" - right. What, uh, are those." And are they going to cause her to turn out like Yaisa, somehow, she really really really doesn't want to be another Yaisa.

"All right.  So.  Um."

"This is something of a long and very weird story.  I'll try to separate facts from inferences," and try to lead you away from thoughts about whether the gods who once were human are trying to fake out Cheliax into believing in this whole story, just in case I was right about that originally.

"Keltham landed near the Worldwound at a point where he would run out of the cold into a Chelish installation.  He didn't land in the middle of the ocean, or for that matter, materialize a hundred yards off the ground, or in space, or in the Plane of Elemental Fire.  If you think about a cloud of probability density spread out evenly across all of Golarion's surface, to say nothing of our larger multiverse including other planets and other planes, it's very obvious that Keltham didn't land at random according to a cloud of probability like that."

"Something put Keltham where he landed, something that, one infers, cared about what would happen after he landed there."

"We then have the question - besides Keltham not just dying on the spot, in what other ways was this force maybe selecting where to put Keltham?  Maybe not just within Golarion, but inside our whole multiverse, maybe even many possible multiverses?  Keltham seemed to believe that dath ilan knew for sure that existence was very wide, much wider than just our multiverse and dath ilan's universe that he showed us."

"When Keltham ran out of the cold into that Chelish installation, the first person who could cast Tongues to speak with him, it turned out, was Carissa Sevar."

"Keltham and Sevar, I'm told, are matched improbably well in terms of their romantic compatibility.  Sevar is, to this day, the person who understands Keltham best out of everyone who's tried, including the Queen of Cheliax with whatever ludicrous levels of Splendour she can bring to bear.  Experienced honeypot instructors specializing in Lawful Good targets are saying that they do not understand why anything Sevar is doing works as well as it does."

"And Sevar... frankly strikes me as being more at risk of falling in love with Keltham for real than she'll admit to the rest of us.  I'm guessing here, yes.  But if my guess is right - you would not expect an average Chelish woman, a random Chelish woman, to fall in love for real with Keltham.  You wouldn't expect a random Chelish woman to be tempted."

"From Keltham's perspective, Golarion is even more improbable on that level.  Keltham has sexually sadistic tendencies.  His Lawful Good world tried to make sure he never found out about that.  Keltham thinks that's because dath ilan has no masochists.  He thinks masochism itself is unlikely, that it's not a kind of thing that - that heritage-selection would produce naturally - he thinks that people who want to be hurt, who enjoy pain, who want to be taken and forced into submission, would end up in dangerous life situations having fewer children.  If the sadists of dath ilan knew what they really wanted, they'd just be sad, so it was dangerous-information to them."

"You could counter-argue, and I think Sevar has, that tendencies like that could actually help people survive, if they ended up in situations very common in Golarion.  Dath ilan, maybe, has fewer of those situations.  Or maybe Keltham is right, and the gods intervened to make masochism be a thing in Golarion."

"The point is that from Keltham's perspective, he ended up in a world where sexual desires of his that had no counterpart in dath ilan - desires where, Keltham thinks, he would not expect a counterpart to exist in most reasonable parts of reality - could find fulfillment here.  The masochists he ran into are wizards, meaning he can try harder to hurt them without damaging them too much.  Keltham has healing powers he can use on his masochists afterwards.  These are all things that dath ilan doesn't have, that dath ilan thinks ought to be unlikely, that they wouldn't expect to find in a random world.  All of them make life much more convenient for somebody with Keltham's sexuality."

"And even if Keltham is wrong about Golarion having been selected for that - even if most worlds out there are just like that, and dath ilan is the weird one out for having no healing magic and no masochists - there remains the implausibly good match with Sevar in particular."

"You might speculate, then, you might infer - though it is not of itself an observation, as Keltham teaches to distinguish - that whatever landed Keltham here was, possibly, trying to set him up with a romance."

"It's... not a very nice romance, really.  Not the nicest romance Keltham could possibly have had.  He did end up in Cheliax with all of his romantic interests constantly lying to him about everything."

"It's not something you'd do to Keltham if you were just trying to be nice to him, make sure he found sexual and romantic fulfillment."

"It's something you'd do to Keltham if you were putting him somewhere that a romance novel would start up around him, a novel with a dramatic, conflict-riven plot."

"In particular, a dath ilani romance novel.  With common patterns, 'tropes', out of a dath ilani romance novel."

