Korva has been spending the afternoon reviewing the very first lesson transcripts and fiddling with the very beginnings of an introductory probability lesson for somewhat less mathy children, which hopefully strips out all of the context where the math was originally given to them by some kind of alien. She's taking a lot of breaks, which is what she internally calls it when she periodically task switches to reading transcripts of Keltham's private conversations, which she needs to get through if she's going to know which ways the conspiracy needs to hold itself together.

"...in what area?"

"I've been getting an impression that you've got more of a thesis on what alter-Cheliax should look like, internally, historically, that isn't just a hybrid of Taldor that got nice-Asmodeused.  I have a thought that's something like - Korva on Composition, Asmodia on Consistency, and Sevar on Corruption."

"Subject to Sevar's approval, obviously."

"But if you haven't already developed thoughts on how the revised alter-Cheliax should look, just tell us everything we're doing wrong right now.  Sevar is trustworthy about not hurting people for that."

She's pretty sure she did have a thesis on that, actually, but it's embarrassingly hard to think about it when the Chosen is in the room with them, which is stupid because the Chosen is going to have access to everything she says for the foreseeable future and in that sense the Chosen is actually always in the room.

Anyway. From the top.

" - so one of my thoughts here is that, uh, Taldor and Cheliax are different, right, they have different histories and different historical governmental structures and different cultures and different geography; what we want, ideally, is to extrapolate a future of the actual Cheliax of the past, starting with old Cheliax and then running it through what we described to Keltham, further development followed by a relatively recent civil war and a victory by the forces representing nice-Asmodeus. I suspect that some things we've said already come into conflict with that, and also suspect that it's going to be harder to find information on than what Taldor is like, but if we could manage it, that would have been the most internally consistent thing we could have done, probably, so I feel like that's where we should start, and then see what things we have to alter to make it fit with our existing story."

"And one of my thoughts is - would Keltham help Taldor. If he had landed on Taldor. Because if Keltham would find Taldor abhorrent, too, find them so unbelievably actually-evil that they couldn't exist outside of storybook villainy and he needed to get away from them right away, too - then probably Cheliax of the past is too near that in some respects, too. And we have to keep that in mind when designing alter-Cheliax, too, make it realistic while also not making it a place that Keltham would immediately run screaming from, because it's not currently obvious to me that neutrality would even meet his standards. I assume that Sevar is the expert, there."

"I'd expect him, if he'd landed on real Taldor and gotten a real account of the place, to listen patiently for a while and then ask about other countries and then go to Osirion. If Osirion didn't exist....

...it feels not in keeping with the story dath ilan tells about itself, for its children to run screaming from a place that is better than other places, because it's in some sense objectively bad. I think Keltham would say that was an error of some kind. - he wouldn't say that if we'd conquered the whole world already and everyone worshipped Asmodeus, then he would run screaming, but the difference is something like that he doesn't want to benefit Asmodeus? And I don't think he'd feel that way about Taldor. If Taldor were the best he could find, then he'd sit in Taldor building something better, and he'd be fine with Taldor being first to benefit from that, and he might personally refuse to work with anyone who - conspicuously kept slaves, or conspicuously started stupid wars, but I don't think it has him give up on the project. 

Of course, I think we need to aim higher than that, because he would look elsewhere, on seeing Taldor, to check if it's really that bad everywhere. And we'd rather he not look elsewhere."

"I think that's more the thing I mean. There are things about Taldor that - I'd expect would make him think that the system was fundamentally bad enough that he couldn't trust it to be telling the truth about being better than anywhere else, partly because the system might be too incompetent to know, and partly because it might seem implausible that this was the best that any given world had to offer, and I don't know precisely where that point is. But we have to keep the fact that it exists in mind, and consider that even an alter-Cheliax based on the actual old Cheliax - which may well have been better by Keltham's lights than modern Osirion is, it was an extremely prosperous lawful neutral empire that also, you know, considered women people - might not meet Keltham's standards for reasonableness, because Keltham's standards might not be in a reasonable place."

"His standards for how societies ought to function are incredibly unreasonable, yes. I don't want to pretend we're more competent than any real Golarion society is or ever has been, though, both because that's probably correlated with things we can't show him and because a competent society could be pulling off a competent Conspiracy, while Taldor observably couldn't be successfully pulling off an expensive complicated conspiracy."

"I think Keltham is trusting in Sevar, his unknown god, and the tropes, to be telling him where he needs to be and to have sent him where he needs to go?  Or - putting a lot of probability on that.  If not for those things, and if not for him being in love, he wouldn't be trusting in our alter-Cheliax without asking about a lot of other countries."

"So, how does alter-Cheliax seem competent enough to not screw that up, is the question?  Though we should also have alter versions of all the countries that are better than Cheliax where they're worse than Cheliax, and be ready to provide faked documentation about that.  I wish 'why trust what you can verify' wasn't a dath ilani saying, but it is."

