Asmodia: "Good work Ione now shut up again."

She almost has it.

She can feel it, she's almost there.

The key to the game between dath ilani.

If the Conspiracy is choosing what to show you, if you know that, if you expect that, it changes - something, somehow - it has to still obey the Law that you can't expect to end up convinced of what the Conspiracy shows you - they can only win if they take you unawares, but if you correctly guess what the Conspiracy is doing, how they're thinking, you win because then the world you see is what you expect if there's a Conspiracy, no matter how much they try to show you things from an Ordinary world - you could keep on seeing evidence that favored Ordinary and go on shifting towards Ordinary and then look back at all the shifts, too many shifts, and realize something was wrong -

No, that's not right, that doesn't feel like the way the math has to work, 'look back on the math and realize something's wrong' isn't something she can prove with numbers and everything else on Keltham's list is -

Asmodia: There are three minutes left on her allocated hour when Asmodia looks up from the example she was building for herself, about somebody who wants to convince you who murdered somebody else, and the clues are all ways that a coin-spin can land, and they're only telling you about the coin-spins that landed Queen and none of the ones that landed Text.

She feels exultant and strangely calm at the same time.

She was right.  #7 is the key.  Not just a key, the key.  Maybe there are much more complicated things that true dath ilani know about this game, but Asmodia has the key to the basic rules.

It's very simple, in the end:  The probability of the coin landing Queen on the third coin-spin isn't the same as the probability of somebody telling you about how the third coin-spin landed Queen.

Maybe in the end it's just common sense about how lying works if you're not being blatant about it, except that now Asmodia knows how to mate that common sense with the dath ilani numbers that they use to track the subtle shifts of probability.

Keltham isn't just thinking about what the Conspiracy is showing him, telling him.  He's thinking about the probability that the world he's inside decides to show him and tell him those things.

If Keltham can figure out which facts the Conspiracy would choose to reveal to him, and he predicts that accurately, he'll learn he's inside the Conspiracy world.  You can't expect to be convinced of things by a Conspiracy that you know is a Conspiracy.  Not unless they pass some test that the true Conspiracy shouldn't be able to pass, like, you can believe someone about who the murderer is, if they show you all the coinspins, or even if they show you enough coinspins that the hidden ones couldn't matter even if they were all Text.

If the dath ilani correctly imagines the Conspiracy, if they figure out the rules the Conspiracy is actually following, they win; unless the Conspiracy following those rules is truly indistinguishable to them from the Ordinary world, and then it's a tie.  And that's a contest Cheliax has already lost, because they've already screwed up alter-Cheliax a few times and Keltham may remember those.

If Asmodia can figure out what Keltham is thinking and - not show him a Conspiracy that picks which coinflips it shows in a way that Keltham can figure out - if the true Conspiracy is still using rules Keltham hasn't figured out - then she can convince Keltham of the Ordinary world, make him shift his probabilities in that direction.  Which she has now proven, can only happen if Keltham wouldn't predict that, even thinking himself to be in the Conspiracy world the way that he currently suspects the Conspiracy to work.

...it's inherently a losing game.  The more she shows Keltham, day after day, the more Keltham knows how the Conspiracy must be thinking, if there is in fact a Conspiracy.  Everything she commands will carry the signature of the way Asmodia thinks, because she can't actually contain the whole alter-Cheliax within herself and truthfully.  And if Keltham ever imagines Asmodia fully, if he sees enough the true shape of the shadowy hypothetical being playing against him, he wins.

But she can try to lose very slowly.  Maybe, even, slowly enough.

That is the game between dath ilani; and if Asmodia isn't one herself, well, she is no longer entirely not one, either.

Asmodia: "I'm done," Asmodia says to Ione.  "You can go now, unless you want to hang around for forty-five minutes in case I want somebody to bounce ideas off for the game against Keltham."

There's a strange feeling of emptiness to go with the exultation.  Everything else she can do in the next forty-five minutes, working out more details of the game to play against Keltham, none of that is going to be as exciting as this.

Maybe the Grand High Priestess's puzzle will be more exciting.

The thought brings with it a chill of fear... no, she was told she wouldn't be hurt as long as she wasn't incredibly stupid.  Being lent the Crown of the Most High isn't something that happens to you when your life is ending.

Will the Most High understand how much she's achieved?  No, she was told that Sevar would judge it.  And Sevar, Asmodia thinks, Sevar will understand.

Ione Sala: "I wouldn't mind sticking around for forty-five minutes.  Just to see, in my capacity as touched of Nethys, whether you explode."

Asmodia: It's hard to shift gears, from the math where things get solved and stay solved, to the real world where she has to play a slowly losing game against Keltham, full of particulars.

"So what's the most important thing we've got to make Keltham think next, according to Ione?  Feel free to deliver a prophecy about it, if that helps."

