"I suppose, in a world without healing, everyone who enjoyed receiving pain, would have died, and then - those who enjoyed dealing pain, probably followed.  And maybe Good is all that's left, after that."

Albe seems quite visibly sad about this thought!

"...Huh. That's - a possible explanation for why there aren't very many - people like me, I guess. There are more people who enjoy causing pain, and - probably a lot more who...would, if they ever had reason to think about it, and then they would be unsatisfied, and some would be very deeply unhappy. So Civilization tries to make sure that those people at least aren't actively prompted to consider it. ...And the Keepers do at least somewhat actively look for people like me, because I would not have guessed it was a thing - in relationships with other people, I mean. Someone had to sit me down and tell me. And then I - guess I got to make some people really happy, which is neat, especially for a thing I didn't have to spend ten years training at, I - wasn't expecting there would ever be anything like that." 

It feels like CHEATING but not in the sort of way that bothers Merrin or that she would think to consider bad. It's just - sometimes there are things that work out well. 

She's still not sure what this has to do with 'Good' and 'Evil' and is going to have to push for those concrete examples she requested. 

"Oh, so you are Evil, then.  I did think I was getting that vibe from you."

"But - not at all the type to want to see what happened when you guided my own finger into the Magma?"

"...No, not really. I doubt I have much intrinsic draw to it, and then after spending my entire career in medical work, it's just - hard to associate other people in pain with anything other than that, you know? I...can enjoy fiction or roleplay where people get hurt in, like, a natural disaster or an alien invasion, and then I'm there when they're getting rescued and treated and comforted, which I guess is sort of adjacent to the thing? Though I'm not sure it would be nearly as nice enacting that real life with actual injuries, it - would probably get really tangled up with all my mental habits around actual work and be emotionally confusing and weird." 

Shrug. 

"...I think I'm not quite following how much it's pain that's Evil - in which case, is being a medical provider and, like, placing an IV to save someone's life and causing them some pain also Evil - or is it the...wanting it because it's nice and good and makes you happy? In which case I - don't actually think dath ilan has any shortage of that. If enjoying winning games against other people and winning money off them in bets counts then I can hardly imagine dath ilan having more of it." 

She frowns, watching Albe's expression. "I don't know, I guess my sense is that most people have both? I enjoy people hurting me, especially people I feel close to, but I'm not...living in that part of myself most of the time? It would just be really distracting at work and I don't have the leftover mental bandwidth for it anyway. And even if I didn't have a career that I really love, I - don't think I'd want to be doing that all the time, I'd get bored. ...Incidentally if you want to seduce me, it's going to be way less frustrating once I'm not still considering myself to be 'at work'. I guess the exact balance varies, dath ilanis are less binary about work and downtime than I am, some people spend a lot more total time on leisure - I'm kind of notorious with my friends for working a stupid number of hours - some people are even more like that and as far as I can tell their leisure is just reading other people's math work to take a break from their own. I have one boyfriend who, as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything that is only for fun and not also productive work except for when I see him, like, once a month, and his work is pretty for-the-benefit-of-society-oriented, it's not something he does for the money - a lot of dath ilanis do, and I don't know how your system would categorize that either." 

Albe is having trouble tracking all this even with her rather high (for Golarion) Intelligence; it doesn’t help that she is trying to figure out both how dath ilan appears to Merrin and how it must actually be.

“I think it would feel very different to me to - cut off someone’s poisoned finger before the poison spread, say, and to cut off their finger because I wanted to see how their face changed when they were in pain.  That these two things are at all the same is - something I wouldn’t have expected to hear from someone Evil enough to enjoy pain at all.”

”Compared to most people of Cheliax, I am relatively much more likely to flirt on my job, and also I have a lot more fun on my job and with my life in general than most people in Cheliax.  I’d consider the position that you should carefully separate all the fun out of your terribly important job to be Good generally and dangerously-Lawful Good particularly.  It is again not something I’d expect to hear from a girl naughty enough to enjoy waving her hand around in Magma, and I wonder if I am looking at an Evil woman immersed in Lawful Good to the point of that damaging what she is, what she should be, what she could have been in Golarion.  If I were writing a novel and sending the character of Merrin to Golarion after her death to learn something, it would be that.”

