"If that would be what I wanted Cheliax to believe, what doesn't fit?  Why isn't it straightforwardly a good deception?"

"You also have me leave the room during those negotiations, for one thing.  For another, you would be trying harder to conceal the truth, if that was the truth, and Cheliax would be expected to know that."

"Cheliax when they were running the Conspiracy on me didn't seem that smart, until near the end, and they've lost both of the two people who I taught to run games on that level."

"But yes, there's games underneath games going on here, including my not wanting to look to hypothetical smarter opponents like I'm running an exact particular first-order game, and real agreements I'm making in some cases underneath the secret negotiations that create the appearance of a possible diamond-aggregation method.  None of which you have any need to know."

"Cheliax thought you a child, correctly.  Do not underestimate Abrogail Thrune once her attention is fully roused."

"I apologize for playing a fascinating game against Abrogail Thrune and forcing you to watch me play a bunch of obviously suboptimal moves from your perspective.  I sincerely would let you step in and do it, but I am not quite sure our interests are that aligned."

"Hm.  I do appreciate that you correctly understand your sin, here."

"Can I ask your probability that I actually have a method for aggregating diamonds or synthesizing them outright?  You didn't mention that as a possibility, so the probability you assign to it is either very small, or large enough that you decided not to mention it in case I would arrogantly believe you hadn't thought of it."

The Ordinary Keltham who does not have unlimited diamonds, but wishes to appear so, would ask that question, and therefore so does Conspiracy Keltham.

He smiles slightly, at that.  "It's the second one.  I admit, I'd feel a little hurt if you had unlimited wealth, but paid me so little.  Five Wish diamonds when my employment was done would make up for my hurt feelings, or thirty-one if they were truly flowing without limit."

"You don't have anything of especial urgency on which to use the thirty-first Wish, but you're thinking that the Keltham who has unlimited diamonds is more likely to ask you what the thirty-first diamond is for."

"All right, fine, I'll be a little less obvious in the future and reluctantly concede that you may actually be making some move against Abrogail Thrune that I don't understand."

It's not a good outcome, that Ri-Dul respects him a little more; but the other possible mental states that Ri-Dul could enter, down this conversational graph, were worse in expectation.  Some losses are inevitable even if you play your best.

He goes into the next building that looks affluent enough to afford five Wish diamonds and offers Wish purchases, and trades five Wish diamonds for rather a lot of platinum.  If they do have to send somebody back to the City of Brass to buy more things, they won't need to pay with Wish diamonds, if somebody suspects those prices are about to drop.  He can return the money later, under many of the possible cases where anybody survives long enough for diamond prices to drop.

After finally finding his first building that advertises up to 5 Wishes, and getting his Wisdom to 27 instead of 26, and checking himself to see if he's being stupid in any obvious way he can now see...

...it does, finally, occur to him to pay a native for directions to more places where up to five Wish-conversions can be bought.

Some thoughts are just way more counterintuitive to some people than others.

He won't make the same mistake again, not even once over the rest of his life.  It's just, he's lived his whole life with global positioning satellites and network searches and cars that automatically go places...

Well, it's promising for his having overlooked other possibilities, maybe.

1 point of Wisdom and 2 points of Intelligence continue to be a lot.  Boosting Strength and Dexterity and further boosting Constitution does less than that - but it does something, the increase of these strange weights in Golarion's conceptualmagic ontology, that seems to think them words speakable in the same breath as Wisdom.

It would be a little easier to become a god, like this, it feels; there is more weight to his person.

He spends six Wish diamonds and buys a Belt of Physical Perfection, +4/+4/+4, as you can find somewhere in all the City of Brass if you try a few shops and pay for directions.

It's not for himself.  It's for Carissa.  She'll need it more.

He gets her a black Robe of the Archmagi too.  Though she'll need to not wear Belt and Robe and Ioun Stones where Ri-Dul can see all that, she must leave Ri-Dul behind on future trips a-culting if she wants to wear it all.  Ri-Dul would know, if he saw.  They can get some fake versions of at least the Belt and the Robe made up with Greater Magic Aura, so that Ri-Dul will have an alternate explanation to hand for any rumors he hears later.

In time, a slightly different man returns to the Doombase, so that Carissa Sevar can put her headband back on and hopefully undergo positive changes of her own.

He did not, at any point, enjoy seeing her like this.  It's not the kind of cruelty a distant past Keltham was slowly learning to enjoy.

He doesn't know if Carissa Sevar will find a path to a better world than she feared, though he does surely hope it.  But Carissa Sevar should have Wisdom enough now to make an internal decision, and enforce that decision, to stop hurting herself within whatever world she comes to believe herself within.  So he greatly hopes, and somewhat less greatly predicts.

Carissa Sevar, inexplicably even to herself cheered by wandering through the slave markets of the City of Brass or possibly by saying mean things about Keltham, Plane Shifts from a scroll back with Tarnish and then Teleports them to the base. 

The way he would have ideally liked to do this is with him running Detect Thoughts on Carissa as she ascends, and Carissa having access to his own thoughts in turn.  So that she can see what he thinks of what she is thinking, and so that he sees if she outgrows the geas at the same time as she stops believing in the value of oaths between people with differences.

He has fallback options if that would be really bad for her, in her own opinion.

