PL-timestamp:  Day 87

PL-timestamp:  Day 88

PL-timestamp:  Day 89

Okay.  It's pretty clear they're going to get spellsilver into the target range.

It's time to consider what it is he and the Project want to do next, after that.

...is he going to regret not using an Owl's Wisdom on that, he wonders.

He supposedly doesn't owe that to anyone or anything, but -

No.  He doesn't owe that to anyone or anything.

Okay, he's starting to lose patience with himself here.  What is it that he'd supposedly see, if he used an Owl's Wisdom on himself?  If he already knows what he's scared of seeing, and is going around gloomy and depressed about it, every scrap of common sense out of dath ilan says to just face it already, sheesh.

He could make sulfa drugs, Keltham thinks.  Probably.  He doesn't really know how, but he has a rough idea what sort of chemical that should be, they have all kinds of reaction-pathway tricks up their sleeves now.  That will make more people survive bacterial infections if they can't afford Remove Disease, and their population density will go up until they're more vulnerable to disease and things are brought back into equilibrium, unless he can first master contraception, or maybe roadmaking so that there can be more cities with lower density, which possibly need to be supported by better crops.

It's a big tangle and he knows this, so why is this a sad thought?

...Maybe it's that there's now an untaken option for thinking about it, which is... cast Augury on what happens if he puts on a +2 intelligence headband.  Augury isn't perfect, is the problem... but then the probability of disaster isn't that high in the first place, and he could just take the headband off if anything starts to go wrong.

While that option exists, he has not, in fact, thought as hard as possible about how to cut the medicine-sanitation-agriculture-density-contraception tangle.  So the thought isn't really quiescent inside him.  He just thought it would take a huge self-sacrifice, so then that thought got to linger around making him feel guilty about not making that sacrifice.

...the problem with that is that Augury has a 30-minute time horizon, and if an intelligence headband goes great, he's going to want to go on wearing it, judging by how much everybody on the Project is constantly wearing headbands, now.  Going around wearing one of those for the rest of his life is going to alter his personality.

Well, there comes a point, where you decide to either do the thing, or not do the thing, which you do by actually managing to evaluate it with your utilityfunction or your cheap human approximation thereof of 'wanting'.  Or, on a meta-level, you decide to either think about the thing more, or not think about the thing more, and either way you're supposed to be able to get over it, at that point.

There's the war on Nidal, too...

And this is a depressing thought, why?  What does his brain think he's supposed to do about that?  Is he possibly just supposed to be depressed because Nidal is awful?  Hm?

He could make weapons, as his thing to do next.  He's got acid in very large quantities, and that will let you make large quantities of some relatively weak and tiny things that go boom.

He doesn't want to make weapons.  He doesn't want his knowledge to be used to hurt people.  He doesn't want that to be his meaning to Golarion.

And he's Evil, so what he wants, should be enough of an answer.  That's the whole point of being Keltham instead of a median dath ilani.

Yeah, his brain isn't actually buying that at all.

The people in Nidal - are hurting.

It matters to them a lot more than any of this matters to Keltham.  

Carissa's school instructor got soul-trapped and Keltham has not been asking questions about what happened to him exactly.

And that also matters to Keltham and he cannot, actually, live in denial about that, either, no matter how much it flaming resembles all of the smug, satisfied opinions that people around him politely didn't express, but that he knew they were thinking, about how maybe Keltham would just grow out of it and turn into a median dath ilani one day.

It may not even be the Lawful answer.  He'd be destroying a lot of their value for a little of his value, and that's not what he'd have wanted the timeless/updateless decision to be, of people in his position.

Cool.  Next up, make weapons for Cheliax.

...aaaaand his brain's not buying that one either.

Dear brain:  You must, in fact, either make weapons for Cheliax, or not make weapons for Cheliax.  To take neither of these options is not, in fact, among your options.  So you should decide which of these two things is better, and then do that thing, and then not feel bad about it.

If that argument doesn't sound appealing, is it because there is some additional thought Keltham is supposed to think, to weigh, before deciding?  Please exhibit it, brain; or make a gesture in its general direction.  Or throw up a tiny note of discordance or something.

...is he actually reluctant to make weapons for Cheliax mainly because his brain still hasn't gone quiescent about the Conspiracy thing?

This is not a very consistent attitude to hold, brain!  In the sort of Conspiracy world where Cheliax does not already know all of that stuff Keltham knows, where his making weapons would actually matter... Keltham has also been teaching them to refine spellsilver at 10% of the cost.

That is also a bad thing to do if he is secretly captive inside a Conspiracy!

If his dath ilani sensibilities don't instinctively worry about that, the way they worry about crafting weapons, it means his sensibilities are wrong and incoherent about at least one of 'Is it okay to make weapons for Cheliax' and 'Is it okay to mine cheap spellsilver for Cheliax' and he needs to resolve that.

Is he, in fact, thinking about the right things at all, here?  Maybe if he asked Lrilatha about weapons, she'd say it's unlikely that Cheliax could really benefit much from them, that he should spend his next effort on forging, or roads, or agriculture, instead.

Thaaaaat seems unlikely to be the thought that finishes this dilemma.

He has not, for one thing, actually asked about weapons.  Except of that paladin, on a much more grand and impractical scale of explosions that seemed safely nonthreatening to his real life.

And for another thing, explosives shouldn't be very hard at this level of chemical expertise, compared to mining spellsilver.

And for another nother thing, back in dath ilan, if he'd come across an internally inconsistent thought like 'It's okay to mine spellsilver for my apparent hosts but not to build weapons for them', he would have considered that as a big deal, and tried to resolve it.  He somewhat got out of that habit due to Golarion making him be totally incoherent all of the time.  But things are settling down now, he is not having a new terrible epiphany every four hours, and he can afford to maybe start being a little coherent, again.

Right.  So.

Is he, in fact, inside of a terrible Conspiracy of terrible people doing terrible things, who should never have been given any of his chemistry ideas and definitely shouldn't be given explosives.