"I swear to you, as a servant of Cheliax and of Asmodeus, that as far as I know, the Neutral Evil gods really do all seem to suck and there are none I'm failing to mention deliberately for strategic reasons. My best guess why is because Abaddon eats souls and anyone with better priorities hangs out somewhere else. Asmodeus is also called the Prince of Hell, or the Prince of Law; Hell is nine planes and He's on the deepest, called Nessus. His holy symbol is the pentagram, his domains are -" tyranny, slavery, "authority, contracts, and pride, trying to pray to Him sounds like a good idea to me, I pray to Him every night and nothing's happened but no one's ever minded, afara ghe esssent savat see a - Gurre." Helpless handwave. 

Keltham tries for his best smile.  "Thanks," he says uselessly.  He draws a pentagram in the air, to show he got that part.

He's very rapidly trying to invent an art form of playing inside counterfactuals that shouldn't exist, where dath ilan teaches only arts that improve defense more than offense.  Given how much people complain about illusion of transparency even when people are trying to communicate, Keltham's actual thoughts as a complete outsider to this system may in fact be fully opaque, given the number of possibilities from her standpoint that she doesn't know how to rule out.  But if not, if he's less safe than that, maybe it will help that he tossed her one of his lesser suspicions, as a distractor from some of his larger suspicions.  Because Keltham was not confident of his ability to completely conceal, in his body language and attitude and pauses to think, the fact that he has become suspicious, from -

Did he actually forget to ask her name this whole time?  "Keltham," he says, tagging himself again, and then looks at her.

"Carissa."

And she trots off to find the priest.

Keltham will sit quite still, trying to control the hammering of his heart and the visible sweating that might also be giving info away.  Stupid body, it shouldn't reflect his thoughts like that during complicated negotiations.

Carissa thought that he would think that her oaths meant something, which is a good sign that the Algorithm is not completely unreflected here.  Though Carissa also thought she needed to swear in her capacity as a god's employee for her oath to mean something, which is sort of awful and sad but also makes an awful kind of sense.  Among his current suspicions is that knowing logical decision theory may make it a little too easy to call out to gods, and also entities like, say, Rovagug; and that's why people here aren't being taught the purer forms of the Algorithm, left to struggle along with intuitive honor, the Algorithm's fragmentary emotional shards.

It was, in fact, one of the more convincing things that Carissa could have done at the last, not to convince him of that exact point, but to show him that multiagent coordination still really holds here at all.  So that could be true, or she could have correctly guessed what would convince him...

He's not going to be able to guess her thoughts either, across this level of social gap.

But if Carissa is trustworthy probabilistically, then he should not go with his Plan A, to contact the Knowledge entity and ask for 25% of the orientation packet he can safely sustain, because that way he will end up bringing his knowledge and methodology to this world.  Gambling on Carissa's knowledge base having misinterpreted the natural tendency to mess with high-energy reactions, in a world with afterlives, as "drives everyone insane", seems like a little too large of a gamble.  Nethys could also just know all the infohazards.  This is still Carissa's world and not his...

This isn't what he should be thinking right now.  He should be reviewing the information he needs to remember.

Pentagrams, contracts, authority, pride, the deepest layer Nessus of a nine-layer plane.

Abadar, who runs the banks and a territory called Osirion.  The part about the prices being ideal prices was just a guess; he was fishing for information via contradiction, but Carissa didn't confirm or deny.

Norgorber, god of violating regulations and killing people for money, whom Carissa swore was in a class all of whose members sucked.

Calistria, god of women who want to leave their husbands, get abortions, and get revenge.  Why this doesn't also apply symmetrically to men who want to leave their wives is one of the things he didn't have time to ask Carissa.

Nethys, god of knowledge and mad experimentation, an extreme to which he could still be forced.

And, he supposes, Sarenrae.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

The priest has his eyebrows raised and that, of all things, reminds Carissa to be terrified, which she’d been attempting to forget on the grounds that lying’s harder than just having the right opinions in the first place. She’s not sure that was the wrong tack but - probably in hindsight this should have been handled by a specialist in dealing with prospective defectors from other countries, someone who actually knows what they say about the gods in other places, not just the things they say to Chelish soldiers in the uneasy context of the Worldwound truce. 

Failing that - she should probably have been stupider? It was pride, motivating her there, he’s obviously very clever and she doesn’t like being outdone, doesn’t like hearing that god math is easy, taught at a younger age than the age where she started training as a wizard -

- is he lying about that? He gave a credible impression of being not very good at lying but that’s only sort of lying, really, claiming you were twelve when you studied topology instead of twenty, people exaggerate more when telling stories of their conquests and don’t even consider it deception -

- if he’s not lying about it then how? There’s a classroom-full of children of a given age as intelligent as Carissa in all Cheliax and it’d be logistically difficult to put them in one place.  Maybe steel can do that. 
 
He didn’t mention being tracked for it - maybe he was tracked for it and just didn’t think it bore mention but he mentioned that they checked for Evil and thought he was somewhat there inclined, and surely no society checks for Evil inclination and not for intelligence, which is much more obvious and easier to test for. 
Not impossible, she concludes, thinking about it, if you have a good way of putting all the smartest children in your country in the same place. But he doesn’t carry himself like someone who thinks he’s one of the smartest people in his country. And no sane society would be discouraging its most intelligent people from having children. 

- she’s getting distracted. She should be composing her report for the priest, which should include these inferences and exclude the error analysis. They’ll probably mindread her for it later but by then she can have shaped it to be a little more generous. 

“He’s from another world,” she says. “I think…. I think they’re smarter and Lawfuller, and I’m not entirely sure they have free will.”

The priest looks at her impassively. 

“There’s a billion of them. Unless he’s lying - which, with permission, I can check in a minute, I’ve got a Detect Thoughts left - people who are not particularly notably smart have the prerequisites for wizard education covered when they’re twelve, not because they have wizardry or any reason to have treated it as an educational priority. He wants to try to reinvent his world’s technology here. I think he can do it. I assume we want it done in Cheliax, and probably that means you want to take him back there tonight, because here there’s nothing we can do if he talks to Iomedae and decides to walk out the door - I think he is probably going to. Plausibly going to try to talk to every god I mentioned, He had lots of questions about them. He has Chaotic sympathies and I’m not sure if he believed me the Chaotic gods are no good for this. And he was confused about why all the Evil gods outside Asmodeus are…so terrible… because he is lacking the context that Evil gods mostly hurt petitioners badly, I only had 50 minutes and that always takes a really long time to explain to people in a way that doesn’t send them running out the door screaming so I judged it better to omit it. But he noticed, uh, that without that and without the context that heresy is prohibited in Cheliax and without the context that it’s recommended not to learn about other gods lest you get yourself in trouble, then it doesn’t - quite hold together, and I think he’ll have a lot of questions for someone who knows more than I about defectors and how to explain those things. 

