Asmodia: "Strange man knocked on my door and woke me up in the middle of the night, next to a Security that I did recognize, including by Arcane Mark.  He said that one of, uh, Keltham's terms, the very smart people in Governance, presumably him in retrospect, wanted to look into what happened if you put an artifact-grade headband on somebody studying Keltham's Law.  So he'd Teleported here from the front lines to get his nightly two hours of sleep - note for Keltham, sufficiently powerful wizards can compress their sleep down to two hours a day.  He said the plan was for me to try on his headband, while Security sleepspelled him for those two hours so he wouldn't have to experience not wearing his headband."

"As far as I can tell, that actually was his entire plan, unless it had some second stage I didn't get to see."

Ferrer Maillol: "His second stage would've been that you did incredibly well, and then he'd let you lure Keltham into demanding to try that too, by your being such an interesting shining demonstration.  Context, Manohar wouldn't be planning to usurp the rule of Cheliax at the end of this, he'd just literally be doing it to see what happened."

Ione Sala: "This being why everybody assumes he worships Nethys despite him having never once said anything about that."

Ferrer Maillol: "That's not bad enough to use up his bad-behavior token for the year, though.  What happened?"

Asmodia: "I solved all seven of Keltham's problems where I'd previously only gotten up to #5.  No, that's understating things way too much.  I suspect I've basically completed the Law of Probability inside my mind.  I want to try replacing Keltham for the next lecture, which I assume was going to be on the meaning of those seven problems, and seeing how Keltham says I do at that."

Keltham: Okay, assuming either tropes, or the Conspiracy, Keltham has no idea whatsoever what's going on at this point.  This is neither a recognizable trope, nor does it have any recognizable Conspiracy objective.  This, of course, could be the sign of a competent Conspiracy, but then the interactions leading here would've had a better script to the point of not giving him that scripted feeling.

The problem with Golarion is that the Ordinary possible-world is so much more insane than the Conspiracy one.

Still, testable things can be tested.  "Meaning of problem seven?"

Asmodia: "Uh, the evidence of somebody telling you about a fact has to be weighed separately from the evidence of the fact itself, which is how the rule of #6, about not being able to predict what the evidence you see will make you believe, manifests when you think somebody else is filtering what evidence you get."

Keltham: "Shit," Keltham says with feeling.  "Yeah, correct."

Well for that to be a clever plot, the Conspiracy would need to already know the Law of Probability, which is mostly not what Keltham had thought was going on inside the Conspiracy world.

Ferrer Maillol: "I'm still not hearing the explanation for why Manohar isn't coming back for Keltham."

Asmodia: "I reacted badly when Security took the headband off per prior agreement and put it back on Manohar to wake him up."

"I request to make the rest of my report in private.  But it looks like I'm basically okay so long as I go on wearing the +6 Wisdom headband that Manohar got for me afterwards, and I observe that I expect this final outcome to be greatly advantageous for my study of Law and for Project Lawful generally."

Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodia, considering the sheer degree of what-the-fuck I'm expecting our honored guest is experiencing right now, I'm going to insist that Keltham be allowed to hear that report too, while you are initially giving it to me."

"Is there some very good reason that you did not tell Security to report to me before now?"

Asmodia: "...I guess I thought in the back of my mind that they were allowed to report to you after he was gone.  I acknowledge fault in that."

Ferrer Maillol: "You acknowledge fault in THAT?"

Asmodia: "My own choices were entirely legal, ended up benefiting myself even more than I'd hoped, did no harm to anyone else, did no harm to this Project's interests, and in fact advanced this Project's interests in multiple ways."

Ferrer Maillol: "I see."

"Asmodia, Keltham, with me, please."

Keltham: ...Keltham will trudge along, after asking for everybody to still be here in 15 minutes, if that's okay.

Still not as weird as the candygod thing, so why does that feel more objectively real somehow, compared to this?

Asmodia: When they're more in private - though not all the way to Maillol's office, just a private 'breakout room' near the cafeteria - Asmodia finishes reporting.

