Keltham's senses are no longer returning data to him, but he's still conscious.

He can barely feel the weight of his body, followed by some vague pressure(?) on his left hand, and then…

A voice speaking directly in his head, bypassing the ears. "Greetings to you. Aiquzall had a godwar. It's now sealed, and the less damaged pieces form the 'world' of 'Suaal'. The gods no longer live in the same places mortals generally live. You're in the Upper Planes, where the Celestials – you may have heard of them, they're a faction that includes Dai-Kitsu and Torag – live these days."

He doesn't respond.

The voice is still talking.

"You are on a channel of the spell Message with myself, Griffith of Erlonn. I'm relaying for my adventuring party the Resolute Reclaimers, for some reason we were advised to not have them speak to you in their words. You are receiving these communications telepathically because your senses haven't returned yet, and you should be able to reply by intentionally sending thoughts towards the message sender."

"We do not know who you are. Causing you to be here was relayed to us by a trusted entity as a long-shot chance we could take, but the overwhelming majority of that entity's communications to us were destroyed."

"We understand that you are likely extremely disoriented. Our situation is urgent on the order of months or years, not hours or minutes. Feel free to take your time to awaken."

His senses slowly return.

There's a soft surface below him, which feels vaguely unreal, and comfortably warm atmosphere around him, which feels unreal, and some cloth draped over his body, which feels unreal, and the fake-sounding noises of people standing and pacing around in a room, and some fake light shining in through his eyelids which also feel–

WHY ARE THERE CONNOTATIONS BEING FORCIBLY SHOVED INTO HIS HEAD, THAT IS NOT HOW THINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK

"I know it's a lot to take in. Your loved ones are almost certainly–"

His eyes open.

There is what in fact looks like a Golarion-ish high-level adventuring party. A human-looking man with multi-lens goggles and the kind of comfortable and practical lightweight clothing, lacking closures, that doesn't really match Keltham's model of Golarion's manufacturing capacity, but also looks less 'manufactured' than 'magically synthesized'. A woman with metallic-looking wings and hair and nails, wearing a formal– an illusion of a formal dress over some very shiny metal armor. A somewhat human-shaped plant wearing armor of many small pieces of leather cut and embossed to look like leaves and sewn together. They're all wearing headbands.

The pervasive feeling of unrealness is still present.

When Keltham asked the simulators to be set up to not think the stakes were larger than they really were, intrusively shoving a feeling of unreality into his head was not what he wanted. Maybe he should be more specific next time, if there is a next time. It does seem like his current simulator is attempting cooperation with him somewhat, so he'll go with the premise for the moment.

Whoever's speaking to him is probably one of the people in the room, but it's annoyingly unclear which one. The vocal qualities maybe match the plant-person, it sounds like a voice coming from a pretty small mouth, but he hasn't actually systematically studied how telepathic voices and spoken voices correspond.

His body has a cloth over it but isn't clothed. He doesn't have any spells prepared. His connection to Abadar is gone. The small scar on his knee that he'd never paid attention to while in Golarion is also gone, his body hair has a different pattern than it did last time he looked at it, and his nails are a neat uniform length and cut differently than his recent attendant tended to cut them. It's like the simulators put together a new body for him, referencing his previous story, which was clearly not in a medium where anyone looked at his body very much. His body also feels unreal. He wonders if an externally imposed connotation of unrealness is something the brain learns to ignore over time.

He has a ring on his finger he didn't put there, which given that this story seems Golarion-ish is probably a bad sign.

Right. This story seems Golarion-ish, except also not. The names Aiquzall and Suaal are utterly unfamiliar. He's expected to be used to gods living in the same places as mortals, apparently? The Upper Planes are supposed to be unfamiliar, even though he has heard of them. He in fact recognizes the term 'Celestial' and the names 'Torag' and 'Dai-Kitsu', though he doesn't remember the latter being Celestial-aligned? Lives in Nirvana but is 'Neutral', not 'Good'.

And 'some entity we can't talk to told us to bring you here but we don't have most of their message' is a really, really cheap excuse for an isekai plot. Possibly less cheap than 'you just appeared out of thin air and we have no idea why either', to be fair. Would have been neat to be the version of him that woke up to a nice message like 'we have infinite compute and decided to rescue sim everyone', instead of in a world with problems he's apparently a long shot for helping solve. "My party isn't supposed to speak directly to you, for reasons with no justification in the intact parts of this document" also looks like an excuse for not computing too many people.

Well, he's never liked lying, and if he's definitely somewhere fake he's not going to do things he doesn't like. Which means attempting to take the ring off, no unknown-effect magic items for him today please.

Both aloud and attempting to communicate over whatever telepathy spell they were using, he says "I'm Keltham of dath ilan. Do you want to tell me this setting's lore first, or skip straight to asking my help with some kind of horrible problem, or what?"

The ring comes off, no problem.

The reply he gets is in his ears this time, not his head. It has the usual directionless feel of a regular Message spell. "Thank you for introducing yourself, Keltham of dath ilan. I don't know the full history of summoning in Old Aiquzall, but are you at all familiar with the phenomenon where summoned creatures feel unreal?"

Great. So there's supposed to be some in-universe excuse for this. "I've summoned before, it's not like that. Look, I'll participate in this if you're nice about it, you don't need to have this argument with me."

"You know, I have heard arguments that people from other alternatives are fake, but I have not heard them made by someone visiting such an alternative. I will stop discussing this matter for the moment and come back to it later. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Boatman is intelligent these days and is trying to kill everyone."

Keltham doesn't bother to avoid looking a bit relieved. "Okay! Lower stakes than last time. Thanks. Is the Boatman Charon?"

