"I wrote every word on those three pages, and the assurances I gave you are intended to hold for everything in the contract."

...which could always be an auditory illusion but then she could also just not be a Lawful being in the first place if they're lying about that.  At some point you have to notice that these eight million doomy possibilities are all highly conditionally dependent on each other, meaning that the world in which they're all false has a decent-enough probability.

Keltham signs.

She signs as well.

She sets the quill, under its own power, to producing a copy; it does this even faster than she wrote the first version. "I will look forward to working with you in the future," she says, while it writes.

This happens to not be a standard dath ilani business pleasantry, prompting Keltham to start analyzing the statement for possible hidden meanings that she'd want to communicate to him; the obvious baseline interpretation, that it'd be of positive expected utility to have future interactions they'd both deemed to be of positive expected utility, wouldn't seem to communicate much extra information.

She's not... also flirting with him, is she?

If so, Keltham's kinda got enough to worry about in that department already.  Maybe someday when he's got a lot more sexual self-confidence.

"I hope and expect there will be future business opportunities worth your time," Keltham replies with ambiguity-leaning-negative.

She takes the second copy, and walks out; everyone in her path steps well clear of it.

"Now there goes a female entity who actually acts like a sane person," Keltham says in Taldane.  "You know, I frankly don't understand how your planet manages to be so screwed up if people like her are even around.  Do you just have a custom of not asking them what you're doing wrong, or what?"

No one is quite sure how to answer that question and it shows for a moment. 

"Well, it'd be stunningly presumptuous to talk to her, which I guess is a way of saying 'yes'? What would you expect, I don't know, the Worldwound, to look like, if people listened to her about things?"

"Didn't get the chance to observe it in detail, remember?  But in broad strokes it sounds like the Worldwound military expedition is one of the most functional parts of your entire planet, presumably because it's backed by relatively more attention from highly intelligent gods.  I'd expect the rest of the planet to have better coordination and more advanced material - you know, this is just going directly into the lecture on the basics that I can now start giving.  Anyone want to take a minute to get set up, before I start covering, like, the basics of Lawfulness so someday you can be as awesome as her?  Oh, and I should've thought to have said this earlier, but I can't cast illusion spells yet, so I need -"  Taldane has no word for 'whiteboard' or 'multipen'.  Lovely.  "- an erasable vertical surface to draw on, and if available, thick erasable pens in multiple colors."

'Someday be as awesome as Contessa Lliratha' is a very compelling pitch - Hell does not in the typical case produce results that good - and everyone gathers excitedly around. Vertical surfaces are by default eraseable if you have Prestidigitation, and pens in multiple colors can be found with slightly more scrambling than that.

Keltham takes their scrambling-time as a pause in which to think.  It's been a long time, at least by the standards of his total life lived so far, since the very basics were explained to him.  Keltham was stupider, then, hopefully stupider than these people are now, because he sure doesn't want to spend years painstakingly teaching all that stuff, with like a dozen dozen dozen carefully composed exercises whose exact details he can't possibly remember unless there's an intelligence-enhancing spell for that.

Maybe he'll just, like... rapidly state as true, all the things that are true, and see if that just works for most things, before he tries to do anything more difficult than that?  In accordance with the classic dath ilani proverb-heuristic which says:  Try things the easy way first; if you succeed, you won't need to try them the difficult way; if you fail, you'll know the first part that makes it difficult instead of guessing that in advance.

The proverb itself puts Keltham in mind of the Watchers-of-Children who first spoke the proverb to him.  Mostly, of course, children learn from older children, but there are adults who know more to oversee the process, and prevent any semantic drift that might otherwise occur.  They are not full-fledged Keepers, those Child-Watchers, but they are in a profession that calls for an oath or three.  Children matter a lot, what happens to them is one of the causal lynchpins of everything else that makes Civilization work.  And the Watchers who specialize in teaching foundational subjects are those who are selected (among other qualities) for being able to hold very basic truths in reverence, and operate them with joy.

Keltham is not usually a reverent person, but it has never particularly occurred to him to question the attitudes that his Watchers took towards the deeper truths of reality and thought, when Keltham was a child.

Keltham remembers, then, how things are taught to children, especially those ideas too important and precise to be entrusted to the teaching of older-children alone; Keltham draws those feelings about himself.

And Keltham holds forth upon the Way.

Even when you truly expect and anticipate that something will happen to you, sometimes, something else happens to you instead.  "Beliefs" are the name given to those things that control your anticipations; that which gives to you your actual experiences is termed "reality".  Sufficiently young children have not yet developed the capability to appreciate that their beliefs, the beliefs of other people, and reality, are three distinct objects of thought; they are not capable of distinguishing between what they know themselves, and what other people know.  Comprehending this marks a threshold in what is taught to dath ilani children.  Keltham thinks everybody here probably understands that already, so he's going to skip over that threshold and the exercises leading up to it, but people should let him know if this starts being a sticking point.

Reality possesses both overt order and deeper order; surface appearances, and facts behind them.  Deeper order can be obvious or nonobvious.  When you observe that Jennith resembles her mother Merwen, you observe a surface seeming; when you say that daughters often resemble mothers in general, you are observing a deeper order.  If you could peer at things that were arbitrarily small, like being able to look at a bug as though it were the size of a bird, and smaller yet; and you saw tiny twisting spirals inside Jennith, all carrying the same very long intricate pattern; and you saw that half of those tiny twisting spirals appeared also in Merwen, and the other half of Jennith's spirals had come from her father Eveth, you would have discovered a nonobvious deeper order, something with the promise of explaining the obvious deeper order.  Baseline has a separate word by which to speak of the nonobvious deeper order, the hidden order.  Behind a hidden order may lie another hidden order.  Even when you are not told about a hidden order, even when nobody knows what the hidden order is, it may still exist and be the secret factor that has organized the seeming chaos of the experiences before you.

