"Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom."
-- J. R. R. Tolkien
"I don't see why I should be held to a lower standard than Iomedae. It's fair to say I'm actually worse than her, and so shouldn't do what she'd do because of my own actual failures, but I don't think the bar should be any different."
" - well, that's not a reaction I've ever gotten before to the 'why you might not want to follow the math that says you should do something appalling' talk. ...if you want to, you can try to be exactly like Iomedae, but Iomedae also wouldn't go kidnap people from Axis to feed to daemons because She wouldn't learn anything from doing so, and I think Keltham probably aspires to also be the kind of person who wouldn't learn anything from doing so."
"And he might well be the kind of person who wouldn't learn anything from doing so but I don't think he can be 99.999% sure he wouldn't!"
"...and yet, I'm pretty sure Iomedae, if She could show Keltham something, would definitely not show him that."
" - yeah, okay.
Do you just not personally want to hurt me or do you actively recommend against my getting hurt for some reason."
"I think we don't have a ton of time and you aren't going to be using it very well if you try to get tortured every time you handle something badly. And I think that part of being an adult is to - screw up, and know you screwed up, and have nowhere to look for forgiveness or for punishment, and keep going because there is very nearly as much to fight for as there was yesterday."
"I'm sure Her church can just write Abrogail Thrune and get that straightened out in the next edition."
Carissa turns herself into a bird and flies around in case Nirvana's on to something and that helps you have more universal human compassion, writes a list of arguments for delay and strategies for delay which she will make if Keltham seems like he's in fact possible to persuade about that, and then soothes herself with Abrogail assassination plans until Keltham comes out of his tent.
"Hey. You are right that probably it does not advance our goals to just blow up Cheliax, and I appreciate you not responding to that by telling me I was too much of a child to be here and letting me figure it out myself. I know that it is really hard for you to work around the ways I am unpredictable to you."
"Well, don't expect any forgiveness for it. Both of us are under too little stress and have had too much time to relax already; cutting each other any slack would only make things worse."
"Yeah, okay. I have some ideas related to buying more time but I think there's some confusion I need to resolve first about why it feels like my ideas for delay are - not landing, or are threatening to hear -"
"Sorry. I worked that out, once I had time to stop and look back. It's because I want so much for all of this to be over and done, and I'm glad that the story gave me a time limit because it means there's only so long I have to hold myself together."
"Oh. Well, maybe you want to see Carmin about that or something, if it's - not the kind of thing that stops being true once you notice it."
"Carmin is not able to help me on issues like that. Nor Fe-Anar, nor she who calls herself Minor Character, nor Sarcini, nor Ione Sala when I see her. Help me think about plans, yes, about other people, yes, internal issues no. If I cannot solve them myself they are not solvable by their advice."
"I will at least decide consciously how much risk I want to take of unnecessarily destroying the multiverse in exchange for doing this faster, including as a selfish bargain within myself, rather than making that decision unthinkingly."
"I realize this is a mode of thinking you're uncomfortable with, but given that the story is forcing you to work by persuading me, anything genuinely important that you need to persuade me about, is something I can probably be persuaded of. It is not the slightest bit uncommon for the big villain of a dath ilani story to get talked out of it, there just has to be some clear reason the villain didn't think of the argument himself. And tropes aside, it is very hard to get a dath ilani to just shut you out and stop listening by making one mistake at him, when we already have an established relationship like this one. That element of the story may come with time limits for you to think of the right argument, but it won't be sudden-death."
"I think - that if you find yourself wanting to let your selfish priorities rule at substantial expense to plan success, that would be completely fine and understandable, and in that case we should give the million diamonds to the church of Iomedae and go hide somewhere until it's all over. If you are going to be selfish, be selfish enough to not do any of this to yourself; don't be just unselfish enough to decide you owe it to the universe to try and not unselfish enough to give it the kind of try that can actually succeed."
"Sadly these kinds of internal emotional arrangements often lack the kind of clear-cut structure that would make that a crushingly valid argument, and not every optimal strategy is at an extreme of the action space though they usually are. Congratulations anyways on making the sort of argument to a dath ilani that even Ione Sala would not have known how to make."
"To check, because it's something that I'm nervous about, what did you understand about why not to destroy Cheliax immediately?"
"Lots of people have probably had the thought you might want to destroy the world, but they know you're a first circle wizard with a little bit of alchemy and so they're not very scared of you. Once you do something big, they'll recalculate, and that probably reduces how much time we have. You already threatened to destroy Cheliax, and Abrogail might've believed you, but other powers in Golarion didn't, and the gods don't know you're capable of it. We don't want them to know until it's too late. They might do what Otolmens did about Nidal and just steal all the diamonds, or change physical law, or squish you, or something.
...also we're almost definitely underground in the Ostenso nonintervention zone and I might hit us by accident."
"Heh. Yes, that was the overriding reason not to do it in two hours. Lrilatha sent me a message swearing that Otolmens wanted me back in the nonintervention zone, and demanded that I go there in Otolmens's name, guaranteeing my safe-conduct in Ostenso if I did and that Cheliax would not act on Lrilatha-derived knowledge about where I was. I negotiated some on what I could get in exchange from Otolmens and Asmodeus. Everybody here shares my diplomatic immunity if they want to visit Ostenso, and Otolmens has up some kind of further noninterference field around this mini-vault."
"I still keep up Mind Blank at all times and so should you per agreement."
"Did the Iomedaen or Fe-Anar manage to explain to you why it mattered that I still hadn't killed anyone?"
"She thought that it'd affect you quite a lot, and you didn't have any way of knowing how much, and so I shouldn't think that we'd get more functional Keltham-time out of killing people, especially not out of something like killing everyone in Cheliax and sending them all to Hell."