"Keltham doesn't know all his love interests are lying to him.  But he knows he landed in a situation where he's around a number of different interesting girls with interesting different backgrounds and special powers.  That, he found suspicious, after he arrived.  He doesn't know how weird it is that Pilar Pineda was selected as Cayden Cailean's oracle and bestowed with cookie powers.  He doesn't know that Ione is the one oracle chosen of Nethys.  But he knows that he's around other girls with special powers, an improbable and surprising number of them, and that is to him an obvious signature of a dath ilani romance novel."

"Or as dath ilan calls it, an 'eroLARP'."

"Keltham has tried making predictions about how events would happen around him, if he had in fact been selected and placed somewhere that further events would develop, by unbroken prophecy, in the way of an 'eroLARP'."

"We are concealing from Keltham how many of those predictions have, in fact, come true."

"In alterCheliax, Sevar is not the Chosen of Asmodeus.  There is nothing special about Sevar that is causing Hell to delay its purchase of her soul, or, as we've presented that to Keltham, 'making afterlife arrangements'.  Then Sevar should be able to make her afterlife arrangements and get her own Arcane Sight."

"Keltham predicted that, when Sevar went off to try to sell her soul, something mysterious would happen that prevented her from selling her soul.  He didn't know about Sevar's previous failed attempt, he just predicted that she'd fail that time, because it would be what happened in a dath ilani romance novel."

"Sevar turned out not to be able to sell her soul again.  They arranged for her to get permanencied Detect Magic somehow, no I don't know the details.  Sevar came back apparently all cheerful about having sold her soul, for Arcane Sight plus enough spellsilver to have an excuse for being able to make Keltham-corrupting magic items later."

"Keltham had a panic attack about whether there was some incredibly clever reason that the government of Cheliax would need to lie to him and fake selling Sevar's soul and somehow fake the Arcane Sight, because that would be what happened in an 'eroLARP'."

"Sevar managed to talk Keltham down from his being, in fact, completely right about all of everything," including Sevar being a hidden cleric, very likely, just based on how the rest of that went, but Asmodia's not going to get into that.

"That was one incident.  There were others, particularly including a conflict with the Queen of Cheliax, that I am apparently not allowed to know all about," presumably because Keltham won embarrassingly hard.  "From Keltham's perspective, he successfully managed to avert all of the antagonisms with the Queen that his 'tropes' would predict, casting severe doubt on his whole 'eroLARP' theory."

"From everyone else's perspective, I'm told, practically everything that Keltham predicted actually happened, but in a way where we prevented him from seeing it."

"Welcome to Project Lawful.  At least we have cookies.  And if we ever run out of cookies, one of Keltham's likely romantic interests can suddenly appear with additional cookies - namely the extremely devout Asmodean, who was chosen as oracle by Cayden Cailean, whose curse, which we call Snack Service, has really been quite helpful in, for example, ridding Egorian of Lawful Good spies, and giving apparently good advice about how to corrupt Keltham further, and also offering snacks.  Wherever Keltham was placed inside Golarion or somewhere larger than that, it somehow rendered that a totally reasonable thing for a Chaotic Good god to do around a Lawful Evil project."

"If we're inside a dath ilani romance novel, it's probably not one that takes itself very seriously.  Hopefully I don't get smote for saying it.  But, you know, the sort of being who could do all that, could probably see me thinking it even if I didn't say it.  So I might as well say it."

"Do you, uh, want me to voice my first ten objections to this theory, so that you can explain to me why they are stupid."

"Oh, yes."

"Okay."

"Independent of what I might think of all of the specific pieces of evidence you just brought up - am I getting it right that Keltham is the one who came up with this theory, and he came up with it because he felt like he was in a dath ilani romance novel, after Cheliax spent an enormous amount of resources providing him with a harem of vulnerable pretty wizard girls who could keep up with him intellectually but also hung on his every word and wanted to have sex with him, specifically because the Crown was trying to bribe him into helping us by making his stay here as closely resemble his wildest fantasies as possible. Because that seems like the sort of thing that might skew someone's sense of whether they were in a romance novel."

