See, overexcited batch of chattering wizard students, that's how you seduce people. I hope you're taking notes. 

(They're totally taking notes.)

She stands up. "I accept your challenge, Keltham. I have some logic homework, and if I'm not going to have time for it tonight I'd better do it now. Can't have anyone thinking I only get good scores because I'm sleeping with my teacher."

- Who would possibly design an institution where the same people responsible for teaching were responsible for scoring the learning metrics, that's like an electrical diagram with the world's most obvious short circuit
- Do people do that sort of thing here
- Possible priority within the Basic Stuff, explain how education works literally at all
- He is not going to ask any of that right now, he needs to come up with a witty romantic reply

"Oh, I'm far too Lawful for such a thing, by local standards.  Just don't expect me to be Lawful at all times."

"What's Chaotic in dath ilan, hair-pulling?"

"Surprises."  Shit now he's got to come up with something to back that up... well, he's got time.

This is going to be so much fun if it doesn't get her killed. 

She leaves the room to do her logic homework immediately go invisible and poke her head back in just for a minute.

Keltham will be eating more of his food and wearing the fixed look of concentration of somebody trying to figure out which very standard dath ilani sex techniques in his very standard repertoire, that he did not expand much because he had other life priorities, would be able to cash in that "Surprises" promissory note.  An obvious place to start would be to figure out which bits of standard technique would have no corollary inside a mess like Golarion, while still being executable by him... actually, that does narrow down the search a whole lot?  A vibrator would probably surprise Carissa, but, of course, he doesn't have access to a vibrator.  Okay, if he narrows it down from that angle, there's an obvious possible-surprise to try.

Keltham is also trying to figure out what Carissa could have possibly meant by 'hair-pulling'.  If he just straightforwardly visualizes somebody pulling on his hair, it could be a moment of spontaneously passionate embrace, but mostly it would just yank his head back, and if it was hard enough to hurt, it would hurt?  Though oddly enough, when Keltham tries to visualize the case where Carissa could have meant him pulling her hair - if she hadn't mentioned that in a sexual context, his unrevised first guess would be that it should just make her say ouch.  But when he visualizes that producing a sexual response from her instead, that - seems to be booping on some internal sexual part of him that hasn't been booped before?

Yeah, he's probably going to lose this contest.  That's what happens when you challenge somebody older and more experienced.  It doesn't mean he's going to lose without dignity.

Keltham eats some more of his food, with the absorbed look of a horny teenaged male who knows he is in over his head and who is going to swim that fucking pool anyways.

- okay she is not going to let this distract her from her main priority here which is becoming a perfect devil before she's even dead. This is actually, if you think about it, not a distraction from that goal because the closer she is with Keltham the more incredibly annoying and difficult it would be to execute her for heresy. 

She turns and leaves the room again and this time actually tries studying her logic homework.

Keltham will eventually turn his thoughts back to further lesson plans, if nobody has interrupted him yet; he does not conceptualize himself as a man too thirsty to get important work done.

He makes a mental note about sending a respectfully brief letter to Lrilatha mentioning his concern about lowering child mortality in a way that might run ahead of agriculture and if that's safe to discuss with Chelish humans y/n, along with a numerical-scale brief question asking whether Keltham should be sending fewer or more letters like that in the future -2/-1/0/1/2.  And a mental note to ask about getting one of Irori's books, on the remote chance that it contains a ton of useful exercises for making people less imperfect.  He doesn't think a handy guidebook like that should be a thing that already existed here, given that Golarion is still Golarion; but it sounds worth checking, maybe they only got halfway and Keltham can provide the other half.  Oh, he should've asked whether Irori counted as Neutral Evil, or what exactly - Keltham still isn't sure he has this alignment thing down at all.

No one interrupts him for the rest of lunch, though several girls look like they're agonizing over whether to.