"You don't have to work with us if you don't want to, but if you do want to, this is serious! And how did you know, or for that matter guess, Boaty's name?"

"How about you explain this place to me assuming I have absolutely no context, and then I'll decide what I want to explain?"

"Yeah, sure." Griffie appears to do nothing, but probably actually has a telepathic conversation with eir party.

After a moment, the goggled man hands Griffie a spheroid. Ey takes it, and an illusory diagram of a bicone shows up, black on one side and white on the other with a thin layer of neither in the middle. "So, this is the bicone model of the multiverse! It's a simplification to make it work in three dimensions. Uh, should I explain dimensions or does that translate alright?"

"Yes, I know what a dimension is. Do continue."

"Great, I don't normally do math lectures but I don't get to outsource them to the usual speaker today. So, the depths of the Positive and Negative Energy Planes compose the overwhelming majority of the multiverse, this model understates it so that there's anything to see."

The illusory bicone splits into two cones which show their bases, 'revealing' a green dot in the middle, surrounded by a circle with a red-hot quarter, a stony grey quarter, a deep blue quarter, and a translucent pale blue quarter that blur into each other, surrounded by another circle of abstract symbols, including some implication of a red pentagram that's not really complete enough to be Asmodeus's symbol. "And then in the tiny subset of the multiverse that won't explode you with healing, we have the Material Plane, the Elemental Ring, and the Outer Planes. The Upper Planes, where we are, are a subset of the Outer Planes."

"It's not known exactly how mortals and gods began, but the consensus model is that it was a cycle between both. Souls come from the Positive Energy Plane and are complex Positive Energy structures. Mortal life is made of the elements with a soul. When it does stuff, it produces quintessence of the stuff it did. For instance, if I study dimensional math, then that produces scholarship-y quintessence. Quintessence clumps up and can get souls as well. A quintessence being of, say, scholarship, will try to make more scholarship happen. So if you consider really simple life forms, they might produce something like 'assembling the correct chemicals to build more of itself' quintessence, and then that might form some extremely weak force of encouraging life forms to do more of that, and then, well…" Griffie waves around to indicate the room and its occupants.

"With me so far?"

So the claim here is not that the gods as they are today created mortalkind, but rather that they evolved. Mysteriously in parallel to dath ilani, which is sure something. But actually, there's another thing.

"Sorry, mortal life is made of the elements? And gods are made of quintessence, which connotes 'fifth element but not like the four'? Elaborate?"

"Alright then! So. Normal matter is composed of particles of four elements. Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. Air is, uh, the stuff you're breathing. You can't see it. You could try exhaling forcefully into your hand and then you'd feel it?"

Keltham does not seem particularly inclined to do this, so Griffie continues on, pulling a metal cup out of eir backpack. "This is metal, specifically ferin. Metal is a form of Earth. As you can see, it's solid, which makes it useful for the next part of this demonstration." Ey makes some gestures and mutters under eir breath, and clear liquid appears in the cup. "This is Water. It's a liquid: it has a constant volume like Earth, but it flows freely like Air. You can drink it, or play around with it and the cup, we can handle cleanup if need be."

Ey holds the cup of water out.

"I've interacted with solids and liquids before. Could I get a particle-level explanation?"

"So, I am not an alchemist? There's particles of the four elements, which are at least plausibly the smallest unit of elemental matter. Low-energy experimentation can't break them down, and high-energy experimentation is probably illegal. Most substances are not actually single-element substances unless you're on the relevant Elemental Plane. Even the Air and Water and Earth samples I've shown you all have some Fire in them, which is why they're not freezing to the touch. Each element depends on its respective field to exist, and these fields also enable the relevant state of matter. For instance, in the absence of an Earth field, Water wouldn't freeze solid no matter how cold it got. It's difficult to fully suppress an elemental field, but in outer space away from Suaal they get increasingly weak. I can put up some textbook pages on the projector if you like?"

…this sure seems to be a set of claims that really do not match up with chemistry as dath ilan and Golarion know it.

"And these four elements can compose into bodies like mine or that of your colleagues? Do you know the details of how that works?"

Bioalchemy is at least more familiar territory than the elemental fields! Griffie pulls up a textbook on the projector (the text of which is not actually readable to Keltham), finds some diagrams, and starts explaining bioalchemy. It's like some weird twisted parody of the chemistry Keltham is familiar with, as if someone was inspired by dath ilani biochemistry when designing their four-element system, but ultimately more committed to system consistency than to sticking close to normal-atoms chemistry. There are known experiments Griffie can cite regarding eir claims, and they have a DNA-analogue which Griffie is aware of the function of.

The particles have electrical charges, but nobody seems to know of charge-carrier particles, which plausibly makes sense for them not to have figured out? The interactions are weird, and really don't fit with the atoms Keltham is used to. Also, they probably won't want him to teach them the scientific method and they definitely won't want his chemistry knowledge.

He glances at his body, which looks deceptively normal. (Aside from the fakeness.)

"Tell me about the godwar."

"So. Gods gain strength from quintessence of their types. Quintessence comes from beings doing stuff. Strength can be used to cause beings to do stuff. If you're on the Material Plane, this forms a feedback loop. You start existing, you get some mortals and make them more you-ish and help or force them to do stuff that makes you exist more, you use that to create or take some more beings which get you more power. And you're an idealist, you believe in what you do. You want everyone to cower under your adamantine fist, or enjoy delicious rice products with their families, or have access to libraries, or whatnot."

