"I'll pause here so we can all take a break for meals and washrooms, and resume in four third-hours... in one and a third hours.  Though I can also stick around here for another two dozen half-minutes... twelve minutes, if anyone wants to ask any immediate questions that you don't want to let fall out of your memory.  I mean, you can write them down, but I appreciate that there can be important messy thoughts that are hard to write down full notes to yourself about, and if so I can manage to stick around twelve minutes while you blurt them out before you forget them."

Meritxell wants to know what makes people able to become Keepers while they're still alive. Are they the smartest people? The most careful? Can you tell at age ten?

Not the question Keltham was expecting, but Okay Fine.

"I'd guess the smartest, the most careful - we have a specialized term for that as a usually-mostly-stable quality of a person, maybe 'conscientiousness' would be the best translation here?  I expect they'd look for things you can test in childhood that somebody has shown to correlate with keeping oaths in adulthood later and being very unlikely to go unstable under stress.  I mean, the real answer to your question is that we have prediction markets, people betting on outcomes, with which a lot of people betting, operates as a kind of summary of everyone's best guess at the probabilities of definite observations being made later.  And, I would strongly expect, the Keepers have secret prediction markets that only Keeper institutions can bet on, because it's a secret what exactly they're betting on, because they don't want parents pushing their kids into faking their way into joining the Keepers.  But I imagine the secret prediction market topics say, is this person going to end up passing the following competence tests, will they end up measurably mastering the Way that Keepers keep, will it be recorded that any spilled secrets get traced back to them, will they ever be observed to have broken an oath they took.  Are they going to get along with other Keepers the right amount, neither too conforming nor too iconoclastic.  Will they end up being promoted, are they going to report enjoying their work and be happy at it in observable ways... now that I say it out loud, I feel like there's probably more in the secret markets than that.  That's the kind of market you run to find out if a kid is going to be a good matchmaker or doctor, not to find out who ought to be a Keeper.  The thing is, prediction markets are ultimately betting markets and they have to resolve in definite observations at some point.  So there's some sort of observable thing that would happen to you over the course of your career as a Keeper that a bet would have to be about, in order for it to ever pay out.  In terms of your local system - I don't quite know if they'd qualify as 'Good', they do get paid for what they do, in both money and reputation, but they definitely lean further Good than average - they are, in the end, spending their lives taking care of other people."

"I've always felt weird about the aspect where Keepers are significantly more Good than I am, to be frank.  Even if you nod respectfully at them and pay a tiny fraction of their salaries, they're still doing you this huge favor, that you didn't ask for - some of which probably has to be done in order to make society livable for you at all - but they're doing more of it than I'd ask for, if it was up to me - supposedly on my behalf.  And they aren't doing it wrong, that I know about, or hurting me in any way, that I know about.  But they're still doing more of what they do, than I'd have really asked for... though I'm not a typical dath ilani, the typical dath ilani probably feels more on median-average like there's the right amount of Keepering going on.  Though actually, by the nature of their jobs, there's got to be more of it going on than we really know a specific reason for?  So some reasons for the Keepers' existences are hidden, and maybe my own first-impression feelings are closer to average and I'm just failing to adjust for predictable updates on the hidden info if I could see it... the whole Keeper thing is probably one of the objectively weirder institutions in dath ilan from an outside viewpoint, along with the Surreptitious Head Removers, the Official Government Con Artists, and the Planetary Emergency Rehearsal Festivals.  All of which have completely logical and reasonable reasons behind them, and are still understood and acknowledged even by Civilization generally to be some of the weirder things they have talked themselves into doing."

"Though, I mean, I don't disagree with the reasons, I can see why something like the Keepers need to exist.  Very stable geniuses can extensively develop thoughts that will wreck less stable people's minds, often without them even meaning to do that.  Even pursuing Lawfulness too far can sometimes end up that way.  Human beings are not designed to work great when we push ourselves harder and harder in the direction of Lawfulness - I mean, we're not designed at all, but I doubt it's something our distant ancestors bred themselves to be able to do safely.  I imagine that Keepers are people who by nature are smart and resilient and exceptionally stable in the face of internal insult, able to tolerate weird stuff going on inside or outside their own heads, and what they spend that internal resilience on is going way further in the direction of Law than their ancestors a million years earlier were pseudo-designed to do."

