"Fifty percent let's test this before Nocticula or somebody else with overwhelming Splendour actually shows up targeting me, fifty percent can I go through the transcript afterwards more slowly and figure out which invalid steps of reasoning they were able to persuade me about, secretly one hundred percent it just sounds incredibly interesting."

"But.....if something is widely considered kind of a bad idea and might go wrong, you could just not do it!"

"Maybe you could," Meritxell says. "I bet Ione couldn't, if it was really intellectually interesting, and Carissa couldn't, if it involved whatever the fuck personality trait has her sleeping with the two most powerful people in the world -"

"And you couldn't, if it involved mildly impressing someone."

Alter Meritxell smiles cheerfully back at Carissa. "Indeed."

"To be clear, here, Gregoria, the thing I was contemplating doing was having this hypothetical government Splendour-augment take a run at me under controlled conditions.  Not doing the thing with the succubus anytime soon."

"Somebody bip me at lunchtime or dinnertime to see if I can make any headway about recounting one of the short stories from a Reckless Investor Miyalsvor continuity.  Uh, Miyalsvor is someone from a relatively primitive planet at dath ilan's tech level, who would otherwise have died the true death but gets rescued by aliens, because it's only legal for them to do that if you're otherwise going to die for real, and he gets out among the stars and tries to sell some dath ilani fiction there, and a defecting investment group tries to steal his copyright on the fiction, but Miyalsvor manages to turn the tables on them and take control of that entire investment group, and then he goes around from star to star investing in alien companies and having all sorts of fascinating adventures where he has to stop his investments from going wrong."

"The reason I mention this is that Reckless Investor Miyalsvor is considered one of the best examples in dath ilani fiction of an author managing to depict an incredibly persuasive character who has to do the equivalent of passing the Keeper test, talk his way out of holding cells and so on.  So maybe if I can remember the dialogue closely enough, I can retell one of the short stories and have that convey something... this sounds more and more implausible the longer I talk about it, but maybe worth trying just to see how badly I fail."

"I'd definitely like to hear you try," Peranza says, and smiles.  "And I'll be merciful if you fail."

(This, she can do.)

It seems like a fine note on which to go to lunch.

PL-timestamp:  Day 10 (8) / Noon

"So, have you seen a succubus, Carissa," says Tonia at lunch. They decided they have more conversations among themselves, rather than waiting for Keltham, in alter Cheliax, and they don't want to transition on him all at once but can nudge a bit in that direction.
 

"I have seen the bodies. They don't tend to join a big rush of demons, much likelier to try to sneak through the wards on their own and venture off to wreak havoc, so it's the patrols that usually get 'em."

Keltham has selected 'flirt with Yaisa' as his Romantic Option for the day.

Yaisa will at the slightest excuse cuddle up against him and look adoringly up at him. "You know, you can have more fun with a girl who isn't on your highly urgent very important government project to transform the world."

That's... one alternate conception of how flirting works, sure.

"More fun than Carissa sounds like a difficult and dangerous sales pitch, but I'm not stopping you from trying to pitch it, or deliver.  Specifics?"

"....how interesting should I be assuming that your sex life is. Like, should I be trying to beat it for interestingness by suggesting interesting applications of sex toys to the problem of 'I want to spend the entire day gone doing other things but also want you to be constantly tormented', or should I be trying to beat it for interestingness by providing a price list for scrolls of Polymorph to species with completely different genitalia."

"First one.  How about if we pause and take this conversation upstairs, there's a more private room with a nice ocean view."

"As you wish," says Yaisa, and looks down so she can peek up through her eyelashes at him.

Gregoria does some calculation about how good alter-Gregoria would be at not glaring and decides on glaring. 

Keltham is not particularly paying attention to Gregoria right now.

The Keltham Seduction Room - Keltham does not know it to be called this, but would not consider it suspicious if he knew - still has a lovely ocean view even with there being a light drizzle going on out there.

Keltham's not really paying much attention to the lovely ocean view either.

He has never been seduced quite this directly before.

"Resume," he says.

"Okay, Asmodia, talk to me about saying the names of entities we do not want involved in our lives, on the assumption tropes are real."

"I'm going to try that but then, I propose, this entire conversation gets copied to the Most High, who is either very happy about my progress, or sends it back with a lot of red underlining.  I mark that I wouldn't even have suggested that if not on a low-punishment regimen."

"I'm being punished in accordance with ordinary Asmodean law and that has not, actually, been an impairing degree of punishment because that does not serve Asmodeus either. But noted, and we should speak privately so that if we are erring terribly we minimize how far the error spreads. And we can avoid actually naming any entities, while we discuss."

"Acknowledged."

"So - I think one way of looking at this - is that we can think in terms of - this normal effect that our actions have, and then a second effect that they have through - making universes exist or not exist, or maybe, making Golarions get or not get Kelthams."

"And Keltham's Law is later going to contradict me about that, because Law isn't the sort of thing that should have 'normal' effects and 'second' effects, it'll just be about effects, somehow.  But we don't have that Law and I don't know how to think about it that way, yet."

"If there's - just one Keltham who has to be somewhere and just one Golarion who gets him and all the other ones don't exist - then - I think we can not talk about demon lords in order to not have them appear?  Or, no, maybe that choice is like - having it retroactively be the case - that we don't exist and this world isn't here - except, it's not like we blink out of existence or anything, it's that instead there's always all along been some Asmodia and some Sevar who arrived at a decision more convenient to the tropes.  And we're having this conversation after it was all decided, but that conversation has its effects before it was all decided, so we have to pretend it hasn't been decided yet, because where the conversation matters, it wasn't."

"This is so much not what the actual Law is going to sound like, I can already tell.  The Law isn't going to be about, do you look at it this way, go look at it that way.  There's just going to be one unifying principle that treats all the numbers the same way.  But I don't know what that principle is, and instead I have to try to work with, ideas, words, and hope they end up corresponding to true Law-fragments -"

"But if I had to guess at one of those fragments - maybe it would be something like - if you imagine that the tropes are about to start over and do this all again, and we're getting to advise the Sevars and Asmodias inside the worlds the tropes are selecting from, what do we tell them to do?  And then the answer to that will have to be the same as the answer to what that Law says we should actually do right now."

"If the number of Kelthams changes depending on what the Asmodias and Sevars do, I think we advise them to go ahead and talk naturally about powerful beings they don't want showing up, because in worlds where the tropes wanted to make a demon lord show up with a warning, our telling the Asmodias and Sevars never to mention them, means those worlds don't get Kelthams.  I'm glad my world got a Keltham and I expect you're even more so."

"If there's one Keltham or a fixed number..."

"I can't actually figure it out.  It seems like this weird twisty sideways thing.  Pause to get a Cunning on me?"

Carissa gestures for someone to do that. "Helpful for me to speculate off what you said or no?"

"I would take any help whatsoever at this point, yes."

"If there's a fixed number of Kelthams and the tropes allocate them to the set of Golarions that produce the most interesting stories, then trying to be interesting on purpose is just competing with other worlds like us, and we shouldn't; if there's a fixed number of Kelthams and the tropes allocate them to the set of worlds which aren't necessarily Golarion that produce the most interesting stories, then we want to be interesting because while I think we don't care if Keltham lands in this Golarion or a similar one we care a lot if he lands in Golarion or some other world that's not Golarion. ....I guess you might also specifically care that he lands at this moment in history and not a thousand years ago or a thousand years in the future, I care less about that I think..."

"Arguendo," another Kelthamism.  "Why wouldn't we compete with other worlds like us?  Maybe whoever best serves the tropes wins their favor and there's nothing we can do to change that game, just try to play it."