Yes.  A logic which relies entirely on Keltham ignoring that logic and being ready to actually destroy Cheliax, because Keltham is Lawful, presumably the Pharaoh is Lawful, and obviously there are going to be truthspells involved.  No?  So Keltham is, indeed, ignoring that logic, and proceeding as if he may need to destroy Cheliax at any random time in the next week, and not relying on Cheliax offering to do anything else which is not that; since, if Keltham relies on that offer, and ends up not prepared to destroy Cheliax, Cheliax will not so offer.

Keltham will go try to learn to cast cantrips within the Black Dome, then.

It's sort of like learning how to retie your shoes if all your muscle memory got erased. It's kind of annoying, but the tutor is in fact very good, and has a very detailed and precise set of exercises for getting used to the different way that magic moves.

Keltham will at one point think of Carissa tutoring him in Spellcraft, send the tutor out, have a sobbing fit for about five minutes, wipe off his face, invite the tutor back in, and resume studying.  Not being able to use Prestidigitation is very inconvenient, including when you need to clean up your face or your clothes have gotten sweaty.

He has it down, though inconsistently, after a couple of hours. The tutor says he's a quick study, and apologizes for the inconvenience of the Dome. 

Weird thing to apologize for if you're not the first Pharaoh or, possibly, Nethys.

But Prestidigitation that works half the time is good enough, so long as he's not fumbling the catch of the cantrip.

He forgot to eat lunch - oh, Keltham is probably going to want a Ring of Sustenance at some point, and that takes a week to kick so he should probably put one on soon.

...what does he need to learn in the way of 'etiquette' to meet Merenre and Ismat?  The note did say specifically 'breakfast' but Keltham wouldn't be surprised if they'd also do dinner, or afternoon snacks, or -

- actually nevermind his brain just screamed at him.  He should not actually try to meet with Merenre or Ismat or study etiquette today.

He'll next review the note about intellectual property that Osirion copied from Cheliax.  Does it look urgent?  What's up with that?

Abadar has been copying Osirion all contracts and all prediction markets related to Project Lawful. Most of the time these didn't have intellectual property concerns, but there were a couple of prediction markets on which of several spellsilver approaches would pan out fastest. Osirion has no qualms about espionage against Cheliax because Cheliax would do it to them but they don't want to have stolen anything from Keltham, and are happy to pay him whatever seems fair. They were not able to make spellsilver cheaply off just this information by itself anyway; they didn't have enough detail on the Prestidigitation technique.

Not urgent, then.  It wraps into whatever else Ione Sala can give them.

Who else has bid on his time?  Keltham is too tired to read and doesn't want to be alone with his thoughts.

New request since this morning: a different Prince has bid six thousand gold to be taught Baseline immediately. 

...by casting Share Language (Baseline) from scroll outside of the Dome?  6000gp is enough play money to still get Keltham's attention, he could buy some useful things with that and own them, but not if this is a bid on literally being taught the whole language over the course of months.

Oh, he thinks it'll take him about three days. Maybe two.

...Keltham's not seeing it.  But three days is a lot of Keltham's time even at the 6000gp level.

What's this Fe'Anar guy's bid on Keltham spending an hour sketching the technical basics of Baseline, and then Keltham can cast Share Language (from a scroll to be provided him) (outside the Dome because otherwise Keltham can't cast that high), up to 6 times over the next few days, on somebody else who can teach Fe'Anar all the particular words etcetera?

Also Keltham has not had time to learn any 'etiquette', and might need some sort of legal release form or whatever saying he's allowed to not know it.

- 1000gp for the diminished version. Keltham can get an etiquette waiver.

Not as attractive, obviously, but it requires less brainpower than a lot of things, so sure.

"The same offer goes for any other languages spoken on your planet of origin, obviously, and for dialects, if you know any, and I'll also pay for literature or poetry, if you remember any, or brought any with you, or think you can coax Abadar to give it to you out of the Vault on the grounds it's just returning something you already had. Why is it called Baseline?"

"It's the language everybody can be assumed to speak, as a baseline on which to build other ideas and concepts.  For example, all the phonemes are a minimum distance away from each other that guarantees people with slightly less acute hearing can understand it when spoken under slightly adverse conditions.  In-between phonemes that are possible to pronounce, but potentially difficult to hear correctly, are then reserved for constructing 'conlangs', constructed languages, many of which use 'Baseline' as a baseline but add new short words using the expanded phoneme set.  The only one of those I know is 'Default-Conlang' which has a lot of subtle in-between syllables, so that children will hopefully grow up to be able to distinguish 'conlangs'; you can teach your child a different conlang but it ought to be conlang-phoneme-complete."

"Huh, is the idea that it's free Law if you've got everyone teaching their child languages with phoneme-differentiation in mind? That's brilliant, now I'm annoyed my children are all grown, maybe I'll do it to the grandchildren. How did you get the language to that state, I assume it didn't start that way. Did you do a bunch of deliberate consonant shifts?"

"No Law-Chaos judgement built into the universe, no magic, no afterlives just the equivalent of turning people into statues until we can heal them later, people just do it so their kids can learn conlangs when they grow up.  I assume our language got synthesized de novo, but for unknown reasons Civilization sealed off all its history, so I don't know the story of that.  It's held in fictionalized standard fanon history that there was a huge fight between all the conlang fanatics in the world over how to design it.  But compared to Taldane the difference is very stark, it's very obvious that Baseline was designed and Taldane just happened."