"Security gave me a Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom first, before taking off the headband, so it wouldn't be too much of a shock at once.  And at first I thought I was going to be okay, it just - I sort of went successively crazier over time, riding some kind of developing high, couldn't get back to sleep.  They tried slapping me to bring me out of it, which seemed to work at first, and I went to read for a half-hour but I could tell I wasn't normal at the end, so I told them to set my hand on fire for thirty seconds and I thought that had brought me out of it but it didn't, I told them to use a sleep spell on me for an hour and when I woke up I still wasn't normal."

"They tried Fox's Cunning on me first, which I think actually made it worse, but before dispelling that, they tried Owl's Wisdom on me and then I was okay again.  And I was still okay after the Fox's Cunning wore off, but not when the Wisdom did. Boosting Splendour didn't change much either way there."

"So now I have a nice +6 Wisdom headband I should probably never take off again, which I maintain is a wonderful outcome for Project Lawful."

Ferrer Maillol: "I've never heard of anything like that happening to anyone."

Asmodia: "Manohar said - by comms, he didn't come back - that he suspected an interaction with the part where I completed the Law of Probability while wearing the headband, like, that insight had actually reshaped my mind somehow and it couldn't function at my innate Wisdom anymore."

"I don't especially buy that it was the Law of Probability part, myself.  I remember this huge rush of happiness and - glory - while I was figuring everything out, which, I thought at the time, was just my being really happy about figuring out all of Keltham's problems and completing the meaning of all the math and seeing the world the way Keltham sees it."

Ferrer Maillol: "Keltham, does dath ilan know about anything like this?"

Keltham: (It's feeling more real, maybe just because the shock is wearing off, or maybe it's just that this part particularly seems more real -)

"No.  No headbands there.  We don't know what happens when you boost a mind way up and then take it back down again."

"All I can say is that, if her brain did rewire itself to need the boost to go on working at all, I'm not surprised it was the" cognitive reflectivity "Wisdom part rather than the Intelligence or Splendour parts."

Ferrer Maillol: "I am absolutely not happy about this, Asmodia.  Your implied inability to wear an Intelligence headband, unless and until somebody obtains an artifact-grade headband which boosts both Intelligence and Wisdom, is a serious loss to your future career as a wizard and your potential usefulness to Project Lawful."

Asmodia: "I would now consider myself primarily a student of Law before wizardry, and might have elected to request a Wisdom headband in any case."

Ferrer Maillol: "Are you under the impression that you're now primarily answerable to Keltham rather than to me, Asmodia?"

Asmodia: "That did form some part of my calculations here."

Ferrer Maillol: "Mm.  Keltham, anything to say about that?"

Keltham: "I... am going to have to consult with Carissa on this one."

What the FLOOP does he do NOW.

Ferrer Maillol: "I admit, I was hoping you'd tell me to please take Asmodia aside and yell at her exactly the way I would if I were still her boss, on your behalf."

Keltham: "The thought had occurred to me that you seemed to be expecting that.  But - and I realize that Asmodia may well have guessed this part - Civilization's view of what she did may be substantially different from the Chelish one."

"Not saying I'm not going to come back in an hour and tell you to do that.  But I need to talk to Carissa to - get to grips with this entire thing."

Ferrer Maillol: "All right.  I'll warn you right now that if this behavior is not somehow punished you can expect her to do more things like this in the future, and in fact worse ones, as she goes on testing the bounds of what she can get away with while working for you."

Asmodia: "Not necessarily the prediction I'd make about myself.  But if so, I predict that I won't act that way for unimportant reasons, nor in a way that I expect to harm the project."

Keltham: "Asmodia, are you okay, you sound different."

Asmodia: Yeah.  She does.

And did even before the Most High delivered her the Wisdom headband, to learn so that she could teach.

In the end it didn't seem like something they should gamble on hiding from Keltham successfully; and the advantages of Asmodia being able to wear her new headband openly, after true events that didn't happen in alterCheliax, also seemed large.

