" - good question. I don't know. I rather want to ask Subirachs if Asmodeanism has an answer, actually."

"You're not allowed to leave the cuddleroom yet."  There's still an internal jarring, each time he says something like that, and yet - it is comforting, that she can be here just because he wants her to be here, safely, without cost to him.

She beams at him. "Yes, Keltham.

Anyway, there is a teaching that mortals are specifically bad at reasoning about really large numbers, and devils aren't, and so it seems possible that once I am perfected as a devil I could tell you exactly how much realness I'd trade for how much magic, and it seems further possible that Hell could tell me already, to at least moderate accuracy. But I am yours, and submit to you in the matter of whether I should ask about that."

"I know how to reason about large numbers, which is only a matter of knowing how to carry out a whole chain of reasoning using numbers on every step.  But in this case it's not about the large-number part of it.  You value your experience of magic.  You value there being more Carissalike things that are real.  If your value on the second thing scales linearly and is currently strong enough for you to notice it at all, you'd sacrifice your future experience of magic to become two trillion times more real."

"Hell doesn't need to do the part where it reasons about large numbers.  Hell needs to know whether your currently stated preference for there to be more reality in Carissalike things, is a valid part of your idealized utilityfunction, and one that grows as an independent component without limit until it trumps the part of your idealized utilityfunction that wants to go on experiencing being able to do magic."

"And - I would personally say - giving up your sense of joy in doing magic, because you had a sense that you ought to be obligated to become two trillion times more real even if you couldn't feel that at all from the inside, even if what became two trillion times as real was the sad Carissa who lost her magic - that does feel to me like - it has something in common with the thinking of the people who thought they had go on existing in the present in order to destroy the future."

"There's - something of Goodness - in caring too much about what's real, and having that drown out how things feel to you."

"That's a very interesting answer, and maybe also Hell's answer, in which case I'll believe it. But two trillion Carissae would get to do so many things - I love magic, but I am sure I would love other things too - and there'd be enough of her for all the Kelthams around, and I'd be a little less always on the brink of being gone, and - Hell's answer might also be that, I'm not sure. Not that I'd be obligated to give up magic for there to be more of me, but that I'd chase the opportunity until I caught it, if I saw it out of the corner of my eye.

Also it's not like there wouldn't still be a Golarion Carissa who did magic, right? Just, most Carissae would be ones born into worlds that exist more, like worlds without magic or that didn't have an Earthfall?"

"I doubt my last girlfriend existed in more different places than future Carissa Sevars will, over say the next subjective million years?  I'd guess she'll probably exist in fewer distinguishably different places, because her reality is more densely concentrated.  Or on a macro scale, I expect the different dath ilans end up less diverse than the branching Golarions."

"I think you're confusing the question of how many importantly distinct versions of something there is, with the ~~~~~~~~ of being any one of those versions.  Probably some of the most individually real consciousnesses in all of reality are incredibly simple minds in simple universes that stay on single tracks and never branch."

"Does anything important depend on how I answer this question or should I just drop it until I am older and wiser?"

"I mean, we lead strange lives so I cannot guarantee you will not suddenly be offered a chance to become two trillion times more real at the price of your magic.  And, come that day, it might be important for you to understand, that this is not at all the same thing as creating two trillion importantly different versions of yourself having diverse experiences."

"But, I mean, if you turn out to have the option of asking me first, you probably should."

"Oh, and you asked about permission, I should answer explicitly.  No problem if you can afford the comms bandwidth someday to ask Hell about it, but I predict they answer that they need an unmanageable amount of detail about your psychology, or say '85% likelihood that if we knew everything about a random fourth-circle wizard we'd tell them blah blah blah, but it's incredibly hard to actually learn for individuals'."

She bets they won't, because Hell doesn't care what she values but what they value in her. But - "yeah, they might. I'm still curious. Thank you."

PL-timestamp:  Day 25 (21) / Long Night

(Branched subthread for an event during this Long Night:  Korva explaining her own suggestions on alterCheliax.)

PL-timestamp:  Day 26 (22)

Three of the twelve candidates are not being hired.

It's easier the second time.  Maybe also because this group wasn't friends with each other the same way as the Ostensos.  He doesn't have the same sense of splitting people up by assigning them different fates.

A note from Korva says she's fine working for Asmodia and would prefer to skip her exit interview.

The cleric of Asmodeus accepts without changing expression that he can best serve Asmodeus by staying on in this Fortress as a staff cleric, against their potential future need for a Security-cleared pure mathematician.  He accepts the Project's offer to him for the option-value on that without negotiating.

