"Prestidigitation works fine on books, Ione. ....was that less true when the herald of Nethys Takaral was alive. Maybe it was. Anyway, my room is fine."

Off they head. 

She closes the door behind her and has her Unseen Servant bop around failing to bump into any invisible people, just because it's what a fourth-circle wizard would do. "Ione requested we meet," she says for Pilar's benefit, and looks at Ione expectantly.

"Repeating for Pilar's benefit:  I managed to keep Keltham from immediately exploding all the minds of all the Asmodeans in class, today, but I don't think it's a good look when everybody else is frozen up in fear of heresy.  I can be the one who interrupts Keltham since it's my library, but the others need to stop going quiet or he's going to notice.  Sevar talks because she's confident she has the authority to decide to do that.  I'm thinking maybe Pilar can be confident enough to speak up too."

"Is there a plan for not having everybody's minds collapse?  I also asked Pilar along because she's the third person in class who isn't going to have her mind explode if Keltham rips apart everything designed to make Asmodeans not realize how much they don't want to go to Hell."

"Thank you for that very constructive frame for the discussion, Ione." 'thank you' is only used sarcastically, in Cheliax. "I don't think the core problem is that people don't want to go to Hell. Maillol is a fifth circle cleric of Asmodeus and he said he's not looking forward to it; therefore, it's fine for people to not look forward to it, though I think when they actually get good at reasoning they will look forward to it because they'll want to get even better. But mileage might vary. There is a very real possibility that nine out of ten people exposed to dath ilanism just become very miserable about going to Hell and can't get over it, and it'd be worth it even with attrition rates that high, but - but I don't expect that? I expect that whatever arguments Contessa Lrilatha believes are true and we just have to get people through the rough patch where they don't know those yet and do know enough to think themselves in a million dangerous directions."

"Works on you.  Works on Pilar.  I find myself not even slightly tempted to ask Lord Nethys to take back His grip on my soul so that I can go to Hell and be improved through horrible pain that causes me to not even remember my human name when they're done, instead of sitting in an enormous library relearning magic takaral.  Besides you two, I doubt anybody else in class except maybe Meritxell is somebody who would actually want that."

"Essentially all of the Asmodeanism that I was ever taught is, in fact, a tissue of things that are obvious lies or bad reasoning or downright meaningless as soon as you're allowed to think about them.  Keltham didn't get far into forcing everyone to think about it, because I shut him down, which I could do because I'm not going to Hell and don't have to believe in any of that anymore, meaning I already watched it all collapse inside me and I could see the direction Keltham was pushing people.  So it didn't explode today, but Keltham's not going to just not teach that stuff without a reason, and even given a reason, I bet dath ilanism doesn't actually work without it."

"The entire project that I have been set is coming up with a dath ilanism that actually works and is true, which is compatible with the fact that all of us will go to Hell and that it is written into the contract of Creation that eventually everyone will go to Hell. dath ilanism is a set of tools, and it ought to be possible to use them whatever world you find yourself in, and we find ourselves in a world where we belong to Asmodeus, and reasoning doesn't stop working when that's true. It'd be an enormous weakness in Law, if you couldn't use it if you were going to go to Hell."

She can feel herself not fully using her brain to have this argument, though.

"Anyway, we have some latitude for - like, if we end up concluding that Hell needs improvement - well, it's an imperfect expression of Our Lord's will, and He wants this project so he wants the kinds of souls this project outputs and if necessary we'll figure out how to ensure they are adequately accommodated in Hell."

"If that's the vision you expect to convince my classmates - and let's be clear, I find myself not even slightly tempted to turn my back on Lord Nethys for it - then you'd better start thinking of how to inspire everyone with it before Keltham explodes their minds."

"My sense is that Lord Nethys looks favorably on this project with Asmodeus, but I am not certain of His plans.  If at some point it looks like failure is inevitable I will begin considering the prospect that Nethys means me to stay with Keltham after this blows up.  I'll continue to try to shut down Keltham when I think he's about to explode people, unless countermanded by you.  But not if it gets to the point where I think I'm making myself look bad to him and hindering a plan by Lord Nethys to have me accompany Keltham elsewhere."