Then Keltham shall eventually make his way over to the harem tables, once they look to be past their hypothetical initial food rush; and once he himself has eaten enough food to no longer feel imminently hungry, plus 20% in case the unfamiliar flavors are causing him to underestimate energy demands, or he's overestimating later food availability.  (His set point is stable, and if he accidentally takes in excess food it's not going to change anything long-term, obviously.)

"Hey.  Wanna tell me about anything I'm doing wrong as a teacher?  It's been a while since I was an older-kid teaching younger-kids, and this time I don't have a Watcher backing me up, plus I'm in another plane, so I'm not going to be surprised if you've got complaints."

Having a date with Carissa makes it easier to go talk to the research harem about other stuff; they're not going to be trying to grab him for this night.

...probably.

They look baffled by this question!

"I'm not very clear on how we are evaluated," Meritxell offers after a moment of silence. 

"That's... very legitimate, but not one I can solve in 5 minutes, sorry.  I don't have all the measuring instruments we'd have at home, I can't just go to the store and buy standard tests for how you're doing at learning predicate logic or calculus, and if I'm going to have to improvise that, I'd better not do it right here on the spot.  Success metrics are hugely important on any operation, I don't dare half-ass them.  I can't even promise that I'll manage to find somebody other than myself to evaluate all aspects of your short-term performance, separately from my being the one who teaches you, even though in dath ilan we'd think it was hugely stupid to have the teacher be the student evaluator.  Like, general issues of Lawfulness aside, we'd usually consider it to be a blatantly obvious matter of optimal institutional design, that there be a separate student evaluator that students would theoretically have to sleep with in order to obtain better grades, who's not the same person responsible for teaching the students in the first place.  And we'd also be looking for forms of evaluation that were easy for a higher Watcher to spot-check and catch out any lower Watchers who'd done it incorrectly, for sexual reasons or otherwise.  I can't promise you any of that, it may not even end up being the practical priority, and I ask for your understanding and forbearance about that given the incredibly weird circumstances."

"Though, I mean, in the long term there's an obvious team metric where we look at the gross domestic product of Cheliax and Golarion and see if we pushed it above trend, or measure how much money we made by selling better metals and agricultural implements."

Excited giggles. 

"That's fine," Meritxell says. "Anyway, if you're sleeping with everybody then there's no question of it affecting anyone's grades unfairly."

"Oh, come on, you're not going to all have the same skills at sex," Keltham reflexively points out the obvious invalidity in this argument before his central monitoring loop has had even the slightest chance to think about it at all.

Meritxell seems to think this a completely reasonable response. "I don't think the mechanism by which grades get altered by sleeping with the teacher is bias, I think it's inducement, so as long as you think everyone's doing their best there's no incentive to toy with their grades, even if some people have a better best." She nibbles her lower lip. "Even though some people have a better best."

"To be clear, I think we'd want to rigorously separate sexual performance from research performance and not get those confused into one metric over a person - I'd frankly expect both you, and the Chelish government, to be pissed about the performance hit to the world economy if I got confused that way.  That said, it'd be conventional practice in dath ilan to pay people proportionally to their apparent output, not - whether people are doing their best?  It's a lot easier to measure how well somebody is doing, than to know whether they're really doing their best.  And there's an implied incentive that seems really awful to me, for people to be - weaker, for their best to be worse - if you pay them to do their best.  Even very Good people in dath ilan wouldn't do that, it's not Lawful."

"That's how Cheliax does punishments," says Asmodia. "I have never heard it applied to sexual favors except informally because you can only get anywhere if you have something to offer, but probably that is because we are insufficiently Lawful and haven't thought it through properly."

"People mostly don't actually sleep with their instructors for better grades," Gregoria clarifies. "Probably if it were widespread people would've noticed how to do it Lawfully, even here."

"With punishments, though, there's some sense in scaling - like, you want to evaluate second years against second years, not second years against fifth years, in deciding who is underperforming, because it's just not informative if your process concludes that all the second years are underperforming."

