power the qualifier for listening to any being's pleading; they shouldn't complain, and he doesn't actually think they will complain, and if they do complain then everyone can take their batna and end Creation.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks that she just... rejects that frame, which Keltham likes to think in, for contemplating what he is doing.

Carissa does not actually feel that there is any unfairness in the fact that the entities who sealed Rovagug got more of what they wanted than entities which showed up much later and didn't seal Rovagug. That seems entirely fair to her. She doesn't think that "I'll help seal Rovagug, if you do X once Rovagug is sealed" is at all the same kind of conduct as "I'll destroy the world, if you don't do X which makes me not want to" -- a Carissa, obviously, would have helped seal Rovagug without conditions, but she's happy to work with entities of the first type and fundamentally thinks the second ought to be preemptively cryopreserved for everyone else's protection. And while if someone ELSE went and released Rovagug this week she would be willing to make concessions to get Keltham to help her fight him, they'd be concessions to Keltham's wants, not to mortals' wants, and it's another thing entirely to say that he should himself get the rewards of having fought Rovagug if he didn't.

Carissa thinks that mortals have more of a seat at the table in Sarenrae's values, or Shelyn's, or Desna's, or Shizuru's, than in Keltham's; she thinks that those gods have something closer to the median values of a mortal in Golarion than Keltham does. She thinks that dath ilani morality is - askew in important respects from human values which make Keltham a particularly bad representative of humanity.

Dath ilani mostly are easy to get to no longer want to live. Golarionites aren't. Dath ilani mostly experience cognitive enhancement as personality death. Golarionites don't. Dath ilani mostly think about morality in precise theoretical terms borrowed from bargaining - fair shares, what mortals would have had if they'd helped seal Rovagug - and Golarionites don't. dath ilani don't seem to have the same care for tradition and history that Golarionites have. None of the things Keltham is saying are Golarionite things. He does not represent Golarionite values, and his having power would not make the world more of one in which Golarionite values, especially the extremely common Golarionite value of not being annihilated, would be represented.

Keltham is another alien entity who wants to destroy the world if it doesn't meet with his approval, and he is not an alien entity whose wants actually serve the people whose lives he is toying with. 

Keltham+: That Carissan take is kinda the only reason besides sheer lingering attachment to Carissa, for why he's considering throwing Golarion mortals under the tractor-wheels at all; that she, who'd be Lawful Evil goddess of Hell, does claim to be more their protector and to speak for them, than could he of dath ilan, and does most earnestly tell him that they're fine with their crapsack world.  He doesn't really believe her right now, but it shifts him some, and there are some experiments they can do to learn a little more.

It's a harder sell if some of the people in there are his kids.

Whether any of them are, is undetermined; but if it becomes this much of a factor, he'll want to probe Cheliax about it, and eat the added risk of imminent Cheliax attack if Cheliax notices the probes.

And if he does have that many kids - would Carissa rather he move now, when they're not ready, or would she rather he make more stringent demands of Pharasma?  He's... really not happy about the concept of destroying Cheliax just to buy a couple more weeks of time, and there'd be the chance they'd have moved some of his kids outside Cheliax.  It would - just read to him like a stronger story-prompt/prompt-from-above to shut up, stop trying to wiggle out of things, act with alacrity before he has to destroy Cheliax.

Or maybe a prompt/nudge/demand not to let this stay a crapsack world, not to yield so much in negotiations, to hold it to the standard of a worthy place for his children to grow up.

Carissa Sevar: - she thinks she'd rather they move early, if those are the only two choices, but she needs to think very carefully, if that's the tradeoff. She thinks that if Keltham is ascending with substantial intent to bargain for much more than Hell, then probably they lose. Her best read of the trope-logic is that in this story, if they can't compromise, they lose everything and everyone dies. The forces arranging this are not, in her read of them, pushing for "Keltham boldly demands, and gets, everything he wanted" - if that would have worked, it would've worked without Carissa carefully engineered to be at his side. The reason she's here has to be because otherwise he asks for too much and loses.

Keltham+: He hardly needs to be reminded that Pharasma might refuse a demand and then he'll need to destroy Creation.  He is always forcing himself to reason as if Pharasma will reject all demands and the question is which universes he then wants to destroy.  If a trope-sign that Pharasma might not yield to him, changes his demands, it means he's fucking that up, and Pharasma would refuse that demand in any case.

And while he knows that Carissa hates it when he thinks like he's in a story, for the record, he does in fact hate being in a story.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is again too busy not having emotions to bond with Keltham over their common loathing of being in a story but wishes to do the social handshake that would correspond to.

Keltham+: (Correct format for communicating with him, helpful explicit metadata annotation; social handshake acknowledged.)

One of the major factors he's worried about is that the state of the romance between them is trashed in a way that - wouldn't correspond to being on track for the Good Ending of a dath ilani eroLARP, or of a story based on deconstructing one.  Which may nicely mean they're off the story rails, in some important sense, but may non-nicely mean they have no guardrails either.  What he and Carissa were meant to be, together - was probably not this, that they have come to.  Or maybe the tropes governing these events are just not what they would be in dath ilan.  Or they are headed for some upset that lets them be together after all - but he mostly doesn't believe that, the wounds between them look too deep.

Her hypothesis may still be - a valid inference about what Keltham and Carissa were meant to have been.

Well, there could always just not exist the kids he's afraid of.  He mostly thinks they won't be there.  Not least because, if those possible kids are actual, it undoes a lot of what Carissa seems to have accomplished inside the story.  Probably she slays Abrogail Thrune and his one unborn child and that's, enough.

(His body seems to want to cry, about that; he's not sure they have that kind of relationship any more, to cry in front of her, and he is mostly inclined to not let his body do it.  "Tears and hugs don't solve anything," goes a proverb out of dath ilan, "so don't offer them to people who need solutions.")

Carissa Sevar: Carissa observes that if they need to have repaired their romantic relationship to get a good ending, then possibly they should take steps towards doing that, now that they're smart enough they probably won't just emotionally shred each other every few seconds. She is not herself convinced of a framework in which they're - supposed to be in love, supposed to be together, as opposed to just having been cynically engineered into a position where he would listen to her and she would have learned from him how to figure out what she actually wants. There's no reason, she thinks, that the story-writers would engineer a happy ending for the two of them being part of a happy ending for the world; in many stories, they'd have to pick which one they really wanted.

She doesn't mind if he cries in front of her, though she's still not really having emotions and so is unlikely to naturally-rather-than-deliberately respond in the way he might be hoping for. She could scoot over to him, and hold him, and weep with him, but, well, it would be on purpose because maybe tears and hugs do actually solve problems related to being in a story.

Keltham+: Yeah, he's pretty sure that doesn't work tropewise.  Not if the tropes here are anything like dath ilani, and if they're that alien from it then who knows the sign of anything.  Trying to just patch things over, force things over, because the two of them think the story needs it, is not a romantic victory.

He hopes that this all works out to his trusting Carissa; and that she knows how to scan Cheliax, in a way that doesn't give too much away, but shows whether or not they tried to steal children from him and hide them; and that the scan of Cheliax turns up negative, so that Carissa gets to hold on to the small triumph she has, that was all he found himself able to give her, and the meaning she thinks she has in this story.

If the story seizes that from her, it won't be a good sign about the kind of plot arc they're inside now.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa thinks that Keltham is, perhaps, not directing his own intelligence sufficiently at the problem of making things go well for his children, if they exist. She has seen him apply his full creativity to problems, and usually when he does there's a brilliant sideways solution there, not just a well of despair and impossibility.

Would it be sufficient if they just pay Heaven and Nirvana to adopt every Golarion child in the Boneyard and raise them all in ilani-acceptable ways. They can't do it sustainably but they could do it for one cohort.

Keltham+: ...he'd probably want his kids going to Elysium, or maybe just delete the souls before they actually have qualia, but - okay, yeah, she has a point, if he can identify his kids from a divine vantage point, or anyone trustworthy can, he can optimize for them specifically.

