He'll start trying to cast Detect Magic using the Guidance boosts.  Detect Magic and Guidance are the two cantrips he's plausibly going to need over and over and over.

He manages it three times in a row before, on the fourth, the window slams, security guy steps between it and Keltham casting something, and Detect Magic slips away in Keltham's instant of distraction. 

Keltham looks at the window to see if this is a room-evacuating issue, some of what his students said about Corn Failure Modes leaping awfully to mind.  He'll also try to hold his concentration on Detect Magic, if possible.

There are a bunch of overlapping spells on the window, but nothing observably entering through it; there is a dead bird on the ground outside the window. 

"Most likely," security guy says without moving, "it's just a regular dead bird that the Forbiddance picked off, of which there've been dozens in the last half-hour. We have a team checking it out, though."

Keltham goes back to practicing at once.  He will continue casting Guidance and using it to boost its own next cast until Haste runs out or catching fails, then practice more Read Magic without Guidance until another minute of that passes or catching Read Magic fails.

He doesn't fail at Guidance before Haste runs out. He manages six of Read Magic without Guidance before losing it.

"This was a great success, everyone, and with any luck I can start looking more at how magic works tomorrow, once I can watch magic happening.  Right now, though, I think I should quickly go off by myself and think for a few remaining minutes before the Owl's Wisdom runs out, and do that right away, see you possibly at dinner -"

Keltham is grabbing a couple of sheets of paper and a writing implement even as he speaks.

No one interferes with him.

Keltham moves out of the room even faster than he usually would, thanks to Cat's Grace, also still in effect.

"See you later," says Carissa, who is officially the person with the rights to that line tonight, as he reaches the door.

Heh.  "Indeed!"  And then he's out of the library and speeds up again, on the lookout for an apparently quiet and deserted unoccupied room on the way to his assigned bedroom - he'd rather not spend remaining spelltime to reach his assigned bedroom.  But he'll go all the way to his bedroom if he doesn't see anywhere that looks appropriate for meditation.

And also he's already started thinking.

(Standard procedure for dealing with a mind-affecting drug that claims to produce useful insights is to write down the insights, and see how much sense they still make after the drug wears off.

While that's going on, you don't let people who aren't Keeper-trained and Keeper-oathbound talk to you.  You especially don't talk to people you don't trust an awful lot.  You double-especially don't talk to whoever talked you into using the drug or maybe subtly guided you down a path that ended with that decision.  There are known drugs that seem to have an effect of permanently relaxing your priors about whatever somebody says to you while you're on drugs, which in dath ilani terms is something like a date rape of the soul.  Keltham has had drugs that mimic the more innocuous effects that go along with those, and Owl's Wisdom is absolutely nothing like them, but still.

All of this is, in any case, advice you'd only need in the first place if you went to a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods.  Or if a criminal dosed you.  Dath ilan does not recognize any uses of lysergic acid diethylamide, dimethyltryptamine, or psilocybin, within the mainstream of Well-Advised Consumer Goods.  They don't do anything useful that can't be done by a high-ranking Keeper just talking at you.)

The room right across from the library appears to be some kind of administrative staging area but the room after that, some kind of antechamber, is empty.

Keltham ducks in and starts writing.  Translation spells are a thing, and he's not sure how that interacts with cracking the kiddie's substitution cipher he has memorized, for writing non-readable notes to himself in RPGs and so on.  Instead he's going to write down some cultural references from his homeworld, and hope that there's no version of a cultural translation spell that reads through those; Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, as it were.

He doesn't have time to think through very much, the first priority is just to write out all the things he hasn't been thinking, notes to himself to hang the thoughts upon, to be followed up later.

Blue and orange, is the first thing he scratches out.  There's a constant drumbeat of hints that the people around him operate on a very alien and possibly inhumane morality, and he's been saying things to himself like Carissa was probably making a joke he failed to get, when she talked about tossing the rats into a pit to cannibalize each other and selling tickets to that like people would pay to see it.  There's a whole history of little pings like that and his brain pushing back at the dissonance with 'Maybe it was a joke I didn't get?' and he can see that, now, while he's got Owl's Wisdom running.

