"Go get it healed. If for some reason we want to know what happens to you if you inhale acid fumes we can try it on someone less valuable."

She obeys, of course, and heads off, though she's a bit puzzled about what her valuableness has to do with it.  She could always get it healed later.

"I now see new unfortunate romantic possibilities that I was not seeing a minute earlier, and which I wish, indeed, I had never seen."

"At his current rate I think Keltham will be kinky enough for Pilar in, like, two more weeks."

"Yes, but what if their romance ends up being, not that of rapist and victim, but Nethysian mad experimenter and willing experimental subject?  The tropes wouldn't have brought them together based on a fake compatibility, is what I'm worried about here."

"At this point, I'm just praying that all of us doing whatever we are naturally inclined to in bed will somehow make him Evil because lying doesn't seem to work and so far the truth is working quite well. If Pilar wants to be dipped in acid she can be my guest."

"Well, you can probably feel a little less worried about what Lord Nethys might be trying to accomplish here, because that's seeming sort of... obvious."

"I'm worrying at this point that I may end up as a heretic too, just like the rest of Project Lawful.  Only in my case that would make me a Nethysian heretic.  One who has started to believe that some things should not, in fact, explode."

"Well, you know, if you ever get in the mood to renounce your god and sell your soul, we're here."

"Hm.  Let me think about that.  Hm.  Hmmmmm."

"Hmmmmmmmmm."

"Still thinking.  It's such a difficult question."

"If a thousand years from now Evil Keltham and I are ruling a layer of Hell acknowledged as objectively the most awesome place in the multiverse you can't say you weren't warned."

"I hope your worldview doesn't disintegrate in another week after Keltham proves using cold, absolute, indisputable Law that the objective awesomeness of an afterlife is determined by its number of books."

"Hell probably has more books than other places since it has more slaves to make them."

"Doesn't count if they're all copies of the same book.  Writing new books is a bit harder to do with slaves..."

"...I suppose your vision of your Hell layer actually is one where the slaves write new books, isn't it."

"If it's valuable, then I think it ought to be possible to have my slaves do it! And writing books is obviously valuable!"

"I sincerely and unironically wish you good luck with that."

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Morning

The Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer is, unlike the rest of the horde she is being inducted with, not excessively impressed at mentions of Her Infernal Majesty, and is in fact fairly judgmental of anyone who brings Her Infernal Majesty up to make a point; it's classless, the behavior of people who have had exactly one encounter with real power in their lives.

That said, she hasn't met Her Infernal Majesty, and is not under the impression it'd be good for her, and she is on her best behavior. That means she has been exceedingly patient with the power-drunk teenager who wants to help her reify her backstory to make sense in alter-Cheliax, and brought no servants except for her familiar, a chinchilla named Ira.

And good sense means she hasn't asked any of her growing list of questions. In particular, she'd kill several of her siblings for an answer to why, precisely, the Chosen of Asmodeus is named such, and in what sense Asmodeus chose her, but you can't just ask that. And she'd kill a lot more people than that for an actual working understanding of Keltham, the center of this whole thing, who everyone seems to regard as some kind of appalling hybrid between a paladin and an uncontrollable natural disaster. But she suspects already that Project Lawful does not have one, and if there's to be one she'll have to develop it herself. 

Which shouldn't be hard. The power-drunk teenager was impressed that the Lady de Seguer was competent to fake any sexual reaction she felt like, and her bluff is easily much better than anyone else's here. The plan for that is apparently swords of glibness, for some reason, which sounds like a plan made by a wizard.

All this to say, she's splendidly dressed and very much looking forward to meeting Keltham, and she's tolerating the food in the breakfast-hall for it, even though it's not very good food and she has a Ring of Sustenance.

"I see we've got some new faces this morning!  Hi, I'm Keltham, I'm not from around here, didn't grow up around faces like yours, and it's probably going to take me upwards of a week to learn faces and names.  After I'm done talking, please use Prestidigation to alter the color of a trace over your clothing to read out your name in Taldane.  Somebody will get you actual paper within an hour so you don't have to keep doing that.  Carissa, you're in charge of making that happen on take two if it ends up not happening the first time."

