" - I find it kind of terrifying and infuriating that you haven't argued the core plans with people but I guess I will work on getting into a state to argue about them without just sniping at you! I feel like if I were even considering doing something like this I'd have argued the core plans with a couple hundred people before deciding on it!"

"I'm not saying this well.  And, mostly wrongthought, I was speaking, angrily at myself.  I argued with a lot of people about individual details and everybody wanted to argue different details to the point where there was no unified explanation I could save time by writing.  In my defense, the - actual macro strategic calculation - is not something where Golarion natives think in that format -"

"I think my emotions are actually coming back online through all of the damage at Splendour 25 instead of Splendour 20, and it's incredibly superheated odd that dath ilani are wired in a way where Splendour 20 wouldn't be enough."

Are you sure that's a dath ilani thing and not a you thing - not worth it. 

"I wonder if there's a way to get Peranza and Asmodia. Just so there's people around who you taught and who speak your language and who, uh, didn't wrong you like I did."

"Ione Sala has been filling some of that role, though she doesn't try to talk me into or out of anything.  I'm also worried that if Asmodia was around I'd be, moved by her in an uncalculating way, and then that's one more person where Pharasma can look through me to Asmodia... I'll think about it."

Through the portal and into the time-dilated demiplane, murmuring "Green glowing glitter" as he enters.  The Forbiddance edge is marked with green paint on the ground; nobody has put up an illusory curtain across it as yet.

"Everybody out, unless you want to quickly make the case that your work is time-sensitive and near a critical path," he says loudly enough for it to fill the small demiplane.

People take one look at Mister Doomlord in Intense Lady's company and quickly get out of the demiplane.

"Do you need anything from me before we take a break?"

"I don't think so.  Uh, random in case you end up trying to do mental planning, we already have unlimited diamond dust for Permanencies given somebody to cast it, I don't think I mentioned that, and I'm obviously not going to complain if you want to spend a hundred thousand gold pieces on anything at all important."

"Where're you getting your money? I know Cheliax was stalling..."

"Early on, by accepting fees from Evil entities attending lectures or wanting to use my knowledge without getting me angry about patentgratuities.  Buying headbands and spellsilver from Cheliax, which they're obliged to sell me up to a fractional limit of production, and which they can't price too high because that affects the accounting on what they have to pay me later over internal production; reselling some of those goods to Evil entities.  Taking out some relatively small ultra-high-interest loans backed by my share of Project Lawful from Evil entities like the Church of Norgorber."

"Somewhat more recently, I decided I hadn't been taking things seriously enough and was repeating the mistake I'd made in Cheliax when I hadn't asked for serious resources earlier.  Given the diamond synthesis trick and how far I'd come in establishing Lawful Evil purchasing lines and my own lair, I was very likely going to be able to do something.  I was going to try to do it before the probable deadline on Cheliax attacking Osirion.  I decided that my having more time to think things through would constitute harm reduction even from the extrapolated fully-informed perspective of people who disagreed with me."

"So I took out high-interest loans from Isfahel backed by the prospective income from Cheliax, started buying from the Kelesh Empire, and paid the Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae to put up the temporary time-accelerated demiplane."

"Golarion is not so primitive that it has no large financial entities to propagate probable future income backwards in time."

" - okay. I'm going to - try to figure out how I think morality should work, and what kind of person I am, and assuming I don't end up deciding I just want you to have an emotional breakdown, I'll let you know in a couple hours when I'm ready to talk."

"Right, well, my plan is to go have an emotional breakdown and rely on Splendour 25 to just make it through on sheer force of will, spend long enough like that to go to sleep that way, and hope when I wake up that I'm in a state that's stable at Splendour 23 so I can swap to the +4/+0/+4 headband..."

"I am actually kind of scared to augment Intelligence or Wisdom again, or go underneath Splendour 25, but that is something I can think about later."

"Any harm-reduction comments on that?"

"- I do notice that you're having way more problems with identity-consistency than most people I know of who wear headbands or get cursed into losing half their intelligence or whatever. Some of that might be dath ilani techniques which make the stat boosts affect more aspects of your thinking, but some of it might be that you're changing how your brain works all the time? If I were you I'd try changing my mind around less. 

I'm - not you, though. Osirion knocked me down to INT 9 and I was still me, just me who couldn't quite remember why I was doing what I was doing."

"The - angry scathing remark that comes to mind, such as does sometimes come to mind about Golarion, and I am not sure that it's false - is that people here do not use their mental abilitystats for much.  Do not have skills that deeply matter and scale to use more of those abilitystats."

"I checked around to see if Golarion knew anything collectively about side effects of rapidly changing around abilitystats to handle particular problems, and Golarion's collective wisdom seemed to be that people were usually just the same if you added +6 Intelligence points, only smarter.  Which was such an absolutely alien concept that, again, the scathing remark that came to mind, was that Golarion did not have any experience relevant for grownups, only for primitive untrained children who only use their mental abilitystats for stereotypically abilitystat-laden work problems.  I am again not sure this scathing remark is wrong."