"They provided him the harem within hours of him arriving in Golarion.  Transcripts show it was Sevar who first made the suggestion, after reading Keltham's mind about how his own Civilization hadn't valued himself and his kind of people, and how he'd wanted to become rich and give dath ilan's next generation hundreds of himself whether dath ilan liked that or not.  Sevar's proposal was to seduce Keltham with a sense of himself and his kind of person being valued by Cheliax more than Civilization had.  Maillol made the call after getting a vision from Asmodeus, which I don't think had that specifically in it, but we could ask him."

"Keltham wasn't a cleric then, so we have a full transcript of what went through his mind at the point he realized why there were so many pretty girls around him.  Namely, he thought Cheliax wanted his heritable variations for high Intelligence.  He thought that was a totally reasonable thing to do with an alien visitor and that his Civilization would try the same thing."

"The first point at which Keltham showed overt outward signs of suspicion was when he had everyone in the class independently rate how much we thought we had an unusual background or a weird problem for him to solve, that he'd find out about if he romanced us.  And also, we had to guess what we thought everyone else's average answer would be."

"We didn't have eyes on his thoughts then and didn't understand why, didn't know how to game anything.  The call was made to have us answer independently, in hopes that would look right to him.  Keltham's prediction, which came true from his perspective, was that there'd be 3-5 special girls only some of whom knew about some of the others."

"I'm not suggesting that the harem of pretty girls is his explicit reason for believing any of this; he's not that stupid. I'm suggesting that being surrounded by a harem of pretty girls might still affect his sense of how similar his overall situation is to a romance novel, and that it might affect the sorts of theories one generates about their circumstances."

"As far so many of his girls being special - which couldn't have been the thing that originally roused his suspicion, unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline here - almost all of them are special by way of being oracled by particular gods, right? It was already otherwise obvious that multiple gods were trying to court Keltham. And if the person you're trying to court is a teenage boy who is more  vulnerable to love than most, who sure seems to be making pretty full use of the harem that was provided to him, and whose information about the world and contact with other people is being filtered by Cheliax - well, I don't think that it's a particularly surprising tack to take. The fact that it matches something that happens in the specific romance novels that Keltham has read and remembers, the ones that made an impression on him, is information about Keltham, information about how to make an impression on him that other gods could, in principle, have accessed. That doesn't require us to actually be in a romance novel, it just requires the romance novels that Keltham reads to reflect something of how one might go about courting him in reality."

"Whenever Keltham interacts with information about the world that isn't either part of the web of lies we've spun up around him, or a consequence of a god trying to court him - not literally always, I guess, but often - he doesn't seem to act like it's narratively consonant, or like the world makes sense to him as a story. Sometimes he acts like it can't possibly be true, sometimes he acts like it just doesn't make any sense to him, and sometimes it's so alien that he automatically writes a different version of events in his head, one that has only a very tenuous relationship with whatever is actually happening."

That's a dangerous line of thinking, if Asmodia's earlier guess was right about what her patrons might be trying to conceal.

"At the point where Cayden Cailean decides that His best option is cursing the Project's most devout Asmodean with snack powers - which Keltham reacted to with considerable surprise and astonishment, not with a sense of being courted, so far as I can see - we have to ask if Keltham was put somewhere that this was made to be a clever thing for Cayden Cailean to do, I think?  Obviously Cayden Cailean from His own perspective is trying to accomplish something.  There's a question of what.  But there's a larger question of how it came to be the case that this thing could be best accomplished by giving Pilar cookie powers."

"We don't believe this theory because Keltham believes it, we believe it because the theory's predictions keep coming true.  Keltham guessed, knew, that I was an asexual before any of us knew what that was, because we appear in dath ilani romance novels like that, so I lied to him and told him that I'd felt a couple of flashes of desire in my life."

"And I have, at this point, met Keltham.  He likes confusing people.  Supposedly it's to train strong minds that don't weakly rely on being told how reality works.  I think it may be what dath ilan does with all its repressed sadism.  Either way, the part where Keltham is in a really strange world to him fits with his theory.  The part where we're all lying to him and he has to figure that out fits with his theory, which is why we keep trying to convince him that he's not in an eroLARP.  Though one of the rays of hope for Cheliax is that Keltham has also said it's possible that he's just the oblivious boyfriend of our story about mastering his Law."

"The other ray of hope is that Keltham is already going outside of what dath ilan thinks is good sexual behavior.  Maybe this is a story about our corrupting him, and we just have to do that before time runs out on his inevitably seeing through the lie."