"And, I mean, I'm sure the Keepers have got a pretty good idea about who can do that by age ten.  But that's not because I could take one glance at a ten-year-old and figure out who'd be a good Keeper.  It's because, I confidently predict, the Keepers observe a lot of facts about ten-year-olds, and they keep excellent records of long-term outcomes, and they train people with very high measured intelligence to make good predictions about it.  Come to think, I wouldn't be surprised if the Keepers had a secret prediction market about me somewhere in their systems, saying exactly what my chances were of succeeding at my life goals, and people like me aren't told those predictions because that's exactly the kind of information that - can be a bit - more Lawfulness than we're really happy having in our lives.  And if you can predict that actually a kid is going to be totally okay with knowing that information, then maybe you try to make them a Keeper.  Or maybe what they predict isn't so much kids starting out imperturbable, as that you'll end up driven to face down whatever kind of internal bumps you face, in order to be able to face any kind of disturbing truth and not allow your potential to be limited by the disorder of your own mind... I don't know.  I didn't want to be a Keeper.  They weren't the kind of weird I wanted to be."

She nods. "And - if smartness is part of it - then probably our world just doesn't have people smart enough to be Keepers, yet?"

"I genuinely couldn't guess how much you need Keepers, and if maybe you should slap some intelligence headbands on your top geniuses and have them do their best with whatever Law they can reconstruct from what I remember.  Maybe your society does really badly without that, and does better with some Keepers that are the best Keepers you can make.  Dath ilan bred itself for intelligence over time, they didn't always have people as smart as the smartest people now, and there must also have been a time when the Keepers had much less knowledge of Law and had just started out being Keepers.  Or maybe you can get by on having a couple of advisors like Lrilatha, or building some kind of interplanar communicator that you can use to talk to - axiomites, Lrilatha called them, though she didn't think they could live here, and I'm not sure if they could do the things that a Keeper could do.  Look, I think this question is in an important sense premature?  Let's get some Chelish geniuses thinking and talking in terms that don't sound like total nonsense first, and if anybody's really good at it maybe they'll start up the Keepers here."

The girls are so ready to get back to work on that.

(It seems odd, to think that the Keepers would be motivated by Good, by wanting to help people. It seems like you could run something like that off the pure, selfish want to be more perfect, more like a god, held to the standards of gods - surely that's a drive, in most people, strong enough to matter far, far more than the question of whether being like that benefits other people.)

Keltham admires (and is quietly starting to feel a bit concerned about) their apparently infinite well of drive and enthusiasm, but he needs to eat lunch and frankly allow his brain to cool down a step before resuming the Golarion Industrialization Project.  He's not going to stop them from talking about it with each other, but he needs to not talk about that during lunch, and would like something like ten minutes to himself before he talks about anything at all.

Irori has not been spending nearly enough energy to decode the actual words being exchanged on the material plane, but He has continued looking in this direction, whose spiritual position and velocity is looking increasingly relevant to His interests.

Would you look at that, somebody from this benighted corner of reality is thinking, in a surprisingly non-clueless direction, about what it even means to be a god, that isn't about touching that damnable Starstone.

Why this quite interesting event is happening inside Cheliax... is not something Irori can deduce from the information he has, but He should perhaps do a little about it. 

Irori sends a brief information packet to Asmodeus, requesting conversation under certain terms and conditions.

Asmodeus does not get a lot of requests from other gods that he commit to non-intervention on the information They would like to bring to His attention for a negotiation. If it happens twice in 28800 time units then there is a single underlying cause.

Asmodeus suspects He may already know what Irori is asking about. He does not disclose this.

He agrees to the conversation.

Irori sends a potential contract to Asmodeus, regarding the treatment of a certain mortal, identity to be revealed after contract is signed.

A current mortal inhabitant of Cheliax seems to have set one foot upon the Way.

This mortal is not to be particularly hindered by Asmodeus or His deliberately dispatched agents.

If the mortal continues upon the Way, their steps shall no doubt take them beyond Cheliax in due time.  No devil shall accept sale of their soul, as Cheliax sometimes demands of its people before allowing them to leave.  Should such an event occur in Cheliax's due civil processes, any such devil is to instruct Cheliax that this mortal's soul may not be bought, but that the mortal is to be allowed to leave Cheliax regardless and not hindered in going where their footsteps take them.

The mortal's current teachers shall not be killed by Asmodeus or His dispatched agents for a period of at least one year.  If Asmodeus wants to wipe out their teachers after that, Irori shall not interfere.  (His Way is not a Way of rendering a mortal's path easy, and such events have not uncommonly spurred others on their Way.)

For this boon, Irori offers a relatively small amount of energy in payment; the request doesn't call on Asmodeus to make any urgent, costly revelations.  If the mortal falls before Cheliax's ordinary challenges, then so be it.  Indeed, Irori is offering an energy payment barely more than the cost to Asmodeus to thus instruct His relevant soul-buying devils to refuse a certain contract.  Irori would offer a greater fraction of the gains from trade, if not for Asmodeus's barely-Lawful tendency to selectively accept contracts on which He can screw others over, a tendency which Irori needs to take into account when offering prices.