He said he wants - to be so rich he can’t keep track of how much money he has, and to have lots of beautiful women to have lots of children by, which I think was - well, obviously, a normal motivation in its own right but it was significantly about his country not thinking he was particularly valuable to it? I think you could get a lot of goodwill just by treating it as very obvious that we want ten thousand of him. Which we might, even if he’s Chaotically inclined he gave a credible impression of not thinking people should - commit crimes or overthrow governments - and he wouldn’t choose Abaddon.”

“Did he like you?” the priest says.

- an obvious question. She’s unprepared for it in the sense her thoughts hadn’t gotten there yet, but not in the sense she feels at all surprised. “I don’t know. Or - I think yes but possibly if you give him twenty pretty girls at that point it’d be not particularly.”

“Your recommendation is that I get him to Cheliax tonight?”

“Yes. Somewhere - abundant in ways even a much richer world might not be abundant, if they didn’t have magic -“

“I’ll talk to some people. Go read his mind.”

She does that.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys, Sarenrae.

Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; women getting revenge on their husbands but somehow not the other way around which like why the asymmetry no he needs to memorize not puzzle; knowledge and mad experimentation; Good in everyone.  And Carissa went out of her way to mention that Sarenrae had destroyed a city which, like, possibly reasons, especially if people go places when they die.  But also implies maybe Carissa doesn't want Keltham talking to Sarenrae in particular which - which mostly implies her trying to steer Keltham away from places that Keltham does not think he really wants to go.  He does not know that Carissa and himself are in anywhere near the level of zero-sum destructive opposition where 'do the thing Carissa least wants you to do' is a recipe for anything except suicidal contact with eldritch person-transforming entities he should not touch.  Except that -

- he's just going to keep thinking this until he actually thinks it.  It's profoundly unhelpful and not at all the most important thing going on, but he's going to actually think it, just to get it over with.

Once, when Keltham was a child, they placed him in an unreal situation, as children are sometimes placed.  He saw a person in distress, seemingly lightly injured; but very lightly, for dath ilan does not wish to distress its children too much in the course of testing them.  Just earlier that day, also, seemingly by coincidence, Keltham had been told that a fine fun party awaited him, but only if he arrived exactly on time to depart with others.

So Keltham went out of his way to find an adult, despite the party.  But Keltham also made very sure that the adult promised to share with him the credit for helping this person, and told the injured person that he wanted to be paid for it, plus extra for missing his party.

It's hardly terrible - even from an average dath ilani perspective, that is, if you're Keltham it's not terrible at all.  He didn't refuse to help, he just asked to be paid for it afterwards.  Cities wouldn't exclude Keltham on that basis, if they could even access that information about him.  Dath ilan doesn't think him outcast like a murderer.  It's just that -

There are a few places, besides just parenting and teaching, where pure unselfish Good is a thing that humans ever do.  One of them is the will to help others in distress.

Dath ilan has an image of what it wants to be.  It wants to be the sort of person who hears about Abaddon and is suffused with a pure horror that Keltham does not, in fact, feel.  He feels revolted and sad, but he does not feel the thing that others feel when they hear about true death, that would lead them to be able to contract with Iomedae on the basis of that alone; and, if strength of emotion counts for anything, channel however much power of a god that lets them channel, to tear one more soul out of Abaddon.  That is what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up.  And that is not what Keltham is.  Dath ilan does not want to be Keltham when it grows up.

He's not outcast.  He's not prohibited from having children, if that was even a thing outside of the Last Resort.  Keltham just has to fund those children himself, if he wants them, because dath ilan is not particularly trying to grow up to be him.  Or so they were very likely going to say to him on maturity, despite Keltham having otherwise gotten +0.8SD on intelligence.

And that was that, and Keltham had made his own proud accommodations with it.  Because people are what they are; and can only attain what they can, in the course of being what they are, better; not by wishing they were somebody else.  Keltham spoke to a Confessor about his life's master plans, in case a Confessor had anything unexpected to say; and the Confessor formally predicted to Keltham that if he had his 144 children, and screwed all the elite desirable women who hang out with elite male public-goods-producers to mutually prove their respective eliteness, Keltham would at the end still not feel happy.  Unless, perhaps, he'd gotten to know a few of his children much better.  And Keltham had shrugged, and said that then perhaps he'd get to know a few children better.  But in terms of overall life ambitions, Keltham can't think of anything with higher expected value to him, for he feels the way he feels.  If he's not what dath ilan currently wants to be when it grows up, then that's not who he is.  He can maybe prove to dath ilan that it was wrong about who Civilization needs in order to grow; he cannot be other than what he is.

But there's a god of there being potential for Good in everyone.

It's a stupid thought.  He's never going to do it.  And if he did, modifying his own utility function to fit in, is not, quite, provably incoherent, because human beings are not starting out coherent, but it is still not - the Way, as the Keepers would put it.  Keltham is what he is, and needs to find his own way to be himself.  Dath ilan itself would tell him never to do that, because it is horrifying self-mutilation for the sake of conformity and that is also not what dath ilan wants to be when it grows up.

So he's not going to pray to Sarenrae.  At all.  Considering that explicitly, leads him to realize that he is horrified by the prospect of changing himself according to an external criterion; and he knows that.  Keltham likewise already understands, and acknowledges to himself, that he would not even be doing this for his own sake.  It is just a stupid thought about how to fix something that somebody else said was, not even wrong, but not the thing they most ideally wanted to see.  It is perfectionism gone wrong to imagine that this aspect of himself, of his own utility function, might be fixed.

Most of what's really going on, probably, is that some part of him is curious what it would feel like, to be more centrally dath ilani just once; and whether it would make him feel better in some way he's not seeing in advance.  Well, above and beyond the pleasant sense of being more socially acceptable in principle.  But that wouldn't actually be the result, that the real him feels something different temporarily; it would be the temporary cessation and possibly the true suicide of the true Keltham, beneath the manipulators of some inhuman thing.

Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.  Pentagram, authority, contracts, pride; banks and Osirion; regulation-violating and killing-for-money; revenge and overturning of relative status; knowledge and mad experimentation.

...and before he tries any of those, he's going to try to figure out who his own god would be, the hypothetical god that would actually fit him; and call out to that hypothetical being, backed by explicit meditation on coherence theorems to make him more a kind of thing that gods can see.  Maybe there's a god like that.

And if instead it calls in some entity that's new to Golarion, he'll know why they don't teach people here logical decision theory.  Heh.