Ione Sala: "I mean, I would have answered that differently before, but right now, after watching you, I'd say the most important thing we want to convince Keltham about is that - for some reason - and I don't envy you your new job making this sound convincing and just as probable in Ordinary as in Conspiracy - in alter-Cheliax it's an incredibly bad idea for Keltham to ask us for a Fox's Cunning, even though everybody around him is getting them all the time and they look really helpful and fun."

Asmodia: All the exultation is quenched in an instant by icy water in her veins.

She doesn't get to keep the Crown of the Most High.

And even if she did, if Fox's Cunning plus Owl's Wisdom does to Keltham, anything like what it does to her -

They could lose at any time.  Any instant.  They can't have a plausible story ready to give Keltham when he asks for a Fox's Cunning, because Keltham is always walking around carrying the Conspiracy inside his head, and a plausible story is going to sound exactly like what the Conspiracy wants him to believe.  They need to show him something that convinces him he doesn't want a Fox's Cunning, beforehand, and he will know that it's something that the Conspiracy would want him to believe.

But they have one advantage.  They have an advantage, if Keltham is giving them an accurate picture of how he's thought so far, Keltham might credit, maybe, that in the Conspiracy world, Cheliax would never be crazy enough to tell him that Fox's Cunning or Intelligence headbands even existed.  Which, to be clear, they absolutely should not have.

Though - if they lean on that, here - Keltham then learns a further true fact about the Conspiracy, in the world where the Conspiracy is real.  He learns that they are learning as they go, that they were stupid enough at the start to tell him about Fox's Cunning but then changed their minds later; in the world where the Conspiracy existed, that will obviously be what happened inside the Conspiracy, even if it seems improbable and shifts belief in the Conspiracy downward for that moment.  He'll think the Conspiracy is less probable, for the moment; but inside that hypothesis, knowing that takes him closer to the real Cheliax, closer to the truth about Asmodia playing the game against him.

It's still a forced move in the game.  If Keltham gets a simultaneous Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom, Cheliax loses.  It's probably that simple.  Why hasn't he asked for that already?

"Yeah," Asmodia says out loud.  "Stick around, Ione.  Security, I need Sevar in this room, or if she can't be here then I need messages passed fast enough for two-way conversation."

lintamande: "After Carissa showed me the contract," Meritxell says, "I asked her what to expect, and she said 'that would be spoilers'. She would not have said that a week ago. You are a sadism influence."

Keltham: "Would you have wanted Carissa to tell you in advance about my amazing shirt?  Clearly not.  Then obviously she shouldn't have told you anything else either.  Even a dath ilani child could prove that conclusion from that premise."

lintamande: "I didn't say you were a bad influence. Just a sadistic one. And an Evil one. Who would imagine we of the Evillest country in the world would have so much Evil to learn from dath ilan."

dath ilan: Keltham has been, among other things, repeatedly comparing Meritxell to his shirt, claiming that his shirt is much better than her, noting that it has zippers, asking if she has zippers, and examining her (unclothed) form and trying to further unzip her in various ways, most of which have not been working.

Keltham: "Well, since you said you weren't much into physical pain, I thought I'd try inflicting nonphysical pain and see how that worked for both of us."

lintamande: Meritxell is incredibly confused? There's no correspondence whatsoever between enjoying whipping people and enjoying banter? They're just completely different categories? She has absolutely no idea if she'd be this confused in alter Cheliax, or if she'd be able to hide in alter Cheliax. Stupid alter Cheliax is really ruining her sex life at this point. 

"Well, I liked it," some version of Meritxell generated by some process or other inside the real Meritxell says aloud, and giggles. 

Keltham: "Well, I expect, though not with certainty, that this never allows me to fall in love with you.  But I suppose it permits you to be an acceptable shirt to wear sometimes."

lintamande: "I don't actually get why you won't hurt me, if you want to, and I want you to, if that's how you fall in love with people."

Keltham: "It's the response to the pain that matters to my 'gendertrope', I think, not just inflicting the pain itself.  Limiting case, imagine trying to do that to the body of somebody who's currently in Hell and before they get Raised.  This tells you that any internal response is necessary, not just going through the outward motions.  Turns out the particular response also matters."

lintamande: "Unfortunate," she says, and doesn't just mean for her. 

Carissa Sevar: "I actually think the thing to do is to agree to cast Cunning on him if he asks but actually cast something else, if we can possibly get away with that. An excuse will seem too implausible. Is there some spell that'd have some mental effect but not the precise one - oh, I will have to ask Maillol if that's even allowed -"

Asmodia: "Why doesn't the spell do for him what it does for everyone else?  Do we think Keltham doesn't think, never thinks until the game has already ended, of the possibility that the unknown masters of the Conspiracy sat around and figured out a different spell to cast on him instead?  And Security, I request a response from Maillol now, we don't have much time."

