"...seems like a plan that fails in a spectacularly ugly way, if it fails. Say, if Otolmens notices and crushes this project after that but before Keltham can attempt ascending."

" - yeah.

If I were in charge of Cheliax?"

"...is that a realistic possibility?"

" - probably not? I'm exploring a lot of ideas that probably won't work. But, I mean, assassinating Abrogail probably would work, and she did tell me I was her obvious successor. - she was displeased about it."

"I'm surprised she didn't kill you on the spot."

"I think she likes me."

"You have fascinating romantic taste."

"Don't want to talk about that actually.

- thank you, though. This was helpful.

Why are you here, if you don't want Keltham to succeed?"

"Well, I think if he surrounds himself entirely with Rovagug cultists things will go even worse."

The person who eventually emerges from his tent does not look especially well-rested.

A lot of people inside Project Doom's Doom Base* would probably be glad to see him looking like that instead of distant, for what it's worth.

(*)  Not his choice of name, but this isn't Cheliax and it's not his nature to force people to use names they don't like.

Carissa is both looking forward to and dreading having their conversations about this again But This Time With Emotional Maturity. She's made as much progress on the newest headband as she reasonably can today - at some point you just start making stupid inattentive mistakes, and if you aren't being tortured by a devil it's not worth pushing through them - and is now seeing if she can permanency the spell Gust of Wind in a way that makes her fancy new Cloak of Resistance flutter cinematically behind her no matter what she's doing. The book says you need to be sixth circle but there's no way to tell how hard a requirement that is without trying. 

She glances up at Keltham and then looks back at her notes.

"Interruptible else interruptibility ETA?" he says in Baseline.

" - interruptible, yeah."

"Wishes are very different cognitive enhancers from headbands and spells.  I'd expected any difference from their stacking separately, still surprised at how different they are."

"I think in retrospect that possibly dath ilani are built along slightly different lines and the headbands just don't work on us exactly the same way as Golarion natives.  Headband Splendour was not giving me much more persuasiveness, just stronger emotions, and I think the stronger emotions were coming in at a significant discount to what would happen with a Golarion native wearing the same headband.  But now I feel like I could see - maps of how this conversation could be more or less pleasant, persuasive, for you."

"I can also clearly see in retrospect that I should've gotten one attribute Wished up first, and then paused to analyze the effects.  But I'd have picked Wisdom as the first attribute to Wish up, because it's the cognitive self-analysis one, so I'm somewhat glad I didn't actually do that."

After extensive complaining to Carmin about how it was deeply unreasonable to expect emotional sensitivity from Keltham but she could really use it, Carissa came up with a strategy. 

"Translation: I was being a dick earlier, and while I'm not quite willing to apologize for it I'm planning to do better this time, I wasn't being rude because I wanted to see you suffer which is how it might have come across."

"I'm - sorry that the modifications have been necessary, that you've been rushed into them. I know how much you are paying to - try to be able to think as clearly as possible, here. I also have some maps for how this conversation can be more pleasant and will do my best."

"There's a cultural gap we never did cross, and not all of that was the Conspiracy making sure that I never understood Cheliax correctly.  A dath ilani woman would tell me not to use Splendour 25 to make a conversation nicer for her, and, depending on how cautious versus forgiving she was by her nature, might decide that she would not date a man who'd deployed Splendour 25 against a woman even if he'd done so literally to save that multiverse.  She just would not feel personally safe around him."

"That's manipulating you and I don't want to do that, don't want to be the kind of person who does that, don't really believe it's ever okay to be the kind of person who does that even if you've already crossed other lines it's never okay to cross. I'm not reaching the condescending conclusion you don't really understand what manipulation is and are okay with it because you fundamentally are failing to model it, but I'm confused!"

"Talking to someone who has a lot of Splendour on you is giving yourself into their hands at least a little bit. But - well, two things.

One is that many of the other decisions I've made in the last two days are also giving myself into your hands a lot more than that, and I don't see a difference between Splendour and putting on your earring and swearing not to work against your plans and giving you wishes - like, they all might be bad to the extent they let you achieve your goals at my expense, and good to the extent they make things better. I am guessing that to you, Splendour feels different because it's more like modifying your priorities than constraining you, but I think that to me, at least, maybe to most people who haven't had dath ilani training - both of those end up modifying you, everything modifies you, to be in someone's life is to change which parts of you grow and which get squished, and all you can do is choose people who bring out parts of you that you like.

I suspect now that I say that that there's a Keeper art of not being altered by having done something you were selected to do randomly, being the same person as the version of you who wasn't selected to do it but would have, but it's not one of those I think I should be trying to pick up right now. I don't have enough of a self to defend. And the one true real conviction that I do have - that people who want to live should not be annihilated - I genuinely don't think you could talk me out of that with 50 Splendour. 

Two is that just like you can trade with Asmodeus if you're Abadar, you can just price in that He'll be trading adversarially, and so you can talk to someone who has Splendour and just correct for the Splendour. I like Abrogail and that's probably mostly the Splendour and I can in fact set it aside and kill her if that's strategic. I like Dispater and that's definitely the Splendour and I can set that aside if we think of some other way to reach a confidentiality agreement with Erecura where the fact of talking to her won't itself be suspicious. I believe myself broadly competent to correct for liking you and for you trying to be persuasive to me, and where I'm not perfect, I'm also not perfect at - correcting for being mad at you or for hating you or for being scared of you, and hating you and being scared of you makes it harder to think and so is worse."

