PL-timestamp:  Day 23 (19) / Late Morning

How's Meritxell doing on her Possibly Dangerously Destabilizing Mental Technique Acquisition experiment?  Any further awful revelations since then?

Yeah, she's got a bit of a list. 

- her mother never loved her

- she thought that getting the best grades and being the smartest would make her mother love her, but it wouldn't have worked

- when the baby died, and she had a stomachache for a month, those were probably related, even though she thought she wasn't sad because it was only a baby

- the reason she doesn't have close friends is that she feels uncomfortable when people are nice to her 

- she doesn't really want Keltham to want to hurt her, she wants him to look at her like he does at Carissa, and Keltham hurting her probably wouldn't even accomplish that

"There's a couple more but they're, uh, kind of private, unless you really need more examples for some reason."

Understood, and he's sorry for having had to ask.  He's grateful to Meritxell for reporting to him on this; he needs to know what's happening.

Meritxell's report... basically sounds right, it sounds like a bunch of things somebody would notice after suddenly acquiring Law-shaped skills you didn't have for the rest of your life, and a lot like what happened to Keltham after he got hit by an Owl's Wisdom.

Well, her personality and emotions just got yanked around some, how's she doing general sanitywise?  Any signs of instability or tension spreading beyond the specifically high-tension thoughts?

"I have no idea how I'd tell. I don't wish I wasn't on the project. Even when I'm really upset this is better than being at the Worldwound. I - am pretty upset. If there'd been a way to not have this happen for another couple months until we'd settled into a steadier sort of pace, that would've been nice."

"Heard."

Keltham had before a momentary sense that Meritxell realizing that her mother never loved her, just then - didn't ring quite right, it felt like Asmodia and Manohar - but he couldn't see any reason for the Conspiracy to do that, or for Meritxell to lie about it - and then her list seemed right, maybe even too right, or something, but it laid that sense to rest some - and then Meritxell talking about wishing those realizations could've been delayed another couple of months, again rings false, somehow -

"You still want to be in the Keeper sessions?"

"Yes." Stubbornly. "Maybe I'm the way I am because I thought it'd get me things I can't have, but noticing that doesn't make me not that way, apparently, and if I drop out then I'll just be wondering what the next thing like that is, because there's got to be more. - I'm trying not to pick around trying to find them, but it's one thing to not be trying to find them and another thing to not be trying to learn things where I'll find them - does that make sense -"

"I think so?"

Why is this ringing false.  He can't put a finger on it at all, it just feels like - somebody else's world, held together wrong, Meritxell knows what she should say but there's no deep pattern talking, a deep pattern would have a different shape - this one is like - somebody trying to put together the shape of disturbing revelations that they think should be there -

Meritxell knows she shouldn't try to be a Keeper, on some level, that she doesn't belong in the class with Pilar and Asmodia, and is trying to be there anyways?  She found revelations inside her that weren't the real revelations, the right revelations, but would prove to Keltham and herself that she could be a Keeper??

...It feels like that would be enough falsehood, at the center, to explain his feeling of falsehood???

Or he could be drawing a complete false positive on his anomaly detectors.

"Meritxell, I intuitively feel that you're in danger in the Keeper class.  It's possible that some part of me still thinks Pilar and Asmodia are Trope Girls and you're not one and only Trope Girls can do this safely, it's possible that some other part of me knows something that it's having trouble making fully clear to me."

"This could be a bad idea and could end up with you in Hell, but assuming you don't want to otherwise never get an Owl's Wisdom again, one of the thoughts that occurs to me, is that you could take an Owl's Wisdom and focus specifically on why you want to be a Keeper and whether that's smart for you."

" - huh. 

- I'm going to just think about that for a bit, instead of saying 'sounds like a good idea, I'll do that', even though it does sound like a good idea and I probably should do it.

I'm going to be so annoyed if they get to be Keepers and I don't. I know that's not really a good enough reason in itself but I can't imagine how frustrated I'll be every single day, if there are secrets I was too fragile to have and that Asmodia gets to have."

"That is famously not a good reason to become a Keeper.  It's known that before you even get to be a Keeper trainee, in dath ilan, they check to see how much you've mastered the mindset of being fine knowing about questions that rank-one Keepers get answered and you don't.  Anyone who is disturbed by not knowing secrets, it is said, should definitely not be a Keeper, because then they'll find out about all sorts of questions they can't get answers to."