Ferrer Maillol: It's - hard to say - it depends on what the spell does exactly, Maillol thinks - it may be permitted to fool Keltham, but not change him, maybe - he doesn't know why casting regular Fox's Cunning isn't already forbidden - maybe because it's transmutation, not enchantment, it works by a pathway where it doesn't decide what Keltham is thinking - there are things they're allowed to do more if the spell isn't targeting Keltham directly, that's why he was able to approve the spell that targets text and makes it uninteresting, because the spell is about the text and not about Keltham, because it obscures something from his perception rather than forcing his thoughts about it, it's like Invisibility in a way -

Carissa Sevar: "If we just figured out one that does 1 point of int instead of 4, then it does the expected thing but doesn't help him all that much and he doesn't really know how much it's helping us."

Ione Sala: "So how many hours does that take to research?"

"Also, what if he asks to try on your headband."

Pointing out to other people how they're still doomed to explode wouldn't feel like so much fun if it was heretical, right?  Surely she should have better instincts than that, if she's meant to belong to Nethys... she really needs the allowed belief list for her new people.

Carissa Sevar: "Wizards never share their headbands because it feels - slightly like dying, taking them off, and you lose the benefits to spell preparation for the next 24 hours. I'll do it if he really wants but, uh, expressive sad face."

Asmodia: "Checking:  Have you ever taken off your headband in front of Keltham?"  Asmodia has seen Sevar do this, though not in front of Keltham.

Carissa Sevar: "No. I genuinely do hate taking it off, and I'm using the extra spell slots."

Asmodia: "So everybody gets told never to tell any stories about people borrowing other people's headbands.  We should've told him they needed to be customized, too late now... when everybody gets headbands for the first time, are we managing to give him one of only +1/2 int, or does he get told his headband is +4 even if it's +1, but then what if he asks to try on somebody else's headband so he can see the difference between that and +2... has Keltham seen anything that would contradict the idea that, headbands get traces of their wearers, nobody would want to wear somebody else's headband..."

Carissa Sevar: - headshake. "I took one off a dead security during the Nidal attack, traded mine. I might've done that even if headbands get traces of their wearers, since we thought Nidal had tracked us through it, but I would've commented, and certainly not traded the Security the one I'd been wearing."

Asmodia: "If Keltham happens not to think of suggesting the swap the first day - and everybody else, if they say they don't want to lose their spells after that, by taking off the headband momentarily - he'll think it's just a silly theory, hopefully, and not worth upsetting people to run the test - never decides that testing it is as urgent as it was for you to swap your headband after the Nidal attack -"

Ione Sala: "See, one thing the true dath ilan has in common with Nethysianism, I suspect, is that they get really creative about blowing things up.  That thing Keltham said about dath ilani kids wanting to blow up their schools?  These are not Asmodean kids we're talking about."

"So Keltham says, oh, how about if you get a Fox's Cunning cast on you, Carissa, so I can try on your headband?  You won't lose your spells that way."

Carissa Sevar: That doesn't work, as Ione knows perfectly well. "....so we need him to run across the information that that doesn't work before he thinks to ask because it's suspicious if we try to convince him at the time, even though it in fact doesn't work. Maybe I can - be seen wearing it in the bath, and he'll ask."

Asmodia: "We don't just need him to believe that you can't take it off, we need him to believe that you can't take it off even with a Fox's Cunning.  Also him asking you to do something that feels like dying is one thing, him asking you to lose a couple of spell slots is another."

"And if his headband is really +1 instead of +4, does he notice that he doesn't get as many extra spell slots as he should?  We have to tell him that you only gain as many spell slots from your +4 headband as he gets from his actually +1 headband."

Ione Sala: "Or, for that matter, does he notice that taking off a just +1 headband does not feel very much to him like dying."

Carissa Sevar: "Do we have some kind of way to make him less intelligent such that the +4 only gets him back to normal? Insomnia, he's tired when he's awake, must be those terrible pre-Civilization beds...Maillol, checking for permissibility -"

Ferrer Maillol: He is definitely not sure that is allowed, and pushing on the edges of Asmodeus's instructions like that makes Aspexia Rugatonn sad.

Carissa Sevar: Yep, no pushing the edges of Asmodeus's orders. ...they could just make him sleep poorly in some wholly nonmagical way?

Ferrer Maillol: It's definitely okay if they're only doing that for a few nights.  If they're doing it all the time... does that end up damaging people, Maillol doesn't know, it feels like he's trying to keep poking at Asmodeus's instructions looking for the exact edges to work around them and this, once again, makes Aspexia Rugatonn sad.

You wouldn't like her when she's sad.

Asmodia: "Sevar, I didn't have time to explain this, but I solved all seven of Keltham's problems and #7 was the key, just like I thought it would be, and I'm still trying to understand all the implications but - if Keltham sees something that's surprising in the Conspiracy world, even if that also makes it surprising in the Ordinary world, it maybe means we don't lose the same way - though there's a cost, if we do something very weird, Keltham then knows that in the Conspiracy world we sometimes use weird tactics, but he's already in a world with Cayden Cailean snacks and god-wars and that's an argument we should ultimately win - can we think of something weird that convinces Keltham he doesn't want a Fox's Cunning, even though the rest of us do, where it doesn't look like that was the whole point of the weird thing -"

Ione Sala: "Also why hasn't he asked for a Fox's Cunning already, come to think?  Maybe that's the key."

