What?

What?

WHAT???

... no.

Literally HOW.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Is this entire planet completely insane or possibly just very stupid?

You know, we can test this.

She asks the seventh-circle Iomedaen wizard serving as their Teleport monkey to Detect her Intelligence, this being a thing that magic can apparently just DO.

(Based on the average inferred 'Wisdom' of this planet, she estimates approximately no risk of failing her 'Will save' against 'Detect Thoughts', given that it's a live concern for people here at all, but just in case she is also not having any Thoughts.)

Uh, sure?

26.

WHAT.

"What the fuck kind of headband is that?" he asks, pointing at her Keeper rank-insignia-circlet.

Wait.

You have HEADBANDS that MAKE YOU SMARTER???

(And your books are STILL like this?)

That ISN'T a headband? In that case, you're, uh, eight standard deviations above median, which he knows enough about probability to know is approximately not a thing.

Therril is one of the hundred smartest people in dath ilan, at a level where intelligence tests do not really produce well-ordered results because there's no one smart enough to design sufficiently powerful tests—and neither is dath ilan's true thinkoomph distribution quite quadratic-exponential, generations of Basement-specific heritage-optimization for the absolute smartest people having made the upper tail significantly fatter than the lower one—but +8SD is not a thing there either. Even less so, eight Golarion standard deviations, given the observed lack of a society-wide heritage-optimization program here and what that implies about the amount of variance in various population observables relative to dath ilan.

Her modal estimate is that the supposedly median Intelligence score of "10" (assuming this number actually measures any significant component of thinkoomph, which obviously deserves testing) corresponds to four standard deviations below median in dath ilan. This is, actually, much less of a surprise to her than it would be to an ordinary dath ilani without access to counterfactual-models of what dath ilan would be like if Civilization had never done any heritage-optimization—it's worse than those models predict, but only a little bit worse. Maybe this planet is just slightly below the intelligence threshold required to coordinate enough to start doing heritage-optimization without it turning into a giant superheated disaster, or maybe they're just too busy individually responding to everything else on this planet that's already a giant superheated disaster to have ever had the metaphorical five seconds of slack they would need to establish good coordination mechanisms.

(The fact that everything is a giant disaster would normally make heritage-optimization for intelligence that much more important to the continued survival of this planet, but apparently they just have MAGIC for that.)

Okay. And what about her Wisdom?

(The wizard would not in fact have noticed a significant pause in the conversation, because, INT 26.)

They could go get a scroll of Detect Anxieties but he's kind of afraid that, as his own Wisdom is not magically enhanced, casting it on her will actually mildly hurt him, this being the sort of thing known to happen to people who ill-advisedly cast mental divinations on, like, high-level archons and such.

Yeah, you know what, she can infer the information she wants within pretty narrow bounds and doesn't want to know the actual answer anyway at her level, all information is worth having, but it is not in fact worth interrupting their other research to know right now.

Does anyone happen to know if 'diamonds' are combustible? (This being an experiment that would distinguish the leading hypothesis for their chemical nature from most of the others.)

Why the literal fuck would anyone do that?

Because if they're literally just tetrahedral Element-6 crystals, there's a synthesis process that we wouldn't normally have expected a society at your tech level to have discovered but in your case we thought maybe SOMEONE with an INTELLIGENCE HEADBAND would have TRIED given that they can RESURRECT THE DEAD.

They're going to buy a 'diamond' for testing, and if their theory is correct, they're going to place an order when they get home and come back in a few weeks with a hundred million 'True Resurrection' grade diamonds and donate them to any Good or Neutral church that swears to use them for resurrecting people thought to be in Hell.

OK, but well before that point the number of clerics is the limiting factor. Iomedae would create millions of ninth-circle clerics if she had a hundred million diamonds and she could, but she in fact cannot.

What about wizards? They presumably don't all draw their power from the same large entity.

... no, but wizards can't cast Resurrection. You can replicate it with Wish, but that's an even higher-circle spell and it takes two to replicate True Resurrection. Also it requires bigger diamonds, not that that seems to be a problem for you.

And ninth-circle wizards are rare, even more so than ninth-circle clerics, because becoming a ninth-circle wizard is dangerous.

Yeah. About that. First of all, gaining power by killing monsters is a stupid excuse for a ~~~~~. Second, does the power actually come from the monsters?

No, it's thought to be a mental state thing, but it does require genuine danger as far as we know.

Cheliax trains its entire eligible population to be wizards and then sends them all to the Worldwound, where half of them die and go to Hell but the other half end up third or fourth circle. No other country has nearly that many wizards at that level, which is the main reason no one has overthrown them yet.

Yeah, Cheliax can die in a fire but actually quite possibly we should fix the Worldwound thing first, as soon as we've figured out how to cheat at magic.

(Cheating is technique.)