"It's not impossible someone knows but really, everything is like this, it's not confusing that it's like this!"

"I'm only not updating to Conspiracy immediately because I can't see why the Conspiracy would be hiding that, and why they wouldn't have made up a more plausible state of confusion, and why their unfalsified theory set would be theories I could personally test within five minutes.  What is wrong with this planet?  If it even existed before I materialized here."

"How we gonna apply a standard amount of attempted injury?  I'm thinking using standard weights to apply a measurable amount of force to a blade laid across my arm, but maybe you've got better ideas."

"I - have no idea how much a 'standard weight' amount of force does to a blade laid across someone's arm but...sure? Or you could get the heating stone off Subirachs again?"

"Nah, heating stone is too optimized for higher pain per unit injury.  Though I'm going to be really amused in the case where the relative difference in our apparent pain tolerance was off by four bits because you were sixteen times less damageable by the heating stone - to be clear, I'm not under the impression I'd have otherwise been able to compete."

"Man, I can visualize exactly the mechanism I want to set up here, to put a weight on top of a vertically held knife and push it downwards.  But there's no snaptogether pieces I could use to make it quickly... oh hey, that spell you use to feed yourself grapes.  Unseen Servant.  Have you got one of those around or prepped, that you're willing to use on this, and does it have a stable constant max power output that would be enough to injure yourself using a knife?"

"You can use an Unseen Servant to carry something that weighs less than 20 pounds, or shove along the ground something that weighs 100. It moves much slower than you'd want for a knife fight but maybe that'd be fine for this?"

"What's an example of something that weighs '20 pounds'... that I know about... or around how much do I weigh in 20-pound units... or if you've got the Servant running, you could just push on my hand that hard... I'm not actually totally clear on some of these precise units..."

Sure, she will push on Keltham with all the force the Unseen Servant can muster.

Around a hundred newtons maybe, or a bit less?  That ought to injure an ordinary dath ilani if you put that much weight behind the edge of a kitchen knife, never mind the point.  Let's go grab a kitchen knife and try that, first on Keltham, then on Carissa, then maybe on Pilar if she's around, she's also a masochist, right...

(Being around an important hypothesis that would be incredibly cheap to test, and hasn't been tested yet, for a while, for no visible reason he understands, is making Keltham feel indignant.  Or as close to 'indignant' as most dath ilani ever get to that emotion?  Neurotypical dath ilani don't usually feel that emotion as Golarion knows it, but what they'd feel around a long-untested cheaply-testable hypothesis might come close.  This is not how society is supposed to work!  Not how people are supposed to act!)

There's just so many of those!! If you spent a while trying to stab yourself about all of them you'd never do anything else!

"I have a dagger, you don't need to get one from the kitchens." It's in her Bag of Holding.

"Right, let's find Pilar, if she's willing, so that we can try this all at once and all get healed with one channeled surge -"

"Already here."

"Great!  Can I try stabbing you with a dagger for SCIENCE?  Healing will be provided afterwards, though I might ask you to wait for a half-minute while Carissa and myself get stabbed too."

"That sounds like something you could try, yes."

"Great.  Carissa, you're up, let's try Pilar, you, myself in that order and see how much damage gets done before I heal it.  Thigh seems like a relatively safer target?  Edge first, then try the point if the edge doesn't penetrate."

If Keltham ever gets curious about the wrong thing they're so doomed.

Keltham (cleric 7, 32hp), Carissa (wizard 7, cleric 1, 26hp), and Pilar (wizard 4, oracle 4, 27hp) seem to - all be about as difficult to injure with a knife, which is notably a lot harder to injure than Keltham was a month ago.

Healing surge...

"Okay, that argues against toughness-from-healing, and shoots down my first metahypothesis about how the confused epistemic state was persisting, which was that the extra toughness came from healing, and this truth was considered socially infohazardous because rich people who wanted to be tougher would outbid poor actually injured people for cleric exposure."

"But then why are rich people ending up harder to injure?  Possibly the reason for the persistent confusion is that we've got multiple things going on?  And if one of those things is still toughness via healing exposure, part of the confusion persistence could be infohazard control too.  Um.  So I guess I was actually jumping the gun on thinking that part out loud."

"Who do I check with about social-infohazards, Broom, Aspexia, Lrilatha...?"

"....prediction: whether or not Broom knows he'll tell you you don't need to. I'd ask Maillol to write Egorian and then it can get escalated as needed by the Most High or Contessa Lrilatha's secretaries? I - expect it's not an infohazard, I think you're assuming it is because it should be easy to tell but high-level people who haven't had lots of magic healing are rare."

"...All right, I'll tell Maillol."

"Shit, Carissa, I'm sorry.  If I'd known, I would have stabbed myself before I prayed to my deity, and then stabbed myself again before I tried my first healing surge.  I didn't realize it was a kind of data that would be so hard to obtain."

Keltham seems genuinely sad about this!

(Of course he does!  He had no way of knowing, but he accidentally wasted an irreplaceable scientific opportunity that could have contributed to settling a long-standing confusion in Golarion!  What dath ilani wouldn't apologize?  He's not that selfish, nor blind to normal social norms.)

- Carissa has literally no idea what to say to this! "It's - okay? I'm not nearly as invested in this as you, honestly."

"If I continue to stand around here, is anybody going to stab me again?"