"He really doesn't! Until he reacted so strongly to you crying I actually hadn't considered the angle that they'd be running into problems from excessive Goodness, even though of course they would. But it does seem that they pointed a lot of indoctrination at - some people are Problems and you mustn't try to help them, that callousness is a virtue both from the perspective of Good and from the perspective of Evil."

"Personally, I'm trying to throw out everything I know about Good and Evil, and start over to envision a society that sees the entire world using a different alignment chart created by some being who wasn't Pharasma and maybe doesn't use nine sorting categories at all."

"It's actually quite hard, and makes me feel like I might understand Keltham a little better.  Our world's structure - must be absolutely strange to him."  Even when he tries to throw out one of his basic assumptions, he just makes a different wrong assumption instead...

"And we sure would be having some problems, if it wasn't. I do want someone to send to a Good priest somewhere and present them the question about the sick friend."

"Taldorians in the Facility too."

"Do we have any atheists who haven't been executed yet, to ask?  Dath ilan doesn't have gods.  Whatever built the place, it didn't want worshippers."

"I think atheists here are fundamentally different in character from atheists in places where there aren't any noticeable gods."

"Is it possible that the people who have problems as significant or more significant than ever having cried are also all unbearably - Keltham's sideways conception of Good, and all kill or remove themselves, which would ding them but avoid dinging anyone else, and then the rest of the population isn't actually any better at handling interpersonal problems in a way that wouldn't make them Evil, than people on Golarion, they just don't run into those problems at all because all of the weak people are dead. And then they're not Good in the sense of having any resistance to Evil, just in the sense that they've somehow cut out everything that normally makes it convenient."

"They've got to turn up the occasional person who doesn't care at all about hurting other people, in a population of a billion. But maybe they don't turn up any - dilemmas for Good, yeah, any people who are weak and useless and who Good says you're supposed to be compassionate to anyway?"

"Yeah. Especially if people usually weed themselves out well before the point where they would actually be causing what we would consider significant inconvenience for other people."

"From the perspective of the superpowerful being running the place, it wouldn't want any experimental failures hanging around clogging the place up, using resources, or reproducing.  The story the population was given about what they're doing may tell us something about their natural temperaments, what they're doing doesn't tell us as much."

"I also note that the place may be non-Pharasman enough that the whole thing with people going into the cold to wake up later, isn't suicide, or if it's suicide, isn't that being's equivalent of Evil, or if it's Evil doesn't send you to a particular afterlife based on that."

"I wouldn't expect it to get counted against them as suicide, they think of it as more like petrification to be unpetrified by a civilization that has the resources to deal with you, even if they're wrong and the bodies are all destroyed that's how they're imagining it."

"That's fair, I don't think we really have any evidence on their afterlife situation. They wouldn't have any way of seeing whether they were going anywhere, without magic. But - 'we have all of the weak people petrify themselves' is also not something that rings like what a Golarion nation that was aiming for Good would come up with, even if Pharasma doesn't specifically disapprove of that specific step. Which - I guess we've already established that, yeah, they're not aiming for a Golarion understanding of Good."

"By far the most important information we need out of all this, is what it says about that superbeing's concept of romance novels."

"I don't know, I think it's also very relevant to my project of corrupting him. If we knew the thing he was scared of, here, we could have Korva pretend to be it, and validate his impression that all compassion is a grievous weakness or whatever exactly his impression is. I don't want to risk that at my current level of confusion.

As far as the romance trope goes - if dath ilan has something about winning over people who hate you I'd much sooner point him at Lady Avaricia, who I expect can play the part a little more cleanly and who is also doing the 'openly disliking Keltham' thing."

Asmodia bets that doesn't work unless Avaricia hates him personally the right way, and requires that Avaricia even be a Special Girl at all, but Asmodia's not pointing that out to Sevar if it keeps Korva out of trouble for longer.

"Maybe there's - a way to corrupting Keltham through Law?  Or by learning his Law?  That feels like - it should be part of the romance novel - and what I'm thinking in particular, is, we tell Keltham, and we're not in fact lying to him, that one of the Project Lawful girls came up with an interesting theory about dath ilan, though she wants to stay anonymous for now.  We copy to Keltham her advance predictions based on Tallandrian Origin Theory, like about the distribution of animals in his world."

"And, if we can zero in to where she's getting those predictions right, we can at some critical point reveal to Keltham her theory - that his world was created by a superbeing, that the Keepers were placed in control all along, and that dath ilan's real masters didn't like his selfishness because that made him less useful to something else's experiment."

