Carissa is unsure why he keeps reminding her of that!! She has never forgotten it even for half a second!! "If he has an objection it'll be a Kelthamish - it'll be that they ought to be really good candidates for a loan if they've got a guaranteed high salary for the next month, or something like that. But the loan process is probably complicated when the job is completely secret and also you can't honestly say you expect to have it in a month and also you can't go to the bank to do it, and also he expects us to be incompetent at things, if I say that loans on future income aren't really a thing he will just make his general face about Golarion. Look, I am not willing to die so I can wear an intelligence headband more, if I thought it would help for me to take it off around him I'd take it off around him, but it's around him that I keep being not quick enough and smart enough to manage things, I can't reason it out cleverly in advance and then just execute while slightly stupider because I don't get him well enough  to predict his exact reactions yet. If when I put the headband on I actually suddenly can predict him in advance then I'll take it off around him but Abarco can't predict him in advance and he's got a plus 4 -"

He casts an orison that lashes her in the face, hard enough to do an exactly trivial amount of damage to a third-circle wizard.  Hell wouldn't have instructed them to punish Sevar no less than she earned, if she was never going to earn any punishments.  "Keep me informed of your judgments.  Don't argue them at me.  You're very obviously driven to get an intelligence headband and wear it, Sevar.  There's justifications for that, good enough to get me to go along with it.  It's also a very standard form of wizard bullshit, and the way that you will argue with your superiors about this one topic makes it clear that you are a very standard wizard in this regard."

"We're done here.  Sevar, with me, Balaguerre, make sure someone's around who can cast Fox's Cunning on her when she requests it."

If it's only wizards that think it's important to be smarter then maybe that's what's wrong with the church of Asmodeus in Golarion. Keepers would want to be smarter, she bets - they'd be careful about it but they'd want it -

She keeps this to herself. 

Maillol is heading back to his office.  Once they're out of range of the security office - if not of security - he speaks again.  "Word of warning, Sevar.  Keltham is right that our usual schools teach people what to think, not how to think, and I should hardly need to say that the reason is that if they did their own thinking they'd fuck it up.  Unless your vision succeeds far beyond what any reasonable person would expect, a Chelish academy based on Keltham-style teaching is going to have two kinds of people in it:  Priests of Asmodeus, and citizens valuable enough that they qualify for our very limited soul-sale slots.  If I'd realized that faster we could've brought in older women who'd already sold their souls, and not used up a hell of a lot of our project's slack on having a bunch of baby wizards do it, but what's done is done."

"I may be reading too much into Hell's instructions - we get told not to put too much weight on exact wordings that passed through three increasingly less intelligent devils on their way from Asmodeus to us - but it seems to me that Asmodeus gave you four instructions in order, and they may have been an order of priority.  Serve Him well in this world, don't fall to heresy, figure out the differences between yourself and an axiomite, and become the kind of soul Asmodeus wishes mortals were and join His most treasured possessions.  If all we learn from Keltham is tricks for smelting vast quantities of high-quality metal, it will not, in fact, make this project a failure in the eyes of Church and Queen, even if that falls short of your own ambitions for it."

" - understood." But what if you could teach them a better what to think, one that held together against more of their own impulses - but he's right, that no one else can reasonably bet on that just off Carissa wanting it and Asmodeus thinking Carissa worth steering. 

"You're not accustomed to being in the inner circle where you are expected to do your own thinking and put your life on the line for getting it right.  Usually people get brought into it less abruptly than you, and it's possible I'm going to get called up on having trusted you more than you earned, contrary to Hell's instructions.  My belief is that you earned it by understanding Keltham better than Abarco does, but you also haven't held that much responsibility before and my decision to dump it on you is going to look lethally questionable if you fuck it up.  I cannot guarantee that I wasn't influenced by knowing, or thinking I knew, that you were a competent enough person to come to the momentary attention of a god.  Asmodeus help us all if He was trying to tell us exactly not to do what I just did, by trusting you more than you'd earned.  But we also got told to trust you no less than you'd earned, so."

"That's all to frame an important point, Sevar, which is that the theological discussions that Asmodean priests hold among themselves are different from the way you learned theology out in the cold.  We do not sound like fucking Keltham, because we are not fucking outsiders.  But if a new priest has an affinity for slavery, and a fifth-circle priest specializes in tyranny, the fifth-circle priest doesn't tell her to shut up and write down the standard answers he gives her about slavery."