"Welcome to Project Lawful!  I don't know if you've reviewed the section of transcript explaining why that's a terrible name, or at least, explaining that to the extent it can be explained without additional math not yet covered, but rest assured that the terrible name wasn't my idea."

"Project Lawful, or just the Project for short around here since we only have the one, is an endeavor to bring the knowledge of my homeworld of dath ilan to Golarion, so that Golarion can have the sort of nice things we had in dath ilan.  Even nicer things, once you get going, nicer things and faster, because dath ilan didn't have magic and had to do everything the hard way.  Here when you've got no idea which metal is 'vanadium' and no particularly bright ideas for finding out, you just go 'flush this down the toilet, I'm gonna try Prestidigitating element-20 to act like element-23 and see if that works for catalyzing the production of sulfurious acid'.  That's part of my project to drop the cost of spellsilver by a factor of ten.  There were originally some ideas for dropping the cost of spellsilver by a factor of two, but I explained I'd only settle for that if I absolutely had to, because just halving the cost of spellsilver is probably not enough to achieve takeoff on the process of building enough intelligence headbands that more people can be wizards and make more intelligence headbands until all of Golarion has +6 Intelligence, which is approximately what it would take to get Intelligence, alone, into the vicinity of dath ilan's mental stats.  I suspect we had more going for us than just Intelligence, but getting the average enhanced Intelligence up to 16 would be a start."

"By the way, I hope none of you are the sort who have always really wanted to see an explosion of boiling acid from up close, because Ione was complaining really loudly after the last one, yesterday, and I think she wants that to not happen again even if we have Resist Energy (Acid) and Resist Energy (Fire), so you might've missed your only chance there."

"Now, I know the question on all of your minds.  'But Keltham,' you're thinking, 'we're all Evil here, and as much fun as it might be to watch explosions of boiling acid from up close, we're not going to do that just to bring intelligence headbands to all of Golarion, we'd like to become incredibly rich.'  I don't know actually if this part has already been explained to you here, but the basic idea is that the Project forms a business, the business is one of which you can all own shares that vest over time if you do your work well, your share ends up being something like a thousandth of the Project or twice that if you're an unusually valuable employee, then, if our schemes all work out, the Project ends up being worth a billion gold pieces and you end up worth a million gold out of that.  That's how things are done in dath ilan.  Don't rely on that as if it were wealth already in your possession, is another common wisdom out of dath ilan.  In your case, you haven't even been hired yet."

"Whether you get hired - and at what salary, and at what share of the Project to be earned - will depend on your ability to master Law, the basis of all my knowledge out of dath ilan."

The new faces are attentive; they've Prestidigitated their nametags. That beautiful woman over there has 'Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer' on her deep blue silk dress in what looks like gold embroidered thread. That woman over there with a distinctly nonhuman bone structure and weird skin coloration has 'Sibilla'.

A dath ilani audience would have smiled at some point, or looked horrified, or something... right, apparently he'll have to repeat the process of training the newcomers out of that form of Chelish dignity wherein everybody has a fixed expression of attentiveness in order to eliminate all feedback for teachers and managers.

The Lady Avaricia's snap impression of Keltham is that he has absolutely no class at all, and that if he can't tell her apart from everyone else then she's going to get a hair appointment this afternoon and be blonde tomorrow. It should not be hard to tell her apart from other people.

"The Law is what gives an ilani their power.  The structure used by all thought, all living cognition.  It's everywhere outside you and inside you.  It binds the galaxy together, you could say, in the form of the Law of gravity..."

"That was a dumb introduction.  Sorry, I'm improvising here.  Rollback, retry."

"You know how to use math to describe the mechanics of hanging spells, the balances of forces that go as the inverse-square, the inverse-cube, that oscillate with a frequency.  Intelligent people, who are good at math, go become wizards, since that's the high-paying profession that uses math."

"Math can, in fact, be used for more than magic.  A lot more."

"Math, it turns out, can be used to describe how to think.  And thinking better gives you a deeper power over reality than any spell could.  It's like a Wish spell, in a way, except for the part where it actually works and does what you want, if your Art is strong and your Way is true."

