"I told you, no man has ever succeeded in wearing me. What makes you think you're different?"

"No man of Golarion has ever worn such a shirt as I wear even now.  Also the last god who went against me ended up in a little box."

"Then perhaps you could triumph where all before you have failed. Or perhaps when you turned your gaze from defeating gods to wearing me, you aimed too high even for a dath ilani."

"Can't actually say no if you put it that way.  See you later in the evening?  Just to be clear to everyone else, though, that isn't going to work on me twice."

"Nothing will work on you twice," Yaisa says. "We'll have to get up to steadily more depraved things just to do something you haven't thought of, and in two months you'll only want squid, polymorphed into girls, whose eternal servitude you earned by slaying their squid Zon-Kuthon."

Meritxell beams fiercely at Keltham. "See you later tonight."

"See you later, Meritxell.  Well, also see you imminently after dinnertime, if that time works for you and the other three."

"And Yaisa... welcome to Civilization."

PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Evening

They've got something like a proper meeting / breakout room, now, for this conversation.  Well, not by Civilized standards, obviously, but better than just grabbing a random not-especially-so-purposed room in an archduke's villa.

...Keltham probably owes that guy a favor at some point.

Anyways.  It's pretty clear at this point that competence at learning Law has stratified into Carissa-Asmodia-Meritxell-Ione, Pilar-Gregoria-Peranza-Tonia, and Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  The original contract for having the girls come in was for one week, as Keltham understands it.

So, um.  Keltham isn't sure what's... expected, about Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  On his model of things, the bottom third there will noticeably slow down further lecture learning, and probably not produce enough work output to make up for it.  And if there's any ability to add additional people, they're opportunity-costly, they'd take up a limited number of student slots...

Okay, now that he's saying this out loud it's pretty obvious what the decision has to be, even though Keltham really doesn't like it.  (And feels even worse about how he was just flirting with them while managing not to think through this line of thought to its clear conclusion, though Keltham doesn't say any of that out loud.)

How does Cheliax handle this situation?  In Civilization in non-top-secret projects, you just let people go work on something they'll be better at.  In Civilization's top-secret projects, everybody who goes through an elaborate screening process to receive classified info has been predicted by prediction market to work out.  In either case, you had an explicit understanding with them before they came in about under what circumstances they'd go, but Keltham is kinda guessing that the reason this explicit understanding has not been mentioned to him is that it does not in fact exist.

This is a foundational question of how alterCheliax treats people in a way Keltham will accept, not of figuring out the consequences of deceptions already decided.  Asmodia will assume it's Sevar's work unless Sevar tells her otherwise.

"On a normal military secret project, you can get reassigned, if the project's not a good fit for you and you've maintained the level of top secret clearance you needed for it in the first place. If you accidentally wandered into something with clearance wildly above yours, and then aren't a good fit - honestly, the usual is probably that you go to Hell, at least until you no longer know anything top secret - like, in a year or two it'll likely be fine to let them go back to their lives. But - if you're going to be reluctant to drop unpromising students from the project for that reason, I don't see an issue with doing something else?"

"I've actually got no idea how much of a hardship it would be considered to be to spend a couple of years in Hell, and I definitely wouldn't be asking that of somebody unless that part had been explicitly explained in advance.  Given how long it took between when I got here and there were girls in the library, there must have been either a very standard contract or a very improvised one - does anybody have a copy on hand?"

As of slightly over an hour ago, yes, this obviously Ordinary-existent piece of physical evidence that Keltham could have demanded at any time in the past six days now exists; and Sevar thought through this section in advance.

"I brought mine," Asmodia says, and hands hers over.  She doesn't allow the slightest trace of triumph to show on her face, even though, in her own opinion, this wouldn't have gotten done in time without her helping to prompt it.  "I think you probably want section 5 point... 3?"

This contract does permit, in section 5.4.1, that if the contractee is exposed to sufficiently secret information and better options don't exist for hiding it, the Chelish government can demand that somebody go to Hell and stay there for up to 5 years as required.  The 5 is written into a line for the exact number.

He finds it soon enough.

"I'm not saying it's not logical, or even that it's not sensible, but this is still weirding me out a bit.  Do people come back totally fine from that, staying in Hell that long doesn't make them less suited to Golarion?  There's no probabilities, what did they think the probability of this being invoked was, when they signed the contract..."

"This is frankly a much more extreme decision than I thought we'd be facing when we considered startup composition.  I'm not sure I feel okay making it."

"If you'd rather the girls get put in a different wing of the fortress being taught something tricky - ring forging - by a senior wizard, there so you can visit them and sleep with Yaisa occasionally, I don't think anyone would object. If that - lowers the barrier to you removing people from the project - it seems obviously worth it. You're allowed to be Evil and just do whatever is most comfortable for you."

"Thank you for reminding me of that, it is not actually something you hear in Civilization very often."

"I'd like them to have that choice, yeah.  Ideally some other choices too, even if it means calling in favors from Cheliax.  It is not something I'd decide one way or the other for them."  He notes that feeling of moral dissonance that he's had before, when Carissa talked about selling tickets to watch rats devouring each other.  "And unless Yaisa has a very specific sexuality that somebody needs to inform me about if so, she isn't to be told that her ability to stay here is contingent on her fucking me, nor will it, in fact, be so."