"From the standpoint of tyranny, feeling gratitude for Asmodeus owning us is how we tell the common people to feel about it, because it's a simple fucking answer that won't get them in trouble.  Occasionally, though, Asmodeus goes and makes a bed-slave His cleric, which shows that His true priorities do not always match those that we harried and overworked mortals try to set.  We almost always decide to wait on perfecting souls into the exact shape Asmodeus prefers until they get safely to Hell.  Asmodeus cares in ways we don't even try to care, because it's not productive when we try to do it.  If that bed-slave feeling some exact form of gratitude for being a slave was a vital part of what our Lord wishes mortals were like, you may need to wait for a priest who understands slavery more deeply than I do, to tell you that, because instructing me in those details wasn't the Church's own priority for a Worldwound administrator."

"You have tyranny questions?  I can answer those in endless detail, and you'd be stupid to argue until you understand Asmodeanism a lot better.  But I will be checking some of the answers I gave you about slavery and pride, the next time I run into a superior of mine who has a moment.  That's as much priority as I'd give to a fourth-circle priest asking me those questions, if the fourth-circle priest didn't tell me they were more urgent."

"Final warning.  Don't get lost in all these fascinating questions you're supposed to think about for the first time.  Asmodeus instructed you to serve Him well in this world first."

"Are we done, Sevar?  I'll still be here if you have more questions another day, and you said Keltham was waiting on you."  Maillol thinks and hopes this is exactly as much slack for interrupting him as he'd cut a fourth-circle cleric on urgent project business who was interrupting him for the first time.

She does not exactly feel readier to answer Keltham. "We're done."

"Go with Hell's unusually personal blessing, Sevar."  He taps her with the Guidance orison for the little bit that's worth.

"Was someone going to get me a Fox's Cunning -"

And then someone does, by jabbing her in the shoulder. After this she's going to need to work on having a better working relationship with Abarco. 

Fox's Cunning feels good, it feels right, and she's been told to correct for that, she's been told it's a flaw common to wizards, and she's not willing to trade her life for more of it so she's going to do what she was told and not reach for it more than she already has. 

She closes her eyes and tries to drive out everything except the questions she has to answer tonight. 

First, serve Asmodeus in this world. Get close to Keltham, close enough that when he gets sick of Cheliax he takes you with him. Hold things together for long enough to learn new things about metalworking, new things about everything else that makes dath ilan prosperous, but keep in mind that the thinking is not the priority for the Chelish government or the Church. They might be making a mistake, and Carissa might be poised to correct them, but they probably aren't making a mistake, and they won't believe her now.

- she has the option of telling Keltham that. Not tonight, but it's a thought to tuck away for later, it's not damning, that the Chelish government trusts the metalworking to lead somewhere useful more than the habits of mind. 

- Keltham's sideways habits of inference are not, in fact, sideways, they're going to be a perfectly natural outgrowth of the things he's taught them in class, right now 'you don't know what he'll infer from a given bit of information' might be the best unenhanced Carissa can do but she needs that to stop being true as quickly as possible, replaced with the exact habits of inference herself, and it might not even be the best unenhanced Carissa can do; it's certainly not the best she can do now. In fact her mind is now rather spamming possibilities. Keltham thinks in - some theory of human psychology that extends from education to sex, it has gears even if she doesn't know them.  He doesn't think sideways, he thinks in theories that make things be connected.  He arrived in Golarion and noticed that it wasn't all women and went up to the theory about sex balances and where they came from and down again to know that mortals weren't made by gods.  He noticed that people were wearing fixed cheerful expressions in class and went up to some theory about people and down again to how those kinds of people might be having sex.  Carissa deeply wants to know this theory.  Carissa manages to wrench her attention away from how much she wants to know this theory.  Keltham wouldn't be stuck thinking about that if he didn't want to be, she's seen inside his mind.

Keltham thinks in equilibriums; he notices when a strategy seems possible to deviate profitably from without being punished. Keltham is from a societal context where competence at deception is not itself a valuable thing to signal, because deception is basically frowned upon in every context. Last one feels most immediately fruitful, though it's easier than it was a moment ago to hold the other ones apart and not subtly downgrade them in her mind because she's started following the third. Keltham didn't parse them as 'signaling competence at deception' because you signal things you want people to know about and even if you want to be deceptive you wouldn't want people to know you want to be deceptive. Whereas in Cheliax - wait, check, is this only true in Cheliax, because if not she'd better not say it -