"So you notice that the people who are cowering under that guy's adamantine fist are not getting to enjoy rice products with their families! You don't like that! And she's noticed that the people enjoying rice products with their families are not cowering under her adamantine fist, and she doesn't like that either! And you both go and form coalitions, and try to fight with the others, and work on getting more powerful, and by the end of it … the guy who took her empire has equipped all his infantry with swords that let them manipulate time, you and your friends have done the same, he's using truth-value-manipulating magic to make your plans not happen, you're making custom truth values so that it doesn't work, he destroys the possibility for your faction's color to weaken you a bit, you hit back at a concept that might be structurally important that he hasn't reinforced too much, Aiquzall is not really holding up to the strain and pieces are flying."

"And then you find yourself in the metaphorical ashes, holding weapons you don't really understand, one step away from returning to your former power, and your allies and enemies and such are all there too. And you look around, and go 'do we really want to do this again?', and you don't."

"…I probably shouldn't have told that in second-person, should I. Uh, that level of detail isn't known, but the weapons I mentioned all were a thing and all three of those possibilities are things that gods do want."

"When you say 'custom truth values', do you refer to points in the space between true and false?"

This doesn't really fit with the claim Griffith is making, but it's also the sane and sense-making answer, so he's going to check.

"I do not. The, uh, good news is that these custom values were used pretty sparingly and have been illegal for the past, well." Ey makes a gesture that's plausibly analogous to air quotes. "'Thirty thousand years.' Well, actually, twenty-nine thousand five hundred twenty-four years, eighty-two days, six hours, forty-one minutes, and twenty-nine seconds. Except it probably wasn't actually illegal in the first seconds per se? Just … that's how long it's been since the godwar. According to ancient empires thousands of years ago, that is also how long it was before the godwar. In our earliest records, that is also how long it was before the godwar, and it just took the gods a really, really long time to clean up. History compresses. We're not really sure if this is a problem or not."

He will start by engaging with the topic that is not custom truth values, what the flamingnoodles. "That is, indeed, not how time is supposed to work."

And now, moving on to … this. "Explain everything about 'custom truth values', please."

"I haven't interacted with them, just, uh, been exploited in a way that would have failed if I had been using them. At the time I learned about them I didn't have the clearance for too many details. I … probably formally don't have more clearance now, honestly. I can tell you that they were typically created as single-use things? I'll ask for more information, we'll see what we can get."

"I'd say that throwaway custom truth values are too absurd to be believable, but if they're offscreen like this maybe there will be consequences downstream of them I have to deal with and such, so I don't even get to totally dismiss them."

"I guess it's fair that you don't trust my sources here as much as I do. I will admit to not actually having seen samples of these." Also, why is Keltham using a shadow puppets metaphor instead of saying 'offstage' like makes sense for someone with his delusions?

"Thank you for the information. I'll share my perspective now."

"I was recently in a world called Golarion, where I screwed things up and gave an tyrant god's slaves a bunch of information I wouldn't have wanted them to have had I known what they wanted it for. Eventually I figured it out and got to work on solving my mistake, but ultimately concluded that I'd need to augment myself to the point of plausible loss of continuity of identity to have a decent chance. I was hoping that if I did that, and actually I was worried about fake problems and not real ones, some entity would wake me up somewhere else, where I didn't have inaccurate beliefs about the stakes and my interpersonal life was less of a mess."

"And, well, here I am, and I can intuitively tell that all this is fake though it's a bit obtrusive, and your culture seems more advanced in terms of reasoning than the one I was in, and you certainly aren't going to try to push me to teach you physics and alchemy and technology dependent on those because they're clearly not the same here! And the threat I'm supposed to care about is just a bunch of deaths, not a bunch of torture and slavery! So, whoever put us here is clearly cooperating with me somewhat, and I in turn will cooperate with the story where I prevent some deaths if it doesn't ask too much of me, even if I don't think the consequences of the, what, handful of people here who actually exist all being sent off to unfamiliar and weird places is actually that dire compared to last time."

"That is an interesting perspective, and not what we expected. I'm so sorry to hear that that happened, it sounds deeply unpleasant. You're correct that we wouldn't consider getting information from you on exotic-matter alchemy and alternate physics a high priority. Our current plan is to get you fully informed of our situation and see if you have ideas, but you don't have to."

Griffie develops an awkward expression. "Unfortunately, we aren't willing to immediately let you leave. You're in violation of interworld import laws we don't want to be prosecuted for breaking, and the information we thought an Aiquzall refugee would need to orient is somewhat classified. If we disguise your soul and you credibly promise secrecy or agree to memory redaction we can let you go. We regret this planning error on our part, we assumed you'd be more willing to trust us than you are."

"I would prefer not to be held in captivity at all."

"A very reasonable preference. If there's anything that would make this less awful, please let us know. We can also arrange for you to be unconscious until a means of disguising your soul has been readied, if it's not possible to make this easier on you."

The place has a tyrant god, and these people are trying to prevent the end of the world, and they're also in some ways acting as friends to him. This is a potential problem.

"I'll think about what information I want to share. If it wouldn't increase the costs of memory redaction should we go that route, I would like you to summarize the current situation."

Griffie sighs. "If we go that route we're paying for an expensive enough version that a few more secrets, at least of this grade, don't matter."

"Charon is winning. He's manipulated my party, specifically, into fulfilling multiple prophecies, both secretly and overtly violating interplanar law as needed to do so. And sometimes doing stuff that predates interplanar law, he's cursed all souls to age to death and pretends it's natural. In the absence of intervention, we don't know how long there is left, but going by intuition maybe a year to a decade. We'd like to stop him. Our current strategy can, ah, best be described as flailing for resources and information. And here you are, a bundle of information. …we aren't going to force it out of your head, don't worry."

"Why isn't Pharasma doing anything?"

