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He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
...Yeah, actually, how did they. That's a very good question and for some reason Ileosa halfway expects Lyvina Mayyad to answer it out of hand.
Yes, she was listening?? She's standing right here!! What is their reason for not asking that question, what is their logic for it, what is the pattern here she can't see it.
"I am standing right here. Why is it best not to pull that thread?"
"Uh, I guess it's just that I didn't expect anything useful to come of it. Gods are confusing.
But maybe we should think about it anyways, if - "
"...I'm gratified to hear that you hold my opinion in greater esteem than that of, say, General Vengeance."
And then
"Lord Ornelos is on his way back. He has a better solution to the door, and for food and air and light.
There is a lot that needs to be done while there's light to do it in.
Today I'll be busy salvaging Korvosa's hinterland. I'll need many of your help.
While we're doing that, we'll build a fort as secure as the Vault but on the surface, and before Neth's out we'll be back above ground permanently.
5th-circle wizards should talk with Sabina Merrin or myself so we can figure out together how stupid rich today is going to make them.
Dismissed."
and Ileosa had to go up and say something inspiring, but after that she's coming back to figure out what the deal is with her bodyguards. Oh, but she'll wait just a second for them to forget she exists again.
So they don't realize anything's amiss when she steps out of their field of view just a moment, to get detect thoughts running.
Ileosa scans them with Detect Thoughts.
1st Round: Presence or absence of thoughts (from conscious creatures with Intelligence scores of 1 or higher).
2nd Round: Number of thinking minds and the Intelligence score of each. If the highest Intelligence is 26 or higher (and at least 10 points higher than your own Intelligence score), you are stunned for 1 round and the spell ends. This spell does not let you determine the location of the thinking minds if you can’t see the creatures whose thoughts you are detecting.
3rd Round: Surface thoughts of any mind in the area. A target’s Will save prevents you from reading its thoughts, and you must cast detect thoughts again to have another chance. Creatures of animal intelligence (Int 1 or 2) have simple, instinctual thoughts.
Altronus: INT 15
The Caydenite: INT 14
Lyvina: INT 20
Choryon: INT 7
....Those are some deeply baffling numbers.
Ileosa thinks she would have noticed if Choryon only had 7 Intelligence?
Intelligence as measured by detect thoughts correlates very well with potential for wizardry, quite well with mathematical ability and verbal proficiency, and if it doesn't correlate perfectly with what you would call general smarts - especially not above 15 INT or below 5 - she's never met someone with 7 INT who seemed notably clever. Choryon seemed clever. She would have guessed that Choryon had at least twelve Intelligence. Even ten, she could swallow, INT scores don't correlate that well with skill at language.
Seven?
(Ileosa would be a little less baffled if she knew any ogres with high Charisma; many of the factors of stupidity which in humans correlate with a low INT score are in fact correlates and not components of Intelligence. And Choryon, if she's even human, is visibly not entirely so. Still. Seven.)
That Lyvina is a once-in-a-generation math whiz who gets two bonus first-circle spells without a headband on doesn't feel nearly as strange to her, but that's pretty damn strange too. Lyvina seems clever, but not "this is as smart as people get" clever. Though maybe it'd be hard for Ileosa to tell, if she were?
Now take these two weird things and put them both in the radius of one detect thoughts. Usually when you cast detect thoughts you don't get two anomalies like that.
Call it a hunch, but Ileosa thinks that when she knows what these four people have in common, these four who met each other yesterday but wouldn't dream of outsourcing moral reasoning to anyone outside their group... when Ileosa knows what makes them a group, that 7 and that 20 will make more sense to her too.[1]
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1. This tag was written before the author of this piece committed to using the 3d6 bell curve for Intelligence rather than the Planecrash-standard. By the 3d6 curve, 20 INT is dramatically less exceptional (roughly corresponding to IQ 148 instead of 175) - and 7 INT is also less exceptional[2] in the other direction (roughly corresponding to IQ 82 instead of 77.5) ↩
2. Although it wasn't particularly exceptional to begin with.[3] ↩
3. I think that people anchor on the pointbuy when they consider what 7 INT means (or the meaning of 6, as rubs its sevenish shoulder) - because seven is as low as the pointbuy lets you dump a stat, it's thought of as the lowest that the stat can go. The wizard with 7 Strength is an object of ridicule, the barbarian with 7 Intelligence a monosyllabic drooling moron who chews on the furniture. But anyone reading this who can't overhead press 70 lbs (~32 kilograms) has less than 7 Strength. That's 5% of men and more than half of women. Likewise for 7 INT, 13% of adult humans have an IQ between 70 and 85 and they're perfectly ordinary people. ↩
I enter Bloodrage as a free action! And does a 13 confirm against your CMD?!
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