"Chelish version of dignity, like being cheerful in a classroom setting?"

" - yeah. More centrally this than the cheerfulness in class thing, I think. Not - communicating with your emotions or expressions anything you wouldn't consciously decide to communicate with your words. If they wouldn't send you a reply saying "sure, but I think that's extremely weird of you", and they wouldn't, then they also won't make a "that's extremely weird" face where you can see it."

"There is some really basic thing here about social equilibria which I'm missing, and under other circumstances I'd delay it for later but I'm worried that I will somehow do something that Cheliax considers not just undignified but a catastrophic negative indicator, if I don't figure it out."

"Meanwhile in dath ilan, there is famous motion-capture of, like, the head Keeper for the entire planet looking surprised on being told experimental results, because it's way, way, way beneath her dignity to pretend that she's not surprised when in fact she is surprised."

"But, I mean, if everybody here knows that people are - faking things, as we'd see it - then it's not even a failed attempt at deception because everybody knows what's actually happening so it's not even deceptive and there is some very odd equilibrium here that I am not getting at all."

"I think that if someone was very emotionally expressive in a situation where Chelish people generally don't do emotional communication then we might think they were - immature, or not fully in control of themselves, or - trying to make a demand via the emotional expressiveness, the way you might do exaggerated emotions to make fun of someone or make a point to a very small child or to make it impossible for people to engage with anything else... people are capable of adjusting for other people being from other places, though, and you're not emotionally expressive to a degree where it has come up already..."

"But then your -"  Taldane, of course, does not contain the word for signaling-equilibrium.  "I mean, I get how it's often advantageous to conceal information, there's all kinds of -"  Taldane does not contain a word meaning 'zero-sum interaction'.  "There's situations where you do worse if the other person does better, like, negotiating prices, you wouldn't want somebody bargaining with you to know your -"  Taldane doesn't have the word true-reserve-price.  "The lowest price you'd actually accept, if it's lower than they'd expect for some reason.  So concealment, sure, in cases where the other person knows you might be hiding something but what matters is that they don't know exactly what you're hiding.  But when it comes to uniformly faking false signals - I mean, if everyone, like all the students in the classroom, is always wearing a cheerful expression even when they're not cheerful, that's not a -"  Taldane lacks every single component word of the compound term meaning 'an equilibrium where signals preserve their overt semantics given the incentives for both signal-senders and signal-receivers'.  Keltham hates this language, and he'd ask how anybody ever thinks in it, but the answer, of course, is that they don't.

"If everyone has incentives to fool people by smiling when they're sad and frowning when they're happy, pretty soon a smile means sadness and a frown means happiness and nobody gets fooled anymore.  If everybody acts cheerful when they're not actually cheerful, people will figure that out.  It fooled me but only on literally the first day after I arrived here from another dimension without that custom, and this cannot reasonably be the -"  Taldane doesn't have the word average-use-case.  "Normal way that events happen every day.  So you have some incredibly weird equilibrium going, of a form where everyone is acting cheerful even though they know nobody will actually think they are cheerful.  Students are behaving in a way we'd interpret as being about an... adversarial... information-hiding... interaction, with their teachers, they're sending a constant first-order-misleading cheerfulness signal that everybody knows is misleading.  And I don't understand why or how you got there.  In dath ilan, well before that point, a thousand Very Serious People would show up and start arguing that Civilization was doing something silly and needed to wake up and snap out of it."

"And I know that the answer is probably weird and alien and unLawful by my standards, and complicated, and is going to take a while to explain, and not be particularly sexy, so when it comes to that whole general issue we should maybe just pick it up tomorrow.  Except that there's this one upcoming special case that seems important, which is that if I hug you in some way that makes you feel horribly uncomfortable, and Chelish dignity calls for you to send a first-order-misleading constant signal that you're having a great time, and I'm supposed to already know that's exactly what you'd do if something was wrong, and then I'm meant to act in some complicated way that makes that whole equilibrium not suck for you and that incentivizes people in your position to keep sending the first-order-misleading signal, well, in reality, I just got here from another plane, and I do not, in fact, have the faintest inkling of - do you see why I'm trying to ask about this even though we were in the middle of being romantically escalatory?"