"I think that'll be uninformative because I won't have thoughts while you're observing them. That's how I was able to pull off the whole project of getting Asmodia and Peranza's souls in the first place, I knew I wouldn't think until I was alone."

He's aware.  He modeled that process in sufficient detail to think of it as one possibility among others, and prompt her removal to a scry-screened area after she got an artifact headband, timed for when she wouldn't have prepped spells yet.

He knows that what she thinks while under Detect Thoughts will end up not being something that can bind her real self.  She doesn't need to think about whether or not her real self is a being that will keep oaths.

What he might hope to accomplish, by this, is, first, to see if she's directly outgrown the power of a geas to bind her without her even trying; and, second, more importantly, that Carissa have obtained a true understanding of his model of the universe and herself and himself as he truly sees those things, based on her seeing his thoughts, and his seeing her seeing his thoughts.

If she decides to betray her oaths and him, after the Detect Thoughts ends, she'll at least be doing it based on true information that would pass an Imitation Game test.  She'll be doing it based on correctly knowing the structure of oaths, and what's at stake there far beyond Pharasma's Creation.

Her thoughts of him have seemed to him, from time to time, not just unjust but inaccurate.  If she betrays the Algorithm on the basis of a wrong model, that's a farce and not just a tragedy.  That's what he'd be hoping to prevent.

He wants her to have the option of seeing reality, himself, and herself, as he would see them.  He wants that understanding to be inside her, when Detect Thoughts ends, and she actually grows into herself.  If she throws it away then and shatters her vows, then that's how the story ends, he supposes.

Carissa has not - as he understands all this - read his mind directly since she met him at the Worldwound, let alone with INT 29 at which level she might begin to understand what she saw, if he was also watching himself and thinking thoughts meant to help her understand.

- is - is he planning to give her the option of throwing away her vows to save the universe. Or is this all about the chance she'll think of some way around them while disallowed from thinking about them, or disassociate from the Carissa who made them or something, and how likely is he considering that. 

It....matters, kind of a lot. She's not entirely sure that it should, but. 

...on Carissa's own concept of this, which she knows is flawed enough she should not act on it, would not act on it, until and unless she understands it better, on Carissa's concept of this, if someone is enforcing your vows with magic, and you find a way around the magic, that's just fair play. If they trusted you -

- and she's not, actually, sure she ought to be trusted in that way, she isn't a Lawful being yet, she isn't sure she grows up into one -

- but if they trusted you then it's much much more important, to be someone they were right to trust.

Maybe that will all seem insane when she's smarter.

He does not in fact think that it's possible for INT 29 himself to keep INT 29 Carissa contained, short of continuously monitoring her with Detect Thoughts every minute and forcing them to sleep at synchronized times, and maybe not even then.  Once the Detecting Thoughts stops, she's definitely being trusted.

There's some things he can do to try to reduce the expected damage from incorrect trust, like try to detect if she cannot stop herself from visibly-to-him shutting down a thought about how she no longer believes in oaths or conditionally cooperating in the cooperation-defection dilemma.  He can't avoid needing to trust her promise; he can try to make sure that she's still the kind of person who he's correct to trust.

He's hoping that Carissa can grow up into a Lawful being where he can see that.  And if that was only a lie that she put on to fool his Detect Thoughts, and the real Carissa deep inside herself wells up and shoves that aside and discards it - then that deep Carissa is the person he's trusting, and has no choice but to trust; given the promises he's already made to not just statue her, and to augment her to match himself, which he knew then would lead to this point.

He just wants - to make sure that the Carissa inside Carissa - knows what Lawfulness is, what promises mean.  See in her mind that at least some part of Carissa understands.  Before Detect Thoughts ends, and the deeper Carissa makes her real choice.

If it will help, he can take off the earring that forces her to speak truth to him and keep her promises, after the Detect Thoughts ends, if by then she appears to him as one who understands the Lawfulness the inner Carissa would have to cast aside.

He does not want to play with Carissa the game that Cheliax played with her.  He does not want her calculating the entire time whether he'll later ask her a question she'll be forced to answer truthfully, and on that basis censor her thoughts - which is why he has not already been asking every day up until now, whether she's been plotting to betray him in the back of her mind.  He does not want Carissa, herself, wondering if her choices to coordinate were made out of fear of the geas.

He does - hope - that they will reach a state with each other where nothing is hidden, anymore, where their minds can just meet.  But he can promise beforehand, even, that he won't ask for mutual Detect Thoughts again, or any truthspells, will wait for her to offer it, if it matters to her that she doesn't need to fear it.  He believes INT 29 Carissa could defeat measures like Detect Thoughts or truthspells, even as used by him; so he's already required to trust her, and if it helps that he trust her more visibly, he can trust her a little more in reality and much more visibly.

Oh.

Carissa does not know, if she'll grow up into a Lawful being. But - but it's not that there are very many things that could conceivably be more important than being someone people are right to trust. 

She - isn't sure, if she was right to trust Keltham, if he was right to trust her. But - she'll do the mutual Detect Thoughts, if he wants, if he'll take the earring off afterwards, if he wants them to try to walk the road ahead where they don't betray each other even though they want to. 

She didn't know that he was still trying at that.

They've been reaching out hands to each other from the beginning.

He'll never not reach back.

They may not always succeed in clasping hands, because reality and mathematics aren't so kind; but he'll never stop trying to reach out towards her while she's still trying to reach out towards him.

Shall they?

Yeah. All right.