- she should have a specific other country in mind when she tells Keltham how Cheliax works. Now that she thinks of it it seems very obvious. Keltham will be incredulous and disbelieving even about things she knows to be functional equilibriums, but that doesn't mean that every lie she can think of telling is equally credible as a functioning equilibrium. Societies are complicated and she can't invent 'Cheliax but LN', but she can tell Keltham how some place he wouldn't flee from works. Taldor is the obvious one. She doesn't know all that much about Taldor but she's met people from there, and it's culturally descended from Cheliax unlike Osirion or some place where she can't represent how the people there would explain themselves. The main thing everyone knows about Taldor is that it has a weak crown and too many dukes and counts who think too highly of themselves, and it's been wracked with civil war periodically for a long time, not falling only because the crown is old, and rich, and can hold Oppara where their power is invested no matter the madness that goes on beyond its walls. Quick check: has she claimed anything about Cheliax actively contradicted by that. She doesn't think so. Has anyone else - 

- she can delegate that, she has authority here -

"I need someone to check whether anyone has said anything to Keltham that would be inconsistent with Cheliax being approximately Taldor in political organization and culture until the Church backed the right side in the most recent civil war and Hell sent some people to try to shape the crown up."

And now she's followed that train of thought far enough and needs to pull back and contemplate an entirely different one - she can see, from here, how she's been neglecting that before, going with her intuition until it is actually surprised or contradicted somewhere -

- Keltham has a general theory of human nature that is surprised by Golarion, not just by Cheliax, so he's missing something, and it'd be useful to figure out what, both because she might want to tell him and because it'll help with verisimilitude. He's missing - and her mind is spamming possibilities again, not that she's confident in any of them - that people signal negative qualities. That people prefer for other people to lose; that people have values actively incompatible with other people getting what they want, that people are bad enough at thinking that trying to make them think about something is dangerous - many of these are too specifically Chelish -

This would be much simpler if she could make Keltham tell her all the theories he uses to understand people.  Maybe she can sell her superior - or just the one superior, now - on the theory that if they ask Keltham to explain those parts, Keltham will be easier to fool.

- set that aside too, flagged as maybe possibly coming from the part of her that is tempted to trade off lifespan against intelligence headbands.

Keltham has learned more from them than they've learned from him.  He is surprised by Golarion, he is missing something, he underadjusts or overadjusts or adjusts along completely wrong dimensions but he's notably much less wrong than he was a day ago, already. They will not be able to hide things in the vast fog of his confusion for very long, because he is narrowing it. 

They should tell him less, if they possibly can.  They should say it's not the priority that gets their project more support and headbands delivered earlier.  They should say they don't know.  They should find legitimately very important questions they can ask Keltham instead of spending lots of time explaining things to him.  She should find something simple to say to him about sex, that's true everywhere in Golarion, and only later, if ever, ask him to explain theories.

It's not a pleasant thought, not the answer that she wanted inside at all, and Carissa might not have managed to think it before she saw inside Keltham's head.

Fox's Cunning wears off and leaves her - tired. And in a bad mood. And now she - still doesn't feel any closer to figuring out what to say to Keltham - but she remembers the direction she'd found when she was smarter, and she knows perfectly well how being smarter works, that it's a glimpse of a person you want to grow up to be, even if you have to be dragged kicking and screaming, because it's not always pleasant for the tiny stupid things that humans are to grow into bigger smarter things...

"Is he still on the roof."

        "Yes," Elias says irritably.

She hurries.

It got a little cold and lonely up on the roof without Carissa to lean against.

Keltham solved this problem by going down, wandering around randomly for a bit, not seeing any security anywhere he looked, calling out for "Security?" in a not especially loud voice, seeing somebody step around a corner a third of a minute later, and, you know, you would think that if this whole place had elaborate tunnels in the walls for security to hide, and that was being kept secret and not told to him, they would be hiding this fact by having some visible security officers but fine.  Anyways, Keltham then asked if there was such a thing as magic to keep him warm, since the roof had no obvious switchable infrared-lamp-heaters, and the problem got solved.

After that, the roof was about as good a place to think as his bedroom, with an increased probability of later Carissa materialization.

Keltham is currently wondering if maybe Golarion just sort of... collectively lacks the form of Law-aspiring thought where, if you have a problem, you try to think of a way you could rearrange reality such that you wouldn't have the problem anymore.

It would explain everything he's seen, in one sense.  But explains too many things he hasn't seen, in another.  Somebody invented stairs as a solution to the problem of climbing to the roof, thereby falsifying the general form of the theory.  Maybe that was before they invented wizard-based contraception and bred intelligence out of themselves, though?  Or maybe devils told them how to make stairs.

(He's aware it's not a very plausible theory.  But sometimes when you don't get something, it can be productive to play with impossible theories, or even frustrated yelling at reality, in case that knocks something loose; so long as you don't just keep on doing that.)

"Hey you. - oh, it's warm up here."

Oh, good.  "It was getting too cold for me all by myself without you, so I reacted to this unsatisfactory state of reality by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alterative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, which led to me asking a security officer if there was any magic for staying warm."

