"I can start with that." And she pulls out her notebook and starts with the first day's lecture notes. It is, actually, emotionally difficult, rereading them, but this is important. 

"Dath ilan approached it from a weird angle, but the first lesson is just - there is, out there, an actual fact of the matter of how the world works, separate from what you believe, separate from what you're supposed to believe, separate from what everyone else believes. Some things are true. Some things are true everywhere, across all possible worlds, they aren't the kind of thing that could be false, like that if A implies B and A, then B - does your world have formal mathematical logic as a field, Golarion did but none of us had studied it..."

Altarrin listens. 

(He can tell that Carissa is finding it stressful and difficult. The why isn't obvious just from her face and body language, but - in context it's not exactly confusing.)

...Okay, sure, both of those things are true and also in no way new information for him! 

He nods, though. "It exists as a field of study, yes, and not even among the ones I personally invented! I think it was taught in Urtho's Tower when I studied there." He frowns, thoughtful. "I - think most people do know the first part, on some level, in some part of themselves? People understood it more deeply immediately after the Cataclysm, when - when almost every choice was a struggle for survival - I think that most people are more aligned with themselves, hiding less from themselves, in those circumstances. When there is no space for it. But - most people will not learn on their own how to be careful and precise and consistent in their thinking, to keep those distinctions in mind all of the time. It sounds like dath ilan tries to train that kind of internal consistency?" 

"Keltham wasn't sure which parts are just obvious and which reflect errors that people importantly make so he said all the obvious things too.

I noticed that too, that people are more coherent at the Worldwound, where there's only so much you can lie to yourself if you don't want to be eaten by demons. Compared to at the palace, where it was - mostly nonsense, people playing stupid games that didn't matter....

Keltham would say that only Keepers fully master internal consistency but that even children who aren't trying at it are better than Golarionites."

"...I suppose it could be less that situations of real adversity train the skills, and just that everyone who did not have enough of them to begin with dies, and - all the formal logic taught at Urtho's Tower did not actually make Urtho's students and colleagues deceive themselves less or play fewer pointless games than - than illiterate subsistence farmers living one day at a time in the ruins of civilization. I have been trying to fully master internal consistency for seven hundred years and I think I am still not all the way there; the Owl's Wisdom spell makes that especially obvious. If dath ilan knows how to guide people to that level of skill - even if only a few especially brilliant people - in an ordinary human lifetime– at least, I am assuming you would have mentioned if dath ilan had immortality... Anyway, what else does dath ilan say that people get wrong without this training?" 

"Do you want to skip ahead, I don't know if the pace of the lectures is an important ingredient. But there was a proof that, uh, if your wants are incoherent in various ways that they probably are, then in principle you'd be willing to make trades that undo previous trades you were willing to do, and end up with less of everything. You can want whatever you want, there's no Law there, but there's Law about how you have to trade things off."

"I have that concept. It is rather important to have if you are going to - make very large-scale, very ruthless plans and you need to be right about when certain tradeoffs are worthwhile. It took me a long time, though. I...am not sure anyone even had that concept Urtho's Tower, let alone the mental habits to enact it, which I am honestly still working on. The Cataclysm might not have happened if more of the people involved had understood it..." He shakes himself, slightly, as though trying to shed the memory. "Anyway, we might be able to skip ahead - can you just go through a list of concepts that came up in the lectures, and then I can note which of them I recognize at all - and which of them I have the skills to do right in practice, which is a separate concern." 

" - yeah." And she closes her eyes and goes through the lectures in her head, reading concepts out. Some math that'd underlie the later lectures. Cooperation games. Utility functions. How to split gains from trade in an Abadaran way. How dath ilan runs prediction-markets. Chemistry, and the way that you could learn chemistry, if you landed somewhere where it looked different. How to improve an industrial process when you don't understand it very well. 

Altarrin nods along. 

It's - surprisingly familiar? The exact format and framing is alien, sometimes bizarrely so, but it's an almost-automatic mental motion, to try to look past and through that – to guess at the process, the society, that created these concepts and shaped a standard curriculum and taught it to an ordinary (by their standards) young person, not because they knew what would happen next, but because they considered it the very basics of how to think, how to live in the world as a thinking being among other thinking beings...

Prediction markets are an excellent idea! It's the kind of concept that feels blatantly obvious in hindsight, like he must have been blind not to have seen it himself, but it's not the first time Altarrin has had that experience, and it's not actually surprising to him that he didn't independently reinvent the idea in the aftermath of the Cataclysm.

(An entire world of people mostly like him might have, but that's not the world he lives in, is it.) 

