"Yeah, but we'd have to abort if they weren't able to handle the Probability parts..."

"Well, I suppose that means we can just try them on Science and see if they can, in fact, handle the Probability parts, and if not, abort and reschedule.  After all, as the saying goes, why pass up the path of possible greatest reward based on a mere prediction of failure, when you can quickly and cheaply test that?"

"...yeah, I'm gonna be using Communal Share Language (Baseline) on them.  Now that I'm occasionally speaking Baseline again, I'm reminded how much the long message length of snappy dath ilani proverbs in Taldane makes my head hurt."

"I have a feeling you'll manage to give them an interesting and memorable first day."

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Morning Lectures

Maniacal-experimental multi-author subthread for this morning's lecture:

to Hell with SCIENCE!

(longer than usual for a lecture; relatively self-contained; you have the right to flee back to the main thread if saturated)

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Afternoon

Well, that sure was a fascinating lunch discussion full of interesting topics!  And questions!  Some actually pretty basic questions!  Mostly relayed through Ione!  Keltham has definitely learned the important fact that he needs to actually back off and not try to plunge the new candidates directly into the same classes as the current hires!  But it's not a 'failed' experiment, the PLAN failed, yes, the HOPE failed, but the experiment itself is just data.

Keltham now has FOUR basic phases to cram into his limited supply of days and hours!  And they are:

- Teaching Law to the current hires, including some Keeper-only classes;

- Overseeing the current hires teaching the new candidates;

- Doing Science! to acid synthesis, spellsilver refining, roads, medicine, and all other important subjects;

- Having a personal life including wizard practice, scroll practice, also now learning martial arts from Security, and dating Carissa, Yaisa, Meritxell, Ione, and Asmodia.

...This would be a really good time to be a sufficiently advanced wizard that he'd only need to sleep two hours per night.  But that, apparently, is not within the cards for a while.

......The thought occurs to Keltham that, at this rate, he may end up participating in his first threesomes and orgies - rather earlier than those would usually come, in the natural course of increasing sexual complication - just for scheduling reasons.

"I think alternating days is a good idea for the Law lectures anyway, I've seen lots of the girls staying up late going back over the notes and having more time probably lets things sink in more. I have no idea how to help you with your sex life. ...I guess perhaps you would benefit from having it pointed out that you don't have to, like, do a whole evening date every time and can also just pull someone aside for a blowjob at lunchtime? I don't know if that'd actually feel like keeping up with your personal life more."

"Yeah, at some point I'm going to have to slow down and ask myself what I really want, whether I'm really getting it, and what the whole point is, but not now.  Maybe after I'm dating a few more girls."

Anyways!  He's gonna go hang his spell for the day, get in some scroll practice -

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Middle Afternoon

- talk to Chelish experts about agriculture and plant breeding, to see if they're missing anything there he can plausibly quickly fix -

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Dinner

- have dinner with all the researchers, show the newcomers where dath ilan is located inside its universe -

PL-timestamp:  Day 19 (15) / Evening

- and spend his evening making extensive use of Yaisa.

Tonight is the 7-day anniversary of their first week's arrangement, for twenty-five gold per week, including Keltham having... control, of certain things.

How's she feeling about continuing that arrangement indefinitely?

Yaisa is in favor! - she thought about whether she could demand more money from Keltham because he clearly thinks he's being very mean to her but she doesn't think she could say under Fairness she ought to get more money, not really. 

He's pretty happy about that!

He should tell Carissa about that part, later.  Probably Carissa will be happy?  At least Keltham is guessing so, anyways.  Carissa is always happy when...

..well, it feels, sometimes, like Carissa is always happy when Keltham is cruel to somebody.  But it's presumably more that she's happy that Keltham is being Evil and learning to do what he himself wants, that Keltham is discovering his own sexuality, and that Keltham is being more the way that Carissa hopes he'll be towards her.

