"Are there known hazards here that flip people's utility function? Strange distant things in space, maybe cursed items?"

"For the former, not that I know of but going deep into outer space is illegal. For the latter … I think I would have heard about it if those existed. And possibly seen one in action. Demon's Bile drives you mad in an evil way but I really wouldn't describe it like that, devils with infohazards wield them strategically, I've seen a daemonic ritual intended to delete components of someone's motivation but not flip them. It's plausibly the case that proteans have ever done that to themselves, but, well, proteans."

"Do you think telling me about proteans is relevant to either of our goals?"

"Doesn't seem like an obvious priority to go into too much detail? Relevantly, they tend to like breaking rules and heuristics, including occasionally the heuristic that they won't turn themselves into pure rule-enforcers."

"How is it that proteans continue to exist?"

"The answer in a lot of cases is 'they don't'. Sure, every protean you get the chance to meet will have some self-preservation, but this is not actually representative. However, if you do read case studies or meet a protean, you will probably still wonder why they are alive, and the answer to that is that much of the power of a protean goes into forcing the universe to ignore consequences."

"So, 'forcing the universe to ignore consequences' seems wildly underspecified."

"I'm not an expert on chaos magic and bringing one into this facility would create complications. I can tell you that when my party hit a protean with enough nonlethal – er, jargon. When my adventuring party used specialized magic weapons and spells applying very-unlikely-to-kill-a-target unconsciousness-inducing effects to subdue a hostile protean to the point of unconsciousness, ey 'procrastinated' on becoming fully unconscious in order to spit letters at us, and I was later informed that I could purchase a ring with similar effects."

"Why didn't you? That sounds quite useful!"

"That sort of effect requires a lot of power. To reduce the power requirements, the ring was specifically of pointless procrastination."

"'Pointlessness' is a pretty high-level concept. Who's evaluating it?"

"'Pointless' is a summary. Specifically, the ring only allows you to take minor actions you could have done earlier. I was told it could be useful to compensate for memory issues or literal procrastination."

"And, to be clear, your model here is that this is a natural property of reality that the ring happens to interact with, not an intelligence arbitrating things."

"Yes? Time is neither fully necessary nor fully sufficient for doing things, though under normal circumstances time is in fact the constraining resource. Shyka the Many had all the time in Old Aiquzall, though, they were looping, and they didn't win that way."