"Would you be willing to tell us about this 'Pharasma'?"

"Built the universe and the alignment system and treats the whole place like a way to sort souls to an 'appropriate' deity. With some absurd inhuman definition of appropriate. Children, sent to planes of torture, for being at the wrong end of a spell or set up to fall by everyone around them. From what I've heard, possibly designed aging herself, so that people would see being forced into someone's 'afterlife' as less of a bad thing. And maintains the whole awful structure from the outer gods. She could stop it, she just won't. Soul-eaters raid her precious system, and so those who are 'Neutral Evil' get a choice between the soul-eaters and the torture planes. She could offer that choice to anyone destined for a torture plane, she just doesn't."

"That's not a role anyone's playing here. Axis, the Plane of Law, is maintaining an order and preventing outer god incursions, both hostile and plausibly-friendly, but for all their talk they don't own the world. Nobody here does. They just try to figure out what the balance of powers would be anyway and try to get there with as little chaos and conflict as possible."

"And your goals here, to be specific, are?"

"Defeat Charon. Actually defeat him. No more 'rights' to shred someone's soul as long as he does it slowly enough and destroy means of immortality he doesn't like, no chopping bits off every soul as they detach from the body, actually uncovering the full extent of his machinations and stopping them. Which, uh, is almost certainly going to involve returning to open godwar, whether we make the first strike or not. And at that point, who can say for sure what'll happen? Obviously we'd like a full victory for the Upper Planes. I'm theoretically partial to Heaven but, really, every archon would be thrilled by an azata victory and vice versa."

"You've been focusing a lot on Charon. Your stance on the torture planes is?"

"They've got to go. My team isn't primarily focused on that in our work, though we've helped a bit. Killed a demon-god, though that was with a lot of support. I haven't sat down and done a detailed assessment of the relative benefits of the Lower Planes, I don't, uh, want to be more responsive to the details of whatever atrocities Asmodeus – the god of tyranny – is up to than I am, that seems like bad incentives? I would be deeply surprised if we could somehow manage to take down Charon and maintain the status quo with Hell, that's Asmodeus's plane. Axis keeps proposing a full Heaven-Hell truce and they both refuse to sign, so."

"Understood. …if we're interacting with you holding me regardless of my will anyway, you would be capable of using thought-analysis magic on me. For many plausible goals a person in my position would have, such a person would not want to disclose those goals, but–"

Griffie is not, in fact, a particularly charismatic person. Eir speech is clunky at times, eir ability to actually talk down hostiles is low, and eir main actual diplomatic strength is capacity to pick up on and willingness to play along with stuff that is probably ridiculous nonsense and feels rather like losing face. Ey is not a good liar (though it helps that a genuine desire for friendship despite a mess actually looks like a genuine desire for friendship despite a mess). When ey has complicated social problems with humans, ey delegates them if at all possible.

This does not actually mean that Griffie is not perceptive, including in social domains. The Chelish manipulators and Khemet gave Keltham a skewed perspective here, on what outright-superhuman perceptiveness is correlated with, and he's lacking the aid of any spells or items, including his tiny sword of Glibness.

Like many people who have researched daemon cults, Griffie is aware of negative utilitarians as well as regular utilitarians who are just pretty darn sure that the non-Abaddon lower planes outweigh essentially everything else. Their commonality is probably overstated, but they're still a thing.

Griffie interrupts Keltham. "If you think it's morally net negative for the world to continue as it is and would rather side than Charon over us if that was what was needed for the highest chance of ending Hell and its chaotic counterpart the Abyss, you would not be the first, and given population sizes you plausibly will not be the last even if we move fairly quickly."

Keltham doesn't respond.

But in the absence of a Glibness item, his reactions still confirm the hypothesis. "So that's your dark secret, then. My guess is that at least one draft exists of a plan to turn over our information on Hell and the Abyss to Abaddon should Hell or the Abyss win, or we can get information on why it's a bad idea. Heaven is the Lawful portion of the Upper Planes, plural, we do in fact plan for handling disagreements in a friendly manner here."

Once the hypothesis is this salient maintaining secrecy is pointless anyway.

"Using thought-analysis magic before I finished talking was unfriendly."

"I didn't. You're not that subtle – we're going to need to work on that if you want to leave here under the basis of a secrecy agreement, by the way – and this is not that rare a thing for people to think."

"Well, either you know everything really core to our most plausible preference conflict, or it's in my interests to act as though it's everything, and I'd very much prefer to make this statement in both cases rather than lie."

Griffie can pick up on some sentiments there.

"I am not a paladin of Eritrice. I make false statements. I deceive people. I haven't made false promises, but if I were in disguise and it came up I would. I violate interplanar law that was designed to be a compromise among interests including mine and is only an unbalanced compromise due to lack of information, some of which I could turn over and haven't. Compromise with Hell, violate interplanar law, refuse to use your power despite the situation, they're all awful and if you keep not doing the third eventually you'll have to do at least one of the first two. I've done both. And for good or for ill we've oh-so-helpfully chosen one option already for you."

"You've compromised with Hell?"

"We had a shared interest in killing the aforementioned demon-god, and I took payment from them for doing it. We have a shared interest in Charon not destroying the world, so when Charon breaks interplanar law we tend to report it to an Axis-led task force with members from Heaven and Hell. The Asmodeus Corporation has a branch in the city where I normally live, and I have not attacked it, and not because I think my doing so would be genuinely costless to Hell. Et cetera."

Griffie pauses a moment, then winces. "And since we're either inducting you into our criminal conspiracy or constraining you from being an information source to others, I should also mention our interactions with Varten. Varten was a devil, a Hell-built slave of Asmodeus, specifically specializing in knowledge and the manipulation of others and quite empowered within these domains."