Subverted True-man Show, he writes out next.  The girls all wore permanently cheerful expressions during class, Meritxell and Ione and everyone else didn't read as any less genuine to him than their usual selves read while they were acting out routines, like they were all experienced actresses, like they were all already acting.  But they're not running a well-designed full Immersive Reality TV Show trope on him either.  If they were really such good actresses, with smart people and smart scripts behind them, they wouldn't be giving that away by wearing permanently cheerful smiles during class, or by not acting awkward when they were called on to act out new weird scenarios.  They're not trying to prevent him from realizing that they all have and are using acting abilities like he got from his Charisma boost, which, if they were actually constructing a false reality around him, would be the first thing they'd try to avoid him knowing.

(Keltham also makes a note in the back of his mind, not for the first time today, that if they don't get adequate Governance support and don't end up with more urgent priorities, inventing ballpoint pens sure seems like it should be a moneymaker.)

The next part is - hard for him to write.  It feels like it's a betrayal of the person that he'll be, when this temporary boost wears off, to think about this part, to write down the anchor for it.  But he can't unsee it, and it's already too late.

There is a commonly held wisdom, in dath ilan, about the way a human mind is put together, that it is a thing made of little subtle tensions and balances and internal compromises.  The human mind being the limited thing that it is, these balances form around your current level of ability to see into yourself and see the implications of what you already know - or not see them, as the case may be.  The reason why not everybody runs off to learn all they can from Keepers, the reason why not everyone asks a Keeper to tell them all the answers about themselves, is that this would bring parts of themselves into conflict that were previously living in a more agreeable truce of ignorance.  You might not survive as yourself, if you could see yourself.

Those who say "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" may continue to walk the Path from there.  But not uncommonly, even somebody who sets out along that Path, turns back at some point, and well short of becoming a Keeper.  It's not a trivial price, higher for some than others, and there is varying willingness to pay.  A lot of the reason why Keepers exist as what they are, is that the people who have large comparative advantages there - in how little they'll be hurt by knowing themselves, or how much they really internally want to keep going anyways - are conceived of by larger society as being paid to throw themselves on that grenade, so others don't have to.  And if, to some Keepers, it doesn't feel like much of a grenade at all, they understand that their case is not typical, and are grateful for winning the comparative-advantage lottery.

Going up by two local standard deviations, in whatever it is that Owl's Wisdom enhances, is something that the current structures of Keltham's personality were never built to withstand.  He knows, from up here, because he couldn't stop himself from glancing in that direction, that in dath ilan he would never have had his 144 children.  He would have tried to be special and failed and been sad and then maybe gotten an ordinary +0.8sd job and either paid for a child out of that or decided he was too strange and unhappy to have one.

It's not considered necessary for somebody Keltham's age to go and pay a Keeper to tell them exactly what the probabilities are, about something like that.  It's not so much that people are encouraged to lie to themselves, reality forbid, but that people are told it's okay for them not to shove themselves as hard as possible down the Pathway that will dissolve the mistakes their current personality is built out of.  That's what Keepers are for.  They do it so that not everybody else has to.  There are grownups around in Civilization, who can and will speak up if the people less mature are about to make some terrible mistake out of their blindness.  So you do not need to rush ahead to be a Keeper if you'd rather be a little less coherent, a little more yourself and your mistakes and your contradictions, a little more human, for a time.

But it's too late now, for Keltham to go back, because also in the common wisdom is that once you see what it is you weren't letting yourself see - once you know which mistakes your personality is founded upon - or even if you're trying hard not to know it, to the point where it's becoming a big internal battle - well, at that point, you're supposed to give it up.  It means that, well, sorry, you are that smart now, like it or not, you are that wise, you did grow up that much whether or not you wished to stay a child for longer; it's time to move on.

And the part where he was going to fail at his life's goals, in dath ilan, isn't even the important thing that he can't help but see now, about himself; realize now, at this level of wisdom.

There was a question asked once of some bright children, among whom Keltham was numbered; in a class where he had seemed to be among the oldest and worst performers; a class assembled of kids who were faster than Keltham.