(Even at the level of surface thoughts, Keltham's mind moves from thought to thought in a way that is not within the variation of ordinary mortal minds on Golarion.  Keltham's thoughts are explicitly labeled as 'meta' or 'object-level'.  His thoughts don't move in the frequent circles and loops that any telepath would be familiar with, of mostly going over the same points and occasionally diverting from them in a new direction.  Any time Keltham thinks the same thought twice, or at most three times, he undergoes a reflexive wordless motion and focuses there and starts thinking words about why the thoughts are not-quiescent after having already been spoken.  Occasionally Keltham thinks single-syllable or two-syllable words in Baseline that refer to mathematical concepts built on top of much larger bases, fluidly integrated into his everyday experience.

Everything inside Keltham's mind has a very trained feeling to it, his moment-to-moment thought-motions each feeling like a punch that a monk throws after twelve years of experience in martial arts, when the monk isn't particularly focused on showing off and simply knows what he's doing without thinking about it.  When he is sad and upset, Keltham goes into a reflexive motion of letting those parts of himself speak.  When he is uncertain and worried and doesn't know what to do next, he weighs probabilities on his uncertainty, and knows explicitly that his current worries are causing him to currently be trying to figure out what to do next.  Keltham is lost in a different world, but it has been years since the last time he felt lost inside himself.  The present situation is not enough to induce that.  He has mostly forgotten what that feels like.  He has too many options for what to think next instead of feeling internally lost.

Keltham is hardly perfect at any of the things he's been trained to do.  Often he does think the same thought three times in a row.  Frequently his current attempted cognitive tactic fails.  And Keltham notices the failure; and undergoes a recovery tactic or moves on to the next thought; all in motions so practiced that they don't distract him from the content of the thoughts themselves.  That meta stuff is all mostly the same from minute to minute, so it's been trained to the point of being ignored so long as it's not breaking down.)

Carissa listens. Sits at a table and writes everything down, firstly because otherwise she's going to forget half of it and secondly because sitting at a table writing is a reasonable thing to do, and hopefully won't alert him to being mindread. When people aren't used to being mindread their thoughts, on being alerted to it, are all about the fact of someone having access to their thoughts, and while maybe he has the - mental discipline - to not do that if he chose, he also might well choose it, over having strategic thoughts where she could hear them.

She wants to die.

She has known for as long as she can remember that someday she will die and go to Hell and be trained out of her bad human habits, free will, nebulously defined and not the sort of thing you were supposed to ask a lot of clarifying questions about, but it's suddenly clear, looking at his head - free will is the tendency for the mind to wander away from its goals, for the emotions to override thought processes instead of informing them, for the brain to be sticky, burst-driven, impulsive, animalistic- 

- it was not a correct parse of the situation to guess that Keltham doesn't have free will. He's imperfect at the thing he's been trained to do. He's more like - someone raised from babyhood by Lawful outsiders, or something. He might have free will but he's never been around anyone who used it. And he's - nearly perfect - she would not have guessed that a living person could be that, could have that -

She has known that she would go to Hell and become perfect but she hasn't been impatient for it. She's impatient for it, now. 

- set that aside. There's a lot to do first.

There's another thing here which she's not going to unpack, but it goes on the list of reasons to ask someone important, if she thinks she has enough bargaining power, which is that - she has read a lot of minds and in general the meta-process, in all of them, is directed at not thinking anything treasonous, or thinking and then immediately rejecting and mentally apologizing for it. His society is ...going for Lawful Good, evidently - but they seem to have not instilled that instinct, he checks when his opinions are heretical to dath ilan but he isn't scared when they are - perhaps because it sounds like dath ilan, as a consequence probably of going for Lawful Good, uses a very light touch on heresy, though of course maybe Keltham would've vanished in the night and just doesn't know it, perhaps his 'plane accident' was in fact deliberate -

She reads his Intelligence at 18, maybe 19. Innately as smart as her or a bit smarter - and not particularly notable for his society - his society must be terrifying. A tremendous asset to Asmodeus, if He successfully claims them, and - well, Keltham thought they'd side with Iomedae, immediately, instinctively, just out of horror at the destruction of souls -

- she needs to start thinking about how to explain the thing where Hell hurts people without it seeming a conspicuous omission or an obvious dealbreaker, if it ends up being decided that Keltham ought to know. 

(She is acutely aware of her own meta-thoughts right now, from all that poking at Keltham's, and they're scared, because usually when she tries thinking about things like Hell hurting the correct thing to do is to steer her mind away, not pressure test counterarguments -)

...this is the kind of thing you ask a priest about.

It's also the kind of thing where asking a priest gets you looked into, as a potential dissident. She should wait and see whether in fact someone with Greater Teleport shows up here tonight to take Keltham to a comfortable place; if they do then she has the measure of safety that Keltham might ask about her, and might be annoyed if she'd been arrested and with higher likelihood annoyed if she'd been executed, and that they evidently value Keltham highly. She doesn't know that yet, so no thinking about that yet. 

If Cheliax were more Keltham-like, would that serve Asmodeus? It seems obviously so. Keltham's world is rich and lawful and selecting for Good, but not necessarily so, you could do the same thing but prefer the tiny children who suspect a trap in the injured stranger and go off to their wonderful party - or who don't even think of an injured stranger as a fact about the world that demands a response of any kind, any more than people pluck worms off the cobblestones after a rain -

She sets that aside, too, and composes a second report for the priest, and resists the urge to watch out of the corner of her eye while Keltham tries to make a god, which she's pretty sure isn't how you make a god but - well, it wouldn't be the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened, and it would necessitate some rapid changes of plans.

(If Keltham knew Carissa's impression of his own thought processes, he would give a sad wry half-smile.  His half-disciplined thought processes, nearly perfect?  He's some wild kid, not a Keeper.  The Keepers would also laugh, at the same thought; they're not superintelligences.  Superintelligences capable of laughter would laugh too; they're not unbounded.  What unbounded agents capable of laughter might laugh about is unknown, but extrapolation says it would probably be something.)

And Keltham goes on thinking about the god-of-Keltham.  Well, that and occasionally rehearsing some short-term memories he needs to keep.  Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.  Abadar runs the banks and Osirion; Norgorber is about violating regulations and killing people for money; Calistria does revenge and inversions of status; Nethys, knowledge and magic and mad experimentation.

Keltham notices that he has now been thinking for a while about the proverbially difficult and crucial problem of Finding a Cofounder, in the special case of finding a god; is he still thinking about the right thing?  Should he be thinking about something else instead of this?  Like deciphering and abstractly-reversing the specific way that Carissa was filtering his info, if she was in fact doing that?  But Keltham may not realistically have enough info to figure out what Carissa could have hidden from him (or even outright lied about); he is too unfamiliar with this world.  Across whatever unknown distance, it is not an epistemically safe stretch to presume even that, just because Carissa is shaped like a human being, she would like to have more money.