Wait has she TRIED cutting off someone's finger is that just a THING here– ...it would be, wouldn't it. Healing magic. That would be so convenient. Merrin...is not actually sure if she personally would enjoy having her finger cut off - actually she's almost certain she wouldn't "enjoy" it in the moment it was happening, any more than she enjoys, in the moment, having to do actual triage in an actual in-real-life multi-casualty incident. (She's dealt with, like, two of those that really counted. Dath ilan is really good at not having accidents if they can be avoided at any reasonable cost, and 'reasonable' is...a lot, when Civilization has vast resources and people really really don't want to die the True Death.)  

Merrin loves her job. Not in the same way, and obviously there are about thirty different aspects she likes about her job, but it's - not a completely different thing either? There's a glorious simplicity in emergencies, there's that moment where the world is sharp and bright and so real and immediate, and she's not in exactly in control but she's entirely there, and it's a little like falling, like the moment after jumping off a ten-meter diving board, and it's very simple because you can't, actually, un-fall once you've jumped.

A few of her colleagues seemed to recognize that, when she described it. The Keeper she spoke to recognized it. Most people don't; most people, relatedly, are confused and impressed by her career path - and, Merrin suspects, attribute a lot more of it to Good motivations than is actually the case. It's not that she's indifferent to the value she's contributing to Civilization, but she's pretty sure most people, herself included, can't run their entire motivation system on that and end up working as hard for as long as someone of -1SD intelligence to succeed at becoming an endurance paramedic and go on to maintain certifications in, like, half of Exception Handling.

She did it because Merrin at fourteen saw a future and wanted it, was hungry for it, and - she's luckier in a way than almost anyone in dath ilan, right, that there wasn't a tradeoff there, that the thing she wanted most in the world from the moment she knew it was out there to reach for is also something that results in people thinking she's some sort of hero.

It's true that she had to put a huge amount of effort - not always fun effort - and struggle and shaping-herself into - being able to exist and fit in as a member of Civilization, and - maybe it's true that this involves hemming in parts of herself, other ways that she could have been, other people she could have been who would have been happy. But unless Merrin is still completely misunderstanding the axes, that feels like it's far more about Law? 

"Thank you for the advice, it's noted," she says dryly. "I - still think I could assess what you're even saying much better if you give me ten examples each of things that are Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic?" 

Corrupting this woman would be trivial if she had Wisdom 10.  At Wisdom 20 it becomes a far more serious problem that you can't reliably solve just by reading somebody's mind, figuring out what parts of themselves didn't fit into their old place in the world, packing up those parts with everything else you want her to be, and telling her that the complete package is what she is and that a person like that gets to have everything she knows she wants.  Reading Merrin's mind gives the further impression that this is not just a woman with WIS 20, this is a woman with WIS 20 who was trained and conditioned by experts with far higher Wisdom than that, and that those trainers might have immunized this Merrin against such simple tactics for breaking her out of her Lawful Good conditioning.  They did an unfortunately good job of keeping her happy.

But she has enough basic information about possible vulnerabilities to work with now, and if at all possible should gain more time to think and plan before taking next steps.

Albe floats another wand through the illusion of dark walls screening off the rest of the workshop from Merrin's sight, and summons Quasi-Elemental Void like a distortion hanging in the air.  She waves Merrin's hair through it, to verify that Void is not the particular elemental vulnerability that so many screens and fields turn out to possess.  "I would expect that if you poked a finger into this, it would feel like somebody sucking very powerfully on your finger, possibly enough to damage it - this is Void, the combination of Air and Negative, which should have already removed all the air inside the sphere of energy, on some theories of Void.  I'd be curious to test it, but I think that we should not."

"With respect to the other topic of conversation, I'm starting to feel the same sense of trepidation about trying to explain the nine alignments to you, that you seemed to feel about explaining to me what forces might have produced the antimagic around you."