Keltham is not bothering to pretend to not be very concerned by this.

"We got advance notice from a friendly god that the situation that led to our interactions with Varten would be risky but raise our odds of success in other domains. We didn't walk in blind to the risks."

"At some point, it would be nice to get back to being in a world with actual professionals in that domain. But one out of three isn't the best."

"So! We have this vague warning about something in the Sarini Manor being useful but likely to scar us. We … so the reason we were there is that we'd figured out that the Sarinis were diabolists, uh, working with devils, and they'd set up a town charter to secretly be an infernal, uh, hellish?, contract with some document continuity tricks. Send the souls to Hell, stuff about 'appropriate town morals', et cetera. Manipulation persisted after their deaths. Anyway. These still have to stabilize on an actual physical document to work, and for stuff like this that isn't really a proper contract proximity helps, so when we built a tool to look for it it turned out the document we needed was located in their manor. And also this demon who was trying to poison the town was there so we wanted to deal with that too. So we deal with the demon and his minions, recruit some and contain others, and it turns out that … right, you have absolutely no idea who my mother is. I guess we can skip over that for now. We clean up the manor, our tool is like 'actually that document is waaaaay deeper than the basements here go', we poke things and find a hidden-from-the-Sarinis tunnel under the manor my mother made, and we find Varten."

Keltham is listening, but primarily waiting for the relevant part of this story.

"My mother bound Varten. He and his colleagues were in a bad position. He knew we wanted information and the bound souls of the town citizens. He offered us information necessary for our victory, his story, and answers to some of our questions, in exchange for our destruction of him and his colleagues, and freeing the souls in their possession. And no penalty clauses for non-completion on our side. He accepted us rewriting a contract covering those terms in our own language. It was all absurdly generous terms. We needed the information and the souls would be passed along to Hell otherwise. We drafted various clauses, and his only challenge to them was ensuring our receiving the souls was absolutely airtight in terms of Infernal property law, and that his secrets would hurt us and he would thus not sign a contract barring him from harming us by sharing non-deceptive information. We took the deal."

"And it turns out that Hell has some really, really good infohazards, except given that I'm your prisoner and plausibly have information you want, if you were working for Hell I'd be in a less pleasant environment by now. So do go on."

"The information was intended to cause interpersonal conflicts. With some notable successes interspersed with amusing-in-retrospect failures, he had a lot of secrets and wanted to see what would stick. The real issue was the souls. The overwhelming majority of souls in Varten's possession were almost certainly not moral patients, but were instead extremely simplistic souls that fed on devils who owned them, designed to multiply at the expense of their hosts and hijack the ownership structures and markets of Hell as a transmission vector. Transferring ownership of them to us … halted that. Varten called us heroes of Hell."

Griffie sighs. "The attack was slow-going. If we hadn't ended it, it probably still would not have borne fruit soon enough to matter."

"The infohazards that you noticed caused near-term personal conflicts, and looked like an attempt to throw things at the wall and see what sticked. Do you not realize why that's not necessarily the reassuring statement you think it is?"

"I am actually pretty good at noticing things. And there are a number of people we would retire and if need be enter containment on the word of, and they haven't asked us to, and at least in some cases not due to ignorance of this incident. Varten was dying and wanted to stop the parasitic souls and thwart Charon, which also suggests reduced capacity for really complicated manipulations of our mindstates."

"And how do you think he did at stopping the parasitic souls and thwarting Charon?"

"Pret…ty well. Some of the information on Charon he got us only became usable to us remarkably recently."

If Keltham were differently acculturated, he'd give Griffith a Meaningful Look in the confidence that ey would parse it. In practice, that rather rarely works for dath ilani.

"And here we are having a disagreement about whether Asmodeus or Charon is a priority target. On your side, in part because an expert manipulator devil gave you information about Charon while doing infohazard-based attacks. Do you see how this is suspicious?"

"So, yes, but I'm not sure how to act on it being suspicious here? I'm not just going to take the word of a person who we fetched on the basis of a record that Charon's servants deleted all but one specific section of, that seems like the exact same problem just in reverse."

"Leaving one continuous chunk of a message doesn't actually offer as much capacity to optimize as just choosing arbitrary information to share does."

"We're pretty sure there was originally a lot of message there."

"It's still fewer degrees of freedom."

"Presumably, if Heaven doesn't want to order me to retire, they also don't want me to spend all my time dithering over being maximally uninfluenced by hazardous useful information. Speaking of which, do you want to hear about another–"

"No. Not right now, please. Does it even seem both urgent and like a good idea to you?"

"It can wait."

"I'm a bit surprised that, even though your world has a better scientific culture than Golarion, you don't have a good culture around infohazards."

Griffie makes a series of hard-to-parse faces and a frustrated noise, before saying … ehh, nothing important.

Well, not having your questions answered is what you get for asking aliens questions implicitly instead of explicitly. He'll ask again.

"Why doesn't Suaal have a good culture around infohazards?"

Griffie looks less frustrated and more resigned. Ey doesn't answer, ey just keeps looking at Keltham, creating an awkward silence. How long is Keltham willing to let this continue?

He'll give it a bit before asking "Are you alright?"

"I've had better days, but any day where nobody's attacking me is decent."

"Are you going to answer the question of mine that you previously did not answer?"

"Not at this time."

"Will you answer it later."

"Maybe."

"Will you tell me why you won't answer me now."

The part of Griffie's answer that Keltham hears is "no". (He doesn't catch the "Empirically," that preceded it.)

Well, it sounds like this is Keltham's to figure out, then, since he can't get a more cooperative person to talk to him.