Utility functions: none of the building blocks are new to him, and he thinks he's nudged up against the concept before in his own thinking, but the sudden relevance of it hits unexpectedly hard. Because it's exactly the sort of thing you have to get absolutely right, if you've just realized that actually the gods of your world are an insurmountable obstacle, and you need to meet them on their level, which means somehow, some way, putting everything that actually matters about mortal lives into terms a god can understand.... 

Altarrin doesn't feel like his current self is smart enough to figure that out. 

The cooperations games, as she explains them, are– it's not that the idea of it doesn't make sense to him, because it does, and it's almost a familiar way of thinking. Almost. The difference is...hard to pin down, and oddly painful to think about. He makes a mental note of that. Maybe he can work it out better with an Owl's Wisdom, later. 

Chemistry is interesting. Processes to understand chemistry in a new and different world are especially interesting. Industrial processes: highly approved. None of that hurts to listen to. 

"...I am very curious about the leaders and scholars of dath ilan, who came up with these ideas and decided they were the right ones to teach to children," he says, finally, once Carissa seems to be done speaking. "I am - surprised by how much of it immediately makes sense to me, but - it would not, for most children raised in the Empire. Whatever their world is doing - regardless of their reasons for it, and whether I would approve of them - I apparently cannot match it." 

Which isn't an observation he's used to making. Urtho was in many ways his intellectual superior, but no one else has been like Urtho. 

(At least, no one who lived long enough to grow into it...) 

And he wasn't exactly trying to do whatever dath ilan is doing. The plans and goals that shaped the education system he built were shorter-term, more narrowly focused, and without Owl's Wisdom it's hard to even think about whether that was a mistake all along. 

"They're run by the Keepers. They also have a government, but - they rehearse to overthrow the government if it's unjust, they changed the government when they sealed their history. It's the Keepers who have real power, it has to be. They're also very smart on average, and the Keepers are even smarter. I don't know what, exactly, they built dath ilan for, but - I think Keltham would agree that they had some purpose in mind, that they were hiding something, maybe hiding the  gods..."

They rehearse to overthrow the government??? 

That's a good idea a useful policy if you're aiming for - some sort of goal - he's not actually sure what goal it serves, probably because he has none of the surrounding context. 

"I...suspect their 'Keepers' are much smarter than I am, then," he admits. (And their ordinary, maybe-moderately-clever citizens, exposed to that leadership, could keep up with him without difficulty. He doesn't say that out loud.)

"But my understanding is that they do not have your world's kind of intelligence-enhancing magic, so there must be another explanation - the obvious route would be incentivizing clever parents to have more children, increasing that trait in the population over time," a long time, but dath ilan is clearly a society built by people who thought on long timescales, "- but that would require a reliable way to measure the trait they are selecting for."

Which seems much more difficult than checking whether a child has mage-potential or not. Altarrin wonders– actually, he's guessing that Carissa's world does have a way to measure the mental traits they call 'Cunning' and 'Wisdom', using their magic. Which dath ilan doesn't have - or doesn't claim to have...

"- Was Keltham aware of a test to measure - general cleverness?" he asks. 

"I think so? They knew about how much smarter they were than average, they did lots and lots of testing and betting, and they definitely did encourage clever people having children, as well as people who had other traits they wanted. It seemed very sensible. I really liked hearing about it, at first."

"It does seem sensible! I would have done the same myself, probably, if I had a way to measure cleverness as reliable as testing for mage-gift potential–"

He stops. Frowns, slightly. 

"- though I am still not sure to what extent our programs for increasing the rate of mage-potential in the population had unintended side effects, and intelligence seems like - a broader trait, that correlates more with other traits. You said 'at first' - do you think that dath ilan had their own set of unintended effects from this effort...?" 

"I'm not sure. They also might just have been - different from the start - and it might be Golarion that got optimized in a bad direction, Keltham thought so - 

- but he wants to destroy the world, any dath ilani would. And - and they didn't have people who like suffering as long as you're a little gentle about it, he was unfamiliar with the whole idea. And - I -" She shouldn't say she loved him, that's never a wise thing to say to a man about another one. "I am not sure how many of the things that seemed wonderful to me about him were real and how much I was lying to myself because I was doing a lot of lying to myself."

Several parts of that statement were confusing. Maybe if he had an Owl's Wisdom it doesn't actually seem like a good idea to get in the habit of leaning on that mental crutch at all, let alone putting off thinking about entire topics until later because of it. 

He's confused about the pause in the middle. There's clearly something significant to Carissa, and he can't quite pin it down. 

He isn't sure what she means by "people who like suffering as long as you're a little gentle about it" - who exactly is doing the being-gentle? And it's not as though he likes suffering - or likes anyone else suffering - it's just that sometimes it's a cost worth paying (and one that is, of course, always, much simpler a decision if he can pay it himself...) 