Whoooooooa they can just make magical vacuum that's neat. Merrin runs a brief mental search for technologies that she knows become feasible once you can reliably evacuate the air from a container and get a sufficiently hard vacuum. Nothing that seems fast or easy to explain, so she'll note that for later. 

Just sticking her finger through a magical boundary into vacuum wouldn't seriously damage her, Merrin thinks; humans can survive thirty seconds or a minute entirely in vacuum without permanent damage. She would be more worried about breaking the magical boundary and causing the surrounding air to rush in suddenly. Or about unknown weird effects. If Albe thinks they shouldn't test it then Merrin's going to listen to her. 

"You're worried that it's - something where explaining it imperfectly will mean I end up believing something dangerously false?" Merrin is certainly not inclined to ignore or push past that kind of concern! "I think it's not that urgent that I fully understand it? I do feel like I'm going to keep being confused about gods - and the afterlife thing - until I understand the categorization system, and I'm sort of holding off on making any plans for what to do here until I'm less confused about gods - but it clearly would be worse if I thought I understood it and was on the wrong track. Are there experts in studying it who would have a better chance of conveying it right?" 

"The problem that concerns me is more the amount of missing background information that we have about you and that you have about us.  You have really said very little about what dath ilan really is, or so I'm told, except that it lacks gods and alignments and afterlives, and knows more than we do of medicine, and has some means for preserving people against death that we do not need as urgently as you suspected.  And there are more people who enjoy causing pain than those who enjoy receiving it, so only a few of those who enjoy causing pain are ever allowed to learn what they are... I admit, I'm a little curious as to how it is said that they are selected for the privilege.  This is Radiance, Fire with Positive."

It's brilliant and multicolored and beautiful.

Since the quantity of missing background information on both sides is - Merrin is pretty sure - a lot of what has been making her feel deeply uneasy this entire time, she can't object to Albe worrying about it too. It should be a relief, really. 

...It's mostly a relief? It would be more purely relieving if it felt less - 'unbalanced' isn't quite the word - if it felt less like Albe was an alien with a psychological architecture incredibly far removed from any that ever existed in dath ilan, who is now looking at Merrin and, presumably, finding her just as strange from her own point of view, and - seeing Merrin as damaged, seeing something wrong with dath ilan, and maybe she's got a point but there's still going to be a direction to all her advice, right - 

- and Merrin wants to make her happy, wants to earn her pride and approval, wants to get it right and prove herself -

....But also, on some very deep fundamental level, Merrin dislikes it when people cleverer and more knowledgeable than her have agendas for her and want to steer her toward the right answers. She did even when it was 'all of Civilization' that felt like it had an agenda for her, that knew what was correct better than she could ever find on her own. And of course that's always been actively in conflict with her other drives - to fit in, to be part of a whole and contribute to it, to belong, to be the shape that other people approve of, to make people around her happy... And neither of those is in itself a truth-seeking motive, but - there's a balance, there, for Merrin. The not-wanting-to-be-steered is protective of something, and - in her hazy and probably-wrong conception of the categories here, it feels like in dath ilan it was protective against following 'Lawful Good' off a cliff - against the thing that Albe seems to be worried is what happened? Because it would be tempting, for a Merrin to try over and over to shape herself into exactly what Civilization wanted her to be, except that Civilization also tried to teach her how to notice when she's being nudged around by implicit social pressure - which, Merrin is pretty sure, is a vulnerability she has VASTLY MORE than most dath ilanis - and when she notices it she gets kind of prickly about it. 

It's not the case that she's never experienced implicit-social-pressure to prioritize leisure activities more, but this is a new direction for it to come from and it's WEIRD and makes her feel OFF BALANCE. 

Well, that's a her problem, isn't it. She's going to have to understand Golarion and figure out how to exist here, and inevitably she's going to be learning about it from locals who are coming from a massively different culture and perspective and have opinions – about dath ilan, about her, about what they're hoping she will accomplish here. Which Merrin is going to notice even if they're not trying to give advice pointed all in one direction - even if they're actively trying hard not to do that - because that's what her brain does, it tries very hard to figure out what everyone around her wants and make sure there are never any conflicts and no one is disappointed.