"You'd have to time it right, but as a step in his corruption - it feels like that could be Korva's role in the romance novel" which doesn't require Keltham to hurt Korva and makes her be valuable as something other than a torture-doll.

"I'm not firmly opposed but it sure doesn't happen in alter-Cheliax, Asmodia."

"Does it not?  What does alter-Cheliax do when alter-Tallandria tells me about her theory?  I'm worried about what it does to Keltham, if she's right.  I probably write a report to the Most High, because that's how infohazard protocols work in alter-Cheliax.  Alter-Tallandria is nervous about coming to Keltham's attention, after their last interaction.  I still know how beings who aren't Lawful need to make their predictions in advance.  We don't want to add it to Keltham's plate while he has so much else on his mind, either; even if we're right, it's something that can wait."

It kind of feels like in alter-Cheliax Asmodia is somewhat less fiercely attached to Tallandria but she doesn't know where she got that intuition and maybe it's wrong.

PL-timestamp:  Day 25 (21) / Early Afternoon

Time to rate tests.  He called Carissa back in for this part, for second and independent opinions.

Willa Shilira... just kept talking about probabilities everywhere and it was hard for Keltham to make out what was prior, likelihood, or posterior - there's a reason why well-designed languages have three different words for those!  And Willa is expressing things in strange awkward ways, mathematically speaking!  But she could be saying the correct things awkwardly and therefore, probably is.

Alexandre Esquerra... seems to have a solid grasp of the basic way to apply math in principle but to have not quite grasped what mortals can't do at all, let alone without computers.  Still, that's better than a lot of other exam submissions.  If you look at it as 'tried to invent a new way of expressing his ideas about Probability and didn't completely screw that up', it becomes some evidence of Golarion genius / dath ilan averageness.

Lady Avaricia has apparently caught up to Meritxell in her grasp of Law, as to be expected of a ????????.  But Avaricia was a trivial-proof for tier-1 regardless.

Nobody matched the standard set by Carissa or Asmodia, but that's only to be expected.

...Korva would have made it in easily as tier-2, based on what she wrote down before she cracked.  She did have any idea of what the Law meant at all, and that combined with her chemistry work would've been more than sufficient.

Keltham feels awful about that.  Like he made some basic mistake, like there was supposed to be some better outcome than this.  But, well, that's what everybody warns you happens any time you deal with mental health events in any capacity other than 'I am an actual trained professional doing what I have been trained to do'.

The cleric of Asmodeus whose report claimed him to be excellent at mathematics, may in fact be excellent-for-Golarion at math, but doesn't seem able to relate his proofs to the structures of Lawful thought.  He proved the Rule of Succession rigorously using integral calculus, instead of the discrete calculus that Keltham used, which is hella impressive for somebody who'd never heard of the gamma function up until that point.  But then... couldn't answer any of Keltham's actual questions about how to use the Rule of Succession inside of Science.  He's not made any progress on Prestidigitation chemistry.

Fail him out?  Tier-2 in case they run into a purer math problem at some point?  This person seems maybe useful if they run into just the right kind of problem, but Keltham can't guarantee that, and it's famously bad for mental health to hire people and then not have enough work for them.

Carissa, thoughts?

"Failing him out seems fine; it seems like he treats every question as practically in isolation anyway, so if we later present him with a pure math problem I doubt he'll be impaired by not having followed along with the lecture up to that point."

"Assumes he's otherwise willing to stay around the Fortress, and if we're asking him to do that I think we pay some option-value fee to him.  But if he's willing, then sure."

Any other opinions Carissa has about hires, non-hires, and tiers?

She's inclined to err on the side of leaving more people in, some of them might catch up later or think of something from an original angle. So long as they seem to be basically following along and understand the fundamentals of what is being covered. 

She's not seeing any new tier-1s here aside from Avaricia.

He would've guessed Willa Shilira for tier-1 based on her combined math and chemistry performance.  But even in dath ilan it's easier to promote people later than demote them, and he'd guess that effect to be exacerbated in Cheliax where there's no explicit emotional disciplines against loss-gain asymmetry.

Offer Willa tier-2 at first, but be ready to jump to tier-1 if she counter-negotiates?  It shouldn't make a Lawful difference to where she ends up, but could make an emotional difference to her trajectory whether she's tier-2 on watch for promotion or tier-1 on watch for demotion.

" - yeah, sure, that works."