"By and large, you don't learn to hang spells by doing explicit calculations while you're in the middle of hanging them.  There usually is not time, your hands are busy so you can't use a paper scratchpad.  By working paper problems separately from the actual process of hanging your spells, however, you develop an intuition for where to put the balance between an inverse-cube force and an inverse-square force, that an inverse-cube repulsion and an inverse-square attraction will almost always have a balancing point, while an inverse-cube attraction and an inverse-square repulsion is unstable."

"Most of the process that produces a higher level of mental skill in an average INT-17 dath ilani than in an average INT-17 Golarionite is not that the dath ilani is constantly doing explicit calculations with numbers.  It's that they have, in offline training, usually as a young child, worked through many toy examples of thought processes slowly enough that they can see what the numbers would be for those, how the Law would apply, and in that process somewhat corrected their thoughts towards the shape of Law."

"Then, from Lawful thinking, comes the skill to uncover the Laws of the outer world.  I am trying to apply such of that Law as I merely remember to the problem of dropping the cost of spellsilver production by a factor of 10.  But my memory is very incomplete, and in some cases will be wrong, and there are important things that I never learned at all."

"I have some ideas about how to cheaply produce huge quantities of high-purity sulfurious acid, as they call 'sulfuric acid' around here, because it's a precursor to an incredibly large number of industrial processes.  Civilization went through hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff every year.  That's not an exaggeration, our actual production figure was 300 million tons per year, if I'm recalling it correctly and converting units correctly, or a third of a ton per year per person.  So there are stories out of dath ilan in which somebody like me ends up on an alien planet somehow and then has to figure out how to produce a lot of acid, basically the exact situation I am now in, and the stories go into detail on exactly how to do that, even if you don't have any magic."

"Even so, I don't remember a lot of key points there.  And when it comes to other things, what I have are not blueprints but hints."

"Hints can be worth an awful lot, in this business, compared to striking out completely blindly.  Hints can save you incredible amounts of time if you could've otherwise gotten to the same place all on your own without the hint."

"Somebody who would never get the answer on their own, however, is probably not going to get it even with the hint."

"So you need to learn to be the sorts of people who could wield Law-inspired and Law-reshaped thought and no small amount of actual numerical calculation, to experiment and discover the Law of the world.  And then further wield Law-inspired thought to apply the Law of the world to engineer new processes, new technology.  Ones not exactly like the processes out of dath ilan.  Golarion processes will use magic for a shortcut, where that's possible and economically feasible."

"We are improvising everything here, improvising it rather rapidly.  My teachings on Law are not optimal for you, they are how I remember being taught when I was young, as soon as I was old enough to understand, which is rather younger than things begin in Golarion.  My Law, I now suspect, was taught to me in a very careful way so as not to damage me in certain ways.  And I cannot remember all the cautions, I cannot reproduce the exact training, and if I could remember it exactly it would still be a training input adapted only to me, to Keltham, and the outputs I had previously output."

"When Manohar dropped an artifact headband on Asmodia for a couple of hours, she deduced an enormous amount of Law from hints I'd previously given the class, started seeing the world in a whole new way, and then, apparently - we're still not sure if this was really related to the Law epiphanies - got into a state where she could no longer be really sane without a +6 Wisdom headband, which she is still currently wearing."

"Being here is not safe.  It is not impossible that we will do some form of damage to you that makes you no longer able to hold yourself together in Golarion, and leaves you nowhere to go but Hell.  It is not impossible we'll do some form of damage to you that Hell doesn't currently know how to fix, and we'll have to figure out some way to stop time for you and suspend you, turning you temporarily into a statue for example, until the future Civilization of Golarion can figure out how to cure you."

"I was told you'd already be told that.  If not, or if it wasn't told to you fully, let me know, and I'll see about having that process revised in the future.  It's too late for you to back out of being part of the Project's secrecy bubble within Cheliax, you cannot go back to anything that isn't under heavy Security; but it is not too late for you to decide that you don't want to risk your mental integrity."

"I am not going to ask you to decide that now in front of everyone; if that's so, you can let me know in private."