It makes sense for that to be uncomfortable for her; it doesn't make sense to be annoyed at them about it. It seems really unlikely Albe is doing this on purpose. Probably she just...doesn't have the social-pressure-vulnerability that Merrin has. It's hard to imagine her having it. 

"I agree, that's a major concern for me too. I - was kind of prioritizing coming up with an itemized list of questions to ask about Golarion, but plausibly after this I should sit down and work out a prioritized list of things to explain about dath ilan. Though I was sort of hoping someone with Governance is already doing that, you're going to know better than I do what questions you want answered." 

The Radiance is so pretty. 

"- Um, people aren't selected to find out about it - ever, as far as I know? Sometimes people just guess, or find out by accident. And then it's the standard problem where you have a scarce good and more demand than supply, so the obvious allocation method is money. I - guess it's pretty miserable to be one of the people who guesses by accident and isn't rich, which is a big reason why this is not widely advertised, it'd be an even worse problem then." 

Could that ACTUALLY be true.  No, that doesn't square with the rest of how dath ilan presents itself - what does Merrin mean, the obvious allocation method is money, that's not any form of Lawful Good that she's ever heard of, that's not Lastwall, that's how Osirion would solve the problem.  There's got to be some level on which, if you were raised Evil and not in dath ilan, you know better to forego skepticism about the final conclusion that in an Extremely Pure Lawful Good Society the rich elites get all the masochists and nobody else is allowed to know sadism exists.  There'd obviously be an excuse, it could even be a very plausible one, you have to look at where the result ended up.

Separately, she notes that Merrin thinks herself exceptionally vulnerable to social pressure for an inhabitant of dath ilan, and that it is best to avoid applying that pressure in a way that looks like people cleverer or more knowledgeable than Merrin herself.  Well, they've got three convenient Ostenso students for that.  Or their impersonators, if their Bluff doesn't look good enough.

Albe, speaking to Merrin, is curious about masochists being allocated to those with the most money; most Lawful Good societies that she knows would try to allocate masochists to those most in need of them.  She's also curious generally about how dath ilan was governed.

A dangerous-looking spherical cloud:  Quasi-Elemental Steam, Water plus Positive.

Merrin blinks at this for a few moments because - money just is the unit by which to measure how strongly you want or care about something? She feels slightly confused about how to parse 'need' separately from that - like, obviously in life-or-cryopreservation circumstances, dath ilan has triage systems to save the most people, but that's - not the category of thing that 'wanting to hurt people in a cuddleroom' is - most things aren't that? It feels a little like saying 'but we should allocate the largest apartments to the people who most need big living spaces' which is just - no, that isn't how that works? 

"...I think it's still hard for me to figure out how to answer that because I don't actually understand what you mean by 'Lawful' 'Good' - I understand why you don't want to explain further right now - but also I think it was Antonio who decided to label dath ilan as that? Not me since I don't know what it even means. If Lawful Good societies allocate scarce goods in general using - something that isn't money or an equivalent, um, universal-currency-of-account - did that translate? - then I'm confused again and probably dath ilan isn't that." 

She's disoriented, in a way that she should've maybe expected to be disoriented, by the suddenly dawning possibility of people and societies that are maybe just not on the alignment axes at all.  This is the talk of Osirion, clear and plain; Merrin is Lawful Good, likewise clear and plain; her boyfriends and these Keepers are very likely Lawful Evil.  Maybe that's simply a natural way to organize your society if there is no Pharasma and alignment axes do not there really exist?

"I'm feeling rather disoriented right now.  I should probably not try to explain why, and should instead go on listening, I think.  In particular about your - 'Governance'?"

An even-more-dangerous-looking spherical white crystal:  Water + Negative, Quasi-Elemental Salt.

...Answering that is actually kind of stressful in itself, and Merrin is inclined not to add any more bonus stress by poking the dangerous-looking magical not-salt while she's in the middle of thinking through and then giving her explanation. 