Keltham will, of course, ask Yaisa explicitly whether he's allowed to tell Carissa about how he's being mean to Yaisa, for that information is also Yaisa's.  (He won't mention his private wobbliness about the direction Carissa is taking him.)

"Hmmmm." She pouts thoughtfully. "....yes, if you sometimes give me secret gossip on what's up with you and Carissa so I can smirk knowingly when the new kids repeat ridiculous rumors."

Keltham will ask Carissa for authorization about that and get back to Yaisa.

...are these rumors theoretical, or...

- no there are totally lots of rumors about Carissa. Like that she was created from scratch by the gods to be perfect for Keltham, that's one that Yaisa's heard, or that Asmodeus Himself chose Carissa to drop Keltham on, or that Abrogail gave Carissa to Keltham as a slave, or that Carissa is pregnant with Keltham's child....

(The Project decided that it was better if Keltham knew some things consistent with someone thinking of Carissa as chosen by Asmodeus, just in case some hidden correlate of that ever came to his attention.)

Oh, right.  He should actually schedule some Alter Selfs to take place where he can see them.

Yaisa okay with doing that tomorrow?  He probably won't date her tomorrow, but it doesn't need to be a date, just a quick switch where Keltham can see it.

Carissa wasn't created from scratch by the gods for Keltham.  It's nearly certain that whatever force selected Keltham to arrive in this universe did so in a way that very strongly matched him and Carissa to each other, and selected Carissa for him to land on.  If anything, from a local perspective, it's more like they should see Keltham as having been created from scratch for Carissa.

Keltham's got no idea if those forces explicitly negotiated with Asmodeus.  Keltham would guess no on the explicit negotiations, but yes on Asmodeus and the other gods rapidly figuring out what was going on and making decisions that would've contributed to the tropes selecting this place for his landing, including some things that the gods would only do if the Keltham-steering forces looked to be sufficiently beneficial for them.

Or if for some weird reason Asmodeus would've tried to shut down the whole thing if Keltham had landed on anybody who wasn't attractive to the Queen of Cheliax, then Keltham could've landed on Carissa at least in part for that reason.  But the Keltham-steering forces might have needed to predict Asmodeus doing a lot in exchange, to serve whatever goals Asmodeus was able to deduce predictably-to-the-steerers from seeing how Keltham had been steered already.

Negotiations like that don't have to be explicit when you're a god.

What's 'slave'?  Keltham heard Yaisa use that term before and he can tell from context that it's a sex thing, but not the details.

(Yaisa didn't follow that but probably someone was taking notes and the anxious genius types will puzzle over it later, whatever.)

A slave is... a person who is wholly the possession of another, if you're really hardcore about it regarded by Civilization itself as their property as much as their shoes are. Yaisa is not herself that hardcore; lots of people use it just for aesthetically reminiscent relationships that didn't involve paying Civilization to go along with this. When you call someone 'slave' in bed you're not necessarily bringing in the whole thing, just the thing that's hot about it. Probably Keltham is now going to have a million questions Yaisa can't answer because her exposure to this concept is all from disrecommended romance novels titled 'slave of a barbarian' and so on.

Yeah, that's been mentioned to him as something he might want to negotiate with the government of Cheliax about.  Though only at the point where Keltham wants that for his own sake, and he's not quite there yet.

Is 'The Queen just gives Carissa to Keltham as a slave' something that especially seems within the realm of plausibility?

....no, it's completely ridiculous, so is 'Carissa was created wholesale by the gods', people don't come up with rumors because they're plausible they come up with them because they're fun to whisper and tend to make other people say, scandalized, "no, that couldn't possibly be" but then doubt themselves because they're on Project Lawful.

And, like, it'd be true most places, so it has that for credibility?  Some places have, uh, kind of a lot of slavery, not that Yaisa wants to have that conversation which does not sound hot at all. 

He's confused but will queue it up on his Carissa questions list.

Actually, he should be heading off to bed about now anyways.

Sleep well, Yaisa...