"None particularly.  She's got a lot more experience, and I'm more running around flailing at what look to me like fires than I am operating from any kind of theory or plan here."

Ione has never left Cheliax and has assumed that this is something about Asmodeanism as opposed to something about Law-as-implemented-in-Golarion in a fit of heretical self-righteousness. Carissa shrugs. "I had a paladin tell me once that much of what paladin orders are for is that the kind of person who becomes a paladin will work themselves to death by 25 and you've got to make them eat and sleep and tend their injuries so they can at least die doing something important."

"In dath ilan that would noticeably correlate with... um, being the sort of person who wants to release Rovagug, actually.  Is that not the case here?"

" - huh! Well, I haven't met anyone who wants to free Rovagug, but paladins definitely don't. They'd say, uh, that when you try to cause great harms to people for the greater good of people, then you end up just causing the harms and not getting the greater good, or that the world will be worth fighting for as long as there exist any innocents in it, or that murder is wrong, or just that that's not what Iomedae says they should do, depending which specific paladins you talked to." She is again not lying, though paladins generally don't talk to the Asmodeans directly; you can get it secondhand, or by joining a conversation out of uniform and not specifying where you're from. 

"...I guess there's an obvious thought here that's - in dath ilan, you need a particular kind of mentally broken Good to think there's anything wrong with the world that requires 16-hour workdays from you?  And in Golarion the world just is in that much in trouble, so the Good people who believe it is aren't systematically broken as they'd be in dath ilan?  Still, not a conclusion to jump to, I should think about it later."

"Regardless of Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, Asmodeus, Nethys, militaries, paladins, researchers, and Worldwound oaths -"

"One observes that Ione thought in a sufficiently different way from everyone else to be the first person to point out to me when I was making a particular kind of mistake, twice in a row."

"This is what Civilization would call" cognitive diversity "diversity of thought, and is much of the point of having more than one kind of person working on a project."

"Though I'm speaking very blindly myself, the very generic caution that jumps into my own mind is that it can be a mistake to try to attribute something like that to very particular attributes of Nethys, Asmodeus, Neutrality, Lawful Evil.  Sometimes what happens is that - Ione had one number for her threshold about pointing out a problem, and everybody else here had the same different number.  Even if the numbers had been generated at random, that might still happen, so it can be a mistake to explain it too much by pointing to specifics.  Ione is an 'outlier' in a certain dimension, more different from the rest of you than you are different from each other, in that dimension.  To the extent everyone with Asmodeus or with Nethys mostly thinks about something the same way, somewhere the Nethys-Asmodeus axis matters, it's not a contest among twelve people to see who comes in first, it's a contest of whether Ione comes in first or somebody else does, if you see what I'm saying."

"I mention all this because it is another thing that seems like it might be different for Worldwound militaries and research projects."

It's a good opening for - "I've actually been thinking we should ask the site manager for more people, now that we know more. Notable mathematicians, more senior wizards, people who might have - additional diversity of thought, from several angles. And yeah, maybe we're overinterpreting, but it definitely seems like there's got to be some things we're missing because all of them just finished wizard school and I've spent my entire adult life in the tundra."

"Civilization has an awful lot of ideas and best practices about starting up efforts like this one, all of them attuned to a very different world.  If I took their conventional wisdom straight, the part of this project that masters the way of Law should be trying to obtain an even younger INT 19, and 18s with high Wisdom - to be clear, I won't try to date anyone a year younger than myself, for other best-practice reasons.  On conventional wisdom, you might have an old knowledgeable ex-mathematician sit in, but they'd have to be careful about who they talked to besides me, and you'd be pleasantly surprised if they started wielding Law themselves."

"The applied side of the project would conventionally be the part where you bring in metallurgists while you work on metallurgy, or more senior wizards if you work on magic, or have extremely well-read people on staff who act as a kind of living library - that's probably even more important, when you can't search inside the texts of the books you actually have."

"In both cases, it is a proverb that no quantity of weird people can compensate for a corporate culture that doesn't know to use weirdness effectively."

"Carissa, Ione, Asmodia, Meritxell, I probably want to talk with all of you about that later today, if you can go onward a bit further without getting quite as much rest as everybody else."

I won't try to date anyone a year younger than myself, for other best practice reasons. 

How do you corrupt someone like that?

"That makes sense. I think. No immediate questions about the bits that might not make sense, at least."

