"Gods are not infallible.  They sight us but dimly."  This was told him, in the course of explaining how he must not in fact assume that Otolmens saw all, knew all, understood all, that She was able to move him with vast wisdom and every consequence foreseen.  "By the laws of choosing, you must be within one alignment step of your god.  This permits that your alignment might be True Neutral.  As is, for example, Nethys, god of destruction and madness."

"Yeah, pretty sure my god and Asmodeus and Cayden Cailean are sighting stuff here more than 'dimly'.  What with, you know, some pretty precise timing and spell choices and all that.  Which would be handily explained if Nethys, god of knowledge, was tipping them off."

"None of this says that the purpose to which those gods are acting is one that would not alarm my goddess of preventing enormous messes.  None of this says that you yourself are in truth a Lawful being."

"I can think of further arguments but I'm wondering if you have some test you're working up to applying, in which case you could just mention it now and save a lot of pointless conversation."

"No.  No test.  Only a question."

"What kind of being are you?  Who is Keltham?  Not your world, not the knowledge taught you, not the god who chose you, not your alignment aura, none of these things outside you, that are not you."

"I'll state for the record that I was talking about that part because it's easily visible and verifiable strong evidence that you don't have to take my word about, as might be relevant to the game we were theoretically going to be playing here, where people have incentives to say something apart from truth."

"I did not say your words were empty to me.  If I had to stake my soul on it, in this moment, I would guess that you were a Lawful being."

"There remains doubt.  Why am I here if you are so orderly?  Perhaps my Lawful Neutral goddess saw imperfectly.  Or perhaps your Lawful Neutral god saw unclearly.  Nethys might tell them more, but Nethys is also god of madness and destruction, and not Himself a Lawful being."

"Who is Keltham?  He has not said much of himself in my presence, only spoken of things outside himself.  Does he know, himself, what he is?"

"There is a sizable chance that I know myself better than any other mortal in Golarion, what with the fact that I alone have had any training in introspection or education in how minds and brains operate.  What exactly do you want to know?"

Whether you are liable to destroy Golarion, destroy all that lies beyond it.  But this Broom cannot say.

"If I knew so plainly, I would have asked you plainly."

"Why are you Lawful?  Why did you choose that?"

"Okay, see, Lawfulness is not a thing in dath ilan.  We learn to use some math.  Because it's useful.  Then you get to Golarion and all of a sudden everyone is like 'what an incredibly Lawful person this is' but that's your weird system, not mine.  I was, am, and remain, Keltham, whatever other people call me, and whatever system they think I fit into."

"What is Keltham, then, that those of Golarion, seeing him truly, might call him Lawful in their own weird system?"

"I could answer that more clearly if your concept of Lawfulness was not itself such a mess.  This language uses the same words for mathematics that is timeless and invariant between all worlds, and regulations made up by people in particular regions and factions, calling both by the word 'law'."

"Laws obeyed by matter and magic.  Laws obeyed by people.  Shapes that they take on, without which they would dissolve into formlessness and chaos.  Constraints that should not be violated.  You see nothing the two have in common?"

"Those who taught me to think, who are vastly better at that than anybody in Golarion including me, taught me that it is not a good idea to think of two things as being the same, just because you can point to some property the two have in common.  In due course I'll probably be lecturing on that."

"Who is Keltham?"

"Keltham is a very large data structure and he needs you to be more specific about your search query."

"Who is Keltham that Keltham will do as he says he will do, in this game?  Not, what god bears witness to it; who is Keltham that a god would bear him that witness?"

"Okay, so I got here knowing literally nothing about Golarion, and then, a few seconds later, that this place was really cold, or at least the part of it I was standing on was cold.  But in short order I found out about gods and clerics, which are not a thing where I come from.  So I decided to try talking to a god who might be helpful."

"How do you suppose I targeted my call, to the first god I tried to talk to?"

"A god that would prove useful to you in your project to change Golarion, a god who might offer you protection from any unknown threats about you, a god whose concerns appealed to you enough that you could be Their cleric."