More relevantly, he is still very confused about dath ilan. 

"...It seems important to understand why - according to Keltham, at least - any dath ilani would destroy your world, and presumably mine as well. Almost everything else from what Keltham taught you made sense to me, but that part very much does not." 

(He doesn't ask why she was lying to herself. He does want to know, but he doesn't actually think they have enough trust, yet, that he can expect an honest answer. And he guesses it won't be a new answer, anyway. Altarrin is uncomfortably familiar with all the reasons why people in his own empire are often better off if they can lie to themselves in the right ways.) 

"....because of Hell. Lawful Evil people, when they die, go to Hell, where they get made into devils, and the process takes a long time and is very painful, and some people are worthless and are used only as building materials and never get to be devils at all."

"- Which I - imagine you think is still better than the situation here, where the dead most likely do not go on to have experiences at all, unless one of our gods wishes to use them as a tool." She had reacted so strongly to that. "Do you think that dath ilanis would prefer our world to yours, on that dimension?" 

He has other questions, and 'some people are worthless and are used only as building materials' seems....worrying, at the very least...but that can wait. 

"...I think not, I think they'd rather stop existing. They....honestly they don't seem to like existing very much? They often freeze themselves in the hopes that a future civilization will be worth living in, because theirs isn't. 

Hell is - well, I was planning to do something about it. But it's much much better than just being...extinguished..."

"...My sense was that Asmodeus is not managing it in a way I would approve of."

Altarrin isn't sure, at this point, how much of that came from anything Carissa said, as opposed to his Thoughtsensers - usually he could track that but things have been happening very fast - and he thinks she was expecting the Thoughtsensers anyway, and wouldn't consider it a betrayal. 

"But, yes. The difference is that the people in your world's Hell are still there, for you - or the you who was left behind in your world - to take back." 

Pause. 

"...Damaged, maybe, and - it is not that uncommon that people in our world will prefer death over ongoing pain," even if this makes no sense to him. "I - could understand if someone wanted to destroy Hell, specifically - if they thought it was better for Lawful Evil souls to cease to exist rather than exist under Asmodeus' control - but Hell is only one of many afterlives, which come after living a full life as a mortal, and - if I could choose to be born into your world or never to have existed, I would definitely choose the first one."

He takes a deep breath. "- And dath ilan as described does....not have any obvious awful problems that can compare to Hell, or even to what the living go through in Velgarth. If their citizens still often prefer not to exist," he's mentally skimming over the 'freezing themselves' part, it's fascinating but not the main point right now, "then - I think either they are very different from the people I have known, or their world is horrifying in ways that Keltham was not willing to speak of even to you." 

"We mindread him, I don't think he was hiding something he knew about. And they didn't think freezing themselves was permanently dying, just - being petrified to be woken when things were better. But - yes, it did seem like they were different from us, and... yes, you understand, it's partially that Hell is better than not existing, which people disagree about, and partially that getting to be born, even if you might go to Hell, is obviously better than not existing, especially since you don't have to be Lawful Evil - except in Cheliax, which is a problem, but I was going to fix that along the way to fixing Hell."

Altarrin's expression when she says 'we mindread him' is very faintly approving.

"That does seem like a difference. I am - definitely confused, but I am not sure it is a priority, or even possible to resolve while we have no access to either Keltham or dath ilan." And he is still very unsure that he would initiate contact with dath ilan even if he discovered how to Gate there tonight. 

"- Do you know anything more about why they thought freezing themselves was - a route by which they could be revived later?" (He is assuming that 'petrified' is a spell that exists in Carissa's world and not here.) 

"...the Keepers and prediction markets said it would work. I think they thought - since they don't have souls - it's all in the mind, so if you store the mind, you have everything there is about the person, and can someday reconstruct them from that."

"...That is fascinating. I am genuinely curious if that would work here - we do have souls, but they are not the full content of a mind, and - it is possible to magically breed a new sentient species–"  

Altarrin manages to stop himself. 

"- Anyway. We do still need to make a decision on whether to return to the Empire and operate from there, or - something else."

And he doesn't have a clear sense of which option is better; his mind is still reeling from the mind-enhancing spells experience and the realizations involved, and it's still vaguely painful to think about the Eastern Empire at all though he could still manage it with an Owl's Wisdom or two

"- I realize you still have very little context on our world, but you also have fewer pre-assumptions, so - what do you think we should do next?" 

"I had rather assumed the empire was the best place from which to build industrial capacity, since it's rich and you're powerful there, and - forgive me - that we could kill the Emperor if he was going to get in the way, what with how I can make magic items that are unlike anything your world can create or recognize."