…he'll start by getting up fully off of this table, wrapping the sheet around himself in the process, and trying the doors.

Most of them are locked. The unlocked one leads to a room with a bed, some shelving, a desk with paper and writing implements, a desk chair, and a fair amount of underallocated space. There's some clothing that looks plausibly around his size and adjustable enough to stay on him draped across the bed. The bed, chair, and desk actually look vaguely acceptable-ish, but the writing implements still aren't great. There's another door in it, currently open to a bathroom which at least on cursory glance looks like it has plumbing. There's some windows with partially-open effectively light-blocking shutters that look adjustable from the inside (though plausibly lockable from the outside), looking onto some massive kinetic sculpture of stained glass and clockwork and gently glowing elements? It might do something but it's not obvious what, and it's dense enough that he can't see anything beyond it.

Clothing does not seem like it'll answer his questions, but he would probably prefer to be wearing it. The texture is actually acceptable. He closes the door and puts the clothing on.

The clothing in fact does not answer his questions, or indeed say anything at all.

Keltham considers the situation.

Griffith switched from eir previous "well, I can say whatever since you're my prisoner and I can modify your memories" attitude to eir current terseness almost right after he said he didn't want to hear about another infohazard. Ey's been attempting to respect his preferences, within the bounds of keeping him prisoner over alleged overwhelming strategic reasons. Eir sudden terseness might be due to uncertainty over whether anything ey says would be infohazardous enough to violate his preferences, but ey was perfectly willing to comment on how eir day was, so there's some bounds on that. Still, worth asking.

"Are you suddenly refusing to answer my questions because you're trying to respect my desire to avoid infohazards at this time?"

This is a good question. Griffie will go with a single-word answer, on the basis that it's probably harder to screw with one of those in a way that isn't suspicious to Keltham.

"Yes."

"Are you dealing with significant uncertainties as to what I would consider infohazardous?"

What Griffie attempts to say is "Technically yes, but not in this case?". What Keltham hears is "Yes".

Keltham can go into a long explanation of what things he does and does not consider infohazardous, then!

Griffie can make some guesses about what Keltham heard em say based on Keltham's reply. The phenomenon Keltham is concerned about is annoying, and tedious, and not actually urgent. If Keltham could just stop poking this for a bit ey can probably slip a bunch of informatively insane statistics and anecdotes that'll let him figure it out into his general reading supply, but no, apparently this is happening now. When Griffie throwing a bunch of books on the subject at Keltham for him to dissect might lead to him, say, failing to notice any of the books, because there is really no plausible excuse for Griffie to be sharing the books. And also, again, he doesn't want infohazards! Why does he have to poke the infohazard if he just said he did not want infohazards right now!

Keltham has now finished his explanation! He will try asking questions again.

"Given my definition of infohazards, do you still think that giving minimally informative answers to my questions going forward is necessary for satisfying my preferences here?"

Griffie is going to try changing the subject. The long meta conversation might make this less informative-looking, even if this is not actually less informative to Keltham.

"Let's talk about something else for now."

Well, it is a decent excuse to see what topics Griffith won't be this terse about.

"What's your model of the effects of engaging in commerce with souls?"

"As far as I can tell the souls-as-fuel market associated with Abaddon carries obvious risks of being attacked, but isn't particularly known for subtle traps. Abaddon likely doesn't want to sell souls in a form usable as anything but fuel, the last time I encountered an Abaddon-derived soul export it was powered soul gems, which are just not going to be reassembleable. We found that powder because a daemon partially possessing a mortal host got the host to use it to flavor his ale," Griffie says in a tone which implies ey expects Keltham to be particularly horrified by this and become less willing to work with Abaddon on this basis. "If you use souls as fuel, that's an Abaddon-ish action that makes you more likely to go there due to getting Abaddon-ish quintessence on your soul. If you sell souls to be used as fuel, same thing. If you buy soul gems and then try to resurrect their occupants … that probably won't work out well and your allies should warn you not to try it? You can resurrect an arbitrarily damaged soul, you just really shouldn't, the results will cause problems."

"The Infernal-centric soul trade, on the other hand, generally involves souls in intact condition usable for non-fuel activities, such as in the typical case torturing someone in response to their lack of submission to Aszy. It is particularly known for subtle traps. Selling your soul to Hell means that, well, Hell has a pretty strong claim over your soul that they can use to grab it. Selling souls to Hell generally means that you're condemning people to be tortured by Hell, which is also Hell-ish. …I'm not sure what the effects are of, say, selling some devil souls you found lying around somehow to Hell, but given that it empowers Asmodeus it probably isn't great. Buying souls from Hell … in general you should expect tricky deals? Hell really doesn't like relinquishing souls they already have."

"I don't think there is a general 'Abyss-centric soul trade', but I'd expect soul trade with demons to be somewhere between Abaddon-ish and Hell-ish, except less competent? Demons aren't as concerning as daemons or devils, there's just a lot of them."

"Does that answer your question?"

That sure isn't a terse answer. "So, the effect of you buying those souls from Hell is?"

"We had a bunch of souls hanging around us for a while. We got the ones which were actually people to the Upper Planes. So there's some rescuing-people-ness and some being-tricked-into-benefiting-Hell-ness around and … I honestly don't care that badly about the little details of the influences on my soul? If my soul leaves my body, the question of where it ends up is almost certainly going to be overwhelmingly determined by other factors, like whether someone is currently trying to suck my soul out of my body for destruction. I've been promised a post-death retrieval attempt if necessary in exchange for services rendered. If my soul just vaguely floats a tiny bit more Hell-wards than it'd otherwise be inclined to, that's not the kind of issue I'm worried about, I'd expect intervention before that got too far. Also, I have done a lot of other things."