He sits down and hugs his knees to himself.  Keeps his face where she can see it, though.  "Okay.  That at least doesn't sound like you're - doing the thing that everyone else in Golarion does - where you have your Golarion frame and you can't imagine anything outside the Golarion frame and everything I actually am is just an outrageous deliberate insult for being not what the Golarion frame calls for -"

"Dath ilani try so hard to reach across the gap that exists between mind and mind.  It's, not literally all of our fiction, our science fiction, but so much of it is that.  When two dath ilani with - let's say a longstanding friendship, old alliance, not romantic couple - when they have a serious disagreement worth putting effort into - they put the effort into reaching across to one another, that novels showed exemplary protagonists doing with literal aliens.  Because that's what it takes for people to actually communicate with each other and not, the thing that Cheliax had, where both sides just pretend.  Which, though the rest of Golarion doesn't know it, they have only very slightly less than Cheliax."

"I thought, afterwards, that the reason why I was able to relate to anybody in the Conspiracy, is that, in trying so hard not to clue me in on what the world was like, in having to keep me contained - you had to meet me halfway.  You had to actually stretch your hand back, across the huge effort I was making to reach out my own hand, which I did because I was dath ilani, and you did because you were making a desperate extraordinary effort to keep the alien contained and needed to understand the alien and meet it on its own terms in order to deceive it.  And which, nobody else in Golarion, has in fact made very much effort to do for me since.  To them, their frame is just, the way things are, should be, must be, and if I try to be halfway less insane that's not very much of an effort worth reciprocating because I should just not be insane at all, obviously."

"I'm glad that you are trying to do - any of that, now - even if it's to try to stop the multiverse from being annihilated, as your own utilityfunction considers to be a bad thing.  Accurately or not, before, you came across as - not doing that, anymore - and I thought - it was because there was no more Conspiracy, and you wouldn't try to meet the alien halfway it it was just under threat of the multiverse being destroyed, and not under threat of being tortured for failure."

"I mean, I get why, according to your held principles, according to your model of yourself, you care about the multiverse more, but I didn't - trust that the real you -"

"It doesn't matter.  Even if it's only under threat of the multiverse being destroyed, I'm glad to be with, the Carissa who also reaches back."

Doesn't need translating.

"I think - it wasn't just the Conspiracy - I think I got put in charge of the Conspiracy because I wanted to understand you so badly that I was better at it than anyone else."

"Out of - a maybe stupid effort to understand a past that's already past - was anyone else - trying for your job, incentivized to try to beat you at it, was there anybody else trying to be an expert on Keltham - would that have gotten them tortured by you, if you'd noticed them threatening you - did you crush down any potential competitors -"

" - it was Maillol's job at first. I - know you didn't really know him - but he was a decent man. He was good at his job at the Worldwound. I don't know if the official statistics are true but I think we had substantially lower losses than average. But Project Lawful was too weird, too confusing, and - required higher Intelligence, probably - the first night we slept together, when I told you I wanted to see a priest, I went to him with a question about whether -

- my recall may not be perfect but I think I was trying to ask whether, if I slept with you, as I wanted to, and then later you learned that you weren't unaware of subtle Chelish signals of people not wanting to sleep with you, you were just, the way things go in Golarion, not supposed to care, then you'd be furious with me for sleeping with you, even though I did want to - because we couldn't lie about the fundamental fact that most people in Golarion have sex they don't want sometimes, it was obviously entangled with too many other things, and if we weren't going to lie to you about that then it might be that we needed to tell you before anyone had sex with you -

- and he said to me that if I understood what I'd just asked I'd have to be the one to figure out an answer, because he did not understand what I'd just asked, and then after some further discussion had me ask Abarco and then told me I was in charge of trying to maximize the amount of time before you got fed up and left us. And that's how it ended up my job.

And then later, in Egorian, he got tortured very badly for a mistake that he made that I still don't completely understand and was - having a hard time exercising ambitious initiative about the project, visibly so, so I told him I wanted Project Lawful to not have torture beyond what was in Taldor, as an experiment to see if that let people think, and he didn't agree to do it but he told me I could ask the Most High to put me in charge. So I did. 

No one especially tried to undermine me about that. They'd have been enormously rewarded if they could legitimately do better, of course, but it was obviously a very hard job, and it's not like the rewards weren't also very high for being my second-in-command. I wouldn't've crushed someone who looked like they could grow up to be genuinely better than me, that could've made us lose. I really didn't want us to lose, and I also don't like - people who are under my command - being weaker than they could be - that was why the low-punishments rule, I thought maybe they'd grow like we needed them to...

In hindsight the rumor mill was probably doing a lot for me, and additionally I think it was visible that Abrogail Thrune had taken lots of personal interest in the Project and no sane person wants to come to her attention in the context of a Project they might fuck up, not if they can avoid it.

When I was being punished for your departure there was a lot of angling to take over the project but it was mostly Abarco and Avaricia gambling I wouldn't come back .... I did torture them. Not so much for trying to compete with me as for driving Asmodia to suicide. And I - hurt Maillol very badly, about that - it was horrible and stupid of me, he was always decent to me and I don't actually know if the damage I did can be undone. But not - not during the Project, not while you were there."