"Asmodia, one gets the impression, could be handed a box saying 'the secrets inside this box will destroy you' and she'd be like 'welp obviously I should not open this box then'.  This, it is said, is among the first fundamental requisites of being a Keeper.  Pilar - would have some sort of Asmodeus-related thing going on but I get the impression she does have a mode like that."

That - seems like a way to have all the people who rule your society be MISSING AN INCREDIBLY FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN VALUE, Meritxell thinks, but does not say, because she doesn't really want to have that argument right now, or rather have that argument bounce off Keltham's insistence that actually for some reason dath ilan isn't missing something. 

"I don't try to find out things I'm not supposed to know. But I'd rather know more things than less things, even if knowing more things also means knowing more things I don't know."

"Keepers definitely want to know more things rather than less things, they just - know how to operate inside a world full of ideas, concepts, structures of information, that were - crafted too much, designed too much, by minds running too far ahead of them, to the point where those ideas are deadly to less tightly woven reasoning processes.  I mean, even regular dath ilani know that's how the world works, you can tell because I know it.  That's what happens when you have people deploying and crafting ideas at - an overly crafted level - you have very stable geniuses who can think of things and not be driven mad themselves, but then those ideas - which less stable people would've bounced off, been deflected from, before they finished them to a quality level where they become dangerous - can get buffed up to finished structures that - well, I don't actually know."

"Look, there's an experiment that gets done every five years, just to check that things are still the way they were, settle rolling prediction markets with a five-year periodicity.  A bunch of relatively smart people who are going into cryosuspension anyways, volunteer to hang around a bunch of rank-one Keepers.  Not being deliberately told infohazards, just overhearing rank-one Keepers casually talk among themselves.  And, like, actually listening to those conversations and trying to think about them, not just sticking their fingers into their ears and playing safe, because that was the experimental instruction."

"And, yep, normal people sure do end up unstable and unhappy and depressed and frozen up and anxious and starting to believe increasingly weird ideas built out of pieces of that fascinating stuff they overheard."

"The same thing happens, we're told, when rank-two Keepers checking out early are placed to overhear unfiltered rank-seven conversations.  Assuming they're otherwise experimentally-instructed to go ahead and think about those things, of course."

"Keepers are still operating in a world full of dangerous ideas that will destabilize their minds, that they're not allowed to know yet.  They're just sufficiently super-adult to be totally fine hanging around dozens of boxes saying 'reading my secrets will destroy you'.  Instead of children, who shouldn't be told that the box exists.  Or ordinary dath ilani adults, who could be safely given a box, but would be disturbed and weirded out about having it resting next to their bed every night, and would be noticeably better off not being given the box if they were never supposed to open it anyways."

"Or sometimes just, there's secrets deadly to society as a whole, even if they're not deadly to the people who bear them.  And that's - something Keepers respect, because it's their job, the duty they're taking up, as the trade they made to be told.  Or just because they're - what you'd call Good, I'd guess, though I doubt it's anything at all like Lastwall."

" - and that is an important theological revelation," Meritxell says. "- sorry. I appreciate that you're trying to give me advice and it's probably good advice and yet what I want to do right now is run to Subirachs and tell her that because it's possible that it's an important teaching of Asmodeus that was taught to me much worse than that because no one knew that was true, to teach it that way. 

...I should probably also talk with her about the Keeper thing."

"Uh huh.  How sure are you that you're not about to destabilize Subirachs?  Maybe there's a reason you weren't told that theological revelation in the form I spoke it just now."

"You want to be a Golarion pseudo-Keeper trainee?  It's your job now to see that possibility yourself without my having to point it out to you, Meritxell!"

She flinches. " - okay, one, if you want us to not check theological realizations with a priest then you are going to break Pilar, actually, arbitrary amounts of caution or having to write it up straight for the Most High in all Golarion are fine but she belongs to Asmodeus and she's not going to do well having to judge for herself which things His church ought to know about. And two, I need you to not give me advice and tests at the same time, not right now, everything's kind of painful and confusing right now and I can either be trying to think clever thoughts that'll make you impressed with me or trying to be confused out loud at you but if you're looking for the first then I won't be able to breathe enough to do the second, and if you're making decisions off how I sound when I'm confused out loud then I need to be confused out loud anonymously at someone who won't. That's why I wish it'd happened in a couple months, your sense of me wouldn't be dominated by this."

"Risking the top person in the entire Church sounds crazy to me, especially given the way most of Golarion seems to be structured.  Who overrides Aspexia Rugatonn if she goes nuts?  I'd consider Lrilatha or - Gorthaklok? - a more obvious candidate if they're allowed to do that.  If not, we ask Subirachs or Maillol if they're willing to throw themselves in the line of fire."