"What happened in class today was Lord Nethys pulling your asses out of the lava.  If I hadn't been there, or Nethys hadn't oracled me, everybody in there would have sat in place frozen in shock at the heresy and too worried about appearances to Keltham to say anything, while Keltham kept talking, until somebody broke and had to be Dominated.  I can't fix this, I can only slow it down and give you time."

"I've said my piece, and if you'd nothing more of me, I can go.  I can copy Invisibility off a Security."

Sigh. "I might run some versions by you, once it's more developed. Go."

She's gone, quietly impressed that Sevar manages to take criticism that well.

Is she nervous?  Only slightly.  Knowing that Nethys can still see the future leads her to have a lot of faith in His plans.  At worst, this all explodes, the Asmodeans kill her or her library curse kills her, and then Nefreti Clepati brings her back and sends her over to wherever Keltham went.

"I obviously stand ready to torture or kill her if that'd be helpful."

Pilar says it more because she thinks she ought to, than because she means it.  Something in Ione's words shook the same part of her that had the thought, in Elysium, about it being better if only people who wanted to go to Hell went to Hell.

"I wish," says Carissa. She's feeling shaken too. 

"Why do you want to go to Hell?" Does that make her sound like she's only pretending herself. "In case Meritxell is the only one persuadable of my reasoning."

"I wasn't - very good at arguing this, when I tried to argue it to the Elysians, and the Grand High Priestess told me afterwards that it was wrong for me to have tried, because they weren't persuadable - but I'll try again -"

"Because I can't exist without somebody above me who hurts me and tells me what to do and punishes me if I don't do it, and what they tell me doesn't have to be perfect but it has to mean something.  I mean, not just anything, but - it's the Lawful part of Lawful Evil, what the punishments and the right behaviors are about.  It can't be somebody Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil who's just, using me as a slave on a farm, and not forcing me onto a right path.  It can't be someone who hurts me because they think I enjoy it and they respect my personal individual desires, like Chaotic Good, that's meaningless, that's not - about the thing that Lord Asmodeus is about."

"I don't know how to say it.  The Elysians kept arguing to me that Asmodeus didn't deserve my loyalty because He didn't care about me except as a useful thing, or at best a pretty thing to own, and, I mean, fine?  It's just very obvious to me that there's no other god I've ever heard of besides Lord Asmodeus who matches the shape of my own soul.  It's not an exchange, it's not a friendship, He's just the god of Pilars."

(though Pilar does sometimes wish that Asmodeus were a little different, in some ways, from exactly what He is)

"Well. - don't take this as an order right this second, but I want you to have ten kids, because it'd be very convenient if that were heritable. It doesn't seem - convinceable, unfortunately. Thank you, Pilar. You should go to the temple and take a punishment for listening to heresy." She's going to hope no one assigns her one, because -

- because the state of her soul is Hell's concern and the Church's is for the state of her project. 

It’s not the right order, and that’s fine.  Her superiors don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be the shape of the thing that has to be above Pilar.

“Acknowledged,” she says, and goes.

"I don't see how you can use probability to solve murders," Meritxell is saying to Keltham at lunch,  "because you'd often end up really unsure and it'd be embarrassing to act while that unsure. Are people really all right with, 'we have decided there is a seventy percent chance this is the murderer, so we're going to execute him now and be done with it'?"

A watching Security continues to think that this is hilarious, and that Meritxell does not seem to have any understanding of how to proactively seduce a high-value target.  Rather than, say, being the pretty girl at the top of her class, who just needs to repeatedly be nearby at a man until he naturally comes to desire her, and make the first move in the game she knows how to play.

"That's exactly what makes it important to have a legible legal procedure which says, we think this person has a ninety-two percent chance of being guilty, which is over the eighty-five percent threshold that all the cities use for non-souldeath murder.  So he goes to the Last Resort, which is the place that has to accept you when nowhere else would accept you any more."

"What's the alternative?  Pretend to be certain?  Pretend that a court in Golarion that claims to be totally certain of its findings, won't actually be wrong at least one time in seven if not more?  When your courts output probability judgments, you can check against the cases where the criminal files a confidential report with the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission saying what actually happened, or the cases where decisive evidence turns up later.  You can check if courts that say ninety-two percent are actually right ninety-two times out of a hundred.  What do you do when a court just claims to be right?  How could you tell how well they're doing?"

"Is it the fault of the number, seventy percent, that you're ending up unsure?  If that's what the state of the evidence is, then, that's the state of the evidence, the problem isn't the number, it's that you couldn't find evidence good enough.  Not reasoning in numbers isn't going to help you not be unsure."

" - I mean, I think I'd say if you're that unsure you keep trying to learn more, it'd be a rare murder where you couldn't be more sure if you spent more time looking. And I think courts in Golarion are far more sure than that, almost all the time, because they get confessions under truth spells."

"Yeah, I guess the charms of probability-theoretic reasoning in criminal justice might well be lost on you if you've got truthspells."

"Unless there's such a thing as people who can defeat truthspells not detectably, in which case nobody has any idea how to figure out what's true without truthspells, and they can go under the truthspell and say that the Chief Executive of Civilization ate their pet goldfish and get the Chief Executive fired.  I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that's what would happen here, I'm just saying, that's how it would go wrong in a dath ilani fantasy novel.  Happy peaceful Civilization with universal absolute honesty based on truthspells, one person figures out how to defeat them, oops everybody except the protagonist has forgotten how to think on their own and detect lies."

" - I mean, if nothing else, the Chief Executive of Civilization could say under a truth spell that he didn't eat the trained animal, and then everyone would know they had a truth spells problem."

"Fair, they'd have to be slightly more subtle than that.  Slightly.  Have you heard about this weird guy who all these important people just attack, like, yesterday he had to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense, what is up with that."

- giggle. "I think as long as less than one in a hundred people can beat a Truth Spell then you get 99 percent, which seems like a more reasonable rate, but if anyone claims that something really improbable happened, you might still figure they found a way....

Are you allowed to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense."

"We don't have truthspells so that would be an ass of a case to try to convince Civilization's courts of, I mean, our Chief Executive is selected by a process which makes it very unlikely that they'd ever try to murder anyone."

"But if we actually had perfectly reliable truthspells, then sure, obviously."

"If they're not perfectly reliable, then a one-in-a-hundred failure rate doesn't mean you get 99% good results.  The 1% of people who can defeat truthspells become criminals and bring the whole system down.  You're not dealing with crimes by random people, you're selectively more likely to run into crimes committed by people who know they can defeat truthspells.  Are there people like that in Golarion?"

"Are there people who can defeat truthspells? Not that I know of but one doesn't imagine they'd advertise it. I'd be kind of surprised if Nefreti Clepati couldn't. Anyway powerful wizards mostly don't have to listen to courts anyway, places outside Cheliax, so I'm not sure they'd bother beating truth spells rather than saying 'yeah I murdered that person, what are you going to do about it'."

"Can we actually go back to the part about the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission?" says Peranza, who's nearby listening in fascination.  Nobody has actually briefed her that Meritxell is running seduction on Keltham and should maybe be left undisturbed.  "Dath ilani criminals file secret reports of what they actually did?"

"They can and we give them some reason to.  If your next question is how we know we can trust the criminals' confidential reports of what actually happened during the crime, the answer is that we don't trust them based on everybody being that Lawful, but sometimes later decisive evidence turns up.  That gives us a picture of how often the criminals tell the truth in their confidential reports.  I don't remember the exact figure, but it's high?  Civilization is careful not to give the criminal any incentive to lie, and if decisive evidence turns up later, a reporting criminal gets paid, not as much as the crime will cost them, but some, and that's only if they told the truth."

"I hope I don't have to explain that the criminals trust Governance confidentiality because yes Governance actually is that Lawful, they have incentives to be."