Carissa Sevar: "Owl's Wisdom caused him to have some kind of internal collapse, that's why he's trying to put all the girls through it, to forestall that. Maybe he expects the same thing from Cunning?"

Ione Sala: "Great.  Bring in one of the new people you talked about, incredibly brilliant, you and Asmodia are both feeding her lines, two days later she's dead and refusing resurrection and the last thing she was observed to do was get a Fox's Cunning from Security.  Maybe it interacts badly with dath ilanism."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah. All right. Asmodia, did you have other ideas for things that are surprising inside the Conspiracy?"

Ione Sala: Wait, are they actually not shooting that idea down?  Ione is surprised.  She thought for sure they weren't going to go for that in real life.  Maybe there's some hope for them after Nethys inevitably conquers all of reality.

Asmodia: "I couldn't think of anything specific like that," and it's frustrating, how can they still be smarter than her, in what way are they still smarter than her, why isn't she thinking of all these ideas first while wearing the literal actual Most High's headband.  "Do we think we've got time for that, should there maybe be a Security who commits suicide instead and who was listening to Keltham's lectures... they're already wearing headbands.  Pela, too much of an obvious other explanation, about the bad news she just got, it's too obvious we're picking somebody disposable.  Should we have - Gregoria do it?"

"Though not actually send her to Hell, obviously."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, maybe. She can get a Fox's Cunning to do the Law homework. Do you have a specific reason to not actually send her to Hell."

Ione Sala: "Hi.  Not Asmodean here.  If you actually send Gregoria to fucking Hell because of a suggestion I made, I sure won't be giving you a lot more suggestions."

Carissa Sevar: She's - surprised by that, and really shouldn't have been. 

Carissa Sevar: "'I just don't like sending people to Hell' is a sufficient answer but if other constraints produced Asmodia's answer then I want to know them."

Asmodia: Asmodia is not sure whether she can get away with saying she didn't want Gregoria in Hell.  She is unclear on what heresies are allowed and which are still prohibited according to Carissa Sevar.

"Because we might want, for example, to keep our options open in terms of Hell sending Gregoria back later with no memory of what happened.  That's harder to do with her still being okay afterwards if she's actually in Hell."

Ione Sala: Gosh.  That sounds like something an Asmodia who doesn't actually want to send her classmate to Hell might say.

She should distract Sevar in case Sevar's thinking that too.

"Better yet, Gregoria writes a suicide note, a Security reads it, he commits suicide, the next Security burns the note, and two days later they're both back from Hell with no memories.  That way Keltham's got more to worry about than 'maybe the whole point is the Fox's Cunning part'."

Carissa Sevar: "You came back better," she says to Asmodia. But she doesn't push it. They don't have a lot of time. "Other options, not filtering them for being good: a powerful noble shows up to try to convince Keltham to overthrow the Queen and rule Cheliax himself."

Asmodia: Okay, yeah, Asmodia completely blew her game against Sevar before she realized the game existed.

"I'm not seeing - the powerful noble tells him to try on an intelligence headband?  Not to try on an intelligence headband?"

Carissa Sevar: "No, sorry, I'm just thinking of things that are weird but not obviously weirder in the Conspiracy. We need a bunch and they can't all be pointed at the headband thing. - if Gregoria and a Security kill themselves I worry that looks like they had an attack of remorse about the conspiracy..."

Asmodia: "He won't finish concluding he's in a Conspiracy just from that, I think, and it - narrows down which Conspiracy world he lives in, in the wrong direction, if he thinks that's the reason, other Conspiracy things won't match up with it.  We want that.  I don't think he will but it's absolutely what we want, later I'll explain the math I saw."

"The main question is whether that makes total sense for alterCheliax, or maybe even, so much sense that Keltham thinks it's meant to point him at alterCheliax rather than the Conspiracy."

"And what else it makes be true about alterCheliax, that we have to live with after that."

"Though - now that I think about it - throwing a bunch of random weirdness at you - might be a tactic in the game between dath ilani that dath ilani would know about?  It's something you see more when somebody is trying to prevent you from narrowing in on true reality."

Carissa Sevar: " - yeah, it might. Ugh. Maybe the best way to keep him busy this next week is evaluating new candidate project members and entertaining emissaries - I think alter Cheliax would let him entertain emissaries - how sure are you that if he tries Fox's Cunning it's over -"

Asmodia: "It might not end that moment, especially if he has something else to think about.  The problem is, he'll want more."

"Don't you see?  Wizards use Cunning for spells.  Dath ilani know how to use it for thinking.  The way you get more spell slots, a headband would amplify his ability to use the Law of Probability, the same way it's amplifying mine, only he must have so much more Law to use - Owl's Wisdom boosts it too, if he tries both at once and really tries to figure us out I think we lose."