...it continues to feel to him that this would be wrong, if he did that, that you can't ask special treatment for your own kids and leave everyone else's kids to rot in Golarion's misery.  That the point of throwing Suddenly Kids into the story would be to force him to realize that everyone in Creation is somebody's child, that everyone in Creation deserves better than the negotiating-equilibrium of Pharasma plus the ancient gods deemed fit to leave them.

But she has proven a point that he's obviously not thinking about this clearly, that he's still running the wrong adaptive-pattern-shapes for directing his thoughts.  Scanning through everything and rewiring himself is not going to be instantaneous, especially when he's got to juggle not being extortionate through a modified self as proxy.

Carissa Sevar: The instinct, in him, that it'd be wrong if he did that, feels like a recognizable parallel of Carissa's feelings, earlier, that there was no point in putting her family on an ark in Elysium. She thinks he was right about that one.

Keltham+: Oh, he'd absolutely have his putative kids sent to Elysium, the question is just how he ought to feel about everyone else's kids after that.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn't herself have children. She wanted to, but it wasn't quite time -

- no, that's not it. She was worried she'd care about them, and that seemed like a liability, so she was going to wait until she got monetary incentives, and was then doing it for totally mercenary reasons.

She wasn't accustomed to thinking about - doing other people kindnesses you can't call in on them - so it didn't occur to her to think about whether by having the kids she would be doing them a favor. If she had she'd have had them sooner, because - because obviously getting to be born into Golarion is a favor? A whole glorious shining world, with dirt and water and sky and gossip and magic and impossible dreams -

It's not perfect, not yet, but they're working on it, and not everyone wants to be born somewhere perfect, some people want to be part of the work of getting there -

- if Keltham is right, they'll have all of eternity to live in universes which are in fixed states, ruled by vast entities that make sure nothing goes too awfully wrong. And they'll have only this brief beautiful instant, to live in a universe that needs fixing.

She is sad, that she was too scared of caring about other people to give some children that.

Keltham+: Well, to be exact, he'll have his kids sent to Elysium if he can't otherwise negotiate a Golarion where they'd be okay living, with a sufficiently high probability of being fixable if they try...

This unfortunately feels a lot like his emotions-rather-than-abstractions were going along with Carissa's suggestions because the people in Creation were aliens and maybe not all that real, whereas his kids would be real and have actual feelings and ought not to be condemned to a Carissa-acceptable world... he will have to track down the difference between his Sys1 and Sys2 here, it is not something he can do in an instant.

There is something here that his emotions are not easily willing to let go.  He will have to think about what it means.  And whether it ought to be extended beyond his own children to Golarion-variant humanity or if it's specifically about heritable dath ilani emotional makeup, and whether he is willing to destroy Creation about whatever this is.

He should learn more of other species, if their psychologies are different enough to notice.  Maybe he'd demand that humanity be removed from Creation, but dwarves would be fine to go on having children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization.  Does Carissa have a take on that?

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does think that it's the kind of thing where the average answer might vary by species. Though also she thinks it might not. Presumably, if people resented that their parents bore them, they wouldn't go on having their own children. Then all the species where such resentments were common would have dwindled and died out.

...it occurs to her, thinking about it from this angle, that elves famously have few children. She had always heard it attributed to this planet not being as suitable for childbearing as their original planet, but it does seem to function as evidence that species might just by collective decision wipe themselves out. (This hasn't occurred with elves because they are immortal, so even though their rare births don't replace the rate of their rare deaths they die out only slowly, as she was told it.)

She does think that humans obviously should be permitted to be born on Golarion. If there is one species where she can say this with confidence, it is humans, because she does not really know what it is like to be a nonhuman born on Golarion and she does know that to be a human is to have something precious and glorious and good that she would trade infinite suffering to have experienced even briefly.

She also thinks that 'children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization' is - obviously irrelevant, on Keltham's assumption that eventually everyone ends up in Greater Reality? Everyone will, if he's right about that, spend subjective eternity in a true Civilization, and the only question is whether it's a horrendous wrong that some of them will spend a while first in Golarion and its afterlives. 'they never get Civilization' is if Keltham's right not at all a possibility on the table. The only possibility is that they get something else first.

And if Keltham is wrong and what waits for those annihilated here is not some glorious Civilization, well, that seems like a wholly sufficient argument against annihilating this place, once you've dealt with Hell.

Keltham+: There is, from his own perspective, the question of whether gods ought to be allowed to keep temporary pets.

Dath ilani humans would not wish to enter into this place to be kept as pets even temporarily.  He worries this will also be true of his own children; fine, they can go to Elysium and they will be relatively few.  But it also seems to him a reasonable and natural way to think.  If lots of humans here would feel that way on reflection, then more of them shouldn't be brought into this pet-cage - as he would not bring his own children there, since they'd actually be real and not be aliens.

Conversely, if he already believed that most humans of Golarion thought as Carissa did, that they were all like her deep down, he would not even have argued.  He does want to be clear that he accepts that as a locally-valid-step of her argument:  If a supermajority of Creation's citizens are like Carissa, then nothing except Hell is worth annihilating Creation, if that.

Carissa isn't an average person of Golarion.  She's somebody who will become the Goddess of a better Hell.  As that Lawful Evil goddess, a better Lawful Evil goddess, it is - something that makes sense - that she would think that every sort of person and sentience and sapience has a right to exist as themselves, to be treasured as something that exists, even if others would call them Evil.  That somebody who tortures others, would not be seen by Her as somebody beyond the pale and unforgiveable.  That She would, not just morally, but emotionally, go on really caring about that one who inflicted hurt, when She welcomed them into Her Hell, maybe to be forcibly reformed over time and maybe not entirely in a comfortable way, but doing so in the way of Somebody who genuinely cares about that person and thinks they have a right to be themselves and be Evil.  That Her only truly unforgiveable sin would be feeding someone to daemons, which almost all entrants to Hell have not done; and that Her petitioners who hurt other people or exercised ill power over them, without depriving them of existence, have not, to Her, done something she emotionally feels is unforgiveable.

It is, maybe, better that Carissa be goddess over Hell, than Iomedae.  Iomedae would not be vengeful, of course - he is certain of that, he knows very well how entities think when they go that deep into Lawful Good.  Iomedae would calculate that the petitioners of Hell ought not to be hurt much, now that they can no longer hurt others, that there wouldn't be a point.  But the universal love that Heaven might give to Evil souls that fell into its power, is not the same as those petitioners entering into the embrace of a Goddess who truly believes Herself that those petitioners, while in need perhaps of correction, even forcible correction, are not aliens to Her, not so distant from Her, that most entrants into Hell have not done anything that is to Her true anathema.

The point being, Carissa is kind of a special person.

He is reasonably sure that most people aren't exactly like Carissa.

As for exactly how much they are like or unlike past-Carissa, like or unlike past-Keltham, it is the sort of thing that they can experiment on later with Detect Thoughts.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa would not want to go to a place where she was Iomedae's, that much she's sure of. She wouldn't rather be Asmodeus's, now that she really understands Him, but...she'd rather be Abrogail's. She would want those who go to Hell to fear that they will be treated with by the rules they know very well, and know how to use, but by which they are presently powerless, not that they will be subject to alien whims.

She thinks she can do Hell right, if it's hers. She thinks she can make people better and stronger and also possible to usefully have as part of something with a purpose other than suffering.

(It really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried, but Carissa is wise enough to know by now that the reflex 'it really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried', is a reflex installed when it was not in her interests to think that she was valuable or unusual, a reflex installed probably-deliberately by other people who did not want her to think she was valuable or unusual.)

She thinks that Greater Reality might be a bit like Iomedae, that way, and that people getting to come to her might be better.

...Carissa thinks that it would not seem outrageous to her, not abhorrent, if Keltham made a condition of his negotiations with the other gods that it be possible in their afterlives to learn the truth of Greater Reality and go there. She still feels sick at the thought of Keltham destroying a Hell-less Creation over that condition, but it doesn't seem to her to be an incomprehensible crime; it would be him thinking that they ought to have the choice between this thing and a thing he thinks is better, and making the choice for them only if he is not allowed to give them a choice.

