"My curse says that it'd tell you if it was allowed, but it's totally not allowed in any way shape or form."

"I think Sevar also has a plan.  You could ask her about that one."

Yaisa will indeed ask Sevar if she's supposed to follow this discussion!

Tentatively obey Pilar's curse. 

Will the Project spot Yaisa the money she is supposed to pay Keltham to fuck her. Because otherwise she is not offering him money.

You're drawing on clout you don't have, kid.

I have to offer under Fairness to pay Keltham the money. I won't think it's fair unless it's Project money, because I shouldn't have to pay a boy for sex.

Security is she telling the truth about that.

Security message:  Yaisa's overt thoughts match her words.

Fine. Give her five silver.

And check if the price of her soul in Dis has fallen now that she's not on the project.

After Keltham finishes consuming food, he announces that it's time for another Silent Image screening of dath ilan.

(Keltham is still trying to figure out illusions of "light-emitting walls with parallax" so most of his images are just being projected onto the illusion of a giant video screen, rather than him trying to make things three-dimensional.)

Here's a rocket launch.  This is how you go to space when you don't have wizards.  It involves an unreasonable amount of fire.  Probably nobody in Golarion has seen this amount of fire unless they were standing nearby when somebody messed up a Wish spell.  Golarion conventional wisdom would say not to mess with people who can produce this amount of fire.  Many wizards throughout the ages who have claimed that all problems can be solved with enough fire, since, if you still have a problem after that, you did not use 'enough fire' by the definition of 'enough', would feel incredibly pleased and vindicated to know that this philosophy apparently works for traveling to space.

Here's a space-laser launch.  They're not safe for human riders though.  They're used to move fuel capsules into low orbit and higher, so that the rockets can refuel and keep going past that orbit.  It would be theoretically possible to reach the Fourth Planet just by burning rocket fuel to lift more rocket fuel into space, but you'd have to be crazy to actually try it that way, it's literally an exponential cost in fuel.  Anyone trying to work out how much Radiance damage this instantaneous beam weapon could do from ten miles away will run out of numbers.  If Cheliax owned this weapon it could conquer Nidal in fifteen minutes.  It obviously hasn’t occurred to Keltham that anyone looking at this image would see a threat.  This could be because Keltham is very innocent.  It could also be that, from his perspective, this is obviously not what a serious weapon looks like if Civilization is building a real weapon on purpose.

This is Civilization's Chief Executive.  Yes, she actually dresses like that.  Nobody gets appointed Chief Executive of the bureaucracy by being the sort of person who dresses to please an audience.

These are the Legislators in session, sort of, Keltham can't necessarily remember all the faces of the current ones, and some of these are actually Legislators who lost voting support a couple of years ago.  Yes the Legislators also dress like that, why would their job require them to dress less comfortably?  It's not physically hazardous.  Yes, she does look young, there's usually one young Legislator, typically selected from among the pool of people who are arguably the most accomplished young people in all Civilization.  Lots of voters are young, and it's not an impressive display of preference aggregation and representative democracy if all the Legislators end up old.

This is Civilization's top Keeper.  Yes, they all dress sort of like that, at least in public?  No, nobody else in Civilization dresses like that, you would not wish to be mistaken for a Keeper if you were not one.  (This top Keeper is a man who looks to be in his fifties, dressed much more like a senior cleric than any other supposedly very serious and important people shown.)

Well, different places, different fashions; your serious and important people might end up wearing clothes that don't show off tailoring, if tailoring is cheap and you want to use your clothes to communicate other things. 

The rocket fire is kind of beautiful. 

It feels right for Hell to be bathed specifically in rocket fire. She should figure out how to make that happen.

Here's what a 'video game' looks like.  Here's a training game for more complicated Probability calculations.  This is what a hospital surgery room looks like when there's no healing magic in your world.

Here's a festival sort of like the alien invasion one, though with a different theme Keltham's not going to explain right now.

This is young Keltham and five other boys pretending to heroically ambush an incoming military force.

This is the military force firing an announcement into the house Keltham is inside, saying that their house just got blown up.

This is Keltham consulting a random number generator to determine that he's alive but injured and pinned under fallen debris.

This is literal superheated Merrin, the most famous endurance medical technician in the world with certs from half of Exception Handling, using up one of her equipment tokens to 'blow away' (politely open) the house's wrecked door, so she can enter and pretend to remove the heads of Keltham's dead fellow ambushers while reassuring Keltham that she knows it hurts, she's sorry, she'll be with him as soon as she can.

This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.

Keltham has been asked at one point what sort of woman from Civilization he found attractive.  If he could have screwed any one woman of Civilization one time and wasn't trying to be clever about it, Keltham would've probably picked Merrin.

"Do I have the privilege of being the first to tell you the good news about what wizards can do with Alter Self," says Meritxell, who hasn't trained Eschew Materials but is pretty sure she can pick it up fast if Keltham-seduction demands it.

"It was, in fact, mentioned by that same person who asked me what sort of women I'd previously found attractive."

Awwww no fair. Well, Meritxell bets Sevar can't do the Queen. ...not that she can ever admit that she can. And actually maybe Sevar can too, having, you know, had sex with the Queen. 

"Sorry, the whole planet pretends she's not famous because she doesn't like it when they acknowledge her fame? You'd have to be so famous to pull that off," says Gregoria. 

"You would think that, and yet, prediction markets were running at only 20% that she was secretly trolling us the whole time."

"There's this weird adorableness factor about it - that I'm not sure I can describe, but will try to describe anyways - Merrin is also famous for having, in your terms, it would be INT 16, I think, or even 15, and yet reaching the top of her profession.  Usually when that happens you just sort of shrug and say that obviously the tests just failed at measuring how much real mental power she has, but the fact that she also has this one really weird hangup - proves she actually is somebody who started out non-brilliant and just succeeded anyways by working incredibly hard for incredibly long?  It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it.  Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you.  But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom.  There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really.  But you must never ever mention it in front of her.  It makes you want to just whap her on the head with a banana until she stops being humble.”

"I don't know, it worked on me, what can I say."

" - yeah, I can see being into that," Meritxell says thoughtfully.

It seems like it'd be really annoying being unable to bring up an error someone is making! Even if it's on pain of death but especially if it's on pain of, like, being condemned in the newspapers or whatever dath ilani famous people do to people they're mad at.

A new group of around 20 people, shown on the Silent Image of a large television screen, sitting all over strange chairlike objects and draped over lying-cushions in some kid's enormous well-decorated living room.  To Asmodean eyes, they're dressed more nicely than Legislators and Chief Executives; to dath ilani eyes, these are people who still have somebody left to impress, with a young person's dignity rather than an exalted person's.  One girl is braiding a boy's long hair, all of them have mysterious objects like open metal books nearby them.

"My writing circle.  They liked fiction with a theme of - selfish people, chaotic people, or what passed for that in dath ilan.  Stories about people who end up in other worlds and for some perfectly totally reasonable reason they end up needing to run a large criminal organization.  At the time I, left home, I was occasionally cuddling with her," red arrow on Illeia, "and that boy's sister," blue arrow pointing to Corun, "and would have liked to score with her," third arrow pointing to Ranthal, who is visibly the prettiest girl in the group, "but she's one of those dreadful types who just smiles when you ask her if she's got an upfront price -"

Keltham loses the image.  He kind of expected to.

The room is respectfully quiet.

Meritxell is wondering to herself how fast she can learn Eschew Materials.