Carissa Sevar: "Okay. 

A thing I am tempted to do here is something with alter-Cheliax having - tension between the Church and Crown - only I don't think we're going to be smart enough often enough to pull it off.  The idea would be that we were told 'headbands might be compromised by Kuthites' but more likely is that headbands are being compromised by Egorian - I can imagine the Carissa that pulls it off but I think I'm not her."

Asmodia: "It sounded like a good idea to me, if it's not a good idea, you might have to explain why."

Ione Sala: Ione is currently trying to pull her thoughts away from the fascinating idea of putting the Crown of Infernal Majesty on Keltham to see what happens to him.  She doesn't say anything to the others, she's sure that her helping to prevent that from happening would be heresy unto Nethys.

Carissa Sevar: "I don't know, it just feels really difficult, it'd have a lot of moving pieces and I'm not sure I could think of them all. If you think you could, then we should do it. - maybe Her Infernal Majestrix will help us, actually, I bet she'd be great at it -"

Asmodia: "I don't know why it would be difficult and that's probably not a good sign.  Your other suggestion terrifies me.  What are you thinking."

Carissa Sevar: "I don't have the skill to pull off a deception in which alter Cheliax has internal political strife, you definitely don't have the skill, the Queen does. Unfortunately she's very busy but I do think it'd work if she was doing it, because she's paying attention to all of the small details of reality that'd indicate a Crown and Church at odds all the time anyway. But we should make a plan assuming we don't have that."

Ione Sala: "I've never heard it said that the Queen is, you know, generally safe to be around, in the same way as say Aspexia Rugatonn or Gorthoklek.  In unrelated news, I could use some more books, can I visit a bookshop in Ostenso coincidentally exactly during the time when the Queen happens to be visiting here?"

Carissa Sevar: "She's more dangerous if you're scared of her."

Asmodia: Hearing the name Aspexia Rugatonn reminds Asmodia to check her pocketwatch.

"I need to - I need you to go, I was assigned a final task during my last fifteen minutes, I think it's meant just for me, and I need to get started on that."

Carissa Sevar: Off she goes, even though she has a good guess what the extra task is.

They're going to fail. Maybe if they're very clever they can delay their failure - six months. And then she'll have to derive the rest herself. Can she? Can Asmodia? If they get six months she thinks yes. If they lost tomorrow, she thinks no. 

Failure feels unthinkable and not just because she'll definitely be executed about it. There's something wrong, in Cheliax, something they're doing profoundly wrong so they aren't unlocking people like Asmodia and Carissa, not using the most valuable resource that they have. She's the only person who can fix it and - if Keltham understood -

- he'd flip out about Hell. The rest he could maybe take in stride but he'd be all upset about Hell and refuse to work with them further, and -

- Ione's halfway to being the same way -

- not the time. Buy them a month, buy them another, then figure out how to work with whatever you end up getting.

Ione Sala: Ione follows her out.

"You know what other things are more dangerous when you're scared of them?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is incredibly not in the mood for smug Nethysians. "What."

Ione Sala: "Me neither!  Because obviously if something like that existed you'd erase it from all the books and not tell anybody about it!"

Ione stalks off herself.  The Queen of Cheliax is among the things she does, in fact, still find scary, because no matter how much sense it wouldn't make for anyone to torture her to death, maybe the Queen does so regardless.  Knowing that being scared of the Queen makes that more likely doesn't exactly help.

Nethys has predicted all of this.  Nethys probably doesn't care, very much, but for the Queen to torture Ione to death wouldn't serve Nethys's purposes in an obvious way.  If Ione sees how that would cause a very large and interesting explosion, maybe then she'll start to worry.  She just has to hold to that thought.

...does she fall apart if she actually knows the Law that forbids her from convincing herself of anything?  Well, now she has something else to worry about.  Yay.

Carissa Sevar: Correction, Ione: you wouldn't tell anyone you liked about it. 

"How's Keltham's date going," she asks a nearby Security. Probably something will have exploded there, too.

Iarwain: Keltham and Meritxell had some very strange conversations, fucked not very hard (Security rates it 4/10), cuddled afterwards, and then Keltham dismissed Meritxell, read a book for a little while, and went to sleep.

Carissa Sevar: Well. At least one thing in her life is going right. 

Carissa takes out a notebook and writes down ideas for reasons Keltham wouldn't need a headband, in case the Grand High Priestess wants her on her way out. Otherwise she will go do Meritxell's debrief and then go to bed.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Child," says the flesh golem.

Asmodia: Asmodia startles up from her scrap paper, the current pages covered with less interesting and powerful numbers than pages previous, along with new notation she invented that probably doesn't make any actual sense.  She didn't have time to check whether it did.  Fifteen minutes isn't really much time to think about anything.

P( e4 ◁ e3 ◁ e2 ◁ e1 )...

"Most High," she says, and hurriedly rises up so she can prostrate herself.

She's going to have to give the Crown back now.  She's been trying not to think about it.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Rise."