Keltham will get closer to the question about infohazard preparedness that got a bunch of terseness. "What would you describe as major societal problems in this world, and why do you think they're happening?"

"Well, that's a big question and the answers you'd get are going to vary. I think an issue that is a problem for our society but an underestimated one is the extent to which we're in a tiny region of relative stability and everything outside that region is various flavors of scary to poke, but I'm not sure that's really the biggest problems, and it's not that societal. The biggest problems are … I'm not sure how to divide up scarcity issues, or what constitutes a fair comparison for some of them?"

"An object-level example of the biggest problems looks about like … so you have this farming village. The people there are typical humanoids, and they don't have access to reliable contraceptives, so if they have sex of the type they most want to have there'll be pregnancies whether they want those or not, so if they're not actively starving the people in relationships will probably have a bunch of kids. It doesn't get to do much trade because it's not close to any good trade routes, and they have about as many people as they can support in a good year, so if there's bad local conditions people will just starve. They live in poor conditions and don't have access to good healing magic or alchemy or such, so they're vulnerable to a lot of diseases. When groups like goblins attack them, they don't have the spare resources to go to the fairly difficult lengths it would take for successful diplomacy, and they also aren't very good at fighting either! So they need someone to defend them, and that one entity is specialized in holding power in various ways, and they have a lot of power over the village because of it. Maybe it's a family associated with a larger polity. Maybe it's a group of organized raiders. Lots of options. And the biggest society-ish problems probably look like variations on that writ large, really?"

"I live in Temda, which is full of cities which actually don't have to lean so hard on the countryside for food imports? The foundation of a typical farming village is that if you manage some land you can have plants convert the sunlight and such it gets into useful nutrients for you. The foundation of a typical Temda city is that if you get a bunch of intelligent gigantic magic trees to agree with you that hosting a bunch of other people is neat, you can hook into their existing systems to also support a bunch of grafted food plants and such. So then we have higher population density, also because we're using the trees as structural supports for housing that's way taller than you could easily manage with out. We have a different set of problems, we have easier food production and more trade which means more access to things like contraceptives, and thus– but we're nonrepresentative and this is a tangent, sorry."

"Circling back to causality questions: If the Upper Planes had free reign to act and the Lower Planes did not, there wouldn't be these food supply and disease burden and senescence issues. In the absence of interplanar law what would happen would not be the Upper Planes fully extended to Suaal, what would happen would be a massively destructive war. Prior to this interplanar law, what was happening was little pockets without disease or starvation or drudgery, and little pockets of horribleness, and little pockets of miscellaneous weird stuff. And even blaming the Lower Planes isn't quite right, because they almost certainly co-evolved with us and to this day draw power from all kinds of mortal failings that occur in the absence of divine intervention. It doesn't take a Shivaska cult to get parents to threaten their children that disobedience will lead to them being attacked by horrible monsters, they just do that on their own and Shivaska gets power from it. It doesn't take a devil to tell you that if you and your buddies worked together you could enslave a bunch of people and extract resources from them. And it plausibly does take a daemon for your soul to age to death, but I would be genuinely surprised if bodily senescence was also their fault. The sorry state of healing spells in responding to it is probably Abaddon's fault, though."

"And I have a bunch of information about early history through illegal methods that very few other people have and I still don't know the answers to questions about the origins here. Sure, there were feedback loops, but why these ones? Your guess is around as good as mine."

"Does that help answer your question?"

"It does, thank you." And it also sounds a lot like Carissa's explanation of power-transfer-through-murder in a small farming village, which suggests a natural followup question. "Would you characterize the claim that most people don't do weird things and this is, given their capabilities especially regarding given evaluating weird ideas, in their interests as correct?"

"So, I would definitely agree that most people don't do weird things. Well, at least by my standards for weirdness, possibly if you asked them they'd say something like 'but I'm trying this new diet for my geese even though I'm not fully confident it works' or such. They don't have spare resources to spend on risks, mostly? If you're thinking 'but surely this leaves opportunities around for the first person to go do weird things', this is true. There are traveling weird-stuff-doers such as adventurers who, when they encounter isolated villages which is sometimes, often provide value to them by doing weird stuff and then get compensated for it. But adventurers have a high death rate, especially without adequate starting resources, so in general the safe thing to do is to not try it."

"Does this world have the problem where people don't have rigorous tools to evaluate weird arguments generated by people smarter with them, and so have to either test those arguments personally if that's possible or ignore them?"

"I mean, my model is that some people do get those tools at least somewhat? From what I've heard of Oluna Foluna she tried to teach skills like that before she left the Curdime school? But, uh, the way that went was that… she offered concealing robes to everyone attending her lectures so that people could plausibly claim to have been or deny having been in her class. The former of which was necessary for making sure people wouldn't just attend to get status, since they could lie. The latter of which was necessary because taking her class were concerned it would be harmful to their careers in the military. So even when the tools are available, there are … forces against their circulation. But also, my model is that if you tried to give those tools to someone of average intelligence it just wouldn't work well enough."

"I've heard a lot of claims about people of average intelligence, and I haven't had as much opportunity and spare time to test them as I'd like."

Also, Oluna Foluna sounds like a relatable person with good taste.

"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?"

"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?"

"What about your society?"

"I think we're doing pretty well. We have the Great Library of Harmonious Scripture and a god is focused on running it and lots of people work on it and it catalogues lots of things including stuff for avoiding threats like Abyssal."

"If a smart devil said a bunch of weird stuff to you that made you feel like you wanted to share it, what would you do?"