That squirrel. Everybody sure does love that squirrel. 

It is a cheaper ask than Abadar's, and in fact wholly encompassed by it already; He's already not allowed to keep that squirrel's soul. Which Irori does not know, because this is the fun kind of negotiation that isn't occurring with mutual access to all relevant information.

He observes that Cheliax has departing persons sell their soul for reasons, mainly that it keeps them from endangering Cheliax in ways that require costly intervention, and that the cost to Him of a troublemaker running around exceed in expectation the cost of informing His devils not to take the contract. And that the sort of soul that might find Irori's Way is an unusually valuable one to Him, too. The price isn't high enough. 

Irori would probably abandon the negotiation, at this point, if the squirrel were only a normal amount of promising; but Asmodeus has the secret information that this is in fact an EXCEPTIONALLY BIZARRE squirrel and so He predicts Irori is, actually, willing to pay more. 

Irori will go as high as the expected cost to a god of a mortal troublemaker, as well as the expected cost of informing His devils in due time, plus a bare margin of profit to make the contract beneficial to Asmodeus at all.  Asmodeus will wantonly wreck this soul for no good reason in the afterlife, if Asmodeus gets it, so Irori does not accept that argument.

It would be a higher price, but Irori needs to take into account that Asmodeus is much more likely to accept this contract if it is in some way cheaper to Asmodeus or less beneficial to Irori than expected.  That is as high as Irori is willing to go; if Asmodeus wants different prices, He needs to become a different kind of being.  Irori would be overjoyed to explain the relevant changes if Asmodeus is interested in correcting His flaws.

Deal. Pleasure doing business. What squirrel.

Irori transmits the identifying info for one Carissa Sevar, and goes about His Way.

Seriously? That one? 

So what kind of group lunch facilities do they have around here?

The grand dining hall has a spread of various foods; it is very abundant, by Golarion standards. The girls are mostly eating and sometimes speaking quietly to each other.

It is not traditional at Chelish schools to talk much about your classes. After all, your classmates are your competitors, not your friends; sometimes it is mutually beneficial to collaborate on some problems, because two people are smarter than one, but it'd be stupid and pathetic, to try to build friendships out of that. 

These classes are hard not to talk about though. They are compromising by talking about their teacher. This constrains them to things it's fine if he overhears, or to speaking Infernal, which he might think is odd; some of them have bland conversations with innuendo that should be hard for him to catch, and some go for Infernal and wait to see if they'll get slapped for it. 

Conversations physically more distant from Keltham get steadily more interesting.

"I think it must be taught very differently in Hell because most people couldn't learn this way at all."

"I think Hell is doing - something different - shaping the way your intuition-brain works, instead of teaching you how to override it with - formal precision - there are devils that don't have high intelligence, and they still have it -"

"And shaping the intuitions requires suffering because it's the - language our subconscious speaks. But teaching how to override it with formal precision doesn't necessarily -"

"We're still going to have to get the intuitions later, though."

Keltham quietly eats his food for at least the first ten minutes.  Insofar as his brain isn't just plain resting, it's going back through what he said to check whether he said anything spectacularly stupid.

He notes, absently, some Chelish girls having conversations in a language he doesn't speak.  It doesn't seem particularly worrisome by comparison with people in Chelish Governance wearing intelligence headbands having conversations where Keltham can't see them at all.  His research harem is probably just discussing strategies for seducing him or something.

...should he briefly rapidly cover genetics and deliberate heritage-optimization next?  It's got a long time lag before it's useful, but that might be all the more reason for Cheliax to get started on it early.

She gives him the ten minutes he asked for - eleven, to be safe - and then sits down across from him, which no one else has quite dared to do. "Is the connecting all the lessons to the fundamental structure of the universe a dath ilani thing or a you thing?"

"Dath ilani, they do a lot of stuff there and I am wildly guessing which parts are most important.  No, that's vastly overstating my competence, I'm flailing around going through stuff as it seems relevant to something that comes up.  You know what I totally forgot to do that whole time?  I forgot to make occasional deliberate mistakes so that people would pay attention to what I wrote and compete to find the errors first."

"Awww, that's so mean to them but it's probably a great idea."

"Mean to them?  I mean, I suppose it is easier on them per half-second if you don't do anything that requires them to pay close attention, but if they don't want to expend effort to learn, why aren't they just goofing off somewhere instead?  Mean would be making them expend more effort per unit of learning - and the fact that dath ilan does this suggests that at least in dath ilan it's been measured to net improve learning per unit of time or effort.  Unless that's different here?  I think I would've been bored if the older kids and Watchers teaching me weren't making occasional errors and I wasn't competing to find them."