"I don't mean that Keltham is confused by us lying to him. I mean that - okay, the theory here is that all of Golarion, possibly the entire set of planes we have access to, was created for the benefit of telling this specific inane story about a normal teenage boy from another universe who is suddenly extraordinary and surrounded by extremely special girls who are fawning over him, which is all secretly a plot by the forces of hell to corrupt him to Evil, which might or might not work depending on our author's taste for tragedy or comedy, and also whose side they're on in the first place. Do I have that right, the scope of this theory?"

"Keltham thinks that reality is very large and we were selected for him, not created.  Which does make a difference to the Law of our strategic playing, though only at the level where the Most High oversees all our moves.  In particular, it matters whether, if we consider doing something that would cause Keltham to have retroactively never arrived here, the alternative we're negotiating against is this world having never existed, or this world never getting a Keltham."

"Leaving that aside, I'd point out that Keltham is, in fact, a normal teenage boy who suddenly ended up in a very weird-to-him universe where he's extraordinary and has a lot of extremely special girls fawning over him, as is secretly a plot by the forces of hell to corrupt him to Evil.  This part is not, in fact, in question.  It's an observation, not an inference.  The question is why.  And the theory is that it's all part and parcel of the same force that put Keltham down at the Worldwound where Sevar would be the first person he'd talk to."

"Sure, I agree that it happened. I suppose the idea of selection vs creation does punch some kind of hole in what I was about to say, but I'm going to say it anyway, just so it's said, because I haven't figured out how to think about the selection thing yet."

"If our world had been created specifically in order to engineer this story about Keltham - there's a lot going on in this world. It has a lot of elements that don't obviously match to any kind of story, but also a lot of elements that match to stories that are less stupid than this one. It sure looks, to me, like whoever created this world had better taste than an entity that would have this story as its endgame. Better stories have been told before, and more detailed, interesting, and sensible elements of reality have been introduced than the ones that make up whatever the Abyss is happening here. Probably that won't make sense as an objection when I've considered all the implications of the selection thing, or - whatever the reasoning was behind us having the ability to cause Keltham to have retroactively not landed in Golarion, given that he's already here, but - whatever."

"Raise you an alternative theory, not one I think is obviously true, but one that I've been thinking about for a couple days now and think ought to be considered. Have you heard of Hermea, beyond the name?"

"I don't even think I've heard of the name.  Ostenso academy does not leave time for anything except studying and plotting."

...Korva is also from an elite wizard academy, but that's not worth commenting on.

"It's harder than most countries to find information on, maybe because it's one of the few countries that gives Cheliax a run for its money in terms of actual functionality as a society. Near as I can tell, though, Hermea is a young island nation, founded post-prophecy, run by a gold dragon - obviously lawful good - that only accepts the best and brightest applicants as immigrants. A society of only smart people, wise people, talented people, careful and meticulous people, and their children; a society that aims at the sort of heredity optimization that Keltham sometimes talks about, a glorious experiment meant to push the limits of what humankind is capable of."

"Keltham's obviously not from Hermea. But suppose that Hermea isn't the only experiment of its type. Suppose that someone or something more powerful than a gold dragon managed to seed another planet with another set of humanity's best and brightest, to see what they would create. Found some way to bathe the planet in antimagic, to push them in other directions. Found some way of shielding them from the interference of other gods. And then suppose that that shielding cracked, somehow, and one of our gods was able to pull one of these dath ilani here. Perhaps you'd pick a dath ilani who would be most useful to your servants here on Golarion, one who would find the environment of his ancestors to be something that matched his particular fantasies and suppressed desires beyond his wildest dreams. Certainly you would ensure that the circumstances of his arrival here were useful to your followers, as opposed to allowing him to immediately die. Suppose that Keltham was selected for us, rather than us for Keltham."

"It explains Keltham's observation that he's obviously a human like us, who eats our food and was born of some similar ancestry. It explains his planet's hidden history very neatly, if the planet doesn't have any. It explains why Keltham would have a latent desire for sadism despite being from a planet where people have apparently never heard of sadism or masochism. And it's less, uh, wild than supposing that we're living in a specifically dath ilani romance novel."

