"All right.  We're rather in the middle of a Wall disaster recovery here.  So I'm going to have Sevar updated on what we think was going on, check if she approves a Maillol interrupt."

Carissa's hanging out with her boyfriend trying to make unforced conversation about unrelated things!

Keltham will have moved on to unrelated things, then!

...though probably not without having expanded at least little on concepts like, yep, Carissa sure did call what happens to overly Good people if they try to improvise taking care of other people with mental health problems.  A lot of dath ilan is set up to route people like that into actually adequate situations for them, like Quiet Cities designed not to drive them crazier or unhappier in a hundred subtle ways; or, failing that, make it really clear to them that it's 100% okay if they want to just go into cryonic suspension, their friends and family will be fine, it's not their duty to stick around.

Maillol knows what he's doing, right?  He should definitely know what he's doing much better than Keltham would.  Keltham can't improvise a handling mechanism better than what Cheliax already has in place.

...at least, Keltham could, possibly, think that, if he didn't know that everything about Golarion was simultaneously broken by his standards and that their mental health system is probably just "Hell takes care of it" which Keltham needs to remember is okay.

And not what he should be focusing on from either a Good or an Evil perspective.  Good says, help all of Golarion and not one person close to you, Evil says, don't make Dad's Mistake.

But if they are supposed to be talking about unrelated things, Keltham will talk about unrelated things!

Maillol has decades of experience with helping people deal with shock, grief, death, and so on, at the Worldwound; Keltham probably finds something inadequate about how Golarion handles sad people because has anything not been disappointing to him yet but she really really does not think this is something he could handle well. Also priests are sort of intrinsically comforting, because they're known quantities - Asmodeus chose them, they're going to be predictably His servants. 

- unrelated things.

Keltham did need to check whether Sevar thought that the level of distraction being imposed on the other researcher-candidates was high enough that it should partially invalidate the test from Keltham's perspective.  His model of Sevar's model said no, but he needs to check with her.  Seriously, like in real life, with respect to how normal researcher-candidates work, not Invincible Carissa or Chelish Dignity should-universe answers.

- she doesn't think so? Her guess is that they mostly if they noticed at all rather than being absorbed in their math went 'wow that's weird I wonder what went wrong' and then Maillol came in and they figured they didn't need to worry about it. He could give them a little extra time if he wanted. 

...that doesn't square up with anything else about how Keltham was imagining people or societies worked, but at this point Keltham is just going to wait for Maillol to report back, rather than quiz Carissa about it.

Here's Maillol!  Looks slightly worn and sad, but not much more so than his usual self.

"Keltham.  I need to ask, do you have particular reason to believe that Tallandria was having - how did you put it - a mental health emergency?  Near as I can tell, Korva Tallandria cracked under test pressure in what seems like a very ordinary way, excepting only that I would've thought a screened candidate for this job would've been tougher than that -"

"Okay, hold on.  Stop.  Come to a complete halt.  Go into reverse."

"What do you mean, cracked under test pressure in a very ordinary way.  Ordinarily people don't - crack?"

"Nobody in dath ilan ever bursts into tears while taking a math test?"  Maillol is certain that this happens in Taldor.

"Possibly if their 'appendix' suddenly bursts, but then you say out loud you're having a medical emergency, you don't - become mentally disabled to the point where you don't even trust yourself to walk out of the room and need to stay around other people who can subdue you if necessary -"

"Okay I think we probably all need to back up and check a lot of basic assumptions.  You first, why would anybody burst into tears while taking a math test?"

"Korva, sudden emergency question, do people in Taldor just walk out of exam rooms if they're about to cry, because in retrospect, it's incredibly obvious that's what they do in dath ilan unless they're completely disabled."

"No.  Not unless they're having a bigger breakdown than the crying itself, and outright throwing the test. I'm - not certain but I'm pretty sure, for most tests."

"Right."

"Well, it's obvious that we were all living in different realities, and now it's time to desperately make like there were only two of those and not three."

Maillol is trying to explain the underlying patterns of, forget the math part, teenagers breaking down crying during any kind of test in which they don't know the answers and the future of their career is at stake.

When you don't know the answers and your whole future career is at stake is not a good time to start crying.

Yes, that is why people who can't master the "not crying on important math tests" life skill are less great candidates for the Worldwound.  Outside the Worldwound the stakes are not that high all the time, and Tallandria apparently hadn't been exposed to any situation this high-stress in her life before.

Okay, but if it's an actual emergency self-management situation requiring a temporary fix, there's, like, twelve different things anybody could do to switch off or dissociate an emotion...

...none of which anybody in Golarion has any training with, causing them all to have the emotional management options of, like, ten-year-olds, except insofar as they have sheer brute willpower for plowing through anyways.

Right.

Updating.

Keltham still doesn't get why Tallandria didn't just walk out of the room.

Because - social conventions are heavily against just walking out of a room during an exam.  It's the sort of thing that gets somebody dropped from their hard-to-get-into wizard academy, and if the rules were any different on Project Lawful, nobody told Tallandria that.

Maillol realizes this may not make sense to Keltham for a while.

"Carissa, is there a fast explanation here relative to your model of my model?"

" - probably, like, half of people are the kind of person who has sufficiently poor emotional management skills they start crying during an important test. Maybe six in ten girls, two in ten boys, yes I know that doesn't make half when I started being more specific in my head those are the numbers that came out. The wizarding academies try to filter it out because at the Worldwound not having emotion management skills will get people killed, I expect the project also filtered for it so Tallandria must have never done it before, but it's not rare generally.

Sometimes one might start crying during a test, recover, and finish the test, and this would be much less problematic for their continued presence in their wizarding academy than leaving the room during the test; one might even cry during a test without anyone in charge noticing, if the room doesn't have several Security who've been told to communicate as much as possible to Keltham."

Keltham will now attempt to adapt for the fact that his entire worldview, all of his social reflexes, all of his thinking patterns, his deep implicit ideas about who is supposed to do what when, that his ideas of what he is supposed to think about and what a Startup Founder is supposed to think about, are all inhabiting a different reality that is not this reality!

"Okay, so if Tallandria wasn't - having a complete mental breakdown - does her cracking during math tests correlate with a rare Golarion neurotype that is very talented at chemistry, and if I don't hire people who crack on math tests, I don't get to have any top-percentile chemistry talents?"

It's actually pretty hard!  Especially when you can only do it one piece at a time wherever your mental attention happens to be focused that instant, and your mental attention is also being focused by patterns from the wrong reality.