There is a specific department which Irret would report to and which she has been firmly told she should go to even if it really seems like she should share the information with someone else first!

"Griffith, do you have an explanation for Irret's claims not matching yours?"

Yeah, ey figured this was going there. Time to play the game of Make All The Complexity Be In Keltham's Questions And Not Eir Answers. "Yes."

"Do you disagree with some of Irret's claims?"

"Yes."

"Which ones?"

"Which ones do you agree with?"

Keltham actually hears an answer from Griffie this time.

"Abyssal is as Irret says. Seal-scrambling is as Irret says. Societies know how to handle these things, and smart devils, it's not extra-hard for them. Irret's society has the Great Library of Harmonious Scripture and a god is focused on running it and lots of people work on it and it catalogues lots of things including stuff for avoiding threats like Abyssal. That department exists and Irret has been told to report to it under those conditions."

That was all of Irret's claims, except for the claim that societies could not only handle Abyssal and seal-scrambled documents and understand the dangers of smart devils, but understand things in that reference class. Which suggests that there's something in the reference class Griffith is aware of, and Irret isn't.

"Are there hazards you don't think Irret's assessment accounts for?"

"Yes."

"What are they?"

"Well, one such instance is Fulgati Psychopomps. They attack civilizations that they believe have gone on too long, and almost everyone just … reflexively forgets them once the Fulgati isn't right there anymore, because Fulgatis are too horrifying to think about. They typically conclude it was just a natural disaster."

"Well, that's terrible. Not worse than Hell, but terrible. Irret, would you say the Upper Planes know how to deal with Fulgati stuff?"

"They're also just really hard to fight, but the forgetting thing yes? We have people who are resistant to that kind of fear and we know to listen to them."

"Griffith, does that match your understanding?"

"Yes."

"But you think the Upper Planes's culture can't adequately handle infohazards?"

"Yes."

"So there's another thing that isn't Fulgati and isn't Abyssal and isn't devils and isn't seal-scrambled information."

"Well, there's actually a lot of infohazards depending on how broad you get? There's snakes which hide in text, some of which are magically created usually to attack an unlucky 'reader', and that's fairly representative."

"But you're not saying the Upper Planes can't handle magic snake text."

"Correct."

"Is there a specific failure you're thinking of here."

"You must realize that your pattern of question-non-answering is a terrible way to avoid leaking information, right?"

"Yes."

Before the sentence "So why are you doing it!?" makes its way to Keltham's mouth, he has a hypothesis. He does not like the hypothesis.

"Are we being observed."

"By the Goddess of Good Tools, Aiyuna, and the people in this room, probably. By anything else … We are effectively betting a lot of lives on 'no', and we don't do that recklessly. We're under deity-level wards."

"So you think it should be safe for me to say whatever I like."

"Yes. It should be safe for you to say whatever you like."

"Were all the secrecy oaths you hold yourself to, which may be the empty set, phrased non-stupidly?"

"Yes."

"Are we safe here from third-party interference with communication?"

Griffie smiles at the question…

…but is less happy about the answer ey gives. "No! No, we are not!"

"How the flamingnoodles does that work if we're not being observed?"

"Good question!"

"Does this make people forget things."

"Yes."

"Have I forgotten some of the answers you gave me."

"Probably. I don't have a transcript you wrote to check."

"Are you having me ask you these questions because it's easier to make me forget an answer I heard than a question I asked."

"Yes."

"Do I need to leave myself reminders?"

"Unlikely." (Nothing Griffie's seen suggests this is the case, but ey could be outright missing stuff still, and ey doesn't want to rule it out.)

"You do think me asking you these questions is a good idea, just to confirm?"

"Yes."

"Irret, what did you get from my conversation with Griffith?"

"Not much? Focusing is hard while I'm healing and I just did a lot and you didn't ask me to this time."

That actually makes a lot of sense. If he was so brain-damaged that he couldn't understand the kinds of basic theory he just tried to explain, he'd probably have focus trouble too.

"Why do you think the Upper Planes's culture can't adequately handle infohazards?"

Griffie indicates a door. "Irret, that should be keyed to you. Please go."

Irret goes.

Griffie turns to Keltham. "There is a hostile and powerful infohazard-using species which specifically has the ability to cause societies to develop incorrect beliefs about them."

"How does that work?"

"I don't know! It's very hard to study something that can make sure your funding for it gets lost! It only gets studied by independent researchers who can't get a significant budget and are prone to going mad from isolation!"

"And I suppose there's a reason negotiations have failed, too."

"The relevant species – they're called Jabberwocks – are mostly into death and destruction. They particularly hate people who try to bargain with them or pray to them, but I don't know why and don't expect to find out anytime soon."

"Why would someone hate being bargained with? Even Evil people tend to like that, they can get more torture victims and such that way! They might not like honest bargaining, but that doesn't mean they'd object to someone being honest with them."

"Well, you can't exactly pay them to answer surveys about their preferences, can you?"

"I… suppose… you… gah! Why are people like this‽"

"There are a lot of ways for people to be and we're in a tiny bubble where we can at least sort of mentally model people most of the time?"

"That doesn't… there are theorems about how aliens with wildly divergent preferences and cognitive styles should converge on acting in various domains. This doesn't actually really mesh well with those. You could model a utility function where the behavior fulfills it, but it's really arbitrary and makes little evolutionary sense."

"Maybe they were created, or they're more quintessence-powered than they look? We don't have good records on the First World and we don't have good records on Jabberwocks and these two combine poorly. Or maybe there is a great explanation of all things Jabberwock and I just haven't seen it even though it's been in plain view of me every time I visit the relevant library section!"

"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."