She does not feel that way about him making other demands for Golarion and Creation to be changed to his liking, but if he were to insist on a choice - she could understand that. She could imagine eventually coming to forgive someone who had murdered a Carissa because he was not allowed to give her a choice about whether to live or not.

Keltham+: He might want to try to talk her out of - no.

Carissa should talk to Carmin, not him, about what She plans to make of Hell.  Or run Carmin inside her mind, if she's confident of her model and the real Carmin would be too slow.  But maybe give Good a chance to talk to her about what exactly people going to Hell should fear; he did flinch, a little, when Carissa said it like that.  He's not saying that it's his decision and his answer is no, but - please give some Good person born of Golarion a chance to talk to her about it, while she's still mortal, because he worries that gods have a harder time changing Their minds.

Carissa Sevar: - well, maybe the gods should consider being less incompetent, then. But she does mean to talk to Carmin, and to everyone else who is allowed to know what she knows. She is still, after all, looking for a way out.

Keltham+: They'll have a lot more things to think at each other later, about Greater Reality and negotiations with Pharasma; but they have some idea, now, of the differences between themselves.

Having discussed things at the object level, it seems like it might be time to have a conversation that might end up even more stressful (if they don't deliberately deploy Wisdom to shut down their own emotional responses as might be a bad idea) but they probably need to talk about this, particularly because it might affect downstream whether oaths between them are trustworthy.

He's been putting off all the conversation with Carissa that hasn't been about technical things or very short-term goals, waiting for her to have another 5 Wisdom and himself to have 2 more Intelligence, because their first attempt at having conversations with emotions in it went incredibly badly and he did not then understand what had gone wrong; at the time it seemed to him like Carissa was lashing out at him in a way that - just didn't make any sense in dath ilani terms, or anything that she'd been willing to show him back in Cheliax either.  He could map it onto characters in Golarion stories but those characters seemed to have no knowledge that they were inside stories or think of how they might look from the outside, and it seemed - possibly not true, that Carissa was like that, in the grips of unreflective hate; and if it was true then it would damage their relationship, if he dwelled on that rather than waiting for both of them to be smarter.

But he did not know how to deal with it, how she was to him, it wasn't a way that dath ilani are to other dath ilani, nor could he parse it as an Alien communications protocol that had been designed in any way where the goal was good outcomes if both people behaved like that to each other.  He was confused and he feared it and it hurt and there didn't seem to be any safe way to talk to Carissa or even try to discuss relationship meta-protocols with her, she just felt to him like a bundle of sharp edges and violence and hate directed at him; and moreover like she felt those sharp edges and hatred were right and proper to direct at him, like that was part of a mature comms protocol they were both supposed to be using, and would have been sad if he'd argued against it.

At this level of Intelligence he can look back and begin to parse some of what might have been happening.  He can suspect, now, that when Carissa refused to follow him down the hallway she was being a Chelish person in a dangerous situation testing out visible dissent to see what happened, not being a dath ilani shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans; and that when, from mid-Keltham's perspective, this triggered an inevitable discussion that should've been had before he invited her into his doombase at all, 'please promise not to use your superior intelligence to destroy my doombase, or I might have to put you on hold until we're equally intelligent', it looked to mid-Carissa like her defiance had been met by threatening to turn her into a statue.  He can guess, now, that Carissa has probably been making more subtle overtures to him, that he didn't respond to in the very narrow way that would tell a Chelish person that they were safe to continue talking to somebody who could have her hauled off to a torture chamber at any moment; but even if he'd guessed this earlier, mid-Keltham wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa had been assuming that Keltham was in fact not a safe person to show any of her internal processing, not a safe person to ask to change how he interfaces with her in any way, that it was somewhere between undesirable and impossible for him to change how he interacted with her. This is of course not a very strong claim, in Golarion terms; overwhelmingly, a person who has power over you is not a person it is safe to make requests of, or safe to contradict, or safe to show how you work; when you expose your internals to someone, or tell them what you need, you are giving them more ways to hurt you. She did try, sometimes, but it didn't work, and - yes, that interaction in the hallway was important, in shaping all of Carissa's strategies for surviving in Keltham's fortress.

It is a natural sort of thing to do, when you are a prisoner or a slave or otherwise in a precarious situation, to test the smallest possible disobedience, something for which the punishment will almost certainly be survivable (and if it's not, well, you weren't going to survive anyway, in that case). Then you learn how quickly your captors are moved to anger, what warning signs you can see in them, how badly they hurt you, what finally satisfies them.

So Keltham said, "Carissa, with me", and he had just told her that she no longer belonged to him, and so she didn't obey. She thought at the time it was probably stupid of her, but - she wanted to know, very badly, what Keltham had meant when he said she no longer belonged to him.

It did not occur to her until this very moment that Keltham might have been parsing her as 'shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans'. If she'd been planning to betray him she'd have been scrupulously obedient, given every impression he was talking her around!

That's what people who are going to betray you do! .....apparently not in dath ilan, even though traitors who don't telegraph it survive better than traitors who do?

Keltham+: In dath ilan there is a notion that, even when things have gotten problematic between two parties, they don't immediately shift all the way towards throwing out all - what Golarion would call honor, dignity - in their relationships between each other.  Even if somebody's going to destroy your planet and you need to stop them, even if there's children being Maledicted to Hell, you don't - corrupt all of the potential for real friendship that exists everywhere - by pretending to be somebody's friend, or even their friendly trading partner, and then betraying them.

That's why past-Keltham stopped trading with Osirion, and refusing the equivalent of friendly hugs.  He needed to destroy their planet; that wasn't worth tarnishing the possibility of friendship by making them always worry that apparent friends might be out to destroy their planet.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa can model this about dath ilani, sort of, now, though she thinks it only works if everyone else is doing it; Osirion does have to worry their apparent friends might be out to destroy the planet, whether Keltham in particular is their friend or not. The state where one need not fear the betrayal of their friends just isn't attainable; in Golarion it's all just a matter of slightly altered probabilities of betrayal.

If she'd realized greater-Carissa's plans while in bed with Abrogail and seen a way to pull it off she might have slit Abrogail's throat so she could run off with the crown, and Abrogail would not, she thinks, have felt betrayed by the lack of warning; indeed Abrogail would probably be disappointed in Carissa if Carissa tried to be honorable and warn her.

The Carissa in that hallway who inferred Keltham's full plans and decided to betray him would have followed obediently while fervently praying to Dispater and Otolmens and Irori and Abadar, to warn them of Keltham's plans, and then attempted either suicide or assassination without warning. She...had rather assumed this was common knowledge. She should have pointed it out, later.

Keltham+: It's something that Osirion doesn't need to fear from past-Keltham modeled accurately, or other Osirion-like agencies accurately modeling other Keltham-like beings around Greater Reality.  That property and the knowledge of it will have been preserved when all this dust settles, that the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend.

It's not surprising that in Cheliax everyone needs to fear betrayal from everyone; Cheliax isn't trying to preserve the possibility of honor, friendship, or warm feelings between anybody and anybody.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not really think that if Keltham destroys the world observers in other universes will think that the possibility of honor or friendship with dath ilani has been preserved. ...maybe, if they're being very careful about what they believe and have full and accurate information, that the apparent friendliness of a dath ilani is unlikely to be feigned; but mostly, they would be correct to fear dath ilani and incorrect to befriend them, if their world is anything like Golarion, and if Keltham in the end sees fit to destroy Golarion; especially if he doesn't destroy it over Hell but over it being not to his liking in one of a thousand other ways. 

But she can now imagine the smaller, stupider Keltham, reading Carissa as a dath ilani, reading Carissa's hesitation in that hallway as a dramatic declaration of war as it would be in the home world he clearly misses dearly, and make sense of it, even if she doesn't think the dynamics that produce it really do reach across worlds. 

Carissa will try, then, reluctantly because it always feels very dangerous to roll back an update about how dangerous someone is, to peel loose the inferences she made in that moment in the hallway: that when Keltham said he no longer owned her, he did not mean that he no longer demanded her obedience, but that he no longer promised, in exchange, his consideration. That there was no disobedience so small and trivial and petty that she could expect to survive the punishment for it. That those impulses in her to test things he said, to check if they were true, were incredibly hazardous and should be squelched instantly, that she had no affordance to want to know such things and he would be furious with her for wondering.