(By a similar line of reasoning, Keltham was considering sex with Ione if Carissa never returned and he felt sufficiently disappointed about that.)

What is that supposed to mean???


"Well, I reacted to the unsatisfactory state of reality where I had no idea how to communicate to you about sex by visualizing alternative and better ways reality could coherently be, and seeing if any of those alternative states of affairs were attainable by my actions, and getting advice from someone smarter, and the conversation ended up mostly being about other things but I do have an explanation about the sex thing. Does dath ilan have social deception games?"

"We sure do have games with social deception, and parts of society where it's understood to be fun if we let things play out in a - competitive, deceptive way - but we try to keep it out of science and commerce and management and politics, or any other context where getting it right matters more than getting it fun.  Both kinds of sexual negotiation exist, but in dath ilan it'd always be very clear which kind of sexual negotiation you were in at any given time."

"Okay. In Golarion people mostly do the games-with-social-deception kind of sex, and I wasn't actually planning to because my incentives are very strongly tilted against accidentally confusing or alarming or upsetting you, but we don't strictly delineate them and I wasn't assuming you weren't planning to, and I was slightly worried the entire concept is one Good people don't invent. I am glad that they do, they'd be missing out on a lot of fun."

"I do not, in fact, understand the thought process whereby this was a sufficiently worrying thought that you needed to consult your best local equivalent of a Keeper, but it's okay that I don't understand that - I don't expect to understand everything for a fair while - and you don't need to explain it in any more detail, if you'd rather do other things with our time.  I express clear acceptance and affordance for you to suddenly need to go check with Keepers while talking to the alien, whether it was yourself you were trying to protect by doing that, or me."

"I don't know whether my own statement there makes any psychological sense to you, as something that a person would naturally say in my position, but it's a sincere speech-act for whatever that's worth."

"I think I understood around the edges of it. If I'd properly had that thought in so many words I would've just said it but instead I just noticed the confusion and all of the attempts I generated to communicate it started a hundred steps back in very confusing territory, which I am going to blame on all this talking to an alien miscalibrating me about how impossible to expect communication to be. And now I think I do want to do other things with our time, if you want to."

"Sounds good to me.  Retrieve an item from the conversational recursion layers all the way back to dath ilani sex technology questions, or pick up somewhere else?"

"Sex technology! Is there sex technology for turning into a dragon so you can have sex as a dragon."

He leans back against her, like when they were on this part of the conversational stack before, restoring the state of the earlier function call.

"Probably not, and I'm considering how close somebody has gotten, but first I need to know what a 'dragon' might be."

"They are reptilian, magic - what we call sorcerers, they don't have to shape the magic deliberately, they can do it from intuition - and don't die of old age, they just keep growing larger. Ancient ones are a thousand feet long, and wouldn't be able to fly at all if they weren't very very magic by that point. ....usually people Polymorphing into dragons to have sex go for smaller ones, because Polymorphing things much larger and more magical than your native form requires very powerful spells. They breathe fire, or spit acid, or various other nasty things depending on planar affinities."

"Yeah, we can't actually do that.  Closest anybody would've come materially would be building a giant mechanical thing that could have sex with you or that you could control to fuck somebody.  And though it's sort of a cheating answer, well, cheating is technique, so:  I expect that the closest people have come to that experience is that there's probably some set of drugs you can get in a Shop of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods which will let you, I don't know, put on a costume or stare at a moving picture, and experience that you are a dragon with some amount of hallucinatory sensory remapping.  But if I have to resort to saying that's how we'd do it, then you win in terms of the technology question."

"To be fair I can't personally do that either! As a mere third circle wizard I can turn into any woman you've ever met or heard of but only for six minutes and they have to be humanoid."

"Okay, I hopefully won't have to suddenly go meta too often, but for purposes of rapidly learning how romance works around here, that was totally a probe to find out what kind of women I find physically attractive, right?  Where the fact that you can and will call any bluffs by transforming into that person forces me to be honest.  And on my side, I can choose between flattering you by listing women who look more like you, or teasing you by listing, say, Lrilatha?  Because that would - not that this is a problem or anything - that would definitely be Complicated Romance rather than Straightforward Romance in dath ilan."

"- huh. That's - Straightforward Romance around here, Complicated Romance involves hiring specialized seduction devils to test peoples' monogamy commitments who've made them or something. Anyway I don't have much riding on being your type because every girl you're going to find here's got light brown skin and dark brown eyes and hair. ...saying Lrilatha would be a Complicated Romance response because the possibility is real that she'd hear about it, I think maybe my mental delineation is whether we have introduced non-romance stakes..." She's kind of bad at...not telling Keltham things....this is a bad thing to be bad at!!!