"The fact that Keltham's world sealed off their history - has never been far from my own mind," what with Asmodia having a strong sense, somehow, that it is her duty alone to also prevent the actual world of Golarion from ending up destroyed, "because of how it seemed to imply that - they must have encountered something incredibly dangerous, something dangerous just to know about, that they had to seal off all their history just to prevent anyone from hearing about again -"

"As for your brilliant new theory that dath ilan has no history, because their world was just constructed like that, not very long ago - do you know what I think of that?"

"Well, I'll tell you."

"I think it's ridiculously obvious in retrospect, is what I think."

"Keltham has given arguments about how his world could have ended up with their incredibly Lawful Good system already in place at the point where they sealed their history.  Why it had to end up there, given that they had no magic.  Those arguments always seemed a lot more stretched to me than everything else Keltham says."

"So, yeah, obviously, if you look over all of the larger reality, most of the places where everybody grows up believing that their world sealed off their history a while ago for mysterious reasons, are places where their whole world was created then.  I'd say there'd obviously be some elaborate excuse but it doesn't sound like Keltham's world even had an excuse.  And those worlds will also have an incredibly powerful and mysterious conspiratorial group, that knows the forbidden truth, and secretly controls the government, who were put there by whoever created that world to keep it on track for its intended purpose why did I not see this earlier."

"Well - I am getting the sense that you've been very busy, these past few weeks. But - we don't have a reason why that's stupid, then?"

"I'm not seeing a reason.  But then, I'm not the only one with eyes on this problem, so maybe somebody else thought of it, and saw a reason it obviously couldn't be true, and didn't tell me about it."

"If in fact that's just a brilliant idea that nobody else involved had at all, well, let me put it this way.  If your ambitions previously involved living the rest of your life without ever once coming to the attention of the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn or Her Infernal Majestrix Queen Abrogail Thrune, you probably just blew it."

"Well, we can't have everything."

Having her own Korva is great!  She's so useful!  Asmodia never wants to give up her shiny new Korva!  She'd purchase three more if they were available!  They actually help with things!

"What do we do now?  File a report with the Most High?  Tell Sevar as soon as she's not busy wrangling Keltham?  Maaaybe but I have the feeling that, if we were Keltham, we'd be thinking of something else to do with this theory besides just running off and telling our superiors oh right I know we make advance predictions!  What else does the Tallandrian Origin Theory of Dath Ilan predict, even in probabilities?"

"Okay, um... oh, I remember one of the things that originally got me thinking about this was - how Keltham peppers in warnings against ways of thinking that often sound pretty clearly like things you'd observe in Golarion, even though he says he doesn't see the point of them, has never seen the point of them, and can't imagine anyone actually being that silly. Like the thing about certainty. That's not itself an advance prediction, but - if someone on his planet has knowledge of ours and is specifically warning against mistakes that we make, even if almost nobody on Keltham's world makes them, I wonder whether we're going to eventually see things that seem even more targeted at ways of thinking that are promoted on Golarion."

"...dath ilan having fewer plants and animals, but mostly ones we recognize. Because - because it'd be harder to move absolutely everything from our world to a different world, right, and if it wasn't relevant to the project, you probably wouldn't bother? I'm - trying to think of probabilities for these but I'm not sure the math part of my brain is entirely back up and running yet, and - I don't really know how you'd assign meaningful probabilities to these sorts of guesses anyway, exactly. I know you do one probability for each question for the world where dath ilan has nothing to do with us and really is old, and a different probability for the world in which it's an experimental offshoot. But - it's not like I know how many plants and animals a normal - hm, no, if it were a totally different planet I'd expect it to mostly have different animals than ours. I think. And about the same amount. Except that we already know that dath ilan also has humans, which suggests about the same kind of life."

"Don't worry about making up probabilities on likelihoods.  Keltham didn't tell the rest of us how to do that either.  You might as well say 'more or less likely' and leave the Law part to me once I know what I'm trying to do with the Law."

"Dath ilan has humans but no other sapient species.  That's lower variety right there.  But we could ask Keltham if his world has badgers or archaeopteryxes or bats or giant hamsters or octopi or squirrels or ujaheim... I mean, I'd have to think about the context in which to ask him, but that's an obvious thing to check.  And see if his world has lots of animal species that Golarion's never heard of, but that sound like they wouldn't be all that related to the humans..."

"I think the really big question is whether, if dath ilan is that close by, a Greater Scry would let us look at it.  Maybe one of the people Keltham's shown us in a Silent Image, like his writing-circle friends or, what was her name, Merrin."