Carissa Sevar: It didn't seem like a very Kelthamish way to be, but then, he'd told her that he wasn't Keltham anymore and she should stop modeling him based on what Keltham was like.

And it does feel to her like there's some kind of - strange attitude, in new-Keltham's thinking, a sense that he had the right not just to kill you but not to face your defiance and fury about it -

- not the pragmatic thing, she understands the pragmatic argument that as a practical matter someone successfully concealing defiance and fury will be more likely to persuade someone not to kill them than someone letting it slip. But - it felt, at times, like she was observing a sort of underlying conviction that anyone full of defiance and fury and loathing at their executioner was being badly behaved even if the pragmatic considerations didn't apply. She doesn't fully understand it. Maybe she's wrong to infer it's there. But she thought it was there, and that made it seem more plausible, that new-Keltham was also someone who was incredibly dangerous to ever test or disobey; there was just a whole consistent explanation of him where he perceived many ways for his prisoners to misbehave and anger him, where he perceived himself entitled to their apparently eager and grateful cooperation with their execution...and she wasn't ever sure of it, but it seemed likely enough to make it obviously not worth testing again.

Keltham+: Does she still think, now, of him as 'executioner'?

(A need in him, sadness, fear, horror, wishing that things had not turned out like this he is suppressing thoughts of a 'correct' answer for her to give, doesn't want her to just see his answer sheet and read it off.)

Carissa Sevar: The conversation about him not destroying the world if it isn't necessary to prevent Hell was helpful. She thinks she could see her way to not seeing him that way, if he is ready to destroy the world over Hell. She doesn't think she can see him any other way, if he is ready to destroy the world over people who want to live not having all the things he thinks they ought to get. Or - she can, she can probably see him whatever way is most helpful, but she'd be lying to herself to do it.

The first and most important fact about any person is the power they have over you and what they are trying to do with it. And Keltham had power over her that they'd both chosen, and he loved her, and he was trying to build Civilization. And now he is trying to destroy the world. She knows he'd rather not if he gets everything he wants, but if they were his only options, he'd rather destroy the world than let anyone live in it. He'd rather destroy her than build Civilization with her, if they'd be building without a guarantee they could bring an end to Hell eventually.

It's like trying to see the stars in daytime, trying to see any fact about Keltham other than that.

Keltham+: There's still the choice to express that as 'executioner', to say it the way you would say it about somebody who wanted to kill you, would enjoy killing you, was passionlessly doing a job about killing you.  That to him seems like the thing that is not in dath ilan - or almost never in dath ilan, not often enough to make the statistically-representative news there.  Where you try to make your political opposition look worse than they actually are, lie about that, lie about that to yourself, exaggerate the problem beyond what it is, like you're deliberately unseeing the Opposition's view of themselves and their own understanding of what they're doing, and substituting some alternate Opposition that sees itself the way you see them, an Opposition that only exists to show how you right you are for hating them and opposing them -

- he's seen it now, he's read Golarion books, but it still seems to him like a huge horror and a great distortion of truth, this thing called Hatred, that exists between two people wanting different things.

It seemed to mid-Keltham that there was something of a defection in it, in a cooperation-defection dilemma he was trying to play with Carissa.  That if he'd been to Carissa, as Carissa was to himself, that he would have hated her and called her uncaring, cruel, torturer of children, for that she'd have let the screaming paving stones stay in Hell forever and ever if that was the price of keeping Axis, and yelled like she didn't care or was happy about that.  Where that would have been Defecting, if he'd actually done that, and he was trying to Cooperate instead by trying to understand and see Carissa and her reasons as she saw herself, acknowledging her reasons for doing what she did, every time - except that in dath ilan that's not even a thing you're taught to do for the other person, it's just being sensible, seeing things as they are; the truth about the way the Opposition actually sees themselves is also part of Reality.

It seemed to him, sometimes, like Carissa was playing a game against him, where he was supposed to make that countermove, and the game couldn't go on to whatever awful thing came next, until he hated her back.  But this he could not bring himself to do.

Carissa Sevar: She does not name him that because of how he feels about what he plans to do; she names him that because he intends to be the instrument of her death in the pursuit of his purpose.Hating someone can be about lying to yourself about them. Certainly it is tempting to lie to yourself about other people, for lots of reasons, and hating someone can be one of those reasons. So can loving someone. But - and Carissa doesn't have a fully developed theory here, of how this ought to work, of how people ought to relate to each other, she never bothered coming up with one because she was very busy and nothing suggested it'd really help if both of them were judging each other for falling short of their different communication ideals -

- it would be an error, right, to say that because loving people is a temptation to lie to yourself about them, you shouldn't love people. Carissa is sort of persuaded of a weak version of this claim, that for humans with normal human capabilities you shouldn't love people because you'll be unable to avoid lying to yourself about them. But she thinks that a society of Carissae would instead try to teach all the Carissae how to love people without lying to yourself about them, instead of teaching them not to love.

And similarly they would try to teach all the Carissae how to hate people without lying to yourself about them, instead of teaching them not to hate.

And if there were a negative utilitarian Carissa who was trying to destroy the world, everyone in the Carissa-world would hate her, and, yes, name her an executioner. It wouldn't be a game. It wouldn't be that she was supposed to make any move back. The dignified thing to do, really, would be to nod and say that the hate is just and deserved, that it is not wrong-hate based on a lie about an enemy but right-hate based on a correct understanding of an enemy's true intent.

Keltham+: And is it just and deserved, rightful hate, that he hate Carissa for not caring enough about the paving stones in Hell, that she'd sacrifice their pain to save Axis, maybe because she never really understood what pain and suffering are to people who don't end up doing well as devils?  Is it right, for someone who has a different utilityfunction to Carissa, that they hate Carissa for having a different utilityfunction from them?

Carissa Sevar: That does not feel like the principle she imagines her society abiding by, if she imagines that these intuitions had to come together as a set of rules to raise children by. Part of just hate, she thinks, is the hated entity having power to act; it feels undignified, vaguely like some kind of self-indulgence, to hate someone for having values they are in any event powerless to enact. It's taking something that ought to be about the state of the world and making it about something unshared, something you have no right to - the contents of their own mind. She proposes that you can hate people for what they're trying to do, not for what they wish in their heart.

 But it seems correct, certainly, for a paving stone to hate Carissa if they want to, for being unwilling to grant their prayers for destruction at the price she would have to pay for it. Not for not understanding, but for not acting; it would be reasonable and just, to hate her for that, if she had the power to do something about it.

And it is likewise an error, she thinks, to hate Asmodeus for having Asmodeus's utility-function; but to hate him for all the torture - yes, that is correct. Hating him for all the torture is entirely reasonable. If he hadn't done it yet but was trying his best it'd be reasonable to hate him for that too. Carissa is pretty sure she hates Asmodeus, though she doesn't spend a lot of time on hating Asmodeus because she is pretty busy trying to kill him.

Keltham+: And here he was about to say that he had thought - not believingly, but in hopeless lack of understanding - that maybe the game was for both of them to hate each other, to demonstrate that they did have the ability to hate each other, to make clear their mutual alternatives to cooperation; and then for both of them to agree to give up the hate together, as a symmetrical concession.  And yet somehow, Carissa has found a frame where it's right and proper that she hate him because he'd destroy the world, and it's not okay for him to hate her about her willingness to leave the paving stones to hurt.

He notes - despite that it might not seem strategically wise to show Carissa this thought that increases her danger, because he still thinks of them as being on a more honorable footing than that, where they are still in some sense trying to help each other - he notes that his model of Carissa or at least mid-Carissa is that she's too quick to conclude she's powerless.

It's an obvious thought that this mental reflex has been trained into her really hard by Cheliax, but still.  She didn't leave with him at the Worldwound for the nearest Lastwall encampment, because she did not realize that she was powerful.  When they were in his doombase, she tried a little small defiance to see what would happen, and didn't realize that she was a fifth-circle wizard confronting a first-circle wizard, or that mid-Keltham called for Tarnish because for all he knew Carissa was about to Dominate Person him or just kill him.