There is the question of what really happened after the plane crash, of why the whole impossible thing.  There is the challenge of decoding a whole new world that has not as yet been reduced into math, nor into things that look like they should reduce to math.  But the tractability of that is unknown.  Whatever discoverable insights wait there could influence arbitrary decisions in arbitrary ways, it is not safe to assume even that the parts he could figure out in an hour will not influence decisions in the next hour.  But there are not known missing insights like that.

Right now, Carissa thinks he should work with the Asmodean faction, but Keltham has not yet talked to Asmodeus about the local equivalent of equity allocations; that is a known open question.  Before talking to Asmodeus he might want to search on the god that fits Keltham, in case the first god he meets tries to cleric him.  So thinking about that.. still seems like the schedule-blocker?  This is what he should be thinking about?

Enough meta-scheduling; on to the meta of figuring out how to figure out the god that fits Keltham.

Carissa didn't mention any Chaotic Evil gods at all, unless he's forgotten that part.  If Carissa is trying to hide things from him, does that mean that Keltham should be searching for ideals that are more individualistic and selfish?  But there's too many different possibilities for what Carissa could be hiding; he shouldn't stake a lot of time-mind-resource on hoping he got that guess right.

It's tempting to approach the problem by asking which gods would be most helpful for his Golarion industrialization project; or which gods would give him the largest equity allocations, if that's how Good works (it probably doesn't).  But on reflection, looking for the most exploitable god may be the wrong idea on a deep level, if other things Carissa said weren't false.  To become a cleric of a god, he needs a god that resonates with something deep inside him, preferably something that would make him feel good about working with a smarter person who had the same feature.  Some goal that Keltham shares, some ideal that Keltham holds... the god that tries to make a world into which Keltham would fit in a way that he never fit into dath ilan... obviously Keltham wished dath ilan had been more individualized (Chaotic?) and had more room for non-unselfish good (Evil?).  But the feature needs to be more specific than that, gods are not just alignments...

Does he already know what his god looks like?  Before doing a lot of setup work on a problem, you should check to make sure you don't already know the answer.

Keltham doesn't think he already knows.  A few seconds of direct soul-searching doesn't solve it.  But in terms of how to productively think for longer... this seems related to the writing exercise for Environmentalized Intrinsics, doesn't it?  He's never actually gone through that exercise, but he has heard of the concept, in detail, via sheer memetic contamination at gatherings he has ever attended.  Doing that exercise seems like it might also turn up the features of the god-who-matches-Keltham?

(There's a metafictional trope in dath ilan which is popular to the point that even Keltham, who is not an especially avid consumer or producer of fiction, knows all about it.  It's the kind of trope where people talk about their own takes on it, on outings romantic or friendly, even if they write relatively little fiction themselves.

The Baseline phrase for this trope is a polysyllabic monstrosity that would literally translate as Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge.  A translation that literal would be misleading; the second word-pair of Boundary-Edge is glued together in the particular way that indicates a tuple of words has taken on a meaning that isn't a direct sum of the original components.  A slight lilt or click of spoken Baseline; a common punctuation-marker in written Baseline.

When the words Boundary-Edge are glued together into a special term, what they've come to mean - by processes of mere convention rather than explicit decision, a form of linguistic drift that happens even in dath ilan - is 'Cartesian Environment', the Environment as falsely distinguished from the Agent by a boundary, an edge, which does not ultimately exist within the territory.

This glued term for Cartesian Environment has in turn been double-glued (the max recursion depth being three, of course) with Intrinsic-Characteristic, to take on the new meaning "externalization of the inward self's innate distinguishing characteristics into a world"; the Environmentalized Intrinsic or Environmentalized Self.

This trope began as a novel about people who could externalize themselves into pocket worlds, which became popular enough to pick up vast amounts of secondary and tertiary literature as this concept was further explored.  As it turned out, a lot of early-career-phase secondary-literature authors were quite interested in the question of what worlds are inside characters; it is also apt for artistry and memeing.

And when the original author decided the original series was over, the conversation about the trope began again, more seriously and up a meta-level.  As the original author revealed afterwards, the Environmentalized Self was meant not just as a metaphor, but a productive metaphor, for writing in general and worldbuilding in particular.  The question, "What is within myself that can be externalized into a world?" is a place to begin, when an author takes the step from secondary fiction to primary fiction and starts making a world of their own.

Say that you, yourself, have always wanted all of the houses to look like glowing crystals; instead of, as is more commonly the convention in dath ilan, old stone covered in plants.  Then making a world out of that piece of yourself is likely to have an authenticity to it, which does not appear when you are only trying to throw in random variations to make your world be Different.  Some part of you knows why houses have to be glowing crystals, some part of you knows what kind of glowing crystals they should be.   Or maybe it's not so much that you want glowing crystal houses, but that they fit better with you; or that you know in your heart of hearts that, if the world was made out of you, the houses would end up made of glowing crystal whether you liked that truth or not.

It is a facile and not-quite-right proverb, to say that characters are made of authors, or that characters are made out of carefully selected pieces of author.  You can write a character who has some feature that is not drawn from yourself at all; it's just harder.  It requires you to have a theoretical understanding of a psychology you do not yourself possess, strong enough to ring deeply true to anyone who does have that psychology.  It is easier to draw deep on the well of craft when you are writing a character who is enough like you that the thoughts they think seem to you, not just 'reasonable' or 'defensible', but like thoughts you almost thought yourself in a closely neighboring reality.  The further you go from that, the more likely you are to stumble and turn the character into a distant Other who is not really animated by an inward spark that reflects and optimizes the same way you do; the more likely you are to stumble and try to construct something alien to yourself, based on a psychological theory that is false.

Universes can be made in part out of memories of your true world, including the parts of the outer world that you wouldn't have made yourself and that don't fit well with you.  But built worlds can also be made out of you, and that's why the Environmentalized Self trope spread as rapidly among authors as it did.  To the extent a world is made neither out of true world-experience, nor out of yourself, you are making it out of explicit theories about alien worlds drawn from neither memory nor the wells of self.  This is possible, but harder; it can stumble in the same way as trying to write a character based on a psychological theory of the Other.

After proposing that the World of You has glowing crystal houses, of course, comes the real work of worldbuilding.  To depict a realistic world with houses of glowing crystal, you must understand the causes that lead the current world to have houses that look like old stone covered in plants, and you must postulate those causes to be different, and their own ancestral causes to be different too.  You have to ask the question of how a world found its equilibrium in the You-place, where the real world's equilibrium was different.  Unavoidably you must now go to the other deep well inside you, the deep well of theory; your knowledge and understanding of counterfactuals, why the world is the way it is; how it could have ended up differently, given different inputs or different parameters.  And so the real meat of worldbuilding, as with so many other things, tests one's explicit understanding of economics.

