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?"

"Abyssal is what demons speak! If you learn too much of it you go insane. There's stuff that puts word-meanings in people's heads and it's bad. Don't do that. Seal-scrambled is … it happens to records? People's memories when they go through the seal and come back, Old Aiquzall books, that sort of thing. It's really unpleasant but it's super obvious and it's not like you telling me things would be seal-scramble-ish, that's not how it works."

"Would you say that societies know how to handle these things?"

"Y…es? Generally?"

"Do people know it's dangerous to talk to really smart devils?"

"Don't interact with devils at all, if you can't fight them! They're dangerous and lots of people know that."

"Do you think societies are especially bad with dealing with things like Abyssal, and really smart devils?"

"Mortals have a hard time with lots of things, but I don't think this is a thing that's extra hard for them?"