(Why do "water" and "negative" combined make "quasi-elemental" salt???? Unlike the other combinations of Magma and Void, this one is not even slightly intuitively clear to Merrin.) 

It's stressful to explain because - assuming that Governance in Cheliax works very very differently, which given all of the other upstream differences seems like almost a foregone conclusion - then Albe is inevitably going to ask for explanations of why things are different. And Merrin isn't sure she can answer them. Especially without, herself, having full context on Cheliax's Governance structures, but - it's deeper than that. She knows some facts, but not the...underlying generators that resulted in those facts being the case, in dath ilan. Because one thing she can be very sure of is that the system was set up by people far more intelligent than her. Who, at the time, did know whatever lies behind the wall that hides dath ilan's history. And Merrin is only in her mid-twenties, and hasn't invested any deliberate effort in learning more about dath ilan's Governance structures than the pieces she unavoidably noticed just by living there.

And to the extent that dath ilan is run the way it is for reasons deeper than historical accident, to the extent that there are truths about how things work and what works best that will hold across all the worlds, Merrin herself understands and contains only a few fragments of the underlying Law. And an embarrassing amount of what she does know on some level is going to be difficult and frustrating and maybe impossible to put into words, especially across a translation-magic barrier. 

- okay, so she's going to give an incomplete explanation. Not ideal but it seems unavoidable, and - almost certainly still better than not saying anything. People in Cheliax who are not her will be able to make some sense of the random sprinkling of surface facts and justifications that she knows. She will just have to do her best to only say things that she is very confident are true. 

"Right. So, um, high level view is - there are the nine Legislators, who are elected by several hundred Representatives, who are elected by around forty thousand Electors -" high level summary, Merrin reminds herself, "- anyway it bottoms out with the entire voting population of dath ilan voting for Delegates to represent their interests to the higher levels. The Legislators are the body within Governance that can - make changes to the decision-processes by which everything else is run. ...Well, for a really big change to the, um, meta level processes-used-to-generate-processes - did that translate? - you'd need to get a direct vote by the entire population - and usually the Keepers would be involved along with a whole lot of other departments within Governance but that's not written-into-the-law as a requirement." 

Pause to think. 

"Right, so that's the legislative side. The nine Legislators are responsible-accountable for hiring - and firing, if it comes up - the Chief Executive, who's responsible for the bureaucracy that contains a whole lot of departments that actually - carry out all the day to day work that needs doing to keep Civilization running. On that level, a lot of policy decisions - local ones, I mean, to distinguish from the sort of thing where you would want to alter the entire process - are made by prediction markets."

Oh wait is this the kind of thing that might fall into the Translation Gap. She....hasn't actually heard anyone mention what the markets are saying as the obvious input to their decisions, and - right they don't have computers - it's not like you need computing technology in theory to run prediction markets, but it sure increases the overhead, and if there were magic for it then someone would plausibly have mentioned it before...

"- Sorry, that might not translate. There are....information-aggregating betting systems, so anyone with expertise who thinks they know better than the market's consensus can add a bet and expect to make money if they're right? There's a lot of math involved in scoring for the payouts, the result is that you get an - aggregated summary of what the experts of dath ilan think will have the preferred result? Obviously this gives much more likely-to-work-in-expectation proposals - within any given department, for any given decision, there's a specific person who's accountable for making the judgement call, but in practice I think most of those judgement calls are consulting heavily with what the prediction markets say." 

Is that making sense. How badly is she mangling this. Merrin can't tell because she is insufficiently experienced in reading nonhumans' facial expressions. It seems like Albe is still following? 

"...The policy-prediction-markets are administrated by an arm of the bureaucracy, but - obviously there'd be an opening for bad incentives, if the Chief Executive could pass down orders to directly interfere with the markets? So there's a Keeper there in a meta-manager role," this is clearly a single word in Baseline and does not translate with perfect clarity to a Taldane word, "as a cutout between the Chief Executive's level and the department. Same holds for all the departments where you want to add some barriers against adversarial action or perverse incentives, so - Exception Handling, which is what I work for a lot of the time - the military, the police, the entire court system, the cryonics system, and the department that actually administrates the elections for the Legislators and the levels below them in the hierarchy." 

