"You must be very busy, leading the world in rat extermination and rat research and ethics studies and rat infestation origin research," Meritxell says. "Unless you know the origins of all the rat infestations before you start, since you're releasing them, something your position as the world leader in rat research would easily enable you to do. You don't want a rat or a rat researcher. You want someone whose footsteps make rats tremble. And that's me."

"Fight against the rat god must've gone pretty badly, if you're now reduced to begging for garden assignments."

"I just hate rats so much I can't stop until they're all dead."

"What say we all compromise?  We'll all do the job together so she has no other options, charge her twenty times the price, and split the revenue fairly among ourselves."

There are nods all around. "FINE," Asmodia says, flinging her hands in the air hopelessly, and then there are cheers.

"Are you going to need that Haste," says the security wizard, tiredly. 

"Yeah, let me swap to Owl's Wisdom and then we'll run through it.  Eagle's Splendour only wore off a quarter-minute ago, for what it's worth, I wanted to see if anyone noticed from outside."

"Do you only have Wisdom and Splendour and not Cunning?" Meritxell asks. "I'd use Cunning, to try to learn spells...I guess Wisdom might be better for just trying to understand the basics of how magic moves."

"Oh, right.  I was thinking it might be wiser to try only one mental augment at a time on my first day.  And no, my god didn't give me Cunning, I think Carissa thought it wasn't a cleric spell?  But if somebody else has it - you're the experts, tell me which one I should use."

"In general wizardry goes more off cunning. Cunning is cleverness, math, working memory, visualization. Wisdom is - perceptiveness, wordless inference, noticing if your thought patterns are avoiding something. I have Cunning, if you want."

"Key capability loading for catching a cantrip doesn't seem like cleverness and working memory, though, so much as perception and speed?  Not saying you're wrong, just voicing my noticed confusion."

“Yeah, there’s honestly an argument that what you’re specifically doing wants Dexterity rather than any of the mental enhancements, and wisdom is probably fine, even though in general wizards trying to grasp a new concept are limited on Cunning.”

”I can give him dexterity too,” says the security wizard slightly impatiently.

Keltham doesn't need arguments, he's too ignorant for those, he needs somebody more informed to give him the correct decision!  "Snap poll, dath ilani version.  Put your hand in front of your face, then move it up if you think I should use Wisdom, move it down if you think I should use Cunning, how far you move your hand away from face level indicates the strength of your opinion.  If you think I'm asking the wrong question, close your hand into a fist to signal defiance of the question itself, but answer anyways.  Again, that's up for Wisdom, down for Cunning, fist to complain about the question."  Keltham demonstrates by moving his hand in both directions as he speaks, and briefly closing it into a fist.

The girls watch each other nervously and settle on a moderately strong recommendation for Wisdom which all hands then converge towards. An optimist might conclude this was because they're familiar with the theorems governing rational agents persisting in disagreements they have mutual knowledge of. A Chelish person would likely interpret their uniform recommendation in the same spirit as their uniform smiles.

...okay those people just looked at each other and adjusted their votes.  Later he will explain some important concepts about presenting unadjusted first impressions to avoid info cascades - or better yet, just closing your eyes until you've moved your hand into place, that seems like it would be a simpler and more robust rule for non-dath-ilani.  But security guy seems impatient, so for now he'll quietly hope that that resolution procedure had any kind of shard of Law within it for aggregating their knowledge.  At least Carissa picked an opinion (Wisdom) and stuck with it, and she's probably the most expert.

Keltham casts Owl's Wisdom on himself.

And Keltham-the-object snaps into focus to Keltham-the-perceiver.

His first thought is that Keepers would trade out-of-preference sexual favors or do crimes for this spell.

His second thought is that there's so many thoughts he hasn't been thinking in the last day.

His third thought is that this is a mind-affecting drug, one making him think that he can think better and promising epiphanies, even if the rest of his mental processing isn't degraded.  There are protocols trained for being hit by mind-affecting drugs like that, which you're supposed to follow even if it seems like you have better ideas for things to do while you're on the mind-affecting drug.

It takes an additional effort and self-surety for Keltham to override that very trained and solemnly advised protocol, even temporarily.  But he can see, even more clearly than he could at other times, that it would be stupid to follow standard protocol and run out of this room immediately.  He knows he's more awake right now, and it doesn't matter how many people think they're becoming super awake as they fall asleep and into madness, he can tell the difference.

He still needs to cast his spells and then leave this room of untrusted others.  These are rules that derive strength from their unconditionality; there is some real sense in which even an extremely well-justified exception to them is breaking or bending a piece of the Algorithm that would work better for other people the more unconditional it is, and those people should remember the same thing about that Algorithm.  That's even leaving aside where part of his reason for violating these hard-and-fast rules about behaving under conditions of mental oddity, is that he died in a plane crash and has been in a magical world for the last day, which isn't the sort of epistemic state that - he's wasting time.

"It's up.  Dexterity, Haste?"

The wizard casts those: Dexterity first, and then Haste.

Keltham casts Guidance on himself.  He tries to catch that cantrip too, just in case he can.

- yep. Then it's kind of sitting in his hand, a little fragile -

"Now you kind of tuck it away like you're - spinning it so it's all in some other dimension -" Carissa says quickly -

Aided by Owl's Wisdom, Keltham is already over the shock of getting that far, and trying to finish what he saw others doing earlier with his Greater Detect Magic.

The spell folds tidily away, intact.

Practice until the boosts run out, so he can catch cantrips in the future, or until he fails enough to be out of cantrips, or he needs to take the last of the Owl's Wisdom to truly think - is the obvious course here - so Keltham tries his Read Magic, using the boost from Guidance -

And catches it. His harem is cheering, though mostly silently so as not to be distracting.

Guidance again!

He catches the spell the next four times, and by then can feel that it's starting to enter muscle memory, no longer something that without a bunch of reflex-enhancement he'd be desperately struggling to do.