"No.  I was looking for a better partnership than that.  In Civilization we have traditions about that sort of thing, looking for somebody where you can start a business venture with them and stick to that for years and years.  People have proverbially better luck about that if they treat it less like the problem of finding an employer, or employee, and more like the problem of who to monogamously marry and have a kid with."

"So I asked myself the question 'Who is Keltham?' from a direction that seemed useful to matching up with a god ideally suited to me, and the exact form of that question out of dath ilan isn't exactly easy to explain, but - I asked myself what a world of Kelthams would be like, how Civilization would have been different if I'd been an average person there, instead of a relatively strange person for a dath ilani as dath ilani go.  Imagining the world-of-you is one way of seeing yourself."

"And because the thing that was different about me, in Civilization, is always that I was more selfish than the people around me - I asked myself whether a world of Kelthams would just fall apart, because of farmers stealing grain from each other.  Goodness is something that helps to prevent that, that people won't damage others because they care about those others, even strangers.  Then if there's a world of people less Good, doesn't it end up looking, as your goddess might say, a huge mess?"

"I do not know.  I agree that it seems like a wise question to ask, before trying to remake a world in one's image."

"I am not trying to remake Golarion in my image or in the image of dath ilan.  When Asmodia showed up one morning with a +6 Wisdom headband supposedly to compensate for a disability she picked up from a maniacal experiment, starting to use concepts and talk more like somebody out of Civilization, I was sad because I didn't want Golarion to just turn into a copy of dath ilan.  I said that out loud.  Ask Asmodia, she might remember me saying it."

"Then I do not understand why you asked the question in that form."

"Because my answer to how the world of Kelthams held together - is that even if you're selfish, you can still value for its own sake, have as part of your 'utilityfunction', that you will do those things that a Civilization must do to hold itself together, even if the people in it care less for strangers than do those of dath ilan."

"Kelthams don't cheat strangers.  They keep their promises to strangers.  They trade fairly with strangers.  They have, in their utilityfunction, very strongly, the shards of - a thing I was going to teach in future lectures - the essence of Coordination - that made its way into humans, long ago, because people who didn't feel anything about keeping their promises, did less well in trade, acquired poorer reputation, and in the end had fewer children, than the honorable.  And we know that this must have happened, long ago, because there is no other way that human beings could now be what they are, things that have a word for honor."

"...though I don't know if the Baseline 'builtin-honor' is translating well when I translate it as the Taldane word for honor."

"The very first shard of Coordination that children are taught about, in the very beginning, is this game I set them to play."

"The real solution to it takes more Law than I think I can teach in a little while."

"But you don't need the full Law, if you don't have the part of the instructions that say you're to be strictly selfish and care about nothing else."

"One solution is to care about other people - as much as you care about yourself, so that if you can gain nine coppers at the expense of their losing ten, you still won't do that, because it would be a loss to the cosmos, to larger reality."

"The other solution is to care about honor.  Care about Coordination.  Be someone where, if somebody else cooperates with you, trusts you, then you would sooner walk out of this reality through Abaddon than betray them, when they hadn't betrayed your own trust."

"That's why a world of Kelthams can exist, and not turn into a huge mess."

"That was the god I called out to - the god whose domain is following the forms of Coordination for their own sake, as a term in the utilityfunction.  Because that is something very deep and strong in what Keltham is, that goes with his selfishness, and makes it okay, safe, for him to be selfish."

"All you need to do to solve the real version of this dilemma with a Keltham, minus the game instructions to roleplay being purely selfish in a way that demands complicated math to solve by pure Law, is to say under truthspell that you'll Cooperate with him.  You don't need to say why.  If you're not going to Defect against Keltham and take his own stuff, then he's not going to take three coppers away from you.  The end."

"And if I pledged upon my Law to write Cooperate on my own paper, if I believed you would write Cooperate on yours - you would say - what, then, to convince me?  That you pledge it upon your honor?  That you pledge it upon your Law?"