"Are you thinking possibly that you are in - not one of the Outer Planes that we think of as an afterlife - but rather that this entire greater universe is your afterlife?" ventures Isidre Thrune.  It doesn't seem to be what Keltham is thinking, but maybe he'll explain why it's not.

That gets Keltham to smile, briefly.  "Well, this universe rather counts as my afterlife by definition, what with my life having ended, and this being after it.  I don't really have the concept of your afterlives down yet, though.  So whatever further connotations you were thinking of importing from the standard terminology, I can't say anything about those."

Is Sevar possibly thinking anything useful right now.

No, no, that's not it, not that she knows what it is, but she wouldn't have asked that question and she's not thinking how to - she cannot wait to read the thought transcript that'll presumably make this all make perfect sense -

"Are you thinking that this world was in some way created just for you," Isidre says.  "Maybe that - you're the only real person here?"

She has not lost sight of Cheliax's goals; if Keltham thinks that, he will be much easier to turn to Evil.

"I'd have to be pretty search-blind not to think of that possibility at all, but I rather doubt it; anybody who put me in a fake world with a Carissa who isn't real and has no internal experiences is not at all doing me a favor, by that, and why make a whole world for somebody if you're not doing them a favor?  I can tap myself with a truthspell and repeat that, if your version of Governance wants assurance that I'm unlikely to strangle all my students after deciding they're not real."

It's quite the opposite of what Governance wanted to hear, but Abrogail didn't expect better.

This - seems like a good opportunity, or maybe excuse would be a better word, to change the subject.  Abrogail is starting to think that figuring out how to wield Keltham's Second Law is not, in any case, the incredibly good idea that it may have seemed to Sevar at the time.

"That does bring up another topic I'd meant to discuss," Isidre says.  "We can possibly return later to the topic of the patterns you're recognizing, if there's time, but I wanted to be sure we covered this other topic, before I return to my unfortunately busy schedule."

"Understood."

"We have a great deal more experience with people like Carissa Sevar, or, for that matter, like yourself, than dath ilan seems to have, by Sevar's reports.  Is this correct?"

"You can just ask me to review the reports, you know."

"But yes, or rather, my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.  If you've reviewed the transcript of my lecture on evolutionary theory as the basis of biological order, the notion of enjoying pain, the signal of damage to the body, is not something you'd expect to see.  Carissa, if I was interpreting her correctly, thought masochism might have evolved in a situation where women are continuously - not having a great time but could maybe do better by bonding with their captors.  I'd put at least even money on it being something a god put in instead, or otherwise artificial."

"The fact that something like that even exists here - that I, a sadist, am complemented here by a perfect complement to my own desires, one that shouldn't exist - is part of why I suspect that I'm not in a universe that I matched up to at random."

"I'm sorry, I'd meant to move on from that but - are you saying that masochists in Golarion were created for you?"

No!!!!! - not in a universe I matched up to at random - lots of worlds, and why he ended up in this world is confusing, and the most notable feature of this world from his perspective is that there are perfect matches for all his incredibly conventional kinks that dath ilan tried and only sort of succeeded at breeding out of their Lawful Good planet of Lawful Goodness - Carissa would have responded 'I'd predict that most worlds have masochists, I'm not sure how heavily that weighs in your reasoning' -

"That'd correspond to some of the more relatively disturbing possibilities that I'm sure hoping aren't true, because I'm kind of screwed that way, either by being the only real person here, or by being responsible for the existence of a whole lot of other people many of whom seem not to be leading very fun lives right now."

"But no, my main theory is that a vast or weighted-infinite number of worlds exist, and I was nonrandomly sent to a world where masochists exist, nonrandomly dropped at the Worldwound where I'd run into Carissa Sevar, and by the way, it so happens that whatever bureaucratic process that world used to pick the people who'd be my students, would happen to run across Ione and Pilar and also somewhere in there a girl who's working against the rest of us."

Sala and Pineda got oracled after they met Keltham, but she's not sure if this changes anything from his perspective; and this cannot be asked, because he doesn't know they're oracles.

"I'm not sure how heavily this weighs in your reasoning, but I think I would expect - most places to have masochists, in fact?  It seems to me that masochists make perfect sense under the theory that you described to your class -"

Dath ilani anti-interruption norms with respect to Paracountess-level people are much, much less strong than they are in Golarion.  Sure, you'd notice if it happened often, but everybody can take a few interruption tokens per conversation, it doesn't mean anything.

"Applying evolutionary theory in general is surprisingly hard and doing it to human psychology in particular can run into a lot of pitfalls.  I'm sorry, I should have attached warnings about that, we got those in the classes I took, but I was trying to run through the subject on the way to other things and neglected that.  There's very exact rules for what you should and shouldn't predict using that theory, and if you're doing it after you've already seen what reality's answer sheet looks like, there's even more precautions you need to take, which rest on the Law of Probability, which I'd previously planned to explain today, before stuff happened."

Keltham's thought processes show no awareness of himself being rude, only sincerity plus some background thoughts that are full of incomprehensible concepts.  Not that this is an excuse in Cheliax, obviously, but it means that reprimanding Keltham cannot be the correct move.

(She's not particularly happy about being interrupted, but has a great deal more impulse control than certain people seem to think.)

"Well, I won't challenge your expertise or your warning, then," Isidre says calmly.  "The point remains:  You are a newcomer here, we have had masochists for a while, and we have sadists who know what they are."

"This I do understand, and had not meant at all to contradict."

"I foresee some possible points of trouble ahead for the two of you, and wish to avert those, if possible."

"I am listening very intently."

"Sevar, being the sort of woman that she is, is almost certainly attracted to you in part because of a fact and quality about your situation that she is probably rather reluctant to explain directly for a number of reasons."

"Namely, that you have, in fact, great power over her."

"Because I can fire her from the project if she, what, doesn't have sex with me?"

Keltham doesn't like it, but he has started to grasp that Golarion is full of people who seem to think that the correct thing to do with a threatening decision matrix that would not counterfactually exist absent your predicted tendency to give in to threats is to give in to the threat.

His world doesn't - have what - no this sounds like things Aspexia has told her about gods and godarrangements, are they all pretending to be gods there - but that's not what she's pursuing right now -