What??

Does Asmodeus not have enough people who want to go to Hell He can choose????

That doesn't have anything to do with anything anyway.

Tonia attempts to nod.

"If," Carissa says, "everyone except me on this project decides they want to go to Abaddon as a reward for service on it, then probably that will happen, because you are all very valuable and have lots of bargaining power. - I really hope you'll give me a decade, first, to see if I can make something you'd want to exist for....

...I really really don't want it to end like that, it'd never be all right from there no matter how glorious a thing we built, but, there's so much at stake, as long as we're winning, that almost any stupid thing you want is safe to want. A heretic isn't that much of a problem. A broken heretic is one who's stopped seeing that the heretical things they want they can have."

"I want to stop being in the heavy punishments group," says Tonia. 

"I had that coming, didn't I. Let's discuss it after a conclusion is reached on this."

If Tonia asked me to get her out of the Project, would she find herself outside the Forbiddance with a teleport scroll a few seconds later, and myself standing here with no idea what happened?

Only if that served Asmodeus!

So no.

Also that's not quite what happened with Tonia last time!  Pilar will probably figure it out herself eventually, once she's got enough ilan in her.

Peranza would be fine so long as she could just be alterPeranza all her waking hours and never had to do anything as realPeranza she can't say that everybody will think she's crazy.

"Permission to ask Keltham, tomorrow, about how we can collect a lot of different predictions, into one prediction that summarizes them, if we want to guess which girl he dates next after Ione.  Only without people being able to predict themselves, or know what other people predicted about them."

"Then whatever Keltham says, for how to do that, we do that on everyone's predictions of the probability that anyone else is about to break in the next three days."

" - permission granted, and we'll run the method he suggests with and without Security. With since they're the ones reading minds and without since they might not have the skill for making predictions."

PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Morning

Keltham wakes up, and now that he's safely no longer at the end of yesterday, with all his healing surges waiting to be used, and Carissa right nearby, and nothing else he needs to do before restorative sleep, his brain helpfully remembers that he hasn't gotten around to attaching a searingly hot object to his arm while trying to run Detect Magic.  Though, obviously, he shouldn't do that right now, he has work to do today and that might take recovery time afterwards.

Gosh.  It's like his brain is reluctant about this for some reason.

Next time Keltham has an evening with Carissa, he'll tell her beforehand to actually remind him about that.

After breakfast and convening:

So today he's going to try a lecture in Baseline, approaching some of the mathematics of Decision as is more complicated than the simple cases considered under the Law of Probable Utility.  But don't cast Comprehend Languages just yet, there's a somewhat grimdark question he needs to pose to them first.

He can't think of a very soft way to put this, so he's just going to say it.  There's a risk on this project that Keltham is not at all trained to handle:  Namely, personality damage, caused by new knowledge of Law destroying existing mental structures inside people that got built up by previous unLawful processes and were playing important structural roles as thoughts inside them.  He knows how he was raised as a child, so he didn't end up in that state as an adult.  He has no idea what to do with adults already in that state.  Zero idea.

Option one:  Keltham tries to guess a protocol for preventing this from happening - where, at this point, he doesn't know how to decide even between such macrostrategies as 'Try to snap a few of the springs at a time, slowly and gradually' and 'Try to prevent everything from breaking loose until everyone has a bunch of Law and recovery protocols and maybe a Core Fallback entrained and possibly a separate mental image of what a coherent person looks like' - and proceeds according to that.

Option two:  Keltham proceeds faster and with less caution, unless and until severe damage actually occurs to somebody, hopefully still at a fixable level the first time it happens.  And then backs off and replans after that.

"....do you have any examples or anything? It's kind of...hard to imagine," says Gregoria.

If he had examples then he would know how anything worked and he would be less nervous!

Keltham's actual direct experience here consists of himself getting an Owl's Wisdom, and realizing that his previous life plans within dath ilan were entirely hopeless and in fact he had enough data to realize this and was lying to himself about it.  Good thing he was in Golarion first!

And then there's Asmodia, who got an artifact headband put on herself, invented a lot of Law and wound up spontaneously relating to it in a specifically Keeper-like fashion.  Keeper-thinking has effects that people like Keltham deliberately don't get told about.  Keltham does not, among other things, know whether or not it's possible for Keepers to fall in love.  For example.  Keltham initially thought this was probably because Keepers couldn't, and you don't want to tell all the nonKeepers who are in love that their love is unLawful; but on reflection it's much more likely that the Keepers have some well-phrased blanket policy of hiding everything that might be like that from the perspective of nonKeepers, so that their pattern of secrets doesn't leak information.

"It seems to me like it's going to be kind of impossible to be usefully careful without an idea what might go wrong, so we should go ahead until something does go wrong and we actually know what problem we're trying to solve," Meritxell says.

Uh, so it's supposed to be socially obvious, if only everyone here had grown up in Civilization, that nobody here actually makes it obvious what their opinion on the topic is.  They can bring up considerations the group should know about, but carefully saying it in a way that doesn't indicate whether or not they think it's a decisive consideration, or whether other considerations lean the same way.  Then everybody writes their opinion on a piece of paper without putting their name on it, folds it up, and hands it to Keltham, and he jumbles those up before reading them.

There's some further discussion the gist of which is that Chelish people don't seem able to figure out how this really damages somebody as opposed to giving them a bad day and maybe Pilar showing up with a piece of cake for them but not... like... something Terrible?  So far this is all sounding like, "As many as several fates are known in Golarion that are worse than this fate"?  But if somebody ends up sad and depressed and failing out of the project - and, in the very worst case, going to Hell to see if Hell can fix things, and staying in Hell if Hell can't - then probably everybody on this project is willing to risk being the first person that happens to -

Don't state your final opinion.  Especially don't state what you think everyone else's opinions are supposed to be.

But yes, the final form of the question could be, 'Are you willing to risk being the first person on the project who ends up staying in Hell due to unfixable personality damage?'

Everyone will write 'yes' on a piece of paper, then!

He'd have more Conspiracy worries about this if not for, like, the Asmodeus thing and Keltham having now ever met Asmodeans.

Ione, Keltham was kind of expecting more backup here.

Ione is not actually the type to tell people they can't volunteer for dangerous things, just to warn them about the dangers being there.  It's when she sees people walking blindly into things that she starts scolding people.

And the final question was about whether Ione herself wanted things slowed down for herself, of which the answer is in truth no.

Asmodia, you too?

She guessed a few times about what would probably be dangerous to others, and was told by Keltham she was wrong a few times.  Asmodia is now waiting on seeing concrete things happening that she can start to update about.

As for the final form of the question, Asmodia's own personal level of risk tolerance... has already been made clear by her various life decisions.  Not the least of which was signing up for Worldwound duty after graduation, and then diverting from that to a mysterious high-risk high-pay high-Security project.  Asmodia has tried to play a cautious game on particular occasions, but she's not under the impression that a cautious life is what they are all here to live.

On to today's lectures, then.  Everyone now cast Comprehend Languages.

To begin our entry into what Civilization considers the Law of Decision, consider this mathheavier special_case-rigged_demo treatment of the simplest cooperation-defection-dilemma...