"Security.  Give her a Fox's Cunning."

Even as it speaks, the husk of the Most High moves to tap the rising Asmodia with an Owl's Wisdom as well.

Kindness?  Don't be absurd.  Both spells will still wear off.  The plan simply calls for Asmodia to remain intelligent and articulate while speaking to the reincarnate Aspexia Rugatonn.

Asmodia: Even so, as the Crown of the Most High is lifted from Asmodia, she can feel herself diminishing, the awareness-of-Asmodia shrunk, the force of personality and Splendour that drove her vanishing like so much smoke.

She does not protest, and perhaps die; Asmodia has somewhat to live for in Golarion now.

Aspexia Rugatonn: And Aspexia Rugatonn is once more.  She ceased to exist only briefly, saving perhaps some uneasy dreams.

"Did you, in your own opinion, have a productive hour and forty-five minutes?"

Asmodia: "I expect Sevar to be impressed once I have had time to explain to her," Asmodia states.  In this, she is confident; she will be very surprised if Sevar's assessment does not back it up.  "I solved seven problems that Keltham left to us, the seventh was the key to the game of deceiving dath ilani as I had thought it would be, and we made some progress on the most urgent issues of that game with myself wielding that fragment of the Law of Probability, which I had completed myself as mathematics from Keltham's hints in words."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Encouraging if true.  That Asmodia evidently believes it is not of very much weight; she shall see what Sevar says of it.

"And your last fifteen minutes?"

Asmodia: "I suspect I failed at your problem.  It is possible I could do something given more time, which I do not expect to receive."

Asmodia says it without very much fear; she has made a lot of evident and verifiable progress on what was said to be the more important problem of the two, and she was told she wouldn't be harmed if she showed prudence.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Oh?  Failed?  How so?"

Asmodia: "I tried to think of clever solutions to the posed problem using the Law of Probability, but everything I thought of that way ended up seeming stupid to me, like something that wouldn't save the three-year-old in the dungeon in reality.  In reality, the only solution I can see is 'just actually follow your instructions'."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Give me an example of such a clever solution, which you then rejected."

Asmodia: "I tried to invent a new notation, which I'm not sure makes any sense, for the probability that one event leads to another, and leads to another, and leads to another.  You'd want to, if you could, keep to the paths of high probability, where, if one thing happens, something else must inevitably follow after that, in order to make you easier to steer.  But if you disobey your instructions to do that, that makes you harder to steer.  So it boils down to following your instructions again.  It's the job of the adult calling directions to steer you onto more predictable paths, not yours."

"If the child in the dungeon was more than three years old and could talk with the adult beforehand, or you could talk with the being who has almost no time to talk with you, you could arrange in advance for them to know that you would, if you didn't know what to do next, pick the path where you thought everything from there would be more predictable to them, if you thought they could see that path at all.  But if they don't know you'll do that, you're making their job harder, not easier."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "A somewhat older child comes to you and says that the important thing is to try to understand why you were given the instructions you were, so that you can obey them more effectively.  How do you respond?"

Asmodia: "If the adult thought you'd correctly figure out your pathway, from knowing the adult's goal, they'd have just called out the goal to you, not the instructions."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Child.  Do not fear."

"Security.  Leave us."

Asmodia: The first lesson of Hell is to obey, but being instructed 'do not fear' sure doesn't make obedience easy.  With the Splendour still in her, she might have been able to muster the drive for it, but it is gone and Asmodia is not what she was before.

Aspexia Rugatonn: When Security, to her own eyes, is gone, Aspexia Rugatonn soundproofs the room, and then speaks in a voice that trembles slightly.

"Am I being mocked?"

Asmodia: Hearing the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus ask 'Am I being mocked?' is very high on the list of things one hears just before a death begins that lasts for months.

Asmodia, despite her most recent instruction, is too terrified to think, let alone speak.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "- not by you, child.  I won't hurt you.  Don't be afraid."

Aspexia smashes one hand into the wall beside her.  Stone cracks, her hand does not.

"Am I being mocked?  This is what it takes?  This?  There was no mathematics in that, whether incomprehensible to me or otherwise!  There was no brilliant Law she had uncovered!  The asexual out of Keltham's tropes is just able to answer anyways, because she is favored of the tropes?  Half my life I searched, and that is the answer?  The only answer, I now have little doubt, after seeing it, that I am ever to receive?  Do the tropes think it wise to mock me so?  Do they think I cannot find a way to injure them in return?"

Asmodia: Asmodia does not move, does not speak, but she thinks, Wait, did I get it right?

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Yes, child," spits out Aspexia Rugatonn.  "You answered as rightly as anyone except myself has ever answered.  You answered perhaps better, for in all my shrieking specific corrections at others, over, and over, and over again, I never once managed to articulate in words the principle that if Asmodeus had thought you able to pursue the greater goal from knowing it He would have told you that goal and not the specific instructions."

