Keltham informs Asmodia at lunchtime that today would happen to be a good day if she wants to try spending the night together with him; he's planning to spend all his ero energy today on other activities before then.  This is a conventional thing to do before a first date with an asexual if you want to be sure of not sending them any accidental ero signals.  Obviously Asmodia should tell him if she's got different concepts about how to do that sort of thing; Keltham was just guessing that since Taldane didn't have a word for 'asexual', it probably didn't have standard gendertrope advice about courting asexuals either.

...okay.

Um.

Okay?

(Asmodia has calculated that alter-Asmodia sure would say those things, yep.)

Great!

Keltham eats relatively quickly, and then drags off Yaisa to his cuddleroom again.

When done, Keltham taps himself with a Lesser Restoration, and spends the first half of the afternoon working on actual contract language with a Chelish representative who is So. Much. Slower. at contract-writing than Lrilatha.  Keltham is not sure why they are trying to do it this way.

So he asks and is told, roughly, that Lrilatha wouldn't be able to sign off on this contract as something Hell could back, because it contains a lot of terms that Keltham made up for relatively inscrutable Keltham-reasons, plus more terms that somebody in Chelish governance made up for inscrutable human-Governance reasons.  When a contract contains any significant amount of stuff like that, it becomes a human thing that the humans have to do themselves.  Lrilatha is not in the business of checking contract terms that somebody else made up, to see if they could possibly do nasty things, based on some clever trick that could rely on facts Lrilatha doesn't know.  If you want a contract from Lrilatha, you tell her what the contract is supposed to do and why, and Lrilatha writes you the entire contract, and can then give you Lawful assurance of what she expected the terms to do when she invented them.

...that's fair.

The Chelish central bank allegedly doesn't know what their exchange rates would have been for backable commodities the day before Keltham showed up.  There's a note attached that says that the officer who runs the Chelish bank seems to be philosophically anti-weird-projects, not in a personally anti-Keltham way, just in the way of believing that central banks ought to do exactly what they've always done and Governance should not be allowed to bother them while they're working.

So Cheliax is just taking out all contract language having to do with their central bank in any way, and replacing it with a list of six commodities such that Cheliax anticipates being able to pay off any reasonable debt up to 20,000,000 gold in some combination of those, according to this fixed valuation which they can swear to have been the market trading price in Westcrown on the day before Keltham arrived, according to merchant records.  If the Project ends up being owed more than one gold piece per Chelish citizen, and the circumstances of this aren't such that Cheliax now has more of those commodities safely on hand, further debt to the Project starts to be payable in title to government-owned lands, as valued by this more reasonable government office on the day before Keltham arrived.  After that, the Project is responsible for finding somebody willing to buy those lands in order to complete the reimbursement process.

...works for him.  Keltham adds a rider about the government of Cheliax not being able to block or regulate land sale as it usually would if the Project wants to override that in order to complete a sale inside or outside Cheliax; and those commodities of payment being deliverable without taxation to ships owned or designated by the Project at Chelish water ports, which ships shall enter and leave without taxation or other hindrance.

It now goes back to Governance and, with any luck, will be ready to be signed tomorrow.

PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Late Afternoon

Further lectures on Probable Utility, practice problems.

PL-timestamp:  Day 11 (9) / Night

Quick dinner, Yaisa again, followed by Asmodia.

...all right, if Keltham is going to that length to make her feel safe - not that Asmodia would've felt even slightly unsafe, after reading Keltham's thought transcripts, and having like any concept whatsoever of who he is, especially as compared to the rest of Cheliax - or that Asmodia would even significantly complain if Keltham tried to have sex with her - then Asmodia will take him up on his offer, made after some spell-warmed and starlit discussion up on the fortress roof, to try having something warm snuggling her in bed under entirely non-ero circumstances.

Is it true in alterCheliax that alterAsmodia never had anyone hold her, hug her, except in a sexual context, for roughly as long as she can remember? That the only flesh-to-flesh contact she's felt in a very long time has been intended to hurt her at worst and use her at best?  It can't have been the same for alterAsmodia as for trueAsmodia in trueCheliax, though Asmodia is having trouble visualizing exactly how it would have been different, the way her life must have gone instead.  But it could be true in alterCheliax that boys wouldn't have a concept of alterAsmodia as an asexual, and wouldn't offer to hold her in bed without thinking that sex might eventually be in the offing.  Keltham clearly assigns high probability that this might be true of alterAsmodia, based on whatever he already believes about alterCheliax.  It is the safer course not to contradict it.

So alterAsmodia hesitates a bit, and then says she's shy about discussing her history, in that way.  But she is definitely interested in taking up Keltham on that offer to see what happens.

It's... nice.

She catches herself thinking that she might want to sometimes Teleport back to wherever Keltham is, so long as it's nowhere near Cheliax, to have this again, if she hasn't found something equally warm and safe by then.

Does this imply the tropes are real?

Even as Asmodia tries to work out conditional probabilities and likelihood ratios in her head, the thought occurs to her that this is what Keltham's inner mental life must be like all the time.

And Asmodia still hasn't figured out how to Lawfully derive probabilities before evidence and it comes up every time she tries to do this.  She knows that things with added complications have to be less probable than the same things without those added complications, and that, unfortunately, is it.  Her entire algorithm for prior probabilities currently consists of making up numbers that maybe sorta sound right.  She should have tried to figure that out while she had the Most High's crown.