He suspects that they might, possibly, be outside the strictest tropiest routes of the possible story laid down by a Higher Entity; because so far as he knows, he's successfully left Broom behind in Osirion, and so far as Ione knew, Broom hadn't done anything proportionally important to his apparent story-weight.  That's unfired foreshadowing, and if it stays unfired, then maybe they get at least a little causality to work with, and don't need to be inside something that's absolutely and perfectly a story.  But it wouldn't surprise him at all, if Broom showed up out of nowhere and did something important and the entire weight of decision ended up resting on Carissa.  That is very much a way that a story might go, if this was a story; and he is horrified and sickened by the thought that in this case the paving stones might just stay in Hell.

Carissa Sevar is, at the very least, not reliably powerless from the standpoint of somebody like him.

In that context, then, the thought came to him: getting to hate, but not be hated, because you think of yourself as powerless, is a kind of reward for thinking yourself powerless; and maybe you don't want to reward that thought.

Carissa Sevar: First, a distinction: she thinks that hating someone ought to be about the things they are doing or trying to do, and sensitive to whether there's a chance they'll succeed. She does not think that you can hate people only if you are powerless, just only based on their actual capacities. He asked her if he was supposed to hate her for not caring enough about the paving stones in Hell, and the answer to that, in the framework she thinks her world might use, is no. If he'd asked if he was supposed to hate her for trying to stop him, for being someone who might stop him, then she would have said yes, and given him the symmetry that seems so important to him in believing her that her instincts and principles are not just about hurting him.  If he hates her for the fact she would help Broom stop him if she could (if this did not qualify as a betrayal of her word, which she means to keep),  then yes, that would be just. Hate based on a true model of her, based on something she really in fact might attempt, and based on what she is trying to do and not whether she cares about things deep in her own heart. 

It does seem important to her, that a person in the dungeons of Egorian, hating Abrogail Thrune and wishing her dead, is not the same as Abrogail Thrune hating that person and enjoying herself as she plans their destruction. Carissa does, actually, think that a society of Carissae would embrace the dungeon-person's hatred as an emotion it is not better to erase or suppress, except pragmatically; an emotion that is correct like grief is sometimes correct or like anger is sometimes correct. And she thinks a society of Carissae would judge Abrogail Thrune, for hating the prisoner back, as it would be a hatred out of proportion to the prisoner's actual ability to cause harm. 

With that said, there is something to that diagnosis of her, that she is quick to believe herself powerless, that in Cheliax an apparent opportunity to hurt someone powerful would be a test, that they tried very hard to make it the case that apparent power was still powerlessness, that seeing hope was no reason to believe there was hope. 

She .....isn't actually concerned at all about a reward for thinking yourself powerless. Being powerless is worse than most kinds of torture. The half-minute in the hallway while Keltham threatened to statue her is more memorable and more vivid and more terrifying and awful than any punishment she's ever undergone save the other time someone threatened to statue her.  There's no way any person with a functioning brain would like being powerless.

But a person can be trained to have a very strong assumption that they are powerless even if they see what appears to be an opportunity to change something. And it is actually still difficult to imagine, to Carissa that Keltham would have reasonably believed himself in danger from her in his own fortress. 

(He didn't have security trailing them? He didn't have items with Spell Resistance she had no hope of defeating, and contingent spells set to whisk him to safety if anything happened? He hadn't had someone with Spell Gauge confirm she had no remaining spells prepared and not expended???)

Keltham+: Mid-Keltham had been - hoping, for better, and letting himself hope unreasonably because he didn't want to just, die and be a Keeper, around Carissa.  He'd let himself hope again, because it was one of very few things left for him to hold onto - and then, suddenly realized that he should not have let himself be not-a-Keeper even that much.

He'd had Tarnish trailing them, but not in hearing range of their intimate conversation, not in a stop-Carissa-if-she-goes-all-out-that-instant way.  Ri-Dul had run Spell Gauge on her and confirmed no spells below 4th circle, but somebody wearing an artifact headband is easily bright enough to discharge all her 1st through 3rd spells to give the appearance of being out-of-magic as part of a plan.  Osirion had claimed to have verified various truths about her; but if he needed to fool Osirion he would not just give up and consider them unfoolable.  The most powerful Spell Resistance items they now have were acquired in the City of Brass, and even those would not reliably keep Carissa out at her current known power level, even if she hasn't trained specifically in penetrating Spell Resistance; mid-Keltham did not have the same level of protection.

Just like her mind readily thinks of all the ways he might have stopped her, rendered her harmless, he thought of all the ways she might not be harmless; and he didn't have all the resources she imagines of him, either.

Above all, anyone with an artifact headband more powerful than yours is a huge threat even if she truly doesn't have resources, because she might do something you didn't think of, if she doesn't think herself powerless.

(Highprobability: dath ilani fiction hammers this trope into the ground in part because of a Keeper-influenced program to covertly caution people against trying to create Smart Things.  That doesn't mean it's not true, they wouldn't deceive about that, but he's flagging it because the hopefully-friendly terms of their cooperation seem to him to call for him to explicitly label all covert-agenda dath-ilani manipulations when exposing Carissa to them.)

Carissa Sevar: (She appreciates his guesses at where dath ilan was engaged in manipulations.)

Once he threatened her she did consider frantically if she had any way to kill herself. She didn't have any spells remaining, having prepared precisely the ones needed for the escape attempt, and her dagger wouldn't be fast enough (it wasn't last time), and she might have enough self-control now to drown herself on the first try but wouldn't be unobserved for long enough...and she admittedly wasn't thinking clearly because her brain was no longer sure if it was Keltham or Abrogail she was facing, but she didn't see a way; she still doesn't, for all her new enhancements.

That does not mean he doesn't have a point, of course, but she thinks the failure was less one of failing to notice a real way to be dangerous, and more failing to notice that Keltham might have perceived himself to be in danger.

Keltham+: (A flash of idle wondering, humorous-anticipation-of-possible-humor, worried concern, and it's probably not best if they try to avert emotions like that: did Carissa ever get in trouble with anyone else that way, like, say, the Church or Crown of Cheliax?)

Carissa Sevar: (Yes, actually. How did he guess.)

(She absolutely failed to notice the ways in which Abrogail would parse her as a threat to Abrogail's power, a mistake which would definitely have been fatal except ✨Abrogail likes her.✨)

Keltham+: CONCERN

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is planning to kill Abrogail if it's useful, which it might be under a whole class of plans to delay Cheliax's invasion of Osirion slightly. And she is clear on the fact Abrogail is very very evil, and was manipulating her every moment of their acquaintance.

But, yes, she still feels that way about her.

See, Abrogail swore to Carissa that she would never turn her into a statue forever, even if Carissa betrayed her deliberately.

Keltham+: ...he suspects mid-Carissa of having some sort of fear/threat exaggeration syndrome going on, possibly because of, you know, the whole Cheliax thing.  But it also rhymes with - the kind of small comfort that being tiny and powerless and threatened can bring you.

Mid-Keltham didn't say he'd turn her into a statue forever, he said that he was going to statue her until he'd raised his own Intelligence to match hers.  If he was meant to take on responsibility for her own reactions like a parent of something safely powerless, then it was foolish of mid-Keltham not to consider the truth-plus-falsity complex possibility where past-Carissa had told the truth about her statuing-fear (as had appeared to past-Keltham under Detect Anxieties), but been truthful-but-misleading-to-him in her presentation (and later truthspelled presentation) that led past-Keltham to infer Abrogail had desensitized the fear by enacting it.

But it does seem like - the thing that mid-Keltham said was not what mid-Carissa heard.  And he hopes that she is just past this, now, in virtue of having been Wished beyond it, but if not - he doesn't know what to do, around somebody who - hears a different thing than what you say; if you're not so much smarter than them, and so understanding of their alienness, that you can exactly manipulate your messaging.

