"This language has some weird ambiguities sometimes.  Are you asking how she is or how she was?"

"The latter. Someday you'll have to teach us all Baseline even if teaching classes in it while the magic translation tries to keep up doesn't turn out to work."

"Or get an items enchanter whose time is less astronomically valuable than yours to make rings of Share Language (Baseline)*, if I only need to cast the spell once during the making."

"Yaisa was great, to the point where, if I didn't already believe I'd been sent into a world full of people who were improbably-good-matches for my sexuality, I would've inferred that off Yaisa alone.  And now you've gotten me thinking how that sentence would have been one-third as long in Baseline, buuuut never mind we didn't need that communications-channel-capacity anyways."

"And then Yaisa said she didn't have any hidden background or problems I needed to solve.  Fingers crossed on her not ending up with any experimentally granted superpowers or being the hidden Zon-Kuthon cleric, but I am actually starting to be cheerful about this not being the case.  I feel like - I would never fall in love with her, I just really enjoy her a lot, and while that's not impossible given tropes it's a lot less directly and stereotypically tropey."

"If you want additional details I have to bip Yaisa about her own privacy preferences, I forgot to ask her about those.  Though she did say in front of me that she planned on telling everyone else about how I was in bed and I did not object to this, so you can also ask her, if you'd like."

(*)  Taldane contains a spoken language-marker for the part of a magic item or spell that appears within parentheses.

"I find myself in the fortunate position of not needing to beg Yaisa for intel on how you are in bed. But maybe I'll talk to her later. So, assuming Yaisa doesn't grow a plot, that means - no tropes? We can stop worrying? Things will just happen for normal sorts of reasons, except the fact you're here in the first place?"

"We'd still basically be in the world that gave us the god-war and the Cayden Cailean cookies, it just wouldn't be organized and predictable the same way."

"There'd probably be less total weirdness, though."

"Well. I'll take it. Cayden Cailean whatever else you say of him makes good cake."

"If I asked where the cake actually came from would that be the sort of question that had an answer?"

"I mean, probably, on some level, there's an answer? I don't know it. He's not drawing on an Elemental Plane of Cake. Maybe He just bakes lots of cakes, in Elysium, and sends some to Pilar."

"Speaking of grave mysteries, what was that look you gave Meritxell?  Feel free to answer by Message, or I guess not at all, but exchanging an overt glance where other people could see you suggests that, if this is a secret Security issue, the existence of that secret is not itself secret."

"Hmm? No, not secret at all. I was merely of the opinion that hypothetical purely selfish Keltham who is a danger to all Golarion is the hottest thing I have ever contemplated in my entire life, and I was curious if she thought so too. She said back, 'I see your point but am slightly less kinky', or at least that was my translation."

"Releasing Rovagug, hot or not hot?"

"What? No! That'd be horrible! Also we'd cease to exist and ceasing to exist cannot be hot."

"Good distraction for the gods while purely selfish Keltham goes for the Starstone, just in case the gods would otherwise interfere with that.  Sure, it might destroy the world, if the gods now are weaker than during the last Rovagug war, but purely selfish Keltham knows he's on a time limit before the gods catch up with him."

"I don't think you properly appreciate where the saying comes from about killing the corrupted Keeper within two and a half seconds."

"That's not a useful thing to do even if you're purely selfish! The most likely outcome is that you either fail and stop existing or destroy the world and stop existing! How would that possibly - what definition of selfish are you even using -"

"He doesn't touch the Starstone immediately, he..."

"Actually, never mind.  I have remembered that Golarion is a real place and not a fictional one and that I should not explain out loud how fictional people could wreck it.  Even taking into account that my current model could be wrong, I am not that certain of my own wrongness."

"But the basic problem here is that hypothetical corrupted Keltham is able to think of strategies you would not.  Which means that, however bad you expect this to be, based on imagining what you would do in hypothetical corrupted Keltham's shoes, real corrupted Keltham is predictably worse than that."

"I don't actually think that Golarion's historical supervillains have been uncreative such that a dath ilani would be worse than we can imagine. But - they have done creative things that accomplish their goals, not creative things that probably get them permanently destroyed. If corrupted Keltham were both selfish and indifferent about getting permanently destroyed, sure, then he'd be terrible and not even in an interesting way, sure, but smart people unleashing their terrible creativity to accomplish their goals is hot, unless they have goals I just inherently can't find interesting or compatible-with-being-valuable, like ceasing to exist."

"The same logic implies that I should be unable to speed up spellsilver mining, since Golarion's historical wizards have been creative and would've wanted to speed up spellsilver mining."

"Disagree. A civilization of people much smarter than either of us invented a bunch of stuff - both Law and tools for doing stuff in the world - which we're going to reinvent and it's reasonably likely to speed up spellsilver mining even though if we tried without that backing we'd rightly expect to not stumble upon anything obvious. But the civilization of people much smarter than us never actually crashed their moon into their planet, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never actually ascended to godhood, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never actually conquered a continent and slaughtered every man, woman and child in their path, like Golarion's supervillains have; they never bred a new race of sentients, never fought a war that permanently broke the regularity of physical laws for a couple hundred miles round in the region where it was fought, and those are just the things I'm allowed to know about because they were either too hard to cover up or sufficiently hard to get inspired to do myself. Letting out Rovagug as a distraction to ascend to godhood is horrible and shocking but I bet the people who guard against it run into that annually. Golarion has lots more supervillainy than dath ilan, and does not have lots more metallurgy."

"That's not really... adding up for me.  These things are not specialized.  They draw from deeply general roots.  One of those supervillains, at one point during their career, would have had a grimdark plan involving a thousand pounds of spellsilver, and then either they know how to figure that out the same way I'm going to figure it out, or not.  If they can't figure that out, and I can, then hypothetical corrupted Keltham can figure out a bunch of other stuff those supervillains didn't figure out either."

"If you're thinking that I can maybe figure out spellsilver is some known thing in dath ilan, and then have memorized how to mine it, that's not particularly how I'm expecting to solve it.  I'm expecting to know more about how matter works and how to investigate problems like that than other previous Golarionites who tried to mine, refine, or just analyze spellsilver.  I'm expecting that based on all the missing knowledge your world should have grown if those roots were anywhere within it."

Carissa had been assuming that they would in fact be using dath ilani refining/physics knowledge, not just dath ilani Law knowledge, to figure out spellsilver, and she's in fact less optimistic about it if there's nothing applicable from how physics works in dath ilan. Hell doesn't have infinite spellsilver, so Law isn't sufficient. 

....but right now that seems like a tangent. "Well, maybe corrupted Keltham'd be the most terrifying supervillain who ever supervillained because of knowing more about how to achieve his terrible goals, which would be hot, or maybe it'd take him a while to discover the true depths of supervillainy, which would be hot, or maybe he'd just ascend immediately, which would be fascinating, or maybe he'd destroy the world, which is totally unappealing on every level. I suppose I'll luckily never find out."

"Well, I'm not quite sure things could reasonably play out this way.  But if our personal power levels go high enough at some point, and if the rest of Golarion Civilization hasn't caught up to that power level, and if there's still some other country out there at least three percent as bad as Nidal, and if moderate levels of caution permit us to do so sanely, then we could go be supervillains over there for a couple of weeks.  Or however long it takes to wreck their capabilities to the point where Cheliax can handle the remaining cleanup with forty Security officers."

"That is not exactly the thing but I will keep it in mind."

"Remaining difference?"

"Perfectly selfish Keltham, whatever he wants from me, he has, he's not holding any part of himself back because he's scared of what it'd ask for or because he thinks he couldn't afford to pay for it."