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keltham in Osirion; Project Lawful does a pivot
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I have a bad headache already, can it wait. 

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Here's a distribution over possible outcomes conditional on speaking now. 


Here's a distribution over possible outcomes conditional on speaking 1000 rounds from now. 

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Do those feelings value mortals as, things with feelings themselves, and not just agents that trade?

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...imagine there were mortals, going around trading and making cities, but there was nothing it felt like to be them; Detect Thoughts would find nothing there; mind-affecting magic could not touch them, and you could give the mortals awakeness, make them like mortals in Golarion, would you do that?

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....are they willing to trade for this service?

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Pharasma made a rule that you can do this, without cost, but not in exchange for anything, nor can you let them know you did it so they are inclined to repay you. 

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.....but would they pay me to do it, if that were allowed.

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...some of them but not all of them?

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Confirming the hypothetical is meant to be specified such that I can't just awaken the ones who want to be awake and not the other ones?

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"No, I - that's a fine answer -"

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How does this action in this hypothetical translate to the answer to the question about my feelings and mortal feelings. 

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You care about mortals' feelings unless they are mine, which you should consider caring about a little more. 

 

And he rolls over and goes back to sleep.

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Oh!

 

 

 

 

....he wants to touch the other squirrel, now, with a vision explaining that, but probably it's better to let Khemet do the explaining. He's better at it.

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It wouldn't have made a difference to anything.  Keltham can read through tropes, he knows that 'uncertain leaning no' can indicate that the alien didn't understand your question, he knows that the real answer out of story-pattern-completion would then be yes.  Hardly a certain line of reasoning, but Keltham wouldn't neglect to compute it both ways.

None of that Commune is about what he has to do, next, anyways, just about - how sad it is, what kind of story Keltham is in, what other tropes he has to be wary of now, how much of himself Keltham would have needed to burn and break along a fixed course of action.

It's not as bad as it could be.  Abadar traded with Asmodeus in a way that was expected to increase the fraction of mortals in Evil afterlives.  Abadar didn't pay any more than was required to get Keltham to Osirion.

Betraying alien friends isn't any better than betraying human friends, but, at least Abadar wasn't - trying to start a friendship.

If Keltham just pays back what Abadar thought he was buying, at the time, that Abadar didn't pay too much to obtain - and then afterwards does something that might make Abadar regret having ever engaged in that trade -

Then that's a terrible black sin and Keltham is surprised that he can still be a cleric of Abadar while thinking it, but it's not a broken word, a broken compact, a lie, the fabric of the universe is still intact after that.  Even if somebody saves your life and your sanity, they haven't bought out - your following of your utilityfunction - if that's not something you agreed to, if they didn't know that's what they were buying, if they only paid the minimum on the transaction and paid for it with more souls in Asmodeus's Hell.  If they didn't treat you like a true friend, in doing that, if they didn't try to buy your friendship or expect that from you -

It's still a sin, to do something that makes them regret having traded with you, but it's not the worst thing that can happen.

Keltham goes to the palace library, then, to find out how many children go to Evil afterlives, starting at what age; what fraction of children go to the Boneyard, starting at what age, what fraction of those go to Axis through Elysium, the Maelstrom through Hell; and of mortal Golarion, the adults, what their own fates are.

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And there is is, in every book on the subject, not a secret at all, a priority for the Good gods to make widely known.

A child gets a soul early in pregnancy. Not before the first missed bleeding; definitely before they start to kick; there’s uncertainty about the time in between. The best guess is twelve weeks of development, but it’s not advised to count on an abortion being safe that long.

If they die after that, they go to the Boneyard. 

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That's insane - twelve weeks, there's no way that the embryonic brain - is reflecting on anything, routing much in the way of complexly structured multistage perceptual information even, that's barely enough time to wire up the heartbeat - why would the worldbuilding have souls get attached then -

 

- in order for the story to present him with an insane time limit, obviously.

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This about dath ilani, they are trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything - so at the end of it all you look at what happened, and try to build an explanation around that alone.

It didn't take very long after Keltham understood Cheliax as a security-theoretic Adversary for Keltham to go back and question the entire chain of logic that led up to Meritxell disguising herself as other people.

And one of Meritxell's guises was Abrogail Thrune, which Keltham did check by surprise with Glimpse of Truth/Beyond in case there wasn't an Alter Self, running, because it was not lost at all on Keltham that if reality was an eroLARP then he would at some point have actual sex with Abrogail Thrune.