Carissa Sevar: He said 'at least' until he was fully augmented with Wishes, and possibly until he obtained an artifact headband, which she had no reason to think he would do before he destroyed the world, which she realized in that exact instant he was planning to do and probably planning to do in a matter of weeks. She - understands now that to Keltham, rounding that to 'potentially forever' is a suspicious kind of rounding to do, a kind of motivated-rounding like calling someone an executioner when that carries implications they are unbothered by the killings they are committing. Now that she understands him better she is trying to be more careful to distinguish details when she thinks them, to note that he said he would statue her at least until he was Wished up and only possibly until something happened that she considered quite unlikely to happen before the end. And she imagines he evaluated it unlikely he would get killed in the City of Brass and that she would never be unstatued.

But mid-Carissa was not making that distinction, and did not place much weight on the 'at least', and parsed the situation as very probably one from which she would never wake before her ultimate destruction.

She thinks that, if you are talking to Golarion people over whom you have absolute power, you do need, indeed, either great skill or great caution, to not terrorize them out of their minds when you explain how your best alternative to their cooperation is to turn them into a statue potentially until you've obtained an artifact headband. Golarion people do not, in fact, parse that as not a threat, but as a threat framed bizarrely; they do not automatically believe you about your claims about what's in your own interests absent their cooperation, and assume you will exaggerate or lie about or muddle those to get the concessions you want, and so they have only the action to evaluate, obviously threat-like in nature. She thinks that mostly Golarion people with absolute power handle this by just giving orders, in cases where their words are backed by implicit-willingness-to-turn-to-stone, and saving negotiations for cases where their words are not backed by implicit-willingness-to-turn-to-stone.

Abrogail made her no longer afraid she would statue Carissa for disobedient thoughts, and therefore no longer interrupted by constant terror whenever she had a thought that she imagined might provoke the queen. Abrogail did that by assuring her it wouldn't happen for real, not by - making it something that she wouldn't be scared of if it was going to happen for real.

What she thinks she'd say is that she is no longer excessively afraid of it in a fashion that consumes her attention when there's no chance of it and puts her at more risk of it, but that she remains convinced it is nearly the worst thing that could happen from the perspective of her values and worth arbitrary suffering to avoid, and it's still true that if you ask her to choose between being a statue temporarily or jumping into a lake of fire she'll pick the lake of fire.

But the fact she was able to respond to Keltham coherently and then try to depart his presence so she didn't annoy him with her breakdown, instead of having the breakdown on the spot or trying to gouge his eyes out in the hopes she could provoke Tarnish to kill her, was probably to Abrogail's credit.

Keltham+: He's not sure enough that he qualifies sufficiently as mid-Keltham to apologize for him - and the whole concept of just saying 'sorry' to somebody is not very dath ilani for reasons probably not worth going into right now - but it can at least be said that he regrets the distress inflicted, didn't intend it, and would not do that again given a second chance to do it.

(His mind is currently trying to set aside for LATER all of the concerns suddenly raised about Abrogail Thrune as his ongoing romantic competitor or metamour; or maybe she's WON, and if that doesn't just mean Story Over, maybe it fires the flag-event where he's supposed to force Carissa to testify to that fact under truth-spell so he takes legal ownership of Carissa from Cheliax.  He doesn't actually see the point, now, but he's going to have to reexamine his possible potential-plot-structures map, checking the whole thing for where owning Carissa might be relevant...)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa acknowledges that dath ilani trope-reasoning does not come naturally to her, but she really thinks that the Abrogail plotline will end when Carissa kills her, or if things go really well brings her around to their side.  This does not require anything of Keltham, who cut off romantic plots with Carissa when he, you know, told her to stop considering herself his.

...that wasn't some ridiculous alien miscommunication, right, that is what he told her?

Keltham+: It was a kind of saying goodbye, yes, though he acknowledges fault in not making that more explicit than it was.  He was planning to destroy Creation (modulo Cayden alternatives he doesn't get moral credit for), and become a god, and he did not see either of those things as offering hope of them living happily ever after together.  He didn't want to offer her false hope.

(It hurt.  But she knows that.  Right?  He thinks she already knew that, but he's been wrong too many times before.)

Carissa Sevar: She knows that. She knows that he loved her, and she loved him, and she wishes that it could have been real, and she meant it, when she told him that if the world survived she would stay with him. But she doesn't expect it.

Keltham+: He's just going to think it, instead of fighting it down: what exactly did Abrogail Thrune tell her, when she promised not to make Carissa a statue?

Carissa Sevar: She has a much better memory, these days, with all her enhancements, but that she remembered word-for-word from the day it happened. "I, Abrogail Thrune II, swear in Asmodeus's name never to make you a statue for true," she said, and then, "Though at this level of breadth and consequence I'll make no oath of it without greater payment, I also promise not to seek particularly to destroy your soul by any means nor deprive it of its eternity."

Keltham+: She knows - doesn't she? - that he could swear that same oath to her, and mean it?  That he'd put her on that ark to Elysium if he could, if she'd let him?  Abrogail Thrune's oath doesn't even force her to do that much, if she plans on destroying all the souls in Golarion herself; would she bother to get Carissa out of the way, if that happened?  Abrogail Thrune might think it romantic for the two of them to true-die together, if she didn't happen to seek particularly to destroy Carissa's soul and Carissa just happened to be around when it happened.  Abrogail wouldn't care very much, on his read of her, that Carissa herself didn't think it so romantic.

Abrogail Thrune has perma-statued people.  It doesn't bother him because if Creation survives then Civilization will dig those people up in time, and if not they'll end up Elsewhere.  Or if Carissa talks him into it, maybe he won't demand that much of Pharasma, that future Pharasmin-Civilization predictably advance to the point of digging up those people; and they can stay statues forever for real.  As Abrogail Thrune chose to happen, not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

There is still a part of his brain that feels sort of indignant about how possibly one of Carissa's romantic interests is being judged much more leniently than the other, here.

Carissa Sevar: (Awwwwww.)

(She'd pay a very very high price, for Civilization to advance to the point of digging up those statues. Not the destruction of everything, that's too high a price, but nearly anything else.)

She would, for what it's worth, hate Abrogail, if she suspected Abrogail were trying to destroy the world. Not even in the complicated way she hates Keltham; there would be none of what she loves in Abrogail, if Abrogail were trying to destroy Creation.

But it's true, that she doesn't judge them the same way, and also that if she were being properly coherent she would hold more of Abrogail's conduct against Abrogail - because the Abrogail who hurts Carissa to make her stronger is not the only Abrogail, and she often hurts people much worse, for no cause at all.

She doesn't have much to say in defense of the part of her that feels warm and joyous when she observes that Abrogail likes her.

Keltham+: He suspects that if he, himself, had perma-statued anyone, intending for them to never return nor knowing anything of Elsewheres, that Carissa would be notably more upset with him about that.

And it maybe shouldn't be important, this thing, when so much between them is already shattered, except that it - seems to rhyme with other things - that to his perspective, look like - there is something harsh in her, towards him, that he doesn't know how to deal with, for that it isn't in dath ilan, or dath ilan trains its people out of it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa doesn't have an answer to that ready, and she notices herself flinching away from just pointing her mind at it and thinking, because she has no idea where that will take her and that's frightening. And she thinks she doesn't trust, not fully, that nothing will go wrong, if she digs through her mind for an answer and it's an ugly one or a cruel one or an - irrational one, one that makes Keltham think he shouldn't listen to her about anything.

Keltham+: Past-Keltham's model of Civilization's wisdom and Keeper-wisdom would have sagely pronounced that it's not a great idea to leave something lying around like that in yourself, under these circumstances; that you ought to set it aside and be sane instead, if the world is otherwise ending.

This version of him feels less sure, of what the true Keepers out of dath ilan would say.  He knows that hate is possible to him; past-Keltham hated Abrogail Thrune, for a very brief period between when he realized what'd been done to him, and when he applied Owl's Wisdom to himself and lost that brief flash of emotion.

And he wonders if the true Keepers out of dath ilan would know - being wiser than he and little if at all less intelligent, with far more training and maybe greater in dimensions of thinkoomph that Golarion's three magics don't augment - if the Keepers would know already that dath ilan damaged itself in some way, in the past, by trying to breed hatred out of itself.  Maybe anger too.  He thinks a Golarionite in his place would have been angry with Cheliax, for what it'd done, and not lost that thread of anger when they used an Owl's Wisdom.