"Okay, yeah, that's been puzzling me for a while, the books referred to it too, like there was this one book supposedly by a magic instructor who spends the first chapter telling you about what a great magic instructor he is, where he mentions punishing students at the end of the day so it won't interrupt their learning.  If that was literally true and not a weird collection of lies, I'm so confused about this for multiple reasons that I don't even know where to start asking.  If I'm like, hey, give me your shoes for twenty silver pieces, and you value your shoes less than that, it makes sense to give me your shoes.  If instead I'm like, hey, give me your shoes or I'll put you in an armlock and break your arm, and you actually do that because the value of the shoes is less to you than the value of the unbroken arm, then the fact that you reacted that way is the reason why I made the threat in the first place, right?  I mean, assuming I'm the sort of ideal entity who doesn't have any altruism or any inherent desire to behave in a coordinated way with others, if I can go around collecting everyone's shoes by threatening to break their arms, why wouldn't I just go collect all their shoes?  So in the," they don't have the word 'counterfactual', lovely, "unreal branch of reality where I threaten to break your arm, you fight and punch me in the face and don't give me your shoes, even though it costs you a broken arm; and since I know that's how it will go, I don't actually threaten to break your arm, and the branch of reality stays unreal."

"I mean, I can guess that you aren't trained in ways of thinking about real and unreal branches of reality and playing complex strategies over them.  But I would have thought it would be more like human instinct, to punch somebody in the face if they threaten to break your arm if you don't give them your shoes.  I mean, we get training that's about how we have instincts like that and we need to carefully refine them so they actually lead to optimal real-world outcomes.  And then here it sounds like - there is a whole lot more of people punching each other in reality - and then you've got students supposedly paying somebody to punch them in the face and that I just do not get at all."

The students are confused.

"The soul learns through incentives," Asmodia says after a while. "Incentives like 'if I do this thing, it works out nicely for me and I get a glow of satisfaction', but also incentives like 'if I fuck this up, it'll hurt'. The way to teach children not to touch a hot stove is to let them once, and then they'll know. Because the soul is wired to understand feedback from pain faster than it understands feedback from anything else. ...I am aware you may not have souls in dath ilan and I don't know if this still applies without them."

"No magical healing, we try to avoid children touching hot stoves once.  I think if dath ilan could get faster learning by - no, that's not valid reasoning on my part, they could attach enough disutility to the students' experience of pain that they still wouldn't do it, so it's not much evidence that they don't do it already.  I guess I'm still skeptical that you're describing a system that's actually locally optimal and that people aren't messing up?  Because if you get an electrical shock for a wrong math answer - that's a kind of pain we could inflict without lasting injury, if we wanted to go that route - then you don't just learn not to answer math problems wrongly, I'd expect you to also learn not to answer math problems and not to go to classes, in some deep part of you that you can't consciously override.  And it sounded like - from something Carissa mentioned earlier - people end up afraid to point out what looks like an error by the teacher, because if they're wrong about that, they might get pain inflicted on them.  That sounds like - exactly the kind of incredibly obvious failure mode I'd expect to develop, if somebody had the bright idea of trying to use pain to teach things, but you were also so bad at institutional design that students could get better grades by sleeping with the teacher?  I would have been a lot less cooperative with the older kids teaching me if I'd been getting punched by them for errors instead of paid by my parents for successes."

"You definitely have to have the punishments arranged competently by people who know how to do it," Asmodia says. "It sounds like the teacher in the book you read was arguing that the end of the day is a better timing, in order to get the benefits without creating side-incentives you don't want? Though in practice I don't think it's a very big problem, certainly there are not students who are uncooperative so we can't be doing whatever would've caused you to be uncooperative."

"I do not understand how the system you describe is in equilibrium but that can probably wait for another day.  Are you going to be okay if my teaching style is built entirely out of rewards for success instead of punishments for failure?  Because I do not know how to do punishments competently."