He checked the first time, and the third time, but not the second time or the fourth and later times, and with Abrogail running eighth-circle Detect Thoughts on him she could have known whether he had that spell.

Abrogail Thrune, who took the initiative to set him up with having one of his girlfriends use Alter Self.

Were there plausible reasons?  Dath ilani in socially adversarial situations are trained to look past those, at the end result, at what happened and not the reasons for it.

End result:  Abrogail Thrune set him up with one of his girlfriends to use Alter Self, Keltham predictably asked that girlfriend to guise herself as Abrogail Thrune, Keltham did not use Glimpse of Truth to check every time.

Keltham did not write down exact days, about when Meritxell started being other people like Carissa or Merrin; but a conservative estimate would be that it was after Day 50 of the way Keltham himself was counting time.  Abrogail Thrune... maybe Day 60.

...even that is assuming they didn't just invisibly magically intercept semen from oral sex, or extract it directly from his testicles while he was under anesthesia, and impregnate a hundred other people; but Cheliax has not been depicted as being that competent so far, at least not to his own character viewpoint, which is the one that should matter if the story is being fair at all.  For them to go a step beyond that and bother to fake the Abrogail Thrune interaction - so that Keltham would have a hundred pregnancies in progress, but only worry about one - it's possible, but seems more like the strategic level of a real dath ilani adversary, than the Chelish Conspiracy as it seems to have developed by then, that didn't have a whole bookstore of books on Cheliax ready.

If the story is being fair, the pregnancies he has to worry about are Abrogail Thrune and maybe Jacint Subirachs.  Those are the two people Keltham asked Meritxell to pose as, who hadn't signed his contract and were not out of dath ilan...

...well, they could have used people Alter Selfing to others he'd signed the contract with, or Alter Selfing in Meritxell's place to the dath ilani women he'd shown her?  That doesn't take steal-semen-from-testicles levels of cheatiness.  But it would come with a risk, that Keltham noticed something off in the interaction, that he expected from Meritxell...

Meritxell and Abrogail Thrune could have rehearsed it, Abrogail imitating Meritxell imitating Abrogail, somebody else could've done the same thing about imitating Meritxell imitating Merrin, and Meritxell did do Merrin earlier but not much earlier...

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So getting that - woman of Irori, whose name Keltham has forgotten, but who'd be in the transcripts - paying her to assassinate Abrogail Thrune temporarily, would not knowably be enough, even if he also managed to get an assassination on Jacint Subirachs.

Basically, Keltham has less than two months in which to destroy Cheliax, or deploy some other solution to his problems, before the fetuses get ensouled, and would end up in the Boneyard if he ashed Cheliax after that.

A bit less than two months, if the story is being fair.

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It's not a threat, not a hostage-taking, that Cheliax has in progress.  They have every selfish interest in obtaining Keltham's genes, his heritage, even if that wouldn't change at all whether or not Keltham would ash their country.  If, having pursued their own interest in having half-dath-ilani children, not conditioned on Keltham's reaction, that fetus then becomes ensouled?  If it then happens that Keltham, informed of this, would no longer destroy their country for misusing his teachings, because he wouldn't want to send his child as a scarcely formed fetus to the Boneyard?  Well, too bad for Keltham and good for Cheliax, according to the crystal logic of decision theory.

That's what they're waiting for.  That's why they haven't attacked already.

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Any chance that Heaven deploys an adequate number of angels to take care of the tiny helpless things in the Boneyard and they all go to Good afterlives or Axis?

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The Osirians don't even look surprised. 

 

"The Good afterlives all send people - a lot of people - but there are a lot of babies, not all petitioners become angels and it takes thousands of years and the population was much smaller. And - Hell does too, right, and the Abyss - not Abaddon, they got kicked out for eating the babies -"

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"Percentages."

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"...of babies that get a Good afterlife? I think maybe thirty or forty percent? With another thirty or forty percent Neutral?"

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"'Scuse me a moment."

Dath ilani are very sheltered, by the standards of some of their cousins.  They don't grow up with even moderately, mortal-level horrible things happening to children.  Not even to children somewhere else on the planet, far away and unseen; just, not at all.  Dath ilani are not used to it.  They have no antibodies, no defenses, inculcated in them from a young age; no unspoken social training, by pressure of expectations, not to get upset about horrible things happening to children far away that you can't do anything about.  It is not, in their world, all part of the plan.

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