"I think we should get a day of the week without lessons," Gregoria says boldly. "Some schools give Oathday off and you can sleep in and catch up on homework and things."

"Thank you, Gregoria.  Positive reinforcement for somebody other than Ione speaking out."

"In general, yes, obviously.  In respect to tomorrow, say, I'd mostly been assuming that we managed to get some time off in the wake of the Nidal attack... well, no, I'd gotten some time off myself, and didn't think about checking on whether anyone else had.  Did you?"

"Yes, we had two mostly quiet days aside from soul arrangements."

"Not an emergency but I didn't experience the aftermath of the Nidal attack as time off."

"Noted.  I'll chalk it up as a reason to check faster whether I can be romantic with more than one person at a time, now that I can be romantic with anyone at all.  Even if the answer is 'no' you'll at least get some time off while I check."

"I apologize for having not previously set sensible schedules, and the solution to this, I do realize, is probably not to immediately call an all-hands meeting about it.  My social reflexes assume people will spontaneously complain at me when I do things like this; I will try to recalibrate those reflexes toward asking people explicitly; this recalibration will be slow and imperfect.  While anybody can complain at me while I'm learning, there should also be a single person who is commonly-known to be the one responsible for doing so.  Ione, are you up for it?"

"Let me think a moment about whether I can handle that responsibility..."

Orders, Sevar?

Yep, plays to your strengths. This is only a bit sarcastic and she expects the sarcasm won't make it through the Security-relay.

"All right, I'm up for it, I declare Sevar is the one person responsible for telling me if I'm screwing up."

"You're learning."

"So I think what I should do right now is write down a problem set to think over for tomorrow under Fox's Cunning, later and after resting if you're mentally fatigued right now, so the staff's Fox's Cunnings for today don't go to waste due to my failure to frontload them.  People who ended up in the Holding Cell are forbidden to discuss this problem set with each other but are free to talk to anyone not in the Holding Cell."

"And then I'll go off and give you all a break while I try to hang a first-circle wizard spell with just a Security helping me there."

"This problem set is a collection of Law-fragments of Probability, phrased in nonmathematical ways.  The exercise is to see how far you can get, on how many, in translating them into proper Law."

1.  Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.  If you're equally good at explaining any outcome you can see, that's the same as not knowing anything.

2.  Surprising claims require surprising evidence; unsurprising evidence suffices for unsurprising claims.

3.  No empirical theory can prove itself except by risking its disproof.

4.  To convince me of your theory, make a correct prediction that no other theory makes.

5.  A precise true prediction is much more convincing than an imprecise true one.

6.  It is impossible to coherently expect to convince yourself of anything.

7.  You can't expect anyone else to convince you of something either, even if you think they're controlling everything you see.

#7 is obviously some kind of incredible key to the game between true dath ilani, and Asmodia can already guess that she's not going to get it without #6, and probably not get #6 without some of the others, and a Fox's Cunning, and maybe Owl's Wisdom too.

Security, urgent advisory to Sevar, you just got put on a time limit, I'm guessing that #6 and #7 blow things up when Keltham explains them.

Carissa would find it really annoying how convinced Ione is that everyone will stop being Asmodean as soon as they think about it except Maillol seems to agree and you can't be annoyed with people for being right. 

Acknowledged, she sends instead, and copies down the assignment.

Off Keltham goes to try again to hang a Silent Image!  Given the way that other people can create nice-looking illusions without presumably anything like the work of visualizing every detail into their visual cortex, it probably works by creating something that will look right to the caster, and if that's true Keltham has tons of important visual memories that might be extractible that way.

Security is happy to help with a visual of his scaffold and advice as appreciated. 

When he does get it, on something like the eighth try, it's oddly exhausting, like he's just been engaged in vigorous exercise for an hour instead of sitting here trying to make magic flow properly. But it hangs, and there it is, for him to cast if he'd like to. 

"Sounds like I have the evening off, can we arrange the Nap Stack," Carissa asks Security. 

           "Yep, can do. You'll all have to sleep in the temple, it's the only concealed from Keltham space that's large enough with no walls that'd block the spell emanation."

"Fine. Great. Everyone, tonight you get six extra hours. Half of that's your personal time, don't spend it on homework because in alterCheliax you wouldn't have had it to spend on homework. The other half is for a briefing so everyone knows everything that's going on. ...there's a lot."

"He suspects us," says Gregoria.