" - because you're adorable. - sorry, that's not - I do understand what you're saying, I think. It is not the case that you're supposed to read my signals and assume my acting happy means I am actually sad and need something different. I think you're - right, that this is an extremely complicated conversation that's going to take us half a day, in the general case, and -

- and there is a person who could've arrived here instead of Keltham who'd run into that problem tonight, if, say, he said "I want to sleep with Carissa or I'll go somewhere else with the Lawfulness Revolution", and this was obviously worth it to me but not because it was going to be good for me, just because I was going to get rich by more than it was going to be bad for me. That person would get smiled at and the smile wouldn't be any information actually. But - but you're going to tell me that a dath ilani, even an Evil one, wouldn't do that, aren't you, I don't know why they wouldn't do that but you wouldn't do that -"

"I'd tell her that I'd trade sexual favors for getting equity in the revolutionary startup, if she honestly wanted to make that trade, but I wouldn't - expect her to ask for a false signal from me, and then be fooled by it?  Like, if she handed me a script for scripted sex work, I'd run her script if she paid me enough, but I'd expect her to know.  Or if it came to lying to somebody and telling her that I'm attracted to her, in hopes that she'll give me more equity, not that I'd expect she would, but - if that works at all - it works because the world is mostly full of people who don't lie about that, and those people laid the groundwork for me to fool her successfully, so those people built something and I'm stomping on it and breaking it and profiting from that, and that is something I find genuinely repellent.  I want to build my own things and profit from them.  And in this world I don't see how it works at all, because if it's the expected practice you just know I'm probably lying."

" - okay I have - some idea of how I would bridge this but it will take at least an hour and make you very sad. But also you - might actually prefer to have gotten it all before you try having sex with people here? Not - because you're going to hurt me - if you're just worried that you'll hurt me tonight I can just give you my word that I'll tell you in unambiguous words if I need anything - but because -"

Because her own brain is now screaming with confusion, about what the Asmodean version of that is, and she's getting ahead of herself trying to figure that out but also it's her job which Asmodeus gave her, how can she think about anything else -

"I can't predict you very well. I wish I could. I want to understand you as badly as I've wanted anything in my life. But I ...think I predict...that you'd want to know first. Even if it means we spend the whole night being sad. But I'm not - I don't like giving advice as confused as I am right now -"

Keltham leans back into her, hoping it's the right thing to do.  "A dath ilani in your position asks for time to think, gathers her thoughts, probably asks more questions to narrow things down about my own state of mind.  She thinks of questions to ask me, privately makes her predictions about how I'll answer, and then asks.  She isn't in a rush to arrive at answers, even short-term answers about whether or not to give a piece of advice, if she's not right in the middle of trying to - operate dangerous machinery with a time limit."

"We don't need to rush on larger timescales either.  You told me how this subplot ends, I can survive if it takes a little longer."

- what if she wants to be Lawful Neutral because Keltham is -

Well, then she'll die and go to Hell and not get to do anything cool, so she should pick a less stupid want that isn't based on a crush on a teenager. 

It doesn't feel like it's because of the crush on the teenager, it feels like the other way around.

"I'd like some time to think," she says quietly. 

"Hence the rooftop with the pretty stars."  Keltham will fall quiet after that.

They're very pretty stars. 

She will die horribly if she turns Keltham against Cheliax. Anything that's true of all Golarion isn't that, and she's pretty sure that nowhere in Golarion do powerful men want the women they're sleeping with to communicate needing things to happen differently. 

She will die horribly and worse afterwards if she ends up wholly persuaded of Keltham's worldview and not suitable as an instrument of Hell anymore. But her first foolish foray into Keltham's worldview was, Asmodeus thought, worthwhile, so - maybe she has a bit of slack there, presumably he wouldn't have expended those resources for someone who couldn't find the right path even when she was trying. And she hasn't gone and asked the cleric her questions yet. Maybe it's okay to try to understand the dath ilan way of thinking and separately try to understand the Asmodean one and then integrate them. If she can't understand dath ilan she won't be able to do her job. 

Keltham will at some point figure stuff out - not all the stuff, but some stuff. He's already figured some things out just from the fact Chelish students conceal distress during class. The ideas that look right next to each other, to him, are different; they won't be able to predict which things are right next to other things unless they get really good at dath ilan-ness themselves. To him, 'people smile during class' was right next to 'you might not actually want to be here', not that he has the imagination to have realized the ways she might be here if she didn't want to be.

It feels like there are walls closing in from all sides, and -

"Might someone consult a Keeper?" she says. "If they were dath ilani and very stuck and very confused even about the origins of their own confusion."