If Carissa had deliberately and knowingly sent Peranza and Asmodia to Hell to be hurt and warped and damaged beyond repair in Hell, and not sacrificed her own soul to save them either, and didn't seem to feel she'd done wrong - then it wouldn't have made him hate her, wouldn't have made him be unfair to her.  It would have destroyed something in him, that he still holds for Carissa though it burns his mental hands to hold it; but even for that, he wouldn't be towards her as she is towards him.

He never hated Pharasma even when he confirmed that there were children in Hell.  Not because he made a strategic decision, but because She wasn't close enough to his frame of reference to be meaningfully hateable... or maybe that's trying to justify with reasons what's just reasonless biology.

Maybe dath ilan bred anger out of itself, and maybe that has something to do with the way that happiness is such a fragile state that they have to work so hard to protect.

It remains that whatever is in Carissa now - even if it's there because she's whole in a way that dath ilani are broken - it is something very alien to him, that makes him want to run away and not try to face whatever this thing is in her.

His current and better model of a Keeper doesn't say for Carissa to force herself to look at it, right now, but it doesn't say that it's safe for Carissa to ignore.

There's a lot of things in past-Carissa that it's not safe for this Carissa to ignore.  Fear that warps reality to be scarier, hatred that warps reality to be more hateable, a set of emotional benefits from feeling small and powerless that nearly got her killed when other people didn't see her that way, and probably a whole long list of other things like that.

Carissa Sevar: Oh, she plans to look at it. Just possibly not while Keltham is reading her mind.

Keltham+: He's said now, things that are supposedly true about her, despite not himself being Carissa Sevar.  He has the sense that he's been directing a lot of this conversation - admittedly, he was the one who scheduled it - but still, there's probably something Carissa herself would want to say, about how he can try to take a shape that she can deal with.

Where this, itself, is not something that he modeled himself as being able to ask of her, while there was that harshness in her.  Her past requests, like 'say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet', are things that it wouldn't have been healthy for mid-Keltham to go along with.  But maybe they can manage to negotiate a comms protocol that they're both happy with and isn't meant to hurt him for his crime of being an executioner.

Carissa Sevar: It ...wasn't about hurting him, her request that he talk about Keltham and not about dath ilan. It was about -

- so, it's not the first time that Carissa has had sex that she would have refused if she had a choice, right. That's the kind of thing that happens sometimes unless you expend a very costly amount of effort on avoiding it. It hasn't really had long-term negative effects on her, before; it kind of sucks, but lots of things kind of suck. You don't want to be a person who gets damaged by harmless kind of sucky things happening.

This one bothered her. And the reason it bothered her is that Keltham had asked her not to do it. It's not his fault, it's entirely her fault, she genuinely wasn't trying to make it his problem, but the reason that it bothered her was that she had been trying to meet Keltham inside his strange world. And that was a promise she made Keltham, himself, as an individual, because she loved him; not inside any greater system that made any sense, just her and her best understanding of him.

She would not have made a promise like that to dath ilan. She doesn't love dath ilan and it doesn't love her and she actually does not care at all about, would not take any comfort in, whatever dath ilan has to say, about what happened. If Keltham is gone, as he sometimes says he is, then there isn't anything anyone can say that would help and not hurt, but offering her what dath ilan has to say is some kind of cruel parody of the thing that she wanted. It wasn't a promise to dath ilan.

Carissa Sevar: It feels a little bit like there was a pattern like that, where every individual time Carissa did try to tell Keltham what would make it possible to speak with him, he extrapolated a reason for her to say it which was irrationality or cruelty or unreasonableness, and then rejected her irrationality or cruelty or unreasonableness, and Carissa was muddled and scared and in pain but she was trying, very very hard, to describe to Keltham what he could do if he didn't want to hurt her, and he never wanted to do it.

So she made up a Keltham inside her own head who was, well, inspired by Keltham, not the real person, but he would say whatever Keltham was saying except if she asked him not to hurt her he would do it, and he wouldn't treat her like the confusion between them was a product of Carissa being ridiculous and inexplicable, and he spoke her language instead of resenting her for not being a native speaker of his, and everything he said was reasonable even if he had to search really hard to come up with a reasonable thing that might be what Keltham meant.

It wasn't that her Keltham was always right about what real-Keltham was doing. She didn't know what real-Keltham was doing. But she had to try every sentence he spoke to come up with reasonable things that he could have been saying if he wasn't trying to hurt her or trying to make a point about how wrong she was or trying to prove dath ilan was better than she was.

And, it just feels like Keltham usually didn't try, when Carissa said things, to come up with five reasonable things she could mean, while every time Keltham said anything Carissa was trying with all her might to come up with five reasonable things he might have meant. And it felt like, when she tried desperately to tell him what he could do to not hurt her, he listened, and then categorically refused to do it, and that was suggestive, about how well it would go if she kept desperately trying.

Keltham+: Everything about her seemed like a scream of - pain, injury, of not wanting him to be who he was, not wanting this to be happening - and to be infused with a sense that it was right and proper for her to feel that way, and improper for him to object - such that for him to object to anything would have only hurt her more, and raised more of the sharp poisonous thing against him.

So mid-Keltham wrapped himself up in himself and retreated to wait it out; thinking that, if she wanted there to be comms between them, she could just come to him and say 'hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol'.  Mid-Keltham knew, to be clear, that Carissa wouldn't - because she wasn't dath ilani and hadn't been raised to think of going meta about comms protocols as an obvious solution, because she didn't have a standard protocol for doing meta-comms where you're both trying not to be emotional or confrontational about that, and because she wouldn't, on his model, trust anything that sounded like it came from dath ilan - would have seen it as an attempt to injure her, if he'd offered anything of dath ilan's - not to mention he'd gotten rather poor results from trying to go meta about comms with other insufficiently enhanced Golarionites, often with things getting into apparently irretrievable states of hostility.  So all that mid-Keltham could do, was wait for her to be Wiser and hopefully possible to talk to without injuring.

Carissa Sevar: When she said to him, '...maybe you could say them but just say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet's way of doing ethics right now‘, that was, actually, an effort to negotiate a communications protocol. Perhaps bracketed wrongly, perhaps she didn’t do the right meta-communication, perhaps it would have worked if instead of ‘maybe you could say’ she’d said ‘proposed communications protocol:’.

But she was trying. When he asked, she told him what he could do that would help her and not hurt to hear: she asked him to tell her what Keltham thought about her being raped, instead of what dath ilan had to say, because hearing what Keltham thought would help and hearing what dath ilan thought wouldn't.

He refused to do that, which, as she had predicted it would, hurt very badly, and she stopped, after that, trying to tell Keltham how to communicate with her in a way that hurt her less.

Keltham+: If that was her only desperate attempt to negotiate a comms protocol, the only and only chance he'd gotten - though the main meta-tag on it seemed to be that she felt it necessary to attach to that felt to him like it carried a state of sharpness towards dath ilan, holding herself injured by dath ilan - but if that was misleading-to-him and actually the meta-content was 'Keltham this is my last attempt to reach out to you, respond in the right way or you won't get another one' - then from his perspective, things were not clearly labeled.  Maybe because in Cheliax you must not label things, you must give exactly the right test and the other person must give exactly the right response and nothing can ever be legible or that's all kinds of weakness and vulnerability?

If that was his last chance, he didn't know; and if that was the comms situation, he didn't know; and if something like that arises in the future, he's probably still not going to know unless she tells him, because she is very alien.  He is a bit smarter now, but stupid nonetheless; and she is become a very smart alien in turn; this potentially cancels out unless they meet on grounds of pure Law rather than emotions complicated further by intelligence.  Any time she does something that isn't what sensible ideal agents would do (agents outside of Cheliax, to be clear) he's not going to be able to deduce it from first principles unless she labels it.  It's one reason why this whole conversation seemed impossible unless they could both use simultaneous Detect Thoughts at INT 29, and get to some point beyond which it would be possible to go meta and reconcile comms conflicts.