"If any seventh-circle priest of Asmodeus had answered me so, I would have appointed them my successor upon that very spot, had a first-circle cleric so answered, I would have taken them as apprentice, and now - and now -"

"What you have is not teachable.  It is not Law.  You have it because you are Keltham's asexual, not because you are his student."

"And you are not loyal to my Lord.  Do not bother denying it.  You could never take my place, even had your soul not already been bought away.  You fear Hell, your one wish was oblivion in its stead.  So in time I will die, and leave instructions to my hapless successor to consult you on all such matters and never once trust you, and if you do serve faithfully you will be granted Abaddon at your life's end as you wished.  Rejoice, for you will receive all that you ever wished for."

Asmodia: "I -"

"I did use Law, though?  Or - something like that.  I think."

Aspexia Rugatonn: To Aspexia, Asmodia's detected thoughts are flickering between presence and absence in a strange way, as if she is with augmented self-discipline quashing some deadly thought over and over again, fast enough that it never manifests at all.

Asmodia's visible thoughts include that she might not want to spend her life as the next Most High's advisor, that she'd rather teach and be rewarded as greatly - or rather rewarded more, since the gains to divide would be higher - and that Asmodia does think this ought to be teachable, though you might have to start with mathematical talent far above average for a priest of Asmodeus.

It does not take more than an instant for Aspexia Rugatonn to master herself.  "Speak on," she says, sounding emotionless in lieu of many possible emotions.

Asmodia: "Keltham doesn't talk to us constantly using numbers.  Maybe if he was speaking in his native tongue, he would, he often complains of how poorly suited Taldane is to thinking.  But when he was illustrating the Law of Probability to us in lectures, and needed an example with numbers for that, he had to reach back days earlier to an event that occurred when he asked Ione for a book.  If he was thinking in those terms every minute, he wouldn't have needed to reach that far back.  But he is still a dath ilani even when he isn't using numbers."

"Thinking using the Law and the Law's numbers reshapes even the thoughts that you just think in words, with no numbers at all."

"When I talked about the adult telling the child the goal, instead of the instructions, I was thinking, in the back of my mind, about - things I'd tried to write to myself in the notation that probably doesn't make sense - about paths of probability from one thing that happens after another - and I was thinking, the adult could just tell the child about the last thing in the chain, and not the steps there, if the child had - the right version of the thing that describes the steps."

"I don't think... no, I'm sure I couldn't have answered you that way before I met Keltham, even wearing your crown.  I would have - invented clever things in words, and tried to see if one of those was what you wanted.  Not tried to invent clever math, and seen that all the clever math failed."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Ah.  I suppose I owe the tropes an apology, then."

"I will look about those priests who might otherwise be suitable to take my place, to see if there is a mathematical adept among them.  If you can indeed teach them to be my suitable successor, you may have your last reward the day after, as you will, or at the end of your days after a glorious life."

The mission is not actually optional, nor would failure at it be tolerated, but these things need not be said aloud while Sevar's strange experiment is in progress.

Asmodia: Asmodia bows her head.  "Acknowledged," she says.  All her thoughts are consumed with trying to restrain the continuing fear and have fewer of her thoughts be unreadable shit she did it again needs a distraction.  "The headband that Project Lawful requested for me?  At least +4 Wisdom, and anything else that can be found, including Splendour?  It is very needful to keep Keltham deceived a little longer, and the more of his Law we possess, the more likely I am to be able to teach -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: Wizards.  "I will hear from Sevar after she's reviewed your performance and come to a decision there," Aspexia Rugatonn says coldly.  "You are dismissed from this place.  Go."

Asmodia: Asmodia hardly needs telling twice.  She goes very very quickly.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn is aware that she has performed suboptimally.  It happens to her.  More often than ten years ago; she is getting old.

She ought to be happy, overjoyed, that there is now more of a prospect of being welcomed into her Lord's embrace without that proving utterly catastrophic for her Lord's interests.

If she'd found Asmodia thirty years earlier, she would have exulted.

Now it's like finishing some long-awaited work of revenge on somebody you really really wanted to torture to death thirty years ago, and while they're finally screaming their last, all you can think about is how much you wish you'd gotten this when you first wanted it, and how much the way you got it wasn't the exact way you spent thirty years dreaming of.

Iarwain: There's a knock on the door from outside.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia tears open the door, wondering what fool this may be, any emergency worth disturbing her is worth a message, not a polite knock on the door.

Pilar : Pilar flinches visibly, and almost fumbles the piece of cake she's holding.

"I'll leave, I didn't realize it was you, my curse - must think it's being funny -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Stay," says Aspexia Rugatonn, and exhales a long breath.

The tropes gave her Pilar, for which she might be grateful if she knew gratitude to anyone except to her Lord.  The tropes gave her Asmodia and that is, in the end, a blessing, however bitterly delayed.  For all the uncertainty surrounding both of their purposes, it is not - entirely unsuggestive - that the tropes are not as hostile to Lord Asmodeus, as might be expected from a dath ilani romance novel; and that is an encouraging thing.