"I think we can draw a distinction between competence and things that he finds morally repugnant, or at least things that he eventually won't object to, but currently finds ugly, and hasn't been inured to the ugliness of yet. It doesn't seem to me like he particularly minds being cruel, especially in comparison to everyone else he seems to have met before coming here, but a society that was composed entirely of people who were as cruel as he was - or as cruel as he will be in a few months, as he gets used to living in a world that allows and supports it - might still shock him at this point in ways that we don't want."

"So, like - it's not a problem that Taldor is a mess, at least apart from Taldor being such a mess that it sort of strains credulity. But Taldor publicly tortures criminals to death, which is hardly incompetence. And I don't know for sure, but I bet old Cheliax did, too. And if hearing about how we publicly torture criminals to death would give Keltham an attack of something, then maybe alter-Cheliax shouldn't do that. It doesn't have to, I bet they don't in Andoran. We might run into trouble reconciling that with not having certain problems that Andoran probably does have, but it'll be something - improbable, an area where the lines don't quite line up where they're most likely to, and we get more of those than we get things so horrifying that Keltham immediately declares us the villain in some Andoran children's fairy tale. I am pretty sure we get zero of those things."

"I hadn't been thinking about also producing alter versions of other countries, but we can do that, too. Conveniently most of them are terrible, but we should probably put some thought into, like, why Absalom would be worse for a project like this, from his perspective, since that one isn't obvious to me on three seconds of thought. And Osirion, if we expect them to be the main threat if he goes poking other places."

"We're making a very big fuss of how Osirion is sexist, but I don't think that would be remotely sufficient, if he knew Abadar ruled it."

"Abadar is working with some shitty starting material. I do think the big answer there is simply that we have to keep him from learning that Abadar rules it, which we're already committed to. Apart from that - they're less advanced than us, poorer, smaller, and have far fewer wizards. Osirion only recently broke away from Qadira, and I bet it's still in danger of being retaken by Keleshites. - shit, I don't know enough about Kelesh to know why he shouldn't contact the Keleshite Emperor, someone's going to have to think of reasons why the Keleshites suck. Osirian has an obviously-not-a-god ruler who styles himself a god and demands being treated like one, which if you say it right puts it in the same class as Razmiran, which everyone agrees is horrible. Dig up something true and horrible-sounding about their long and storied history of pharaohs who - oh, oh, the House of Oblivion is their fault. He'd be going to the people who opened the House of Oblivion."

Carissa did not know that and is sort of surprised you can be a Chelish wizarding student and also find the time and license to know a bunch of things like that. "I think you're the person to develop the alternate versions of all these other countries."

"...okay. I can come up with a quick version tonight, but if you want it done well, I'm going to need some time, a bunch of uncensored foreign books and, like, I guess probably someone who keeps up with modern foreign politics." Because she hasn't exactly had the ability to do that.

"Alter-Cheliax does seem like the priority, though."

"I'd think so, yeah."

"Do you see any holes in the Wall, as it stands?  Or shaky parts?"

Well, everyone reacted to her crying in a stupid way That is not going to be her opener. Come on, Korva, you had a bunch of thoughts you crushed that weren't about you being a crybaby, surely you can un-crush some of them on demand.

She stares at the wall for a bit.

"I don't know whether this is actually a problem, but it's bugging me. Alter-Cheliax allows infanticide. Some unspecified number of other alter-countries don't. It's not obvious to me whether Keltham would have a problem with infanticide even if he knew everything about the situation? But the whole situation where babies go to the afterlife but don't necessarily go to Hell, and we send a lot of them to the Boneyard while they're too small to make Hell, seems - like something where I don't know what our story there is and like there are probably issues with some of the possible stories."

"Standing rules are not to tell Keltham when fetuses get ensouled.  Earlier, there was a hope that Keltham could be lured into forcing some women to abort ensouled fetuses, which would turn him Evil.  In retrospect it's not exactly what alter-Cheliax would do, unfortunately.  But the past consistency problem is, Sevar and Contessa Lrilatha already failed to warn Keltham against letting abortions wait longer than twelve weeks.  So we're already stuck needing some excuse or reason for why that happened, if he finds out.  Probably that we were trying to keep disturbing truths about the Boneyard from him."

"...it's not a very impressive plan, I admit."

"We're not going to think of a preferred lie to feed to someone if it does come up?"

"Our lie is that we thought it would disturb Keltham to hear about.  Further lie, all his women who signed the contract had to make a separate promise to Cheliax to get their abortions before twelve weeks."

"It's not good, not what the real alter-Cheliax would have done.  The real alter-Cheliax would've told Keltham that for unspecified reasons he should usually ask for abortions before twelve weeks and he'd find out why later.  That's why we'd rather Keltham not look in that direction."

"Luckily it doesn't seem like a very hard secret to keep, unless you can thinking of truth-entanglements specifically of early ensoulment. Aside from that Good countries ban abortion."

"I'm not thinking of any others on three seconds of thought, though that doesn't mean there aren't any. Mothers treating pregnancies differently than they would in dath ilan in some way, maybe. But there's not much to be done about it now."