"An alternative hypothesis is that dath ilani are configured to be more internally consistent in general and tolerate less variance.  People in Golarion seem to vary much more in personality from day to day, even when not swapping augmentations, than I am used to.  Much more visibly so, now that I'm out of Project Lawful and not around people putting up consistent Chelish fronts.  It would've been a dead giveaway to anyone not from Cheliax or, unfortunately, dath ilan."

"I think dath ilan breaks something in people. But I would think that, and probably we shouldn't argue it until we've both had time to think."

"It is common wisdom everywhere that is not Cheliax that Cheliax breaks everything about people, and I did not think to recruit in advance anybody who could help you with that.  Maybe don't set your own new personality in 'concrete' before you've talked with... our Iomedaen wizard, possibly?"

"Fe-Anar of Osirion, the one who was reading over your Hell contract, is closer to being able to keep up with you in a conversation Intelligence-wise.  But I have absolutely no idea if the two of you would get along."

"It might be awkward how my current theory of what to do from here involves letting Cheliax invade Osirion. I'll talk to the Iomedaen, She seems - like a kind of Good that I might not hate with a passion." Especially if the reason Iomedae's not with Cayden Cailean is not being okay with the risk of ending the world.

There's a new adventurer's-tent set up, in the demiplane.  This one is presumably for Carissa Sevar.  Somebody left a plate of chocolates outside the tent's entrance by way of welcome.

She's not really in the mood for chocolates.

She's in the mood to collapse dramatically on the floor and wonder if she should, in fact, have, immediately betrayed Keltham to Otolmens who would crush him. 

This is not an important question to answer, in one sense. She can't do it now. The error, if it was an error, was made due to intense time pressure and incomplete information about her past self's plans and panic and the risk of being mindread and love for Keltham and guilt over having harmed him so badly and existential horror at the thought of him being casually annihilated for a thought he might not even in fact be thinking, and she doesn't exactly think she'll make similar errors in the future. She's sure never ever ever going to love anyone again. 

The obvious analysis here is that yes, she should have immediately betrayed Keltham, or at least have refused to step out of the Dome until she had his promise she could oppose him if she saw fit, which he wouldn't have given, at which point she'd have betrayed him to Otolmens.

(Why does it even come to her to betray him to Otolmens? How is Otolmens not carefully watching the situation already! Wasn't Broom supposed to be handling this?)

(Broom, who Osirion freed because they don't enslave halflings. It would serve everyone right, in some sense, certainly serve Otolmens and Cheliax right, if Broom, freed, decided to go travel the world or buy a house or something. Or maybe he's here, and just hoping he won't have to stab Keltham. Either way, if Keltham isn't worrying about Broom Carissa won't bring the possibility to his attention).

The less-obvious analysis here is that this way, she might be able to talk Keltham into a version of his plan that is actually better than the status quo, and it all depends on the probabilities, which she's poorly equipped to even begin to estimate. But Snack Service thought something good could happen here, something for which Carissa mattered and Carissa's status in Hell mattered, and -

- she thinks everything Cayden/Nethys has done has made this harder for Keltham to pull off? Otolmens picking Broom in the first place was a response to Pilar and Ione being picked; She's paying the situation closer attention. Nefreti said that the deception would've gone on longer without Cayden/Nethys's interventions, and if that's so, then when Keltham departed he'd have been richer, and Cheliax been less impaired in pursuing him, and he wouldn't have had the prospect of his children rushing him to solve this prematurely, they'd already have existed.....

If Cayden and Nethys were aiming at the destruction of the world they could have probably done it, from this starting point. So they're aiming at something else. And - she's not sure this logic is valid, but it does feel like probably if she were the kind of person who Nethys knew would instantly report Keltham, then some other person meets Keltham where he lands instead, some person who doesn't feel so strongly about the world not ending -

This is, perhaps, a question to return to when she's a god. If she's a god. She sure is making a lot of plans premised on her godhood, lately, for someone who does not in fact possess godhood and is actually just a fifth circle wizard with more money than fifth circle wizards usually have.

Perhaps she is staring at this because for all that it hurts, it doesn't hurt as much as staring inward and figuring out who she is and what she isn't and what she's done.

About half an hour later she concedes that she should eat the chocolates and sends for the Iomedaen wizard. 

"Do people go to Hell for practicing Acid Splash on their classmates?"

"That's a good question. Trials are secret, of course, but.... we don't think so, not directly."

" -'s what I thought. It's not about damning you. It's about - you believing that you are, fundamentally, the kind of person who'd do that, that everyone is the kind of person who'd do that, about drawing that outline around the muddle in a way that is the shape of a damned person - if Pharasma couldn't see anything you did before age 20, at all, they wouldn't do it any differently.

Some people find it upsetting, though. I didn't."

"You do not strike me as a person with particularly high empathy or instinctive aversion to hurting people. I don't know if that's innate - people do vary in that innately - or learned."

"Probably learned. I'm a very quick study.

Three days ago I spent six hours torturing a man nearly to death for fun and to impress a girl I liked."

"Is there something we can do now to get him into a safe situation?"