It wasn't something they wanted to attribute to the Grand High Priestess trying experiments on Asmodia without asking Keltham, or, by the same reasoning, to any nonrogue part of Chelish 'Governance'.  The resulting plan wasn't one that anybody was happy with, but nobody had anything better by the time the next day came around.

"Combination of +6 Wisdom and knowing the Law of Probability, I expect.  You'd kind of expect that to make a person sound different, I think, already in the... what's the dath ilani name of the probability before you've seen any evidence to shift it with."

Keltham: "'Prior'."

...why does this seem sad.  It shouldn't seem sad.

Asmodia: "Just from the 'prior'."

Keltham: "I don't want the Civilization inside me to just overwrite Golarion with itself.  I wish that this hadn't happened all at once and with a major personality rewrite.  I never even got to know the previous Asmodia."

Asmodia: Asmodia laughs.  It's genuine.

"I'll be okay, Keltham.  Okay, and still Asmodia.  I just need a while for my head to shake out."

Keltham: "How'd the whole thing end - how'd you get to the dining hall?"

Asmodia: "The Security who knew wasn't allowed to tell Maillol, or so I now realize, but he was allowed to wake me up and tell me what was happening."

"And you asked that because you were wondering how the - it's so weird, I can tell that my language needs all these words it doesn't have - the way that probability is spread out over when Maillol gets to the dining hall, the way that probability spreads out for my getting there, they'd have to be tangled up, or they wouldn't match -"

"Am I seeing it?  Am I wrong that I'm seeing the way you see, now?"

Keltham: "You're seeing it.  Yeah."

Why is he sad like this.

Asmodia: "You're sad.  Why are you sad?  I would've thought this was great news.  I'm happier than I've -"

"I'm pretty happy, from hearing you confirm that."

Keltham: "I don't actually know."

"Asmodia, you go on ahead to the dining hall and tell the others I'll be there in a few minutes."

Ferrer Maillol: "Anything you do want me to do here?"

Keltham: "Is there anything more like this I should be expecting to happen?"

Ferrer Maillol: "You'd have had ten messes like this one if I hadn't been running myself ragged for the last week trying to keep everyone else out of your hair."

"Having this happen to us does earn us some amount of informal political credit for being the ones to take the Manohar hit, like, you don't pick on the people who just had that happen to them.  I wouldn't expect another event like this tomorrow.  Another week, who knows."

"The stronger your Project gets, the more results it produces, the more politically able it becomes to defend itself from this sort of thing.  I'm saying that in part for my own benefit, but it's your benefit as well.  Having an identifiable interest in the Project who's not just the government of Cheliax is likely to help on future things too."

Keltham: Right.  Keltham goes off to take a few more minutes to himself.

Asmodia: "Keltham said he'd be here in a few minutes."

"How are we looking on his thought transcripts, nobody interrupted me so I assumed nothing drastic was going wrong -"

Carissa Sevar: "I think it basically - worked - I haven't gotten the last couple minutes of thought transcripts but he's not hard to read and he parsed none of that as a conspiratorial attempt to turn him off intelligence enhancement, he was too busy being sad for you - bad news for the plan where we get him to ever be even vaguely Evil but good news for the objective." She exhales deeply. "I want an item of Glibness. Is that known to be possible to do - it ought to be, the reason wizards can't cast it is it won't stabilize -"

Iarwain: "Basically worked is charitable," says the eighth-circle wizard called in from the front to read Keltham's thoughts during this dangerous attempt.  "All of you children require additional acting training before you try anything like this again, either that or call in real fucking impersonators to replace you.  Keltham intuitively felt that some of your interactions sounded scripted, especially while you were describing events that hadn't actually happened and things that are not true.  He wasn't confident of his ability to tell that through the dimensional-travel unfamiliarity, but he noticed.  You weren't interrupted on it because my best judgment was that doing so or warning you would've made it worse."

His name is in fact Manohar, just in case; one less lie.