"I feel like the thing to do here might be - not looking through the existing statements we have and seeing where they directly contradict, because they won't, but working out what basic structures are holding up alter-Cheliax, and seeing what shadows those structures would cast on the rest of the world, and whether those shadows match what's on the wall or not. And if they don't, I guess we have to change the structures until we find something that works with what we already have, and then make sure that the new facts we add are in accordance with that. - did that make sense."

"Yes, it's what Keltham calls 'latentvariables', the things hidden beneath the background, and the shadows they cast on 'observables', the stuff we can see."

"What are alter-Cheliax's hidden structures?  Or what's one structure?"

"Well, if you want to start on the human level, which is where I know how to start - "

"As in virtually all human countries known to man, the vast majority of Cheliax's population is engaged in agriculture; arguably this is where the vast majority of all human effort ends up going, generating enough food to sustain our population. But in both Old Cheliax and Infernal Cheliax, an extremely significant chunk of that agricultural labor is done by halfling slaves. This isn't true of many of our direct neighbor states, who have quite recently abandoned slavery while high on the concept of freedom, and are probably experiencing various problems over it. Other older and more stable countries do use agricultural slavery, but don't segragate as heavily by race as we do; many of their agricultural slaves are humans. What differences are borne of that? Halflings eat less; I'd wager they eat enough less to offset any direct hits you take to labor efficiency by using smaller workers, which puts us ahead of other people. There are going to be a bunch of differences that we can't know about, that are down to the differing natures of halfling and human slaves. Plus, if Keltham ever gets ahold of any accurate information about Cheliax's total land area, climate, the percent of it that's farmland, the percentage of people who are farmers, and what kind of food we grow, and possibly half a dozen things I wouldn't know to expect to be connected with any of this, and then compares them to our population numbers, the amount of food we grow won't match what we would be producing if all of our farmers were human. Either including or excluding the halflings will give the wrong number of inhabitants for the amount of food production we actually ought to have. We could fix the number any way we wanted if we knew what all the inputs were, but obviously we don't."

"Obviously, the safe and easy thing to do is to declare that alter-Cheliax uses the same amount of enslaved halfling labor as actual Cheliax; we won't need to fix anything, the numbers will line up, and it's hardly incompatible with being a lawful neutral country. But we sure seem to be going out of our way to keep Keltham from encountering any more of the concept of slavery than is absolutely necessary, so if you think he's likely to have an attack of conscience over five million enslaved halflings, or however many it is - if anybody even knows - such that we think that alter-Cheliax absolutely mustn't have slaves, then we have a bunch of potential inconsistencies - or improbabilities, I guess - hanging out at a pretty basic level."

"We should almost definitely have slaves. But, like, as an example."

"I mean, that's - good point, but - now that you point it out, it's really just the capstone of a much bigger Problem Pyramid which, due credit, Avaricia was pointing out earlier.  The entire Chelish economy runs on coercion in various forms.  It's not just enslaved halflings on farms, it's all slaves everywhere.  Even in regular jobs, if they're a kind of job that some people get told they're taking or can't quit, like prostitution, I'll need comparison data with other countries to see if that affected prices -"

"I don't know if we should have halfling slaves, but we should have halflings, it's just, I need to figure out if they can be paid halflings, and how that would affect the flow of money in and out of farms and the rest of Cheliax, by looking at other countries with non-slave farmers, then I need to figure out the same thing about miners and doctors and everybody else where Keltham is liable to start demanding prices.  And then, I guess, report to Sevar on whether I think I can fake an alterCheliax like that, and if not, realCheliax needs a lot of slavery, and then other countries need to not look better to Keltham if he asks about them."

"It would be easier if the prices in real Golarion made more sense to me.  Sometimes I'm looking at the cost of spells, magic items, scrolls, the cost of hiring a professional for a week, the cost of a slave, the cost of ladders and ten-foot-poles, and it all starts to feel like it was casually made up by somebody who cared less about their job than I do."

"The entire economy of almost everywhere runs on coercion in various forms. More than half the economy of Osirion runs on coercion on a really basic level, between their women and their slaves, which Osirians also have plenty of. Cheliax has more coercion in the form of the state telling people what they ought to be doing than some other countries, but it also has fewer people starving to death because they made stupid decisions about what work to do and how to do it, which may well be the alternative."

"Paid halflings sound like an easy fix, until you realize that lots of people seem to hold that unowned halflings are inherently nomadic - or, worse, inherently criminal, without a whip over them - and that if Keltham ever encounters evidence that leads him to believe that those people are right, it's going to seem very implausible that they choose to work as farmers in greater numbers than humans do."

"The only halfling he's met is Broom, who I think is an exemplar of the race, really, and will probably make it easier to convince him any nomad criminal halflings he meets are outliers."

"Might work fine! But an important thing to keep in mind if he ends up meeting any other halflings, if you do decide that paid halflings are the way to go. Which I still recommend against, on the grounds that virtually every stable state runs on some amount of slavery and this isn't a coincidence, and if you intend to hide that from him it's going to keep rearing its head in inconvenient places. But - obviously there are a lot of considerations."