"What exactly did your curse say to you, on this occasion?"

Pilar : "Nothing, I just found myself outside this door, believing that the person inside could use a piece of cake."

"I told my curse earlier in the evening, when it tried to tell me that Paxti needed cake, not to bother me about things that it thought would be beneficial to me, only what would be beneficial to Lord Asmodeus.  So I thought - when I found myself here, with the impulse to knock - that it would be the right course to knock -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia takes the plate Pilar is holding, and samples the cake.

It's slightly stale, perhaps, but better than nothing.

Pilar : "Was that - beneficial to our Lord?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Plausibly very slightly so.  I cannot say from this that your curse has yet betrayed us."

"Do not get into the habit of trusting it, whether or not it has as yet betrayed us visibly."

Pilar : "Acknowledged."

Project Lawful: Aspexia Rugatonn also needs a hug.

Pilar : Not unless it's necessary to save all nine layers of Hell itself from destruction.

Project Lawful: Pilar's curse knew that Pilar wouldn't do it.  Pilar's curse just wanted Pilar to know.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Dismissed, child," Aspexia says wearily, and, not really noticing herself doing it, takes another bite of the slightly stale cake.

Project Lawful: PL-timestamp:  Day 6-7 / Late Night

Carissa Sevar: "I have an unusual request for you," Carissa tells Peranza. "For the next two hours, I want you to try to think about things that people in Cheliax - not you specifically, necessarily, but it's allowed if it's you specifically - lie to themselves about, things that dath ilani Cheliax will have to handle differently since dath ilanism makes self-deception difficult. If you are confused about this instruction, I can give examples to start you off."

Peranza: Something in the back of Peranza's mind is trying to scream in terror about this being a suicide mission that ends in execution for heresy and then a worse time in Hell afterwards.

Peranza squashes the heretical thought.  Obviously Asmodeanism is not, cannot be, based on lies.  Anyone who said that would already have fallen into heresy.  This is about lies such as heretics believe, or, at any rate, those who are not perfect Asmodeans.

The part of her that's internally screaming manages to prevent her from asking for any examples, even though she doesn't understand at all.  Probably the point of this exercise is to see what she ends up understanding, right.

"Acknowledged," says Peranza.

(If Sevar has a Detect Thoughts up, or is on relay with Security who do, she might be informed that Peranza's thoughts are not full of understanding.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa gets that on relay from Security and wants to scream. "When you are explaining things to small children, you might say 'the Sun is a big ball of fire', even though my understanding is that technically the Sun is a different thing than the contents of the Elemental Plane of Fire. Not the truth, just the closest example they have the capacity to grasp. Many of the things we believe are the version for mortals of truths that mortals can't fully understand. Does that make sense."

Peranza: "Of course," Peranza says, feeling very relieved.  She just needs to list out things that she knows she doesn't fully understand.

(There isn't even any terror in it.  The part that was screaming is not that smart and can't read that far ahead in this game.)

Carissa Sevar: "Ione, who is a heretic and therefore wise in the ways of heretics - maybe, maybe she's just being stupid, we'll see - thinks that when we all start learning dath ilanism, we'll start questioning the version-for-mortals we're given, and we can't go to a priest for counsel because our worries are going to be ones outside the space of normal mortal errors, and then we'll end up in trouble. We are trying to get out in front of that, by finding all the possible errors we might run into, now instead of in front of Keltham."

Peranza: The screaming inner terror is back!  But it's not an agonized mess of aborted thoughts because she has a clear if wordless path to follow: just list out things she's unclear on such that it's only light or at most moderate heresy to claim they could be unclear, then wait to have whatever horrible thing happens afterwards happen.

Operating under conditions of screaming inner terror so long as you can see a way to apparently-sincerely-to-yourself obey orders is a universal Chelish life skill.

"Understood," Peranza says, more firmly this time.

Carissa Sevar: Well, they'll see how this goes.

Carissa isn't trying to invent her own list. It feels much easier, somehow, to answer the question 'how do I keep these girls loyal when they're having heretical thoughts' than to answer the question 'what things do I believe that aren't actually true'. Since then, you know, she'd stop believing them, and if she stops believing them then the project fails and everyone dies, so, perhaps she'll invent dath ilanis without being one herself. Fine. 

lintamande: "Do you think I should go to Hell?" Jacme asks Asmodia, when the latter appears to not be doing anything.

Asmodia: "...why would you ask me that question.  Everyone should go to Hell and serve Lord Asmodeus."

She needs the crown back.  Is there really not any way for her to become the next Most High?

lintamande: "Yes, but I mean, now. As opposed to in a hundred years."

Asmodia: She looks up before she can stop herself, though she does keep any surprise off her face, at the mention of the hundred years.  It's a round number you might pick at random, but -

"One hundred years specifically?  Why did you pick that number?"

lintamande: " - because I might live that long? If I get to fourth circle and get age resistance?"