The understanding that reality is full of hidden order is the threshold that marks a mind's readiness to apprehend the Lawfulness of reality.  Once a child becomes able to distinguish between what they know, and what others know, and what is, that child can soon after apprehend that what seems to them like madness, confusion, noise, or simply a collection of boring unconnected facts, is only the appearance of a collection of unconnected facts, the absence of knowledge of an explanation if one exists; these children are ready to understand that their own bewilderment is their map of the world; and that the territory itself is never feeling bewildered, and that it is often full of hidden orders.

(It is possible to believe that something is a hidden order, and be wrong about that; maps of hidden orders are not thereby part of the territory, they're just maps of a supposedly deeper part of the territory.  Children are led through several exercises meant to help them appreciate this fact on a deep level: that you in your own mind are really impressed with a theory of hidden order is not the same fact as that hidden order actually being present in the territory and able to control your experiences.  This has always seemed like a really obvious point to Keltham now that his brain is mature, so he's just going to press on without doing a lot of exercises there, but people should speak up if that's somehow torpedoing the rest of his lecture.)

It was the way of reality, in the universe that Keltham knew, that complicated things possessed the hidden-order of being made of simpler parts: and in dath ilan, knowledge of this fact was power.  He's not quite sure that the same also holds true of Golarion, but Keltham did do some preliminary checks, and was told, for example, that snowflakes have hexagonal symmetry.  Keltham knows the hidden order underlying snowflakes in dath ilan, the tiny pieces that nestled together in sixfold symmetry there; so he's guessing that snowflakes have the same hidden order in Golarion.  And by extension, that Keltham's own body has the same hidden orders of the same kind rather than having been remade and rewritten on his arrival here.  There are a lot of hidden orders invoked within a dath ilani body.  It is a further guess, though not a certain one, that Golarion possesses all the same hidden orders of that kind - that the things here that Keltham recognizes, are ultimately made out of the same tiny parts that Keltham knows.

In Keltham's world, they don't have spells; some of the hidden-orders here must have been absent from Keltham's world.  In Keltham's world, when you want to go from one place to another place very far away, you get into a huge metal structure with fixed wings and powerful engines that push out air behind it, thrusting that 'aeroplane' forwards to fly across oceans and continents.  To build something like that, you have to understand the hidden orders of metal, in order to build sufficiently strong metal.  You have to understand the hidden orders of fire, in order to find dense-enough fuels that burn hot enough for the fuel on board the aeroplane to last for flying across the continent.  But these hidden orders are invariant within dath ilan; they work for everyone, not just spellcasters.  They aren't truths about the people using the aeroplane, they're truths about metal and fire.  For a quarter of a day's income, you can buy a ticket for an aeroplane trip across a pretty large ocean, going slightly less fast than the speed of sound in air, and get to the next continent in a quarter-day or half-day.  Keltham is not sure how much it costs to teleport the same distance here, but he gets the impression it is more expensive than that.  Artifacts that exploit dath-ilan-style hidden orders can be made without spellcasters.  They are economically scalable.  That is part of the change that Keltham hopes to bring to Golarion; and driving back the demons of the Worldwound will only be the bare beginning of its consequences.

But even if that part doesn't work out, because the snowflakes - it may turn out - are only a misleading resemblance born of other pathways, there's knowledge Keltham has which is more valuable than that, and which is even more likely to hold here; a collection of hidden orders that might hold even everywhere, though it is hard to be quite certain of that, without observing everywhere.

This is the knowledge of the Laws governing attempts to think, which have the character of - wait, Keltham hasn't explained the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths.  Does everyone here already happen to know the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths?  He's kind of guessing not, based on some previous exchanges about 2 + 2 = 5; if not, he can cover that too.  The notion of Validity is as good a place as any to give an example of Laws governing thought.

His audience is very attentive. Chelish school emphasizes not being disruptive or wasting the time of the best students by being one of the worst ones; no one has any questions. 

No one knows the difference between empirical truths and necessary truths, though from context one girl is willing to venture that empirical truths are those that can differ between planes and necessary truths must be ones that hold everywhere.

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Keltham is glad to see that anyone is paying attention.  "Good for guessing," he says, which is a common phrase in dath ilan.  "Now, I'm not quite sure how you define plane, here, but consider:  In dath ilan, no other plane has ever, to my knowledge, interacted with our own.  To see a thing is to have it affect you; we've never seen any other planes, seen anything else that has shown signs of interacting with another plane, and so on.  We are sensible people who prefer not to believe things for no reason.  How would we know that a truth was universal?  Why would we even have a word for that?  Even if you saw that something was true across every plane you'd ever visited, how would you make the jump from there to thinking it was true across all planes?  Does anyone want to venture another guess?  It's better to be wrong out loud than to be silent, as the saying goes."

Well if it's better to be wrong out loud then they'll do that!

"Maybe you can figure out the set of all possible physical laws that could support intelligent creatures and then if it's true in all of those it's true everywhere relevant?"

"You could - like, figure out the set of changes you could make to our plane where it'd still be true, and if it'd be true no matter what you changed then it'd be true everywhere -"

"Even if you've only got one plane you'd still have multiple planets and they might differ on some things but not others -"

"The topic of which laws support intelligent life is a separate interesting topic; we probably won't get to it today.  We're interested in things that stay true even in planes with no intelligent life.  Can you come up with an example of something that has to stay true no matter what laws of the planes you change?"

"...all first-circle spells have to be structurally isomorphic?"

"Their world doesn't have magic."

"So they wouldn't do anything but they'd still be isomorphic!"

"There could be a world with more dimensions for stuff to pass through itself."

"One equals one?"