"I could maybe find us a minor archon who's willing to go into informational lockdown and in terms of intelligence around the population average for Suaal, if you'd like that? Since you feel less sense of urgency and we'd like to provide you with reasonable resources."

"I am still curious about previous open queries, obviously, but sure, that might be interesting."

"Alright, we'll arrange something."

"In the meantime, what do you know of the process by which mortals become Outer Planes outsiders?"

"So, this is an awkward subject and it varies a lot between planes. When a soul reaches a plane that takes it, it's pretty damaged, in ways that many people don't like to think about and which even the Upper Planes doesn't really publicize much, though they don't lie about it. One of the most notable things if you're alive is that outsiders, at least the quintessence-based ones, don't have truly original ideas? Which are obviously a tremendous strategic advantage, any god would want that for emself and eir most trusted servants if ey could get it. People tend to underestimate the downsides of godhood. They can do some temporal tricks to have a mortal's ideas before the mortal has them, but they still genuinely need the mortal."

"Beyond that, when everything is very fragile, you can get some things but not everything and you need to prioritize. Or, well, you can be the Maelstrom and not prioritize and possibly even randomly shove memories into people they don't belong to but it's not really a winning strategy. Hell doesn't care about pretty much anything of personal value to most people, but will damage souls greatly in order to extract memories if they're of strategic relevance. Heaven tends to prioritize friendships and keeping the person intact, but even they still have to patch over a lot of losses with material that just isn't the same as what was there originally and does cause personality changes when used for patching. I don't actually know what Axis does with souls though it's probably a matter of public record. Elysium probably tends to do the same sorts of things Heaven does but they're less predictable? The Abyss … my coworker saw a case study. I can give you all the details there but I'm not sure you want them. Dead souls are very, very vulnerable. Abaddon is a special case, their process is extremely destructive and they somehow get functional daemons via that destruction. Hell and the Abyss torture their starting materials into unrecognizeability, sure, but there's still forms of continuity they have and Abaddon lacks."

"Thaaaat sure is a constraint on the behavior of gods that seems rather well-designed to have powerful gods yet force mortals to still be extremely relevant to plots."

"I suppose you could describe it that way, but mortals except for a small handful like … okay, Shyka the Many was more than a small handful but was one entity in some meaningful ways, Rhoswen was relevant, but overall my Old Aiquzall evidence doesn't support mortals being that relevant, and Rhoswen claimed that godhood had limitations and she was familiar with Old Aiquzall godhood."

Before Keltham formulates a response, the locked door opens and a glowing orrery heads in. (If he's looking, there's some kind of magical airlock setup.)

Griffie smiles. "Keltham, this is a Harbinger Archon for your conversational experiment and also other reasonable tasks at her discretion. Her name is Irret."

Wait, entities that look like that have human genders?

Griffie's expression gets more awkward. "Irret, this is our can-reasonably-consider-himself-imprisoned-by-us guest, Keltham."

"Greetings, Keltham! I'm sorry about all this, we like to do better. What's the secret mission me having some mind injuries makes me helpful for?"

"Allegedly your mental capabilities are around the average for Suaal mortals?"

Irret's rings shift contemplatively before she responds. "Sounds about right?"

"I'd like to try explaining some things to you and see how that goes, okay?"

"Okay! …uh, why is there no shared note paper in here yet."

"Oversight, sorry." Griffie hands over some paper and offers a writing utensil as well.

Irret doesn't take the utensil, but does take the paper, and golden letters that Keltham can't actually read appear on the page.

"I do still have writing on my own down."

And Keltham will start explaining concepts to Irret.

It takes Irret a long time and a fair amount of note-referencing, which she says is an advantage many mortals won't have, literacy rates are unfortunately low. Even after hours, she's still having trouble reliably evaluating whether statements are 'correct' according to the rules at hand, and she certainly hasn't internalized the explanations for the rules.

If this is what the typical cognitive capacity for Suaal mortals is like, that's unfortunate. Irret's help is much appreciated.

Irret is happy to help. In response to Keltham's assessment, she comments "I think Arbiters are only a bit smarter than I am right now, but they're built to understand pure Law? I'm not. I go with simpler rules and I can actually trust my superiors."

"Do you mind if I talk to you about things, even if they might be dangerous to know about or make you stuck in a place like this for longer?"

"I'm fine with staying longer, I think you need a friendly ear who isn't the one keeping you here. Don't, uh, shove Abyssal into my head or try to get me to work with seal-scrambled stuff but you can talk about things?"

"Abyssal? Seal-scrambled?"