He is not a Nethysian.

He doesn't confine his experiments to consenting adults.

Carissa Sevar: "Glibness will solve the sounding scripted and it's cheaper in our time than acting training, though I guess we might generally all benefit from acting training."

Iarwain: "I know of one item of Glibness that exists, so it's possible.  It's not for sale anywhere I've heard of, so it's not easy.  I don't know if the item would play well with your nice new headbands, either, it's a transmutation-based effect."

"Am I done here, Sevar?"

Carissa Sevar: She holds out her hands for the transcripts. "Yes."

(There ought to be a way to make it slotless if there's a way to do it at all; the conventional wisdom is that slotless is a lot harder in addition to being more expensive, but Carissa thinks that's because everyone is a coward. It's not even harder, it's just more complicated.)

Iarwain: "Wait."

"Target is reevaluating events in hindsight and I don't think he's happy."

Keltham: All right, set aside the question of why he's feeling sad about Asmodia; it's plausibly-enough some mix of 'you never got to know the old her' and 'this isn't how you imagined yourself starting Civilization' and 'are you less special as other people master more Law' actually that's too uncharitable it doesn't feel like that kind of sadness, 'you wanted it to seem newer and brighter somehow and not just Civilization repeating itself' well it could still be that but Probability is going to be the same everywhere so obviously Asmodia's going to start sounding more dath ilani as she starts to use those ideas, you can't deny them that, Keltham, just because you want them to go on feeling to you like the fresh new world of Golarion -

Set it aside.

How likely was that whole Shenanigan in the Conspiracy world, versus the Tropes world, versus the Ordinary world.

It feels like a wrong question, somehow.  Something was anomalous about that; and it didn't feel like Conspiracy or Tropes.

Why did the interaction between Ione and Maillol feel scripted?  Is it just something about the way that real Cheliax reads to a dath ilani, something that rhymes with fake permanent cheerfulness in class, with Carissa trying to act during sex like everything is all right?  Permanent cheerfulness is not a trope, it has no clear Conspiracy objective, it feels fake and it is fake but it's not meant to be deceptive.

Can he put his finger on anything about why the interaction felt scripted?

It felt rushed.

Counterarguendo:  It was an emergency.  They were rushing.

It felt optimized for making sure Keltham heard everything he needed to hear.

Counterarguendo:  Everyone talking knew that he was going to be surprised and alarmed and were, in fact, optimizing heavily for making sure Keltham didn't freak out about their back-and-forth.

It felt too clean, like, giving that everyone had been doing their parts separately to keep him informed, there should've been more stumbles and messiness in their conversation.

Counterarguendo:  Keltham has had plenty of smooth conversations both here and in Civilization wherein nothing obviously disruptive or messy happens for up to five minutes at a time, and this was less time than that.

It felt coordinated, like everyone had worked together in advance on making sure that all the information they wanted Keltham to see was present in that interaction, and finished its delivery exactly when Asmodia showed up.

Counterarguendo:  Hindsight, Keltham; would you also have said that if Asmodia had walked in the room right before Peranza said anything, or would you have said that if you'd also gotten a chance to hear whatever the next speaker had to say?

WELL IT INTUITIVELY FELT SCRIPTED, SO THERE.

Counterarguendo:  WELL META-INTUITIVELY YOU'RE ON SOME COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PLANET AND YOUR INTUITIONS MIGHT HAVE SOME PROBLEMS SO THERE

He could make up numbers, probabilities, but that itself feels like the wrong move.  This doesn't feel like Conspiracy vs Tropes vs Ordinary, it feels like the real hypothesis is not in his starting set.

If Keltham just goes purely on intuition...

It feels like Asmodia had an Event last night that changed her outwardly apparent personality and gave her mastery of Probability, an Event they weren't expecting and one that they were flatly prohibited from explaining to Keltham, and then they had to frantically scramble to make up a cover story for that and weren't very good at it.