And young Keltham had, by that time, already seen through some of the Lies Told To Children; he was past his experience with finding that lightly injured adult on his way home.  He had learned that children are sometimes put into contrived situations meant to teach them things.  Keltham was suspicious already, before the key moment; he had already guessed that he was meant to learn, in this class, something about what it feels like to be surrounded by others faster and more knowledgeable and even younger than you are.

But in this guess, Keltham proved to be wrong; he was not the one there who was to learn a lesson, that day.

The class was on self-integrity, and relatedly morals; a class taught directly by a Watcher-over-Children, not entrusted to older children at all.

And the Watcher told the class a parable about an adult, coming across a child who'd somehow bypassed the various safeguards around a wilderness area, and fallen into a muddy pond, and seemed to be showing signs of drowning (for they'd already been told, then, what drowning looked like).  The water, in this parable, didn't look like it would be over their own adult heads.  But - in the parable - they'd just bought some incredibly-expensive clothing, costing dozens of their own labor-hours, and less resilient than usual, that would be ruined by the muddy water.

And the Watcher asked the class if they thought it was right to save the child, at the cost of ruining their clothing.

Everyone in there moved their hand to the 'yes' position, of course.  Except Keltham, who by this point had already decided quite clearly who he was, and who simply closed his hand into a fist, otherwise saying neither 'yes' nor 'no' to the question, defying it entirely.

The Watcher asked him to explain, and Keltham said that it seemed to him that it was okay for an adult to take an extra quarter-minute to strip off all their super-expensive clothing and then jump in to save the child.

The Watcher invited the other children to argue with Keltham about that, which they did, though Keltham's first defense, that his utility function was what it was, had not been a friendly one, or inviting of further argument.  But they did eventually convince Keltham that, especially if you weren't sure you could call in other help or get attention or successfully drag the child's body towards help, if that child actually did drown - meaning the child's true life was at stake - then it would make sense to jump in right away, not take the extra risk of waiting another quarter-minute to strip off your clothes, and bill the child's parents' insurance for the cost.  Or at least, that was where Keltham shifted his position, in the face of that argumentative pressure.

Some kids, at that point, questioned the Watcher about this actually being a pretty good point, and why wouldn't anyone just bill the child's parents' insurance.

To which the Watcher asked them to consider hypothetically the case where insurance refused to pay out in cases like that, because it would be too easy for people to set up 'accidents' letting them bill insurances - not that this precaution had proven to be necessary in real life, of course.  But the Watcher asked them to consider the Least Convenient Possible World where insurance companies, and even parents, did need to reason like that; because there'd proven to be too many master criminals setting up 'children at risk of true death from drowning' accidents that they could apparently avert and claim bounties on.

Well, said Keltham, in that case, he was going right back to taking another fifteen seconds to strip off his super-expensive clothes, if the child didn't look like it was literally right about to drown.  And if society didn't like that, it was society's job to solve that thing with the master criminals.  Though he'd maybe modify that if they were in a possible-true-death situation, because a true life is worth a huge number of labor-hours, and that part did feel like some bit of decision theory would say that everyone would be wealthier if everyone would sacrifice small amounts of wealth to save huge amounts of somebody else's wealth, if that happened unpredictably to people, and if society was also that incompetent at setting up proper reimbursements.  Though if it was like that in real life instead of the Least Convenient Possible World, it would mean that Civilization was terrible at coordination and it was time to overthrow Governance and start over.

This time the smarter kids did not succeed in pushing Keltham away from his position, and after a few more minutes the Watcher called a halt to it, and told the assembled children that they had been brought here today to learn an important lesson from Keltham about self-integrity.

Keltham is being coherent, said the Watcher.

Keltham's decision is a valid one, given his own utility function (said the Watcher); you were wrong to try to talk him into thinking that he was making an objective error.

It's easy for you to say you'd save the child (said the Watcher) when you're not really there, when you don't actually have to make the sacrifice of what you spent so many hours laboring to obtain, and would you all please note how none of you even considered about whether or not to spend a quarter-minute stripping off your clothes, or whether to try to bill the child's parents' insurance.  Because you were too busy showing off how Moral you were, and how willing to make Sacrifices.  Maybe you would decide not to do it, if the fifteen seconds were too costly; and then, any time you spent thinking about it, would also have been costly; and in that sense it might make more sense given your own utility functions (unlike Keltham's) to rush ahead without taking the time to think, let alone the time to strip off your expensive fragile clothes.  But labor does have value, along with a child's life; and it is not incoherent or stupid for Keltham to weigh that too, especially given his own utility function - so said the Watcher.