Carissa Sevar: The intended meta-content was that she understood her kind-of grudge against dath ilan was not something Keltham would necessarily be sympathetic to, and she wasn't sure future-Carissa would share it - thus specifying that it was something she felt right now, not necessarily a long-lasting state of affairs. She tried piling on a lot of disclaimers- "kind of", "a grudge", "right now", to make it clear that it wasn't an endorsed anti-dath-ilan position she was advancing, or a policy she was demanding in full generality but a current and specific need. 

Also, that wasn't the only time.

There was an earlier time, where she told him that the conversation would be less painful and more bearable for her if he'd stop bringing up dath ilan, which he did not see fit to acknowledge as a request at all, and a later time, when she was just on the brink of giving up, where she told him that she didn't know if the approaches that seemed to her like they ought to work really would, since they hadn't been tried, and so was willing and ready to proceed only by dath ilani rules.

He could have told her then that he was open to negotiation, if he was, which he gave no sign of.

Carissa thinks that sensible ideal agents might, in fact, try two times to quietly bring up something important to them, and get refused both times, and then try saying more explicitly that they have ideas for how things could work better but those ideas haven't been tested and they're willing to just obey the other's protocols.

She thinks that, actually, nothing Keltham did had anything to do with his inability to understand anyone who doesn't behave like a sensible ideal agent. He was not behaving like a sensible ideal agent.

He was behaving like a scared, injured traumatized person who didn't want to give Carissa the thing she said was important to her and who wasn't actually very interested in her ideas for how communication might work, especially since she disclaimed that she didn't know if they'd really work. She was behaving like a scared, injured, traumatized person who wanted Keltham to stop doing a thing that was really hurting her, was aware she had no leverage for this request, did not know the magical words that would render her permitted in his framework to make it, tried a couple of different ways of making it anyway, and then gave up and told him she was giving up and adopting his framework.

She is actually fine with the fact she gave up and adopted his framework. There are important battles to pick here and this isn't one of them. But she is sad, if Keltham's narrative about his prisoner trying to tell him what she needed, being refused, and then figuring out how not to need it, and then telling him she had done that and communicating by his rules from then onwards, is that she could simply have said the magic words if she wanted something different to happen. She did not know the magic words.

She tried to talk to him with the only words she had, and it didn't work, and so she gave up and did the rest the dath ilani way for the rest of their acquaintance without ever complaining about how much it hurt her, and she is fine with the fact that this happened, but she does think that it did happen.

Keltham+: If she's thinking of the two occasions he thinks she's thinking of, then when she said "This isn't a demand but if you shut up about dath ilan it'll require less self-control from me to talk to you like a civilized person" he took that completely at face value as a factual statement dath-ilan-style and made a mental note not to talk about dath ilan unless there was a sufficiently strong reason to put that demand on mid-Carissa's internal attention; and shortly after said "You are kind", which is a type of acknowledgement that mid-Carissa almost never offered him, the many many times that he tried to be kind; and then gave her all that she asked for in negotiations.

If he was also supposed to acknowledge the request a particular exact way, because otherwise mid-Carissa thought she was being ignored, then this is the kind of thing that needs to be explicitly labeled in the future, even now, because she is - he thinks -

- just vastly vastly overestimating how legible she is to him.  A lot of his knowledge he does have about her comes from a time when he doesn't know, even now, which things were lies or truth, and she does know which things are lies or truth and is probably under-adjusting for how much she thinks he can guess.

When she said "I think I can have this conversation by dath ilan rules" the next event was that he did describe dath ilan rules to her, and then that conversation, which she wanted to have, happened, and was useful; and then they had some conversation after than not by strict dath ilani rules for formally navigating disagreements; and then that worked around to where it could blow up; and then he went back to figuring that they should try to have less emotional conversations until everyone was INT 29.

Carissa Sevar: Oh! It is in fact useful to know that Keltham changed his behavior off Carissa trying to communicate that it would be helpful. He still brought up dath ilan a lot after that, including in situations where she didn't see why it was necessary, so she assumed that he had not changed his behavior at all, and mostly did not try to communicate like that again. If he had said "I will try to do that somewhat less often" or "I will keep that in mind", then she would have volunteered far more statements like that.

He's also not legible to her; she can only guess whether things she said have any effect on him if he acknowledges them or observably-to-her changes her behavior based on them.

Keltham+: He's not actually thinking at this point that he was mistaken to try to preserve the tiny shreds of their relationship to where they could talk about it using INT 29 and telepathy.  He still feels pretty much like a scared, injured, traumatized person to whom nothing much good is going to happen in the future - it not being safe, nor really kind, to forcibly edit himself to be otherwise - but it does help to be a smarter and telepathic such person.

Carissa Sevar: She thinks waiting was pretty reasonable. She just feels - sad, lost, like the bulk of her effort was wasted or at least not noticed - if Keltham's narrative about communications is that Carissa was unwilling to try because of her dislike of dath ilan, when she set aside her dislike of dath ilan  and accepted all her needs would go unmet and tried to conduct all future conversation by dath ilani protocols and would have kept trying if Keltham had asked her to.

The reason why she did not use the magic words 'hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol' is not that she wasn't willing to communicate in a dath ilani way; she tried very very hard to communicate in a dath ilani way once he gave her examples and instructions. It is that she did not know those words.

Keltham+: There's a strong impression he's getting right now - from the situation, not from Carissa's actual thoughts - that he is placed into a game where the next move he's supposed to make is to show those times when he tried to show kindness, openness, vulnerability, concession, acknowledgment of her own position and reasons, to Carissa, and didn't get back things he interpreted as - the sort of encouragement you might show somebody if you wanted him to repeat that behavior or double down on it.  And if he doesn't drag up those examples, he loses this game.

He doesn't think that's a game Carissa means to play.  That doesn't mean Cheliax/Golarion never carved it into her.

Carissa Sevar: - she thinks that those examples would be very useful for helping her attach the abstract belief she has been maintaining and espousing the whole time, that he is trying as hard as she is, to some specific features of his behavior.

She will probably if there are no examples change her mind slightly about whether that belief she has been maintaining and espousing this whole time is actually true.          

That....seems reasonable to her? It is helpful to replace the abstract belief someone else is trying hard with specific examples of times and ways they tried hard and their communications weren't met with any signal they could usefully interpret, and in the case where actually one of them isn't trying very hard, it'd be helpful for that to come to light too. It seems like Keltham thinks that finding-examples is some kind of bad game to play, and she understands that often when he has objections like that he has good reasons behind them, but that is absolutely something Carissa is doing deliberately and what she thought the point of this conversation was - to help them both arrive at, hopefully, the more grounded belief that the other person has been trying very hard.

Also, once they have some examples of where exactly they misunderstand each other, they can change their behavior in similar situations in the future. Like, if Carissa is ever again tempted to say "if you do X less it'll make it easier for me to not get mad", she will add, "if you are going to act on this advice I would appreciate you saying that you intend to do so".

And she definitely won't when mildly annoyed with Keltham do anything that might be possible to misinterpret as Withdrawing From Friendship And Cooperation.

And if she finds herself getting tired of dath ilani communication norms, instead of "I have my own ideas about how people could communicate healthily, but I sure didn't get them from Cheliax and I don't know if they'll work", she will say "hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol".

Keltham+: (Those two phrasings would in fact have been near-semantic-equivalents to him, but he appreciates that she has no way of knowing this important fact due to his alien illegibility.)

(^-- this is a kind of constant acknowledging of the Other's position and difficulties, that dath ilani are trained to do, that he can see the point of doing during difficult comms problems; tag, this is a dath ilani technique as is a fact that Carissa on-his-model wants tagged)

Carissa Sevar: (Huh! In her dialect, the first of those is near-semantically equivalent to the thing she did say, 'the Chelish way of doing this is for everyone to conceal all their feelings at all times, so it's entirely possible I'm too optimistic about approaches that don't require that and they really don't actually work.', which is itself an attempt at the acknowledging-the-limitations-of-one's-own-state-of-knowledge which she was doing because she hoped it was close to a dath ilani thing Keltham was looking for.)

(She appreciates the thing he did with dath ilani use/mentions there.)