"Obviously it feels dangerous to declare success on any element of this house of cards but I'm inclined to say that, to whatever extent our objective was to have most of Keltham's energy and attention occupied in liaisons, that's a success, and to whatever extent our objective was to convince him that masochists are real, that's been accomplished as well. If he were a normal person, I think I'd say we've now driven the probability of a Conspiracy down low enough he'll stop looking for it absent an actual slip-up; of course, he's not, so we're going to have to keep convincingly inhabiting alter-Cheliax. 

But I think we're in the place where we can start thinking about stage 2, where we have a stably contained Keltham teaching a growing group of students, rather than stage 1 where we are scrambling to keep him persuaded for one more day that he's not inside something he should demand out of. 

....that's a request for suggestions. I don't know what stage 2 looks like. I don't know what's most valuable to Cheliax here and I don't know if there are other things like - high risk of all the girls becoming defectors - to look out for. I know stage 5, in which we improve the process of devil-making and enable Asmodeus in the conquest of all, and I think stage 4 involves building Lawful Evil ilani Civilization, but I haven't got detailed stage 2 ideas."

"I'll be the party's idiot barbarian and suggest that stage 2 looks like Keltham signing his contract with Cheliax, training these girls and the next batch in applying dath ilan's more concrete knowledge, and Cheliax rapidly growing in wealth and power."

"And when Keltham in time finds out, leaves us in fury, and raises up Osirion or Lastwall or both as instruments of vengeance on Cheliax and Hell itself?  The Chosen does have some reason for spending so much effort in corrupting Keltham, even at the expense of slowing Cheliax's rise."

"Can we maybe manage to keep Keltham contained for five years?  In that time Cheliax might be powerful enough to ruin Osirion and Lastwall, if necessary, before Keltham could raise them up against us; or force them to treaty."

"I'm frankly not seeing how to get Keltham corrupted far enough.  But then I don't understand how the Chosen corrupted him as far as she did, so."

"We should solicit everyone's predictions but I bet we don't get five years. That's just a very long time without a slip-up, even if it'd take a slip-up, and it might not. Stabler outcomes include - when he leaves it's because he's fed up with Governance but not in a conspiracy way, he doesn't expect Osirion or Lastwall to be better, and he takes the girls with him intending to build his own independent power base somewhere.... when he leaves he's not blazingly furious with us enough to go to war, or in love with enough of the people he'd be going to war with to hesitate -"

"Asmodeus's will on this does prohibit us deliberately taking direct hostages against him."

"Thinking about it, though, I'm certain Asmodeus's instruction does not prohibit us ruining or destroying any country Keltham tries to set up in, until no country will take him.  Not in a way of us being clever and working around those instructions, it's just plain allowed.  If we could make even a hundredfold-smaller version of that Radiance beam weapon Keltham showed you, the one that his Civilization uses to launch things into space -"

Carissa feels an unpleasant lurch of something. Which is childish; Asmodeus's conquest of all is going to involve some killing. That's how that sort of thing goes. "So that's a win condition, then, having dath ilani weaponry. Maybe the one Asmodeus intends. And Keltham becoming Evil enough he can learn the truth and decide to stay is a different win condition. And Keltham deciding he trusts no country and will go hide out with his girls in a secret location is a different win condition. And losing looks like him deciding to go to Osirion before we have the ability to destroy Osirion or force them to terms, or him dying and being resurrected by them."

"What is it that makes him hiding out with a few girls so much more sustainable over years than the current Project?  Sorry if that's a stupid question."

"It is weird we can't provide him with an entire library of well-written books; it wouldn't be weird for a tiny project to be limited to Ione's book-getting ability. It is weird we can't provide him with clerics of many different gods - where are we on faking that, by the way - and wouldn't be weird for a tiny project. If he ends up deciding to retreat with his girls and take over the world, he's going to be teaching weaponry, and I bet otherwise it's going to be very very hard to entice him to teach that. It's not as good as him staying here, I don't think we should bring it about on purpose, but I do think it's a win condition if well-executed."

"Fake paladin's ready at your will, I expect we could turn up a Lawful Evil cleric of Irori who'd swear to work with us, maybe a genuine Lawful Neutral of Erecura who'd be cooperative with Cheliax but could also show off channeling positive energy, anything else is just calling in an impersonator and hoping they're good enough.  Got told the same about fake envoys, it's standard impersonation and the question is just whether standard impersonation works on Keltham."

"I'll register my own thought that if it looks sufficiently sure that Keltham's going to break containment, we ought to have his girls take the initiative on doing that.  We get a lot more control over results if it's under our initiative rather than his."

"Agreed. We might want a book pointing at a Conspiracy that the girls are uninvolved in, for Ione to stumble across and show him, or something Yaisa can point out to him, he really likes her. We should do some test runs of escaping with Keltham, see what errors come up in the course of doing something that complex. And we'll need the Glibness swords. I should have those worked out in a couple of weeks."

He is a little suspicious that, somehow, the best use of some of Carissa Sevar's time has ended up as her using her admittedly very high Spellcraft to craft magical weapons.  But it is no longer his place to say that.  Subirachs would be the one to point that out, and she'd probably do it in private rather than now with Maillol watching.

"Acknowledged," Maillol says.

(Continued in my fun research project has more existential risk than I anticipated.)

(There is now a Discord channel which, only on the hour, notifies of new Planecrash updates if at least 25 tags have accumulated since the last such update.  I suggest setting yourself up to get push notifications from this Discord channel, if you would like to avoid constant-refreshing habits.)