Keltham did have enough dignity, by that point in his life, not to rub it in or say 'told you so' to the other children, as this would have distracted them from the process of updating.

The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts - not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that.  Something with a utility function, if it values an apple 1% more than an orange, if offered a million apple-or-orange choices, will choose a million apples and zero oranges.  The division within most people into selfish and unselfish components is not like that, you cannot feed it all with unselfish choices whatever the ratio.  Not unless you are a Keeper, maybe, who has made yourself sharper and more coherent; or maybe not even then, who knows?  For (it was said in another place) it is hazardous to non-Keepers to know too much about exactly how Keepers think.

It is dangerous to believe, said the Watcher, that you get extra virtue points the more that you let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part.  If you were older, said the Watcher, if you were more able to dissect thoughts into their parts and catalogue their effects, you would have noticed at once how this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won, because, you're meant to think, people don't need expensive clothing - although somebody who's spent a lot on expensive clothing clearly has some use for it or some part of themselves that desires it quite strongly.

It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself (said the Watcher), and your flaw is not that you made the wrong choice between the two pieces, it was that you hammered one of those pieces down.  Even though with a bit more thought, you could have at least seen the options for being that piece of yourself too, and not too expensively.

And much more importantly (said the Watcher), you failed to understand and notice a kind of outside assault on your internal integrity, you did not notice how this parable was setting up two pieces of yourself at odds, so that you could not be both at once, and arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.

"If I'd actually wanted you to twist yourselves up and burn yourselves out around this," said the Watcher, "I could have designed an adversarial lecture that would have driven everybody in this room halfway crazy - except for Keltham.  He's not just immune because he's an agent with a slightly different utility function, he's immune because he instinctively doesn't switch off a kind of self-integrity that everyone else in this class needs to learn to not switch off so easily."

It was a proud day for Keltham and a formative one, that dath ilan had acknowledged that the alien in their midst might have his uses.  Like making it slightly easier to demonstrate a useful children's lesson for a class full of the smarter and more altruistic kids who would actually grow up to matter.  But even so, there's a difference between growing up in a world that has no place for you and no use for you and respects nothing about you, versus a world which has a place for you and some use for you and ever really actually admits you can get some things right a little faster.

Keltham doesn't review all that in his mind.  There isn't enough time left on the Owl's Wisdom for that.

The other thing he sees, from up here, is the point that his mind was put together the way it is, including the part where he's a kid who doesn't have to rush down the Path to stare at things like the truth that he couldn't have made a difference in dath ilan, and including the part where his contribution to diversity is pursuing the Way of being selfish and the things that selfish people can see faster than others, his whole self was put together, based on the assumption that he's in dath ilan, where, if Keltham is like that, terrible things won't happen to him.

Or to other people.

Golarion isn't dath ilan.

His entire self and personality and emotional balance was assembled around beliefs that might not still be true.  Probably aren't true.

Keltham doesn't try to make any big decisions right now, he shouldn't, that's not what you do when you're on a new mind-affecting drug that is promising all kinds of startling revelations about yourself and what a foolish wrong person you've been.  But it's something that he needs to think about after the spell wears off.

Drowning child, Keltham writes on the paper.  Sorry.

The spell doesn't wear off immediately after he writes it, because reality isn't dramatic like that.

He spends the remaining time looking around himself for other hidden thoughts instead, because that is the sensible thing to do, and when your Wisdom goes up by two local standard deviations, doing the sensible thing has a greater intuitive force because you can actually see how it is sensible and why.

And then the spell wears off.

He spends a while just breathing evenly, trying to absorb the full force of the blow he's taken, which is also a recommended procedure.

Flowers for mouse, he thinks, and doesn't bother to write it on the paper, because it's not a message from the Wiser Keltham, and he doesn't even really feel that way, it's just his brain completing a cliche.