Albe will be more expressive about nodding along and indicating that she's still here and listening.

(She's mostly trying to track who has the actual power here and it's sounding like it's possibly the Keepers but the whole thing sounds so complicated she is not remotely sure which may of course be part of the point from the Keepers' perspectives.)

(Also Merrin just casually ran past 'who has control of the military' like that was 0.1% of her attention, worth literally just two words, which is... it sure is something.)

"- I guess I should explain Keepers more. The Keepers are....not really a part of Governance, and - in some sense they're apart from the rest of Civilization, they're - not accountable to anyone or anything except when they've promised to be. They're– sort of the entire thing they do is keeping promises? They're - they try to understand and follow and - more perfectly embody - the Algorithm."

This is a short word, in Baseline. It...mostly doesn't translate clearly into Taldane at all. 

"Anyway, they still - mostly don't have roles-with-accountability within Governance, just - a lot of points of contact, anywhere you need a cutout within the hierarchy to prevent perverse incentives. And obviously you go to a Keeper if you have a really hard question to answer or decision to make. They're - the people who know all the - true things about the world that are unpleasant to know - they're trying to practice correct thinking even when that's - bad, for humans, for actually living nice lives - they train to - keep themselves sane even in the face of infohazards. ...One of the departments under Exception Handling is infohazards, obviously that has a lot of Keeper involvement in secondary-management roles. You....have to be really smart to train as a Keeper, like, multiple standard deviations smarter than me."

Which, if Merrin's vague impressions are right, there - might not be anyone with that intelligence level in Golarion. Except for gods. Which she still knows worryingly little about, because - it matters, she thinks, that the Keepers are still humans, even as they're studying and learning and passing down the pieces they can hold of something so much bigger. 

".....Sorry I am realizing that I just said a lot of words with high information density and maybe it would help if I had paper and I could draw you a flowchart or diagram of it." 

They've gone through about half the remaining para-elements and quasi-elements while all that was being spoken of.

"Mm, I feel that the main thing I am missing right now, is not to hear all the parts and pieces spoken of, but rather, to understand - how anything happens in practice?  Suppose that a portal opened between Golarion and dath ilan, and some dath ilani was first to find it, and suppose that they were -"  Loyal?  She can't say loyal??  "- aligned with, friendly to, Governance - who would they tell, who would have charge of it, who would decide what was to be done from there?"

Huh, Albe is - putting a lot of emphasis on specifying that the initial report is coming from someone friendly-and-aligned with Governance? Merrin has worked with - and trained for - hypothetical scenarios involving individual unaligned actors - but she really doubts that literally anyone she's ever met in real life wouldn't report it via the standard channels if that happened to them in real life. 

"...So that's pretty solidly under Exception Handling for the very immediate response, I think. We - okay, we don't literally have a written process for 'a portal opens to Golarion' but Exception Handling has processes for responding to First Contact from aliens, we have kind of a huge number of them actually, for a really wide range of possible scenarios. One of the first priorities, alongside verifying that it's real at all, would be to - causally contain the situation until someone - a very high-ranked Keeper probably but I'm not fully read in on that part of the response flowchart either - has thought about unknown infohazards of unknown magnitude and assessed the risk. For a literal portal, we'd - I guess that'd actually be almost the exact same containment protocol as the 'crashed spaceship' scenario."

Which Merrin is SO READY for. Merrin has REHEARSED this. If Civilization decided that they needed to keep a city's inhabitants fed and provided with medical care and emergency cryopreservation as needed then Merrin has this so covered.

"Um, there are equally fleshed-out protocols for verifying it's real, I'm not myself fully read in on the details - a lot of the verification aspects for First Contact situations are kept secret on purpose to make it harder for, um, someone to decide to play a prank on Civilization and fake it." 

(A fact about dath ilan is that it contains many serious, intelligent people with a strong tendency toward cunning mastermind plots, and most of them are not going to use their talent to play a criminal prank of that scale and waste huge amounts of resources, but you super can't just count on that not happening.)