Keltham doesn't remember exact wordings but, if they were expecting to need to pass a truthspell test later, among the things they could do, if they were truly desperate, was call in an eighth-circle wizard named Manohar from the front with the reputation Maillol described - a reputation Keltham possibly finds slightly more sympathetic than the Chelish seem to, that guy is living his best life - and have him act out the events they described with Asmodia, so that she'd be able to tell Keltham under truthspell that it had all happened.  Either Maillol, Ione, and Asmodia are in on it and the others not, or also Pilar and Peranza, and, it sort of hurts to think but, probably Carissa too at that rate, because they'd know Keltham might turn to her for advice.

Does he actually believe that scenario?

The prior here is kinda low.

It's low in Conspiracy and it's low in Ordinary.  It's higher in the Tropes world where Asmodia may still be due to acquire a Special Background.  Her whole deal would never go in a Civilization-original eroLARP, fine, but neither would a lot of other things in Golarion.  Maybe call them pseudo-tropes, fork off a theory where they look enough like dath ilan tropes to be initially recognizable but they're not the same tropes... that hugely widens a prior space that was already way too populated with potential patterns.  But maybe the theory will start to make sense over time.

Something else happened to Asmodia, and they had to frantically scramble to cover it up.

Can he figure out what else would probably be true in that world, and how to test it?

Carissa Sevar: Aaaaargh why is he like this. They should have left him petrified until they had the Glibness, never mind that those aren't available for sale anywhere, Carissa can do them herself. WIthout retraining into Wondrous Items, she doesn't have time for that. She can do them as swords. - too late now.

She needs to be ahead of Keltham instead of behind him for once. What else would probably be true in that world. That isn't about a Conspiracy. .....well, if they're deceiving him and bad at it they probably feel avoidant and guilty, that's a potential direction to take, figure out what Actually Happened and then have them get caught in a lie, demonstrating they have no capacity to fool truth spells...

Keltham: Keltham's heading right on back.  You know, never mind concealing that he noticed, to see if they give themselves away more, that's too bad for trust if he's wrong.  He's just going to try asking some questions under truthspell, ones that try to rule out anything sufficiently awful or emergencyish having happened, but if there's actually some incredibly good reason for him not to know about the thing immediately, then fine.

He considers opening with "You know, if there's some actually good reason for me not to know what really happened to Asmodia, you can just say so and it'll be a lot simpler than this," but that's destructive of trust if he's wrong about all of this, which he's definitely still at over 50% on.

Carissa Sevar: "Don't say things under truth spell that'd be a lie in the world he's just conjured, where something else happened and we arranged to be able to truthfully tell him this. Makes it look more likely we can defeat truth spells."

Asmodia: "Acknowledged."  She feels sick to her stomach but can at least manage her outward expressions - better than before, with the added Wisdom, even if it's not Splendour, and definitely well enough to fool Keltham as he is.

There is something she didn't get previously about 'being more confused by fiction than by reality' and she thinks it's meant to have a very literal sense, one that she maybe missed for thinking of all the wonderful equations, one of just stepping back from everything and asking whether it has a feel-of-reality or a feel-of-fiction, only, only it feels like that wouldn't work for her, yet, if she tried it, she wouldn't be able to see what Keltham saw -

She wasn't ready.  Whatever she is now, it's barely emerged from its eggshell.  She shouldn't have tried something like this against a mature dath ilani.

Keltham: "I'm back."

"Everyone, I'm sorry for this, but I think it's better to clear the air than for me to quietly swallow concerns."

"Asmodia, are you okay with answering some questions under truthspell?  Your employment with me does not depend on it; I cannot, unfortunately, make an honest promise that I'd manage to ignore the update implied by your refusal of it."

Asmodia: "I'm willing to take a non-compulsory truthspell, reserve the option to decline questions, and ask that you probe narrowly about whatever it is you're worried about."

Keltham: "Understood."

Tap.  Symbol.

"Are you the same person I first met who looked like you and introduced herself to me as Asmodia, in the sense of having not been replaced in body or mind by some other person who