"For example, grammatical Baseline - not all conlangs - always has exactly one legitimate parsing.  There's no homonyms, no cases of two meanings with the same sound.  If you stick to a subset used for emergencies and basic social interactions, there's no two sentences that sound the same even if you run all the phonemes together and eliminate spaces.  The most common words are short and long words are used more rarely.  All digits are single syllables that sound completely unlike each other and are written using very clearly distinguishable strokes.  That sort of thing."

"Taldane would reduce most of our people who care about language properties to frothing incoherent horror and madness."

" - no, they'd love it, if your world only has constructed languages. It'd be like a palace-raised child seeing their first tree. Language as a carefully optimized spellform is beautiful; language as a thing that grows anywhere, among everyone, men and orcs and demons and angels and deep sea creatures, is also beautiful. In Taldane, scientific words tend to have sibilants, because we borrow them from Nex, which like most of the fringes of the Keleshite Empire speak Kelish inflected with their own native tongues. Our shortest words are for things that have been around for a very, very long time. Pig. Bread. Cow. King. Tree. Sky. There's a whole history written there, what things people needed words for first. 'potatoes' are a long word in Taldane, and in Osirian, because they're a new food, introduced from Arcadia about a hundred twenty years ago. In Narragansett, spoken in Arcadia, it's 'nuna', because it's a staple. 

I'm not saying that you shouldn't optimize a language. You should, and it's beautiful, and I want you to teach me it immediately. But your people who care about language properties wouldn't be horrified, to see a thing growing in the wild they've only ever built in a lab."

"We've got lab-grown versions of those too.  The fictional nonsynthetic language used by a common alien species in our stories has an imaginary history extending over 60,000 years that was built by thousands of conlang designers working in parallel to extrapolate a reasonable history, and then turned into a real language when some children were raised to speak that as well as Baseline.  I don't speak very much of it but I can say 'Yo let's equalizeassetprices', we come with intent to peacefully trade everything worth trading, or 'Take us to your Keepers', bring us to your most Lawful people who can bargain with true oaths.  Those aliens were expensive to create, but so many authors use them that the license is now practically free."

"But their language doesn't have homonyms because that's just crazy, like, nobody thought aliens would put up with that."

" - yes, that seems like exactly the kind of mistake that clever people trying to invent a language that evolved without seeing any languages that evolved would make, obvious from our side but not from theirs. Sitting in the palace trying to extrapolate trees won't get you anything even remotely resembling a tree, though I'm sure it gets you something fascinating in its own right, and I'll pay you for that too. 

You might think with thousands of people someone would notice that alien language ought to be crazy and if it doesn't have two dozen features that seem crazy you did it wrong, but it's so easy, when you've grown up with the world all around you, to underestimate how much creativity would be required to invent it; I'm sure they were doing their best, and I don't expect I could've done it well either. Well, today I easily could, but not if I'd grown up in your world.

I actually wonder what share of the obvious errors are a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating history, versus a consequence of the difficulty of extrapolating linguistics specifically. How long has it been since your rulers banned your history, did they permit notes on the relative frequency of wars and migration and epidemics and transitions in staple crops and durations of rule or did they ban that as well?"

"Screened off the entire thing, nobody except a handful of people at one pole of the world have any idea now what was happening some unknown number of decades ago.  All the old cities were put into long-term storage.  Nobody can look at any old books."

"I expect more people than a handful know why we had to do that, but I don't.  We're told that a false analogy is getting a pessimized message from aliens with unshattered prophecy, that was allowed to spread in an untracked way, resulting in everything needing to be causally screened off, but that this is not what actually happened."

"Anyways, you want Baseline's type system or what?"

" - wow, that must've involved killing more people than Aroden's death managed. I disapprove, obviously, but on some level I'm impressed your rulers had the capabilities to carry out a crime on that scale. Yes, I do want Baseline's type system."

"I'd be surprised if the number of casualties was greater than like a dozen people who fell off a ladder while mothballing a city, but I had this conversation in Cheliax and don't want to repeat it here sooo..."

Baseline!  All of the rules are known to Keltham explicitly!  They have zero exceptions!  No word is both a noun and a verb!  You can infer the syntax tree in a single forwards pass!  Words agglomerate using explicit agglomeration-markers!  Anything beyond two levels of recursion gets handled by explicit matched parentheses!  If you can learn an actual human language in three days you can probably learn the basics of this in an hour.

The writing system is designed to be displayed using a small set of LED lines, or alternatively to be writable in quick handscript, or alternatively to be readable in fine calligraphy full of sweeping curlicues that look like something Fe-Anar might invent just to be pretty, all using the same underlying shapes.

Thankfully for everyone involved, he is too distracted by learning all Baseline's grammatical rules and asking questions about the design constraints that motivated them to get into an argument about how many people die when their rulers tell them to evacuate their cities and farms for secret reasons, or in the ensuing civil wars.

It doesn't even take him an hour. He does not need things explained twice.

Keltham will have time to chant Baseline's Central Cheating Poetry then!  Where the Central Cheating Poetry of an ahistorical/synthetic-style conlang is the stuff that rhymes and scans because you built the language to make it do that.  It's often how conlang designers fill in final details after all the syntactic constraints and other purposes are laid down.

Baseline's Central Cheating Poetry is mostly homilies of rationality that Civilization wanted people to be able to keep in mind even under moments of stress, plus some other proverbs they deemed central to themselves.  "Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.  I notice I am confused; therefore something I believe is fiction."  "You can move faster if you're not afraid of speed."  "Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't."  "In life's name and for life's sake."

There's important Central Cheating Poetry about accepting reality and accepting costs already sunk and losses already accrued.  Keltham will say those later.  Sorry.