The final rejected candidate says she's totally taking the Hell option, since Cheliax is offering a free round-trip ticket there and back.

(No, not actually.  She'll just be a statue for a bit.)

Nine of twelve are hired.

Lady Avaricia is the only immediate tier-1 among them.

Keltham has his eye on some of the others.  They haven't had as much attention and Law-lecturing from him as the first twelve got during their first week; they should not necessarily despair at not being promoted to tier-1s yet.

(Keltham does privately feel surprised that there'd be Asmodia and Ione out of the first eleven Ostenso students, and Meritxell though she is not quite looking to be in that same class at the moment; and only Lady Avaricia to clearly outperform the rest of a supposedly much more elite candidate class.  It does seem a bit... tropey, if he doesn't just need to offer them more training.  Or maybe these people have too much Existing Expertise and too much Achievement In a Narrow Field and not enough Being Random Very Smart Kids Ready To Learn.)

Lady Avaricia is so incredibly unsurprised by this. What are they doing next.

Tier-two is acceptable - for the moment. Once the field shifts from mathematics to crafting, Alexandre will demonstrate his skills and Keltham will amend his folly.

Willa should be thrilled to have succeeded, but it tastes like failure.

It's not the shares and the money-from-shares that really matter, even though it's really possibly quite a lot of money and it probably should. It's the having lost, to Avaricia of all people, it's the thrill of the test gone to ashes, it's the implied promise that the tier one girls are the special ones. It's painful to think about, that she might just be in the background, forever.

And it's not the kind of thing you can work harder to fix, because she's already been working hard, she doesn't have some extra gear she can tap into that she wasn't already tapping. But she very much wants to be distracted right now. Maybe they'll do more SCIENCE today, and if not, there's always obsessively playing with every aspect of Prestidigitation.

They're not done yet, signing-agreements-wise!

Keltham has now produced a non-disclosure agreement between the Project's employees including himself, and the Professional Alchemist, if the Professional Alchemist is willing.  Keltham sent it off to Cheliax last night, and they made a few corrections that seem fine to Keltham and sent it back signed on their own behalf this morning.  Cheliax is signatory because the NDA also binds, for example, nearby Security, and anybody who's allowed to read transcripts.

The Professional Alchemist wanted a long time to read it very closely but eventually declared it satisfactory.

Yeah, cool.  Keltham admits to being interested in what was worth the protection.

He does temperature-reading with his familiar, a vampire bat, which has heat vision, and which he trained to distinguish fairly fine detail in heat - down to 10% of the difference between freezing and boiling water. He also has some secret processes he'll show them but that is most of his competitive edge.

...that does not particularly sound like it would scale.  But it will, during the prototyping phase, plausibly save them some time, if they're ready for the SO2->SO3 step before Keltham otherwise invents a thermometer.

Anyways, welcome to Project Lawful.

They probably don't have everyone they need, now, they're probably also going to need a smith or a glassblower or who knows what else, but they've got enough to keep on storming ahead in what is hopefully a forwards direction.

For, now that they have basically functioning spectroscopes, they can start learning to modify spectra of light rather than just the way illusions look to the naked eye, modify electron orbital levels rather than just the colors that materials burn, and by doing exercises like those, hopefully, graduate to being able to modify the chemical properties and most-probable reaction pathways of materials via their understanding, and not just hammer from outside on their 'color', 'smell', or 'taste'.

The road ahead of them will not be easy!  Not trivially easy, definitely!  Possibly quite hard!  They'll be performing magical manipulations that don't just do what they want right away, and instead push on weird invisible properties, properties that can only be measured indirectly, in spectroscopic properties or reaction rates.  They'll have to hone their exercises of magical power until they actually do much of anything predictable at all; and then, by observing the little they can observe, often after the fact, they'll have to figure out how to affect complex systemic properties in a way that adds up to a functioning pathway of chemical transformations.  There's math that can guide their way, but only partially, for understanding particular steps; they can't just calculate everything they need to do.

In other words, just like being a wizard apprentice all over again! 

Only this time they will become MATTER WIZARDS.

And then use their MATTER WIZARDRY to produce ENORMOUS QUANTITIES OF ACID.

Then magically perfect the reaction pathways to refine spellsilver cheaply out of less expensive ore, drop spellsilver costs by a factor of 10, probably do some other stuff too, but also get started on making more intelligence headbands for new wizards who can make more intelligence headbands.

And now, begin!