"Oh, it's the thing where you think too much about some question humans aren't good at thinking about - or at least, some question no one has taught Golarion humans to be good at thinking about - like what you're for or who you want to be or what death will be like - and end up having the mental equivalent of the thing where you bite your lip and then have to avoid, every time you swallow, biting that exact spot again while it's swollen. 

I'll pick out an outfit for stargazing and we'll see where it takes us, how about that."

"Works for me."

"You know, the way people think in dath ilan, which probably isn't how they should think here, it's the conventional wisdom that when you can see what you're trying not to think, and it's gotten to anywhere near the point of a bitten lip you're trying not to bite again, you're supposed to just go ahead and think it."

"This probably assumes there's no rogue corn strains that eat you if you think about them.  And also that you know how to think about such things and can think about them productively.  And also that you know people older and more experienced and 4 Intelligence points smarter than you, who you can ask for help if you get in trouble.  And that you can call in a Keeper if that doesn't work."

"I think in Golarion people trying really hard to think the thoughts they're at the edges of would just end up going mad or, you know, not functional enough to do their job at which point they starve - what does dath ilan do about it if you are busy having an existential crisis and can't do your job for a month, does everyone just have a month of savings?"

"That doesn't sound like something that badly configured thoughts are supposed to do to a person.  You'd call in a Keeper before then.  What you're for, who you want to be, and what the Future makes of you after they bring you back from the dead - I wouldn't have thought those were dangerous things to think about, either.  To be clear, I am not at all under the impression that means you could tell me your problems and I'd see nondangerous things to think about them, I've been in Golarion for longer than an hour at this point."

"Somebody my age is supposed to save at least a year's expenses in investments, more if they don't have a support network or the investments are very volatile.   I was at eighteen months of runway when I boarded my fateful aeroplane, but a lot of it was in some pretty volatile investments."

"Wizards are that rich. Most people, if they unexpectedly can't earn any money for a year, die."

"Because they can't cut their expenses below what they are, to save up more of their income, without dying?  Or because they're Intelligence 10 and they can't - imagine multiple possible futures and plan for them?"

"Mostly the second thing but also it wouldn't obviously be worth it for them to cut their expenses more? Cutting their expenses more would increase their odds of dying of other things, like living in a worse apartment makes you catch malaria and cholera and so on more often and if you eat worse food then you're weaker and can't fight off illness as well. And also living on the bare minimum is kind of miserable and one might reasonably trade off some misery against some chance of dying sooner, if they don't think the misery is the useful kind that you learn from and makes you stronger."

"Right.  Afterlives.  There's no point staying on Golarion if you're not having any fun there."

"Yeah. I mean, some of the afterlives suck, but Chelish people at least can be pretty sure of their draw, and if you're done here, not a lot of point hanging around."

Keltham can feel it like an echo of Owl's Wisdom, his explicit awareness, his inability not to look in that direction, towards his perception that everything he's heard about the afterlife has been very vague; and the explicit thought now completed, that this is probably not some random innocent mistake it's okay to ignore while he plunges ahead into everything else that's more tractable.

He wishes he knew whether or not the truth about afterlives was being deliberately hidden from him by the people here, or hidden by gods from living nongods in this afterlife-feeding economy, or if this is some safer issue where it'd work fine to try harder to pin people down on details at the expense of some social capital.

He doesn't want to pin Carissa down on it, anyways.  It's not a fun pre-date topic.

"Sorry if I shouldn't ask, by the way, but I can't tell if your mention of meeting somebody more important than Contessa Lrilatha was a prompt to ask you about that if I was interested, or if it was deliberately vague to signal that I'm not supposed to ask."

"Mostly just vague because the name wouldn't mean anything to you. I met the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, the head of the church of Asmodeus on Golarion. She was laying the Forbiddance."

"Meta before I say anything work-related about that, what's the local defaults and your personal overrides for how much work you want to talk about on the dinner before a date?  Dath ilani default is that if you met somebody over work, work is assumed good to discuss while together unless somebody says otherwise; I haven't noticed a personal override over that myself."

Dath ilan does so much reasoning out which things you do instead of just reading people and noticing if you're getting your desired result. "It seems like it'd be awfully hard not to talk about work, considering," she says. "I don't mind it."