The level-1 beginner's form of this exercise - the form that early authors do to practice starting out, and the conversation that gets made at unserious parties - is the exercise "How would the world be different if everyone was like you?" or "Suppose a world's median was around yourself in all dimensions?" or "What is the world from which you were an average random draw?" or "What is the history and present state of a world which, in mostly-equilibrium, ended up with its medians mostly around where you are?" or "What world-with-a-history spits you out as a very typical person in all respects, instead of the very atypical person in many respects that you are in real life?"

If the harsh truth is that you've always thought the obsession with the exteriors of houses is silly, when their interiors are what counts - and therefore, in your world, buildings look like exposed metal and concrete - if the cities are less pretty as seen from outside, in the world that is the externalization of your interior - then you are faced with a test of self-honesty.  You can either admit the houses aren't as pretty because your utility function wouldn't really care enough to spend a lot of money on that, if the World of Yous had never seen 'normal' dath ilan for comparison to feel competitive about that.  Or you can fail the self-honesty test, and end up trying to worldbuild a world that is not made out of the true piece of yourself, because you were not able to be honest with yourself about who you were.

Conversely, of course, if you claim that the World of You has a substantially higher per capita GDP, while otherwise having the same physics and biology as dath ilan, you're going to face a lot of skepticism about that one.  By market efficiency, your soul is unlikely to contain a realistic economic policy that yields better results than the policies spotlighted by counterfactual-conditional prediction markets.  But that is a very obvious trap that any dath ilani sees as soon as they contemplate the exercise, even if they weren't explicitly warned against it.

So you look within yourself for possible features of a world that would be, or reflect, you; then you do further worldbuilding on that world's history, to explain how it got that way and ended up in that mostly-stable equilibrium; then you write a few stories set there, to shake out the world, to make it more consistent, as you are forced to visualize it fully and make sure your axioms have a model.  And then, you have something to compare and contrast to your friends' own Intrinsic Environment worlds at parties!

All this is the long background story behind why, when Keltham asks himself what god and domain would fit Keltham and be clericable for him, and doesn't immediately come up with an answer for that, he already knows an exact complicated thought process he can try to use to find an answer.  Similarly, if one asks why Keltham is able to go through this thought process without much in the way of blind alleys - and without falling into obvious pitfalls despite his young age, like self-flattery, or blaming everything wrong with the world on other people not being as well-intentioned as himself - part of the answer is that Keltham has heard secondhand-repeated advice from famous authors on how to do this writing exercise correctly and without falling into common pitfalls.

It is also why, in trying to do all this, it will not occur to Keltham that in searching for his own true god and world, he is asking a Question about Himself that is such a Big Serious Question that it ought to take longer than ten half-minutes to figure out.  It's a worldbuilding trope.  People do it live at parties.)

How much room does Keltham have here to godbuild/worldbuild?  Is he searching for one key feature of himself, or a collection of them?  Gods can do more than one thing, if they're related things.  Asmodeus has related thingies for contracts, authority, pride, is called Executive of Law.  Keltham may not need to squeeze the god-address down to one characteristic of himself... no, that's the wrong way to think about it.  Even if he can call beyond the locally known universe, there is no guarantee that gods are dense in characteristics.  It's probably better to find one idea or aesthetic that defines the god that Keltham would want to partner with.  In any case, the correct search ordering is to begin with the most important requirement; after that, he can see if there's room or need for anything else.

...Keltham notices that he has spent an awful lot of time on meta.  His mind is probably flinching away from this.  Why?

...the same reason he never did the Environmentalized Intrinsic exercise in the first place.  The incredibly obvious thought is 'what if - instead of there being a few more people like you in the next generation, if you succeed - rather, dath ilan had been composed of people like you to begin with'.  And that is painful, it is should-ing, if you are actually stuck in dath ilan.  There was no reason to think about things that way, to contrast reality to its alternative and make himself sad.  Now he actually needs to solve this question for other reasons in real life, and needs to just go ahead with it.

What is the Kelthamverse like?

Does the Kelthamverse have higher GDP?  He's going to think that just to get it over with.  First order, 'no'.  Okay, fine, in the details, if you literally do the version 'what is the world-in-mostly-equilibrium from which somebody like you is a median random draw', then the Kelthamverse has +0.8SD g over dath ilan and therefore a higher GDP.  But by convention you are to ignore that, because re-extrapolating a world with higher intelligence or rationality is impossible for known reasons; you'd have to predict the effects of the actions of more extreme geniuses than any geniuses than exist in your current world.  Or maybe Kelthamians care more about higher GDP compared to other considerations, relative to the average dath ilani, and the policy prediction markets' results are weighted accordingly.  But mostly, there is no obvious reason the Kelthamverse has higher GDP in virtue of the people inside it... caring less selflessly.

Is a Keltham even happier, in the Kelthamverse?  Would he actually feel more like he belonged, if he'd grown up there and never seen dath ilan for comparison?  Maybe a Keltham is a person who needs to feel unbelonging over something, and his neurotype would find some other oddity of himself to obsess over instead.  Maybe everybody in the Kelthamverse feels like an outsider there, based on their own personal least socially acceptable random variable.

Keltham recognizes a thought of undue self-uncharity, whispering in its way under the guise of counteracting some bias you might have, and sets it aside.  His self-model does not actually say this is how a Keltham works, and that is that.  He has been taught to distrust himself a little, not infinitely.  No more distrust than he has earned from himself, under his own accounts of his history; the alternative is a kind of inescapable madness and helplessness, and he's not into that.

Does the Kelthamverse have fewer public goods, because, in fact, the Kelthamians do not care quite as much?  Because those who become rich find better paths to romantic success than producing public goods, since that is the pathway that dath ilan laid out for rich people to be romantically more successful, and the Kelthamverse would not have laid out the same path?  Keltham's brain immediately wants to shout back that the Kelthamians would find their own way to produce the public goods that were actually needed, just as well as dath ilan.  But this seems not necessarily true, especially if the Kelthamians never saw dath ilan and never felt competitive about doing at least that well.

The fact that Keltham can no longer actually call a Confessor is no excuse for his not doing the same mental operation of betting on what a Confessor would tell him, just never again rolling an electronic d144 and actually phoning a Confessor if the die comes up 0 to keep himself honest.  Would a Confessor, told this scenario, formally predict to Keltham that a Keltham would be unhappier in the Kelthamverse?  Because he has been, in some sense, free-riding on the nice environment that was created by those dath ilani whose outrage at Abaddon would be enough to make them clerics of Iomedae?