Keltham has likewise been staring up at the stars, pondering whether or not he regrets his life choices.  He thinks not?  He's still going to have sex with Carissa later and this way he also got to act cool and all-wise in front of her.

"I was about to say that most dath ilani have options short of paying to talk to a Keeper, like, they have some regular friends who are older than them and smarter than them.  Then I remembered you are in fact already one of the smartest people on this planet, and also you've been talking to an alien.  So yeah, in dath ilan, Governance would make Keeper assistance available to anyone in a position like that, and the dath ilani would probably escalate directly to them instead of messing around, because there's no point in... there's no point in tapping a nail with a tiny hammer when you can hit it with an enormous hammer instead."  That's not the original proverb and it doesn't make any sense as he tried to culturally translate it, but, eh, hopefully the idea came across.

"Okay. I think I need to go ask a cleric of Asmodeus for help. There's one on site and I was, in fact, told to talk to them if I wanted to, and I was going to in the morning, but I might be sufficiently stuck right now that I ought not to wait."

"Makes sense.  If they say something that doesn't make any sense in Lawful terms, you could come back and ask me about that, and then I could say something else that makes you confused again, and you could go back and forth three times and then stop."

"Or drag them up here and make them talk to you themself while I hide in a corner and listen."

"That would be cheating!  And cheating is technique!"

"Maybe the way to straighten everything up is for you to march off directly to Hell and find a door to knock on and invite Asmodeus to debate you Himself." (Almost definitely heretical???? Will accept appropriate punishments.)

"Think that's a joke but I'm not entirely sure?  I wouldn't expect to win a debate about any facts where I disagreed with a god.  Also I thought the running hypothesis was that Asmodeus can't just tell you or even his clerics all the key truths, and has no better options than pointing you at an alien who has no idea of the local non-necessary facts, but who at least has a lock on some universal validities... you know, I feel a small sense of progress about being able to say that, and having it make sense to you, where it wouldn't have made sense to you yesterday."

"Yes, sorry, that was a joke. Asmodeus can only sort of talk to the most powerful devils who can only sort of convey things to the lesser devils who can only sort of convey them to us. People do go march into Hell seeking help or advice or something sometimes but this just means bothering people like Contessa Lrilatha, there's no Asmodeus to march up to no matter how many doors you knock on. I ....think I understand a lot of things a lot better than yesterday, and I'm delighted about it, but also it means there are all these new confusions in places I was accustomed to relying on."

"Yeah, I'm not sure I can say that I've been there, but I suspect that I've recently been nearby.  If that's already happening to you, then we really need enough Owl's Wisdom cleric spells to touch everyone else in the research group once per week, or a Wisdom headband to pass around.  I suspect it's a bad idea to let people learn a ton of dath ilani technique and only then hit them with their first Owl's Wisdom."

"Seems like it might be, yeah. And if you can schedule your heretical realizations then you can also schedule your time with a cleric for right after."

"I don't think 'heretical' translated at all, it sounded like - false, only actually it's some different property a proposition can have than falsity, but still a bad one - maybe information-with-negative-value flavored?"  Because of course Taldane doesn't have 'infohazard' either... also, 'heretical' doesn't mean 'infohazardous' or it would've translated, but if it's neither false nor an infohazard then what could possibly make a proposition be a bad one... maybe it harms society but not the bearer?  But that should've translated as collective-infohazard, if the info has local benefit but negative externalities.  This pathway of communications difficulties may be finite but it sure is a long-ass one.

"It's, uh, there are a bunch of known ways that human brains misbehave when trying to understand Asmodeanism, and if you find yourself convinced of one of them you're supposed to go get it straightened out, they're false but not false like they say different things about how Hell works than normal Asmodeanism does, more false like....they use a bunch of invalid steps to get to the conclusion, which only happens to be correct because society, which is using a different reasoning process, handed it to them, and if they get too attached to their invalid stepping and run off to do further derivations those'll be just straightforwardly false."

"Particular flavor of invalidity, then."  The word 'heresy' doesn't really sound like that, though?  Well, Keltham can just avoid using the word until he actually understands it.  "I create a polite social affordance for you to run off now to the cleric, in hopes of getting everything sorted out in time to do something else with your day," such as Keltham, "or to stay and look up at the stars for longer.  Just say which."