"Right, so, say anything to - Aspexia? Rugatonn? - about work?  I mean, if I'd been there I'd have asked her what we need to do to get intelligence headbands and a pair of detect-magic goggles, but there's presumably a reason she didn't deliberately give me a chance to do that, and I'll understand if you didn't want to expend your personal social capital on that."

"I did ask for a headband, that was not what she was here to talk about. I don't think they are underrating how important you are, at least."

To Keltham, that doesn't sound the least bit unlike what happens if a Legislator is passing through and didn't schedule time for your personal pet issue; that's what the whole hierarchy of Delegates, Electors, and Representatives are for.

"Yeah, not surprising.  Even the second part is more cheering than I was expecting.  Maybe not tonight, maybe more like early tomorrow, but I do want to talk to someone about - milestones, prices, what they're interested in seeing to create the promise that implies more investment as a correct course of action, what it takes to get resources like magic goggles and at least one intelligence headband and wisdom headband to pass around.  Or failing that, if there's enough other clerics here who can go in with me on second-circle cleric spells, for purposes of hitting everyone who wants it with an Owl's Wisdom at least once before they get their head stuffed full of dath ilani skills."

"Seems like a good conversation to have." Carissa is almost certain the constraint on headbands is whether Keltham's going to destroy the world, not whether if he doesn't he'll create enough value, but probably whoever he goes to for the conversation will have figured out what to tell him. And she wants a headband very badly, so hopefully it'll even work out. 

"Know my next step on who to ask about it?  Like, not necessarily who's in charge, if you don't know, just who I ask to find out where to go?  Other people have this weird ability to find security officers that I don't actually see myself anywhere."

"I just step into hallways and call 'security' and let them show themselves."

"...right then."

You would expect this to be a comedy trope on a TV show which otherwise lacked a mechanical explanation, not the way that things worked in real life.

Is that a very un-dath-ilan way for things to work. Oh well. "I know that if we could actually go to dath ilan things would immediately start happening at a thousand times the already terrifying speed they're presently happening but I sort of wish I could wander around dath ilan not causing an international incident and just seeing what it's like."

"Oh, good prioritizing of topics.  Anybody who wants that to be a romantic conversation should probably get that in with me during the first week or two, before I get especially nostalgic or sad about something I didn't realize I'd miss.  Yeah, it's about as fantastic as you'd expect from a billion people with high intelligence and enough money to spend on making stuff be diverse and pretty.  Enormous buildings that go up into the sky for two hundred layers of living space?  We've got those.  Endless forests with houses you'd never notice, where all the roads are far enough underground that you can't even hear a murmur from the high-velocity automatic carriages moving people around at a mile a minute to their workplace or their friends' houses?  Got that.  Wind pits a hundred meters on a side so people can fly around using small wings?  Got them.  Giant supershop that's fifty of these villas in radius, which ended up as the de facto selling point for everything in Civilization that's in common enough demand to need an exhibit and rare enough to not need many of them?  Got that.  Entire cities of actors that do nothing but play out unending elaborate fantasies that people can pay to wander into for a day or a year, complete with sex workers?  Got them.  It's basically what it seems to me you should expect from people with way more money and knowledge, and zero magic or gods.  Given the premise, I don't know what if any of that you'd find surprising."

- longing sigh. "I don't know that I'm - surprised by any of those things exactly, they all sound like things people might want if they were very rich - I guess I'm confused about, if everyone's very rich, who does all the unpleasant work of digging the tunnels and hauling the garbage and being the sex workers..."

"Machines.  One person can dig a tunnel faster if they have a shovel.  Now imagine, it's like that, but there's a crew of a hundred people and eighty tunneling machines who show up and dig all the tunnels for the city you're going to build, over the course of a week.  Garbage gets tossed down a self-cleaning chute where it lands in containers that get carried away by vehicles that travel around automatically without any humans operating them."

"Sex workers aren't scalable that way because, like, Civilization has made a decision not to scale orgasm production?  But I don't know why you'd consider that an unpleasant job - anyone who sells sex is going to sell it at a price that makes them glad to trade it, right, and people who'd need huge prices to be happy aren't going to be the most competitive sex workers?  Wait this is going to be awful Golarion news and I should be trying to guess it before you say it but I find that I don't actually want to."

"Do you want me to not say it, Cheliax isn't one of the countries where women don't have rights so you don't actually need to know."