There's a common wisdom, in dath ilan, that even after spending 3% of GDP on generalized coordination enforcement, most of what makes a high-tech society like dath ilan actually work, is that the people inside it have truly altruistic components of their utility function.  That most people are not just being cooperative for instrumental reasons.  That most people won't commit crimes even when they're pretty sure they won't get caught.  The number of tiny opportunities for defecting and getting away with it, every day, is just too large to make it work if people don't actually care about other people.  Dath ilan is much closer to the multi-agent-optimal boundary than it would be, in the world with the same institutions, but genuinely actually selfish people.  The crime-reporting mechanisms are built for a world in which most people will take a minute to call the police if they see a violent stabbing in progress; and you don't have to pay people $5 to do that; and then worry that they'll set up violent stabbings to earn $5.  The system is built to be resilient against rogue psychopaths, not against everybody being a psychopath.  The police architecture is set up on the assumption that it might need to catch an individual bad police officer, not on the assumption that police collectively would just take your stuff as soon as they thought they could get away with keeping it.

If a high-tech world could be put together out of entirely selfish people at all, it would probably require much more spending on explicit coordination to set up a system that could stably run factories, without them just being looted by every employee simultaneously plus any police who showed up.  Who even puts in the work to build the whole coordination structure in the first place, if they're not motivated by the good of Civilization?  Maybe perfectly selfish beings who were more coherent and crystalline in their thoughts would find their way to a multi-agent-optimal boundary, kept in place by institutional structures ruling out defection at every point.  None of the crystalline minds would need to altruistically spend the time to negotiate institutions into existence, because all the crystalline minds would see the possibility simultaneously and choose it at the same time.  Beings like humans, but who didn't care at all about others' welfare, wouldn't do that; they would not end up with factories, just roving individuals looting each other.  So says the common wisdom of dath ilan.

Keltham was, in fact, honestly shaken when he heard that the Neutral Evil afterlife was eating souls.  He'd always questioned that common wisdom in the back of his mind.  But - but apparently not.  Apparently, if you're not explicitly Lawful or explicitly Chaotic, if you don't care about social structures either way, then what's left is simply Selfishness the way it might be materialized in an alien or a construct.

The sense in which actually, all of society working depends on people being altruistic - because the incentives just aren't that perfect, and otherwise the whole structure of dath ilan would fall apart almost instantly - that's part of the justification that dath ilan could give, if Keltham tried to explicitly argue with it, for why heritage-optimization should try to preserve explicit altruism in the utility function.  It's a reason dath ilan might give, for why Keltham shouldn't have subsidized childcare; unless occasional people like him are valuable enough to society that he can pay for the childcare himself.

So yeah.  The Neutral Evil beings - just eating souls - yeah, that shook him.  Because if that's where being a little more selfish leads, in the end, then dath ilan is right.

But maybe that's still - the voice of too little self-charity.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

Keltham did not abandon that lightly injured person that he passed upon the sidewalk, even as a child with his own frontal cortex less than fully formed.  He wanted to be repaid, since the other person was capable of repaying him, but he didn't abandon them.  A bird once flew into a window right in front of Keltham, when he was a child, and fell to the ground and didn't move, and he ran off crying to find his father.  He didn't think about whether the bird could pay him back, because it obviously couldn't.  If Keltham came across an injured child now, with a lot less money than himself - well, he'd help, but he'd feel a lot better about a world in which that Civilization would repay him and not give him any second stupid glances about his having insisted on payment, because, why is this child his problem in particular.  But Keltham wouldn't ask the child to repay.  And he'd cheerfully pay a proportional amount into public-good funds to repay other people who helped children when it wasn't particularly their job.

He's not a bad person, not by his own standards.  And if he was, he could choose to do things differently and meet his own standards.  If he's not completely incoherent under reflection, he ought to be able to reach into himself and imagine the world that's nice according to his own notions of niceness.

The writing exercise for the Environmentalized Self is allowed to include ideals inside you, hopes inside you, not just realities inside you.  The point of the writing exercise is that the feature is inside you, so some part of yourself knows how the feature should work, and it is not just an oddity added out of a vague wish to make your writing different.  This isn't that writing exercise, but for purposes of calling the right god, nearby ideals may also be the way to go; if they are Keltham's own idealizations, that the real Keltham could at least come close to attaining on his own.

So the Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse are not selfish, not the way that whatever eats souls in Abaddon must be really actually selfish.  Keltham doesn't think that he, himself, is flawed in that way.  He does not think he is actually just plain selfish and picked up the rest through acculturation in dath ilan.  And even if he's wrong and the real Keltham isn't that nice, fine, so what, he is envisioning a universe in which he is not exactly the median, sue him.

The Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse, Keltham decides, do not have to go to fantastic lengths to enforce and punish and pay for coordination; they are not in a world where nobody actually cares about anybody else or has any honor.  Kelthamians keep their promises, always, whether or not anyone is watching.  Kelthamians don't betray their business partners, whether or not anyone is watching.  They don't qualify as 'Good' by Golarion's bizarre standards, because they are perfectly aware of how a positive reputation benefits them, and they are ready to exploit that and would be very snippy about not getting their due for it.  But they would also keep their promises in the dark, even if nobody ever knew.  Keltham thinks that is actually true of himself; and even if he is wrong, and flatters himself too much, the corresponding god would be one he could work with.  It is one of his ideals, and one that would be very close to him even if in fact he doesn't have it already.

And - it's not the part Keltham needs to be thinking about, but he's going to think about it anyways, just to get it out of the way of the rest - it is actually true, it is not just him trying to stick it to dath ilan in his mind, it is actually true that a neurotypical dath ilani would feel less outside and alone in the Kelthamverse, than Keltham felt in dath ilan.  Because nobody in the Kelthamverse thinks it's a problem if you're more altruistic than the rest of the Kelthamverse, so long as you still keep your business promises, and don't murder people even in the dark, in all the forms of honor that keep Kelthamverse society running and coordinated.  They don't withdraw public support for your children's childcare if you're nicer than other people.  The Kelthamverse doesn't want to be dath ilan when it grows up, but it's fine with there being dath ilani inside it in the Future.

The Kelthamverse has more of an expectation that people fund childcare individually or through individual philanthropy, in the first place; they have much less of a collective Future-optimization thing going on.  The Kelthamverse doesn't have voter-aggregates deciding on heritage-optimization criteria for policy-prediction-markets resolving 20 and 50 and 100 years out.  They're leaving it up to individuals and philanthropists, and just checking the prediction markets to make sure that the default course isn't predicted to end up with huge probabilities of anything awful; so long as the prediction markets don't predict catastrophe, they're fine letting the larger world go its own way.

