"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."

There's a case for concealing this but she - doesn't buy it, somehow. You can only lean on acting ability so far, and if he's going to fix pedagogy in Cheliax he has to know some things about what's wrong with it.

"In the school I went to, you'd have gotten in trouble if you called out the teacher for an error and were wrong, for being disrespectful and wasting their time and interrupting the lesson, so it'd be scary to point out a mistake, not being sure if it's a trick you're meant to call out or your mistake you're admitting. I would definitely expect it to be an effective teaching tool! Effective teaching often involves putting people in situations that they feel scared of, so they notice it's fine."

"But it sounds like even you could - see the problem with that?  I'm a little puzzled about how - a Lawful country, as a whole - ends up doing something where it sounds like a prediction market would straightforwardly predict that you could do it differently and get better results.  Like by putting in deliberate errors, so that students would have to take the scary step of potentially exposing that they got their own understanding wrong, and let the teacher actually know that and be able to correct it.  If even you could see that as a kid, the people running the 'school' should be able to see it, or at least see the possibility.  And experiment with a changed policy, so if it worked, they could adopt it more generally, do better on their metrics, and pick up whatever performance bonuses they'd get for that.  Or did you only notice there was a better way, after you noticed me acting differently, and then it clicked for you?"

"I noticed just now. The prevailing philosophy of education is that it is more efficient if the best students aren't held back by the worst ones, and that means students shouldn't interrupt much or ask questions, since it'll be disproportionately the stupid ones, doing that, and wasting the time of the smarter ones. So introducing deliberate errors and overall encouraging more discussion of errors isn't obviously wise, its obvious effect would be more errors and it's thought that the cost of that in holding back the best students is higher than its benefits."

"It seems like an obvious answer would be to sort your kids by their current progress in the class cross talent, so everybody in the room was in roughly the same place going at roughly the same speed... it's been a while and I was a kid then, and I obviously never had my own kids, so I'm not sure.  But I don't remember a sense that anyone in particular was holding others back or being held back, and I do remember that we'd learn different things in different groups.  My guess is you're going to say the student population is divided by region, since travel is more expensive, and the regional population is too small for sorting?"