"I think we ran into this because Zon-Kuthon is the obvious referent for a utility-flipped entity, and the thing you said is even more confusing if I imagine it as just a policy that, if a corrupt officer of the law in one of the River Kingdoms offers to let you go if you bribe him, but says he'd really have a lot more fun if you didn't, you ought to fling yourself at him and die horribly of it."

"The question isn't whether Zon-Kuthon is utility-flipped Dou-Bral, it's whether he's a conditional other-agent-utility-pessimizer that just naturally wants to minimize your utility function unless you pay him five gold."

"And on that corrupt officer thing, I'm gonna need more context to figure out that one, because I'm not seeing at all how you get that as an implication of the position I thought I was expressing.  For one thing, he's obviously lying, because if he had more fun the other way he just wouldn't accept the bribe?"

" - I don't really know what it's like to be a corrupt River Kingdom guard who takes bribes and beats and rapes people who don't pay him but I'd expect part of the dynamic to be that the other corrupt guards will give you a pass if you're asking for a reasonable bribe and only hurting people who refuse, because that's what they do too, but they'll get mad at you if you just run around being a bandit in a uniform. Uh, I guess it just seems like, if we're not in the realm of gods and formal decision-commitments, there are lots of awful people who want to make your life worse because it's fun for them, and who demand minor things of you, in the world, and if you have the bad luck to be born in a normal country and decide you won't give awful people five gold to leave you alone then you will definitely die horribly."

"I'd have to think about what would be a Lawful response to that situation, but among the obvious thoughts that occur to me is to generate random numbers and spend the effort to find him and kill him afterwards, with a small probability that cancels out his expected gain of five gold from threatening me... though if five gold is like, half his annual income, I guess that might have to be a relatively large probability.  Sucks to be him, he shouldn't have tried to threaten for bribes that large."

That's not a very Asmodean answer.

She should probably sit down with Asmodia and try to figure out what the Lawful response to that situation is if you're an Asmodean. "You still probably die young of that but it does seem more - I can see how it's not just a philosophy to immediately commit suicide if you don't live in one of the three or four nicest countries in the world."

"I am getting a nervous sense here that I may have jumped too far ahead of your background mastery of Law.  Instinctive high-precision use of Law in particular.  Possibly the exact occasions you pick to Lawfully track down somebody to kill them is, perhaps, a relatively advanced topic, especially in Golarion which is full of situations that dath ilan would usually keep inside the 'counterfactuals'.  People are taking the things I said and deriving further conclusions from them that strike me as worryingly not what I was trying to say."

"Possibly people should stick with their sensible instincts or educated heuristics, rather than generating sentences which sound sort of like stuff I've said about Law, and doing that."

"If you seem to have carefully reasoned out that you ought to destroy the universe, but it also seems to you that there's a better thing you could do instead of the Lawful thing, which is not destroying the universe, maybe you should hold off on trying to be quote Lawful unquote for that exact minute.  This stuff is supposed to make sense; if at any point it's advising you to do terrible things that don't feel like they make sense - I can't say it's certain that you're wrong, for reversed stupidity is not intelligence.  But I am certain that you didn't achieve a reliable understanding and internalization of the Law.  Any time the Law doesn't feel like it makes sense, you definitely don't have the kind of understanding of it that you can trust."

"Only destroy the universe if you have a carefully Lawful line of reasoning saying to do that, and you can take a step back from all the careful reasoning and grasp the whole thing intuitively and it totally makes sense why you'd do that, and that doesn't feel at all strained or like you're sweeping key issues under the rug.  If you don't have the 'introspection' - if you don't have the Wisdom to confidently evaluate that level of strainedness, then you should back off the whole thing and leave destroy-the-universe decisions to somebody else..."

"You know, let's just simplify that line of reasoning," it's hard to remember that everyone here is effectively six years old, in some ways if not others.  "Everyone here should just not destroy the universe, period.  Don't complicate it any more than that until you're much much much better at Law, and can be very sure that you're correct to ignore my flat instruction not to do that.  Like, maybe Asmodia in a few years could decide that if someone had to, but everyone else should just not do it."

PL-timestamp:  Day 54

The leaden-cooking-pot issue was still causing Keltham to feel - closer to dath ilan, to the average dath ilani - than he has in a while.  And he's also worried people here are getting an inaccurate impression of what dath ilan is actually like, from their policies being discussed mainly in the context of weird thought experiments.

So Keltham has now managed to reconstruct at least one piece of dath ilani fiction.  It's not a very famous one, but the problem is, the actually famous stories are full of way too much incredible prose and complication and made entirely out of foreshadowing.  His previous attempts to ad-lib Miyalsvor and Verrez episodes at dinner are... feeling increasingly painful to him, let's put it that way.

So Keltham is actually just going with this one short story he happened to read a week before his planecrash.  And this time he took the effort to write it down and polish it, with such writing skills as he possessed.  That way people can get at least one actual glimpse of what a normal piece of dath ilani fiction is like.

Anyways, here.

"Keltham, I've got much stronger Good sympathies than most people here for obvious reasons and even for me that is just way, way, way too much Goodness."

"Yeah, I had to get pretty homesick for dath ilan before I could make myself write it down.  If I did get a portal to dath ilan, I'd call them in temporarily to handle stuff like leaden cooking pots, but I sure wouldn't go back."

If nobody's going to order alterPeranza to have an opinion on this then Peranza is just going to not think anything and not say anything it's safer that way.  She knows alterPeranza would have an opinion, but, but alterPeranza is just distracted or having a bad day, Peranza does not want to figure out exactly what alterPeranza would think.  Peranza is probably just having a bad day herself so that's statistically realistic.  She won't say anything unless Security or Asmodia orders her.

PL-timestamp:  Day 55

PL-timestamp:  Day 56

And there's the first tiny fragment of spellsilver refined by the Project out of the cheaper ore, using entirely Project-produced acids!  Now they just have to enormously scale the process, and the yields of every stage, and have it not require three days of personal attention by Keltham, Avaricia, and Shilira to make it work.

It's not a huge party moment like their first saleable acid - real parties are for shippable product - but they at the very least get cookies about this!

PL-timestamp:  Day 57

Now that they've got a tiny fragment of spellsilver out of the new kind of ore, what remains is more of a process of perfecting everything, and not so much of inventing it from scratch.  That in turn means that Keltham should maybe no longer be spending nearly all of his non-personal time on getting a basic spellsilver pathway, as he has been these last few weeks.

It's time for him to shift relatively more of his effort into Law lectures, so that other people can force-multiply his efforts on perfecting the process they've found!  Chemistry, physics, and Pilar-approved hopefully-safe epistemology for everyone.  And the sort of stuff that even Pilar had trouble with, going in slower and more measured doses to the tier-2 mad-experimental volunteers (plus one cleric of Asmodeus).

PL-timestamp:  Day 58

PL-timestamp:  Day 59

Sometimes Keltham questions whether he was, in fact, dropped in a world next to someone impossibly sexually compatible to him, despite the whole thing with masochists who are impervious to biting damage etcetera.  He worries about whether everything he wants is guaranteed to be something his partner needs; and whether everything his partner needs, is in fact something guaranteed to match his own needs and desires.

He does feel like he's pushing himself, a bit, in doing this.  Isidre would probably tell him to take it slower.

He fought Security until he was over the mental shock of combat.

He fought Security until he stopped hesitating to defend himself.

He fought Security until he stopped hesitating to attack.

He fought Meritxell until that stopped feeling quite so wrong and unnatural, to fight someone weaker than Security who he'd had sex with and felt some affection for.

He fought Meritxell Altered and Disguised as Carissa, until it stopped feeling wrong to hit somebody who looked like the one he loved.

Keltham is deliberately doing everything he can to draw on and self-actualize the parts of himself that ought to go into doing this, according to claims he's heard from Carissa and Isidre and Abrogail and Jacint.  Everyone who ought to know better than he does.

The desire for power over Carissa; the desire to force her to feel what he wants her to feel; his need to command any sexual response he wants from her; sadism, cruelty, lust, pride; every scrap of Evil he can find in himself.  A sense of entitlement, that it's as much his right to have this from Carissa as it is for him to wear his shirt, because she gave herself... no, because she expressed a willingness to be taken and he took her.

Keltham does understand that he's not supposed to push himself for Carissa's sake.  He isn't, or doesn't think he is.  He wants to be able to command her pleasure in the cuddleroom, he wants that to be the way that reality is, and he's pushing himself to get this thing that he desires.  He's pushing himself because it annoys him that he can't just shrug off his dath ilani conditioning as was previously appropriate to a world with alternatephysics from Golarion, a place where masochism and submission doesn't exist.  He's not in that place and needs to stop acting like it, especially as it comes between himself and Carissa.

Isidre would probably tell him to take it slower.  But it's almost two months since he got to Golarion, Day 55 by his count.  A slightly above-average teenage dath ilani should not be that slow to update, however much lower standards may be in Golarion.

What Keltham wants to do is tell Carissa that there's something he's going to do with her, and ask if her schedule is clear for a couple of hours.

He doesn't.  If she made a crucial beauty-treatment appointment with a 1000gp reserve price that can only be taken in the next few hours, Keltham will compensate her.  It's not very likely, and this, above all, should not seem to Carissa like she could have avoided it.

He gets Security to track Carissa's movements.

Waits until she's passing not far from their cuddleroom.

Quietly steps out from a corner, behind her, with a controlled face, and uses a rod to cast Curse of Magic Negation on Carissa Sevar.

Security, consulting with Subirachs, has notified Carissa in broad terms that Keltham is working on the advice the Queen gave him about how to fix her. Not more specifics than that, nothing about attacking her; even with her shiny new pin of Glibness it seems silly to test her Bluff where there's no need. 

Also they're looking forward to watching this. 

Carissa feels the spell hit her and shouts for help instantly, instinctively, before she turns around and sees Keltham - 

- "SECURITY NEED CONFIRMATION THAT'S KELTHAM -"

Keltham doesn't have words to respond to this right now; he's already casting Bestow Curse targeted on Carissa's ability to overcome the previous Curse.  (This will of course be visible to her permanent Detect Magic and her Spellcraft ability to read his gestures.)

Keltham wants his Carissa fighting him at least a little seriously, here.  So Security isn't going to respond to her in words, except in the negative sense of visibly not helping her.

Bestow Curse requires touching Carissa after he casts it, which, Strengthened and Graced, will be his next step, if he can.

It's probably Keltham. If you're a serious attacking force Carissa's probably unconscious or dead before she knows what hit her. No confirmation, though.

She draws her dagger and tries to stab him while he tries to curse her.

Sure, she can stab him anywhere that isn't his head, if that lets him complete the curse instead of wasting it.

He's got healing, and resistance to damage just like her, and he isn't as afraid of pain and injury as he once was.

And showing her that he's got healing, of the flashy channeling type, will be additional probabilistic evidence that it's Keltham and make her less afraid of a real Security breach that is not how he's supposed to be making decisions right now, he'll use a spontaneous Cure instead afterwards though she can probably read that too, with her Spellcraft.