"Discard the entire notion of thinking clever thoughts that impress me.  You don't have the spare capacity to juggle that and the rest of this problem."

Keltham is going to look and sound a lot more forceful right now than Meritxell has previously seen him, by a pretty wide margin.

(If she can't take this much pressure she should not try to be a Keeper.  Keltham is sure it gets worse than this.  Keepers are exactly the people you don't have to be careful with.)

Meritxell doesn't actually seem further intimidated. "If she goes nuts Asmodeus un-clerics her. That's - the entire point of clerics, it's that you know every day.  But also, the reason you take it to her is that she almost definitely already has a procedure for this, because you are not the first weird situation the church has dealt with. I don't know what the procedure is, I don't actually even think it'd be worth guessing, but I do predict that 'we didn't tell the Church about this implication of dath ilan that's of great theological importance or else heretical, because we thought the containment procedures we could come up with ourselves were better than yours' would not impress her."

"Good point if that's reliable."

"Proposed protocol.  You write up a description of what you think you learned, that doesn't give away the contents of what you learned.  That's the header; body text is the contents of what you learned that you think is theologically important.  That gets routed to Lrilatha first, who can decide whether to route it to Aspexia or Subirachs next.  If Lrilatha isn't allowed to output any action, it gets routed back to you, I review stuff to make sure it discloses the dangers appropriately, and then it goes to Maillol because he can be overridden by Subirachs if he goes unstable."

"If you're concerned about spending social capital, I'll attach my own note that I requested this because we've got no clue what the procedures are around things that are maybe possibly infohazards, and whatever object-level route the information flows along here will hopefully be future-reusable without wasting important people's time."

" - I would like your own note, yeah, because that's a terrifying amount of important peoples' time for what, if it's not heretical, I expect to amount to 'a better way a specific precept gets taught in wizarding schools'. But the process seems reasonable for things more important than that, and worth establishing in advance."

"All right.  I propose you go do that, I write my own cover note, we exchange docs when we're done, package them together and send them off."

"I'll do my daily wizard practice and scrolls practice, once I finish my cover note.  Should be less time than your docs."

"Sure."

Meritxell expects any Asmodean will see it, from Keltham's description, but she spells it out just in case. Dath ilan might have pretensions of Lawful Good, but that's Asmodeanism, at the very core; that hierarchy is natural and wholly inevitable, that it'll impose itself - if one doesn't try to impose it externally - in the wholly unavoidable form of ideas that make people useless and confused, and among people who've mastered those ideas deeper, truer ideas that'd make those people useless and confused; a hierarchy you cannot climb above your appointed place in because it's made of your own weakness. It's proof that the inevitable human condition is as a subordinate, with either the strength not to look up at what you should not see or a strong hand keeping it from you.

It must be something she didn't properly believe, for it to be such a relief to learn. But even if others lack that particular failing she thinks there's something in this of interest to the church.

Security's frankly kind of confused about what the Secure thing to do is, here, but fine, if it's going to Contessa Lrilatha he'll wait on otherwise reporting it through channels.

Keltham could ask to see what Meritxell is sending off; Meritxell probably needs to write a fake version of this.

Yep, she's on it. Alter-Meritxell was confused in school about the teaching that there's hierarchy among humans in a way even ideal conditions couldn't alter, and that in a necessary hierarchy it's a great virtue to learn to live in your place rather than seeking a higher one. This felt adjacent to various false things she was assured it was not, and the explanations she got were unsatisfactory, though she assumed it was probably a case where there was a good answer her teacher didn't happen to know. She wonders now if the enclosed description of Keltham's is the thing Hell was saying, there. 

If Security thinks that's still too risky she could alter it further? They don't have a full theology of alter-Asmodeanism for her to work off; they'd need Sevar.

Okay, you know, given the way this actually seems totally safe, Security's making the call that Sevar needs to approve the alter-Asmodean version Keltham sees.  Indulging Keltham's attempts at Security thinking was fine back when avoiding a lie wasn't going to cost the real Cheliax anything, but a risk to Sevar's game is more than this nonsense is worth.

Yes, please do alert her of heresies currently being entertained on Project Lawful.

She thinks they want to claim 'hierarchy in Hell' rather than 'among humans'. She doesn't have a full justification of this, but it seems like claims by the Church about what Cheliax should be like will prompt more questions from Keltham he could reasonably expect someone to be able to answer.