Maybe a dath ilani will feel sad that the entire world isn't as altruistic as they are, that only 5% of the population feels the same strength of feeling about the true deaths of strangers as themselves.  But if so, the Kelthamians won't feel too sad for them, because a Kelthamian doesn't think you have the right to expect all of Civilization to think the same way you do.  Keltham didn't complain about Civilization being of a different mind than himself, because he had no right to demand that of strangers; he just set out to test himself, and prove Civilization wrong if he could.

So that's the first defining quality of the Kelthamverse.  In one sense, yes, people care differently and less about each other; when they help, they do so much more in expectation that somebody will repay them, even if they're helping a child.  But the Kelthamians still help children, and pay into the public funds to pay off other people who help children, they do have the sense that somebody ought to be doing that.  And the Kelthamians still have all the emotions about intrinsically caring about coordination, the emotions that are shards of the higher structure for Coordination and shadows of the one irreplaceable logical copy of the Algorithm.  Kelthamians keep their promises, even in the dark when nobody will ever find out.  They aren't first to betray their business partners, their mates, their friends - and not because they are calculating the value of their reputation, but because that isn't who they are.  They would pay their debts even absent any legal enforcement for debts, the vast majority of them, under the vast majority of circumstances; and so they don't have to pay more of their GDP for coordination enforcement than dath ilan.

If a Kelthamian sells you something, it does exactly what it says on the label, and disclosed all the facts you needed to know.  In fact, if the Kelthamverse is literally all exact copies of himself, not a distribution from which he is the median draw, then advertisements are more trustworthy than in dath ilan; because when everybody is exactly Keltham, there is no variation in trustworthiness, so there is no adverse selection favoring producers who got ahead by being a little less trustworthy in ways they couldn't be caught.  And the GDP is actually slightly higher.  Though they'd also better get cracking on biotech really fast, because, reproduction.

If there's a god of doing really honest business in both business and friendship, with personal and commercial advertisements true in letter and spirit, all debts repaid whether monetary or informal, all promises kept without exception, never the first to defect - even in the dark, even if reality is ending the next day and there's no more iterations of the dilemmas - where it's also perfectly socially acceptable to be nice, because you're not hurting anyone by doing that - but you don't just demand people be nice to lightly injured strangers, then look oddly at them when they want personal or public reimbursement - a god whose thingy is a little more selfish than dath ilan's, in one sense, but unselfishly utility-function-desiring the shards of higher Coordination, in some more coherent but still ultimately bounded version of how humans have honor - and never defacing the Algorithm - then Keltham could see himself working with that god on the Golarion industrialization project.  Maybe even being its cleric, depending on the benefits.

That, Keltham thinks, is the true meaning of Chaos, if there's a Chaotic Evil god like that.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

There is not a Chaotic Evil god like that, because Keltham was somewhat misinformed about Chaos and also about Evil. 

There is, as it happens, a god like that.

Among the many disadvantages of shattered prophecy, is that sometimes strange attention-demanding things happen which are unscheduled.

The situation of a god on the planes could be compared to a titan with a hundred thousand eyes, standing atop a mountain, gazing down at a dozen surrounding countries each filled with a billion squirrels.  Even as a titan, You cannot think about all the squirrels individually.  You can at best set a fraction of Your attention to watching for predefined signals that You have trained the squirrels to use.  The squirrels cannot understand the coordinates to align their eyes across many dimensions to look at You.  But You can give them a word like "Abadar" and a holy symbol and say a few words about why banks need to exist; and then notice when a squirrel looks in that direction, not quite at You, but more in Your direction than the other titans atop their own mountains.

One day, a fraction of Your attention notices a squirrel looking, in one set of subdimensions, along an angle that would be aligned almost exactly on the real You, if the squirrel could get the other dimensions right too.  It's surprising because You have never seen a squirrel look in that direction before.  You have wished You could explain it to squirrels, but prediction always showed their heads exploding when You tried that, so You didn't try it.

Then the squirrel thinks for a bit, and turns its head into another dimension, and looks almost right at the correct angle in that dimension too.

The squirrel pauses, visibly (to a god) staring inside itself and deducing further conclusions from premises, and then angles its head and looks almost directly at Your angle in yet another dimension.

If the power disparities were not what they were, the squirrel's behavior might be considered reminiscent of a stalking predator, the more humanlike and sadistic kind of monster; who is deliberately crouching down to look under the dresser, standing up, and then crouching down again, only to look under the desk; and the stalker knows all along that you are actually under the bed.  You are not frightened, under the circumstances, where the circumstances are that You are a god; but You are definitely noticing.

Then the squirrel gathers itself, angles its viewpoint -

- and turns to stare almost directly at You, including some mathy parts that nobody in Axis is allowed by treaty to explain to anybody who might go back to Golarion.

You wait for the squirrel to pray to You, to make one of the appeals which You are allowed by treaty to respond to without that being incredibly expensive, so You can (very softly and carefully so it doesn't explode) ask the squirrel what the Abyss is going on, and how a squirrel even got this address.

The squirrel thinks loudly about how it might not mind being Your cleric, but doesn't actually ask.

Then the squirrel looks at five gods one after another in the stories-for-mortals coordinates, one of which is the standard wrong address for You.

Then the squirrel goes back to thinking.

Also the squirrel's body is in an Asmodean church near the Worldwound, its mind looks like a teenaged male raised by modrons, and its immaterial soul is ninety-three minutes old.

You would have more attention to pay this sort of anomaly if the surprise had been properly scheduled like in the other worlds you deal with.

Entities with very high Intelligence don't make quite the same kind of comical mistakes that humans do.  They know what they don't know; they pick up on alternate hypotheses and incongruent facts very early on.  They still make comical mistakes, to be clear, as seen from their own perspectives; but different ones.

Why is the mortal thinking loudly about being a cleric, but not actually asking?  Abadar doesn't know, but He knows that He doesn't know.  Among the possibilities is that the mortal, who is in an Asmodean church, is in a life position where suddenly becoming a cleric of Abadar would be inconvenient due to the Asmodean reaction to it.  This is only one hypothesis among several; Abadar does not leap to the conclusion.  It is not even certain that the mortal was deliberately choosing not to immediately pray for clerichood, or that the mortal knew that Abadar was watching and might otherwise have responded.  That is only one hypothesis group among several.

But it is a large enough strategic-equivalence-class of hypotheses that Abadar is not dropping cleric levels on the mortal right away, in case the mortal definitely didn't want that and was trying to signal so.