"If it was a - non-adversarial initial contact - um, I don't remember the exact flowchart for reporting, but very quickly, as soon as it was contained and verified - probably actually while that was still going on - it would be escalated to the Chief Executive, unless for some reason the Keeper-cutout at the Exception Handling department-head level, in collaboration with the very-high-ranked Keeper responsible for assessing infohazard status, decided to keep it contained at that point. I haven't actually encountered any specific training hypotheticals where they'd decide that. There might be some scenarios where the Keepers would sideways-escalate it to another department where they have a secondary-management role. Anyway, assuming not that, we'd have the prediction market department looped in on it in like...ten minutes from the time it was first reported to someone at Exception Handling, assuming otherwise-normal functioning of all of our infrastructure, I'm guessing the portal wouldn't disrupt electronics...." 

That's an Abyss - maybe in this case, she actually should think Hell - that's a Hell of a lot of obedience to take for granted in your population.  And from all of Merrin's other thoughts it really doesn't come across as likely that this is obedience is because any dath ilani who failed to report the portal would die over several months... actually there'd be no point to stop after several months if you couldn't send them to Hell afterwards, but she digresses.

It does sound like the Keepers hold the real power, though, and she can't even tell from Merrin's thoughts whether she doesn't know it or just takes it for granted.

She is going to make a deliberate effort not to react badly to this setup just because it sounds like their version of the Church of Asmodeus succeeded in sidelining their version of Queen and Crown.

"So it sounded like you worked for - a very powerful branch of Governance, with a lot of Keeper involvement?  Did you tend to meet many of the Keepers?  Perhaps there's more important things I should be asking about," there aren't, "but I admit to being curious; they sound so... mysterious."

Merrin's most memorable interaction with a Keeper was in no way work-related. She does not say that. 

"Um, in day to day medical response work, I don't that much? There are several levels of management between me and the director of the Exception Handling department, who actually works closely with the Keeper-cutout there. Um, there is a process where I - or anyone else under the Exception Handling department - could escalate a concern directly to them, but I haven't...done that. There's also a process I could use to receive a recognition code if a high-ranked Keeper needed to give me a really weird direct order and I needed a way to verify it was real. Also has not actually happened to me. I've done training scenarios that involved consulting with lower-ranked Keepers, I guess, but - the vast majority of what I know about them is from stories." 

(To the extent that Merrin reads fiction these days, it's almost always fiction about Exception Handling scenarios, which of course tend to heavily feature Keeper involvement. It would not occur to Merrin that this might be an inaccurate representation. Why would Civilization support the continued existence of fiction that gave people misleading models. ....There is nonzero fiction with Merrin in it - some people really like medical-emergency-response adventure plots - and Merrin doesn't usually read it because it makes her really self-conscious, but she would definitely inform someone if it was inaccurate and she assumes anyone who knows her in real life does that.) 

She can't, because it's info off Detect Thoughts, but now she really really wants to ask how this person ended up in novels when all the rest of Merrin's thought processes seem to mostly indicate somebody who wasn't that important -

Actually, didn't Merrin just hint -

"Forgive me for being curious, but if a portal opened between dath ilan and Golarion, would it be likely that you, yourself, would be called to that incident?"

"- Yeah, I'd be on the list of personnel to be immediately paged and collected for that. I've focused pretty hard on doing Exception Handling trainings, I think I'm on the call list for, like, five different subdepartments. For that one in particular, I'm trained in operating with equipment or supply limitations where you need to improvise, which could apply if an entire city needs to be sealed off for an unknown length of time, and additionally I'm - unusually good at working for long shifts without significant deterioration in my mental performance, so anything where you'd want to minimize the total number of personnel sent in - and 'they're being sealed in with unknown infohazards' counts - is something where I would likely end up near the top of the list. And I've done a lot of training scenarios for urgently figuring out how to provide medical treatment to aliens."

Yes, this is extremely unlikely to ever come up in real life - though, um, Merrin believed that before she found herself in another world which seems like a major update - but anyway they're really fun okay.