Asmodia wishes again that she had some way of knowing if the Gardens of Erecura would also receive Paxti, if Paxti could somehow be advised that the Hell option is her best bet... how would she even communicate that, though, or have Paxti follow through, in a way that wouldn't set off twenty kinds of whatthefuck nearby?

Was that thought a stupid one?  No, if someone somewhere cared about Asmodia, she's allowed to give a fuck about Paxti.  Or the other three, too, though that thought seems stranger as yet.

"Sure, that seems reasonable. You have a lot of latitude; give them some choices. If the choices are good it'll also probably help with other students not being scared of failing out of the project, which I bet you'll tell me is useful for learning dath ilanism. And no, I don't think you should keep Yaisa here conditionally, I just think she's obviously into you. ...and I may have, at risk of becoming a too-Good person with a too big headband, asked the High Priestess if she happened to know which other girls like getting hurt, because ...."

"...because I feel like it's my fault, for having trouble relaxing, that you feel like - maybe that's a Conspiracy, that maybe no one anywhere actually likes being hurt, and if you have a nice uncomplicated time with someone who you can tell is loving it then you'll. Uh. Move your probabilities specifically on the question of whether we made up masochists. But I have been warned against being a too-Good person with a too-big headband so I'll cut it out."

"Carissa, I deeply appreciate your efforts in this regard, may follow up on this later, and would right now like to follow the dath ilani best practice of just completely not talking about this in the context of who stays employed by the project.  As in, we don't talk about this at all, until after everything has been settled, and this meeting has been adjourned, without that having ever been a consideration."

"If you think that's an absolutely terrible way to approach this issue, I'm open to having an extended meta-level digression about whether I'm being overly Good here or just Lawful, though I'd want to free Ione, Asmodia, or Meritxell to sit that one out if they wanted."

"Nope I think that's a good plan, let's make project decisions entirely off one of who is good for the project or what is good for your own personal ability to make project decisions without feeling guilty. Which, it sounds like, is coming up with a bunch of appealing options for the girls and letting them pick one, and surveying the remaining girls to make sure that the options sound appealing enough that they're not scared of being fired?"

"Yeah.  I would have expected a compensation clause in the original contract, actually, if people were going in for a week that carried with it a significant chance of some very large consequence for them of spending the next 5 years in top secret info lockdown, for which they wouldn't otherwise be paid an excess wage... is that already in here?"

The cleric of Abadar attempts to flip through the Asmodean-written contract looking to see if a clause like that already exists.  Does it?

It says compensation is 300gp for one week's time, to be renegotiated after one week, and to at no point be less than their standard military pay if they'd been deployed as planned.

Right.  Their actual alternative wasn't being computer programmers, it was that they were otherwise heading to the Worldwound.  Most top-secret sequestration conditions are probably nicer than that, aren't they, so long as living conditions go.

It is sometimes hard to remember how Golarion works, and casting an illusion of Civilization drawn from his own mind didn't help with his sense of reality.

He hasn't actually said tsi-imbi(*) at any point, now that he thinks of it.  Kind of pointless now.  Still, universalizable rules.  He'll do it next time he's alone.

(*)  Said by dath ilani when they think 'this seems impossible, I might be insane', and the people around them should get them to a psychiatric institution if they don't seem to be correctly checksumming immediate reality.  An emergency signal; never said as a joke.

"All right.  Then I think we take that as our baseline option to potentially improve upon later, though I'll want to check what the actual options being offered to them are and whether I feel a need, or just want, I guess, to call in further favor from Cheliax to improve them."

Wow does that still feel awful.  Well, everyone warns about that, and everyone is apparently right, go figure.

"That leaves the question of what kind of contracts we see for the eight who stay.  In dath ilan, people in this kind of position would usually be offered some of their compensation in the form of an expected share of future profits, and this is something that we have to negotiate with actual Cheliax at some point, but at least in dath ilan, that agreement would be produced by us collectively negotiating with Cheliax, especially you four because you're the ones who seem relatively irreplaceable."

"Actually, now that I think about it, Pilar is not exactly all that replaceable?  She should arguably have something like a tier-one-and-half status, based on a suspicion of greater-than-first-apparent impacts of divine interventions; a status that gets promoted to tier one if Pilar turns out to be way more important than just saving my temporary life once and having snacks."

"Anyways, I'm still waiting on Cheliax to offer me a first-run contractual relationship between Project Lawful's employees and Cheliax, where I'm not quite sure why they don't have one, yet.  Except that my guess is that they want more than a week worth of data to make up their minds, and the trouble there is that I don't feel it's particularly prudent to, like, work on metallurgy or roadbuilding for a month without any contract.  We could potentially have a crude contract for the first research that gets done, with intent to renegotiate it after seeing how early results play out, but I do want any contract.  And -"

"What I'm getting at here is that I can successfully sit down in a room with you and figure out what you think Project Lawful wants from Cheliax, or what you want, which is more than I've been successfully able to do with Cheliax itself.  Except for one person who didn't seem empowered to do binding negotiations, and who I think isn't back from Hell yet after the Nidal assault."