They - also say you're not supposed to throw away and revise your entire personality at once - and he is still himself, he is still Keltham, he is not an average dath ilani carrying out a LARP assignment of being more selfish than average, he is actually the person who didn't need to be taught self-integrity and who wanted to be paid for helping somebody else.  If he decides to change things, it will have to be built around who Keltham is, a person who is not an average dath ilani.  And an average dath ilani would have to make changes too, if they were here.  Only a Keeper is supposed to be built out of pure sharp coherent abstractions that could walk from one world to another and not need to change their clothes along the way.

The part of himself that's terrified he's going to suddenly admit that everything he holds dear was a factual mistake and turn himself into an average dath ilani in dath ilan, is - probably right to be terrified in some ways, because in many particular dimensions that's a kind of decision that his Wiser self left open as a possibility, and he can't unsee or unremember things he should have been too young and stupid to see.  But he is not supposed to turn into an average dath ilani in dath ilan.  He needs to be Keltham in Golarion.

Why didn't they warn him?

Because people in Golarion get Owl's Wisdom cast on them once every six months, and they've never experienced what it's like to have gone your whole life without Owl's Wisdom?

Somehow Keltham doesn't think that's it.

It's a piece of - something wrong, something he doesn't know, something he believes that's false - about this entire situation, this entire world.  People not quite behaving like obvious models say they should.

...or they just have so little internal stuff that is actually powered by self-reflection that not very much happens to them when they suddenly get amplified reflection?

No, that also feels like one of those weird excuses that Keltham was coming up with inside, to dismiss puzzle pieces.

Keltham does feel - annoyed, on some level, injured even, that there weren't more warning signs.  He thought he was getting a perception boost or maybe the equivalent of +0.1sd at some innate mental quality, not this.  Or, well, no, he didn't have that much of a model, he didn't really think about it at all, he didn't ask, because he was still mentally living in a world where everything that can hit you really hard has a clearly attached warning sign that Civilization put there.

But it's also not the sort of thing that you should just allow to happen, if you are running a massive complicated scam on the alien visitor.  Unless you figure that you can't really stop him from casting Owl's Wisdom on himself so you might as well just let it happen?  They could've told him it would only last ten seconds and then sneakily hit him with a Dispel Magic, he knows that's a standard magic, it was in the books.

Keltham can feel that he's thinking little dissonant pieces of thoughts grinding against themselves, and he knows that if he had Owl's Wisdom back, he would be able to see how and why they were grinding against themselves and sort them out much more easily.

Maybe if he casts this spell on himself once per day, and practices thinking the way he practiced cantrips, he'll be able to - well, turn into a more Keeperlike version of himself.

If he wants that.

Well, no, he's pretty sure he doesn't want that.

If he chooses it anyways.

There is - something dangerous, Keltham thinks, about having a sense of perspective, if too much of it comes on too quickly - there is seeing yourself, and the shadow of everything you've done, from the perspective where it is smaller and stupider - even the parts of you that provided all of your drive and your will and your sense of enjoyment in life, maybe not as ill things in themselves, but arranged stupidly - and with no better way to arrange them being obvious, as yet, because you were only wiser for something less than eight minutes.  Of which you spent half that time practicing spellcasting.

He is - not looking forwards as much, to his date with Carissa tonight, as he was an hour ago.  Because he's looked back and reflected on himself, and on the whole headlong rush forwards that is a defining quality of Mad Investor Chaos.  And now he is, in fact, thinking questioning thoughts about whether it is really in his own long-term self-interest - or yes the interest of a bunch of drowning children that he does care about literally at all even if he wants to be paid for saving them - for him to prioritize having sex with his research harem as one of his top goals on his second day in another universe.

Should he actually be hesitant about that?  It doesn't make sense, does it?  He should not, in the face of this shock, have suddenly turned into a standard dath ilani.  He is still himself, he should still have the parts of himself that are hyped for a date with Carissa.  Being hit with a temporary spell should not have changed those internal parts.  And if now his self is in a weird internal state of strife that prevents him from ever having any fun again - then he is pretty sure a Keeper would tell him that this is not the optimal way to get smashed and rearranged by a temporary reflectivity-increasing mind-affecting drug.