"Don't know if you're particularly in the mood for compliments, but that kind of internal consequentialism is a much more ordinary-dath-ilani style of thinking than you were displaying twenty-four hours earlier."

"Are you able to report details on any of those internal collapses?"

Problem is, all of the real collapses didn't happen in alter-Cheliax.  Trying to report on only the fake ones doesn't seem especially wise.

"I'd honestly rather not, if the details don't matter.  I was lying to myself about important things, does it matter what they were?  And now that I know how to perceive it, it looks like most of my thought processes are all about - motivated cognition, wanting things -"

"Wanting to believe things.  Most of our cognition is obviously going to be about wanting things; that's not a problem."

"Even if the things we want are muddled and - contradictory and flickering on and off and - stepping on each other -"

"Ordinary ilani put up with that inside themselves if it's nothing huge and important.  Keepers try to straighten it all out, or at least that's the impression I get."

"But even when you've straightened out some target area, your cognition is going to be full of wanting things.  From some important perspectives on viewing people, we more or less are complicated structures of wanting things.  The straightening-out part is not stepping on yourself in a way where you could rearrange your decisions to get more of everything you want."

"It's when you're flinching away from or towards reaching particular conclusions about reality, that your internal system is acting in an inherently tangled way."

"Ordinary dath ilani will resolve that once they get to the point of noticing it, definitely at the point they're experiencing internal stresses about it or trying not to look there.  Ordinary dath ilani increase over a lifetime the skill of trying to detect that slight flinch towards or away from something.  More respectable and serious dath ilani than I am go hunting traces proactively, try to refine their perceptions early and strongly, in order to at least not make overly visible errors."

"Or as the proverb goes among the Very Serious People of dath ilan:  It's fine to be imperfect, just not so imperfect that other people notice."

"Keepers, presumably, have a store of techniques for doing that even better, that the rest of us shouldn't know about.  And probably have machines for scanning their brains to detect really tiny mistakes and flinches, way before they'd be skilled enough to see them naturally... and they go into those machines at age thirteen, so they've still got youthful mind-shapability, while retraining their brains to do more Lawful stuff than humans are really designed to do at all.  I'm guessing, there, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be true."

She'll think later about Keltham's statement that even unmuddled people are mostly structures of wanting lots of things.

"I wasn't sure I was even going to ask this, but, fuck it.  Can you - do to me whatever those machines do to ilani?  Or just - retrain me, hurt me, until I'm at least as Lawful as a dath ilani child -"

"You know, most dath ilani don't really like making mistakes.  If a machine lights up with a purple light to show you did something wrong, it doesn't need to apply a tiny shock of lightning to make the point.  Which is fortunate, what with dath ilani not being masochists at all, but also unfortunately means that I have no idea how to do any of that training better in a way that gets any benefit from hurting you."

"Anyways, if I'm again reading you clearly now that you're more ilani, you stormed in here like somebody who has strong opinions about how we should proceed from here.  Question mark?"

So Chelaxians become more readable to Keltham as they start thinking more like ilani.  That sounds like so much fun.

"I was, in fact, the obvious person to conduct this experiment on.  I did in fact survive it.  I have an opinion on what we should do with the rest of the Project, I predict you're not going to like it, and I'll say right now that if you want your other researchers to be happy with any different plans from mine, you need to figure out how to make the Project move faster or more surely to where it's going.  Not complain about people choosing to take risks."

"People like Carissa Sevar and Asmodia are, in fact, too valuable to risk by exposing them to what you exposed me to.  But we need data on how this plays out in people, and we have no way to get it except by 'mad-experimentation'," she uses the Baseline word for it.  "Being slow about that doesn't earn us anything except negative time."

"So we call for volunteers from among the less valuable members of the Project, the tier-2s with no immediate promotion prospects otherwise, and see if they - if they tier-up, as you put it."

"If they break instead, they quit the Project or go to Hell depending on how broken they end up.  And then we'll know something about which sort of people break, and which don't."

"That cleric of Asmodeus you didn't hire, I want to experiment on him particularly.  In case people chosen by Asmodeus have more inherent Law in a way that lets them handle this."

"You're correct that I don't like it."

"Good for my prediction record."

"Do you have a plan with higher ‘expectedutility’, or an objection that doesn't boil down to you disliking Golarion people taking risks to pursue their ambitions?"

"Not as of the first five seconds, but I plan to give myself at least a day to think about it.  And I do not particularly accept your attempted frame that I need to adopt your policy as a default baseline to optimize against, nor that you get to make this decision if I can't show you an alternative you deem better.  I am, in fact, still the authority on this Project."

"I don't necessarily accept the frame that you can or should decide for Asmodeans what they aren't allowed to do, in the course of perfecting ourselves as our Lord desires of us."

"Then you don't necessarily get further pseudo-Keeper training from me.  I mean, maybe you can talk me into that, but I don't necessarily accept the frame I'm obligated to keep supplying training to you without thinking about whether or not that advances my own utilityfunction.  Such as if you start using that training to experiment on other people, without my having signed off on that."

"I wasn't threatening I'd start teaching them Keeper things without your signing off on it, Keltham."

"I definitely wasn't taking it as a threat, but it did sound like you were stating that your baseline for negotiation, as individualwise maximized your utilityfunction, would be teaching others without my consent.  I was observing that my own uncoordinated-maximum baseline might then be to stop teaching you."

"No, Keltham.  I'm saying that I don't - that I'm not okay with the entire way you approach things like this.  You're coming between people and their god, ignoring the ways they want to serve their god and the ways their god desires them to serve, because you didn't grow up with relationships like that and don't understand they're important."

She might, under other circumstances, feel guilty about falsely invoking people's eagerness to serve Asmodeus to justify to Keltham their participation in a project for which in fact they'll be forcibly volunteered; but submitting to being used like that is absolutely the heart of Asmodeanism if anything is.  It maybe isn't the way everyone on the Project is, but it's how they should be.

"Consider that registered."

"I will think about this and make my own decision about how I want to proceed from here.  I do expect you, as an employee of this Project, not to take action in this domain, until I've had a chance to decide what I think my own options are."

"If I'm being asked to put on hold a matter I consider at least partially a matter of faith, while you think about things, I request a timeframe for how long that continues."

"Barring unexpected emergencies, I expect to get back to you about this within 2 days, and you may come bother me about it if I haven't gotten back to you within 48 hours from now."

"Acknowledged.  Any else?"

"Literally any non-private details on what the poo happened to you might be helpful here, Pilar.  I know you think it's private and I know the results probably feel obvious to you but I do not understand how Golarion people work."

"I - the problem is that it is private - and it doesn't feel, like the private details help, the general problem is that everybody in Golarion grew up being made out of lies and the details are going to be different for everybody -"

"Pilar, there's widely different possible ways I can imagine for how people could hypothetically grow up around lies, and I do not have any idea which of those things might possibly be statistically common, or what happens to people afterwards when they see the problem."

Pilar is sharply aware that AlterCheliax Pilar is not being this evasive.  She's going to have to answer, and it seems important not to mislead Keltham here.  Both because he's very likely to catch a lie, and also because he's trying to keep the actual people on the Project safe using this information.  Somehow, she has to stick as closely to the truth as possible...

"I - there was something I wanted more than I wanted to serve Asmodeus, which was - to see my dead mother and my dead sister again - which I was in denial about, because, because the reason I'm supposed to want to be on this Project is to serve Asmodeus and become a better Asmodean - only, they're not going to want to see me, I realize that now, they went to Axis, not Hell, on purpose, and - under circumstances which - are private, but imply - that they probably wouldn't want to see me, unless I gave up Asmodeus and went to Axis with them.  Details private.  But my brain - kept on thinking of ways, over and over, theories for how I could get them back, and once you explained to me about - how motivated cognition worked - I could see that none of those theories could possibly be true -"

"I'm not explaining this well.  The problem at the center wasn't the bad plans I had, it was that - I was lying to myself about what my relationship with my family was really like."