Could the five gods in the sequence be a deliberate message?  The tiny fraction of Abadar's attention that He can spare does consider some possibilities like that; it would be stupid in a sense not to think of them at all.  Asmodeus-Abadar-Norgorber-Calistria-Nethys could be interpreted as tyrant-Abadar-murder-revenge-magic, and be an attempted message that somebody was about to assassinate the prince of Osirion, vengefully, using magic.  This comical misinterpretation does not actually happen, because if the mortal had wanted to send a message to Abadar, its posture would have changed in a way Abadar could detect; it's part of the posture of treaty-defined prayer.

But something strange is clearly happening.  And it would be a huge wasted opportunity if this mortal ended up being squished by Asmodeans before it could, at least, tell other mortals some things that Abadar hasn't been allowed to explain directly.

But if Abadar calls up Asmodeus and offers to buy the avoidance of squishing this particular squirrel, might that not call the attention of Asmodeus down upon this squirrel, in exactly the way that the squirrel might (on some hypotheses) have been trying to avoid by deliberately not asking Abadar for clerichood?

If one were a mortal, one might, perhaps, reason that there is nothing to be done here.  But Asmodeus is a Lawful god and does not generally prefer accidentally stepping on Abadar's goals, over being paid to avoid stepping on Abadar's goals.  It would be in some sense silly if Abadar-and-Asmodeus had no possible coordinated strategy better than Asmodeus's church accidentally squishing a valuable squirrel because Abadar was afraid to talk to Asmodeus about that.  They would be noticeably off the Pareto-optimal boundary.

Abadar sends a brief packet to Asmodeus which might translate as:

Hey, Asmodeus.  I want to reveal information relevant to negotiating a potential gainful trade, where that information itself might otherwise worsen my negotiating position for the trade, on the standard condition that you promise not to use that information to implement strategies that lead to worse outcomes than would have obtained in the counterfactual where I stayed silent, as evaluated by either my utility function or by the best-guess probable utility function of another party who revealed that information to me.

Acknowledged, agreed to.

Humans trying to make a similar arrangement might be relying on reputation: "the last thousand times we did this, he kept his end" - or character: "he seems like the sort of person who'd keep his word" - or consequences: "breaking his word would be punished" - or the prospects of future cooperation: "if he betrays the agreement this time, we won't be able to do this in future, which would be a loss to him". Gods can just make parts of them legible to one another, and promise with those; Asmodeus is in part keeping-of-agreements, and if all of those sources-of-motivation suddenly failed to obtain there would still be the agreement itself, in no sense weakened. Not everything about Him is knowable, not even to other gods, but this is.

(Some humans understand this, in part, and think that it means Asmodeus can be outwitted; if He gives His word unwisely, after all, He will keep it, and if you cleverly trap Him into promising you wealth and power, or the right to reign in Hell, or anything else, He would follow through. This is true, but if you think you've found an opportunity to do it, you haven't.)

Asmodeus is curious, but only slightly; most of His attention is in other places, doing other things.

A mortal has had an unshared insight into Abadar's domain.  This mortal is probably but not definitely under the power of or threatenable by Asmodeus/Cheliax/the Asmodean church.  Abadar wants to pay to modify future events so that the mortal doesn't end up dead and soul-trapped/maledicted in a way that prevents Osirians from resurrecting it; nor spending nearly all of its natural lifespan in Cheliax or prison never talking extensively with Abadar's followers; nor tortured by Asmodeans into not being in an Abadaran shape; nor traumatized (eg by having all of its friends and family tortured) to the point where it'd no longer be an inspiring teacher if Abadar/Osirion paid it to do that.  (Abadar doesn't need to explicitly list brain damage and mindwipes as also undesirable; He mainly sends a specification over ultimate consequences.)

Abadar honestly discloses that this mortal may or may not be opposing some ongoing Asmodean plan, as mortals sometimes end up doing.  Abadar doesn't know this, but has seen 1.8 bits of evidence over the prior.  If so, Abadar is not offering to pay for letting the mortal have free reign to oppose Asmodeus unopposed, or anything that expensive; He just wants to pay for having the mortal delivered to Osirion afterwards instead of squished.  Abadar did however find all this out, through what seemed like a voluntary high-trust action of revelation from the mortal.  So information from this negotiation itself, especially that the mortal might have plans opposing Asmodeans, must not be used to further Asmodeus's interests at the mortal's expense, if Abadar points out the mortal to Asmodeus.  (That Asmodeus should not eg try to falsely depict Abadar as having betrayed the mortal to Him, follows automatically from the previous goal-spec.)

Abadar mainly predicts this would cost Asmodeus one revelation to Asmodeans via priest or devil; whatever marginal value Asmodeus could otherwise get by torturing one mortal instead of coaxing it; possibly it being marginally harder to oppose the mortal's opposition to some unknown plan; and attention / cost-of-thought.

If Asmodeus has a price on that, agreeable to Abadar, Abadar can give distinguishing characteristics for the mortal in question.

(It's a marginally more complicated negotiation than, say, Iomedae would demand; with Iomedae, Abadar would just offer to pay for some utility, since She knows Abadar's utility function.  Indeed, Iomedae could just ask for fair reimbursement afterwards; He's Lawful, She's Lawful.  Asmodeus has stated a preference for fully specified contracts with advance-agreed payments based on expected values instead of actual values, and the thing where parties retain some private information while trying to guess how much private information the other party has.  It tends to favor the party with higher Intelligence in negotiations, but Asmodeus apparently still does it even when the other party realizes that and adjusts prices accordingly.  He just likes contracts.  Abadar is happy enough to go along with it in cases like this one where that reduces Abadar's payment's variance across counterfactuals.)

Asmodeus considers this. A human would be tempted to try to identify the mortal based on the information provided, and it happens that in this case that would probably be possible, but Asmodeus does not do that; it would be resource-intensive, and He is committed to not using the information, and He is not in the habit of acquiring information He can't use.

He names a price.

Sold!  It's this mortal in an Asmodean church at the Worldwound.  You can't miss it, it's the incredibly odd one.

- huh, that is an odd one! Does Abadar happen to know why it's adult-shaped but apparently a newborn baby? He's not willing to pay much for that information but it seems of mutual interest if there were a way to make adult-shaped humans without the expensive baby stage.

(The cleric praying to Asmodeus in that church gets a vision.)

Abadar has no clue (lit: plenty of hypotheses and no evidence) who this mortal is or what is going on, but it sure does look Lawful.  It is possible that some glitch has occurred, and that this represents a profit opportunity for Law.

The priest stands up, shaking. Waves Carissa over. "There's a scroll of Sending in a locked box in the back room; here's the key. Bring it back."

She's not going to ask what happened; it's none of her business. She goes and gets it. 

"Urgently with direct input from Asmodeus requesting seventh-circle pickup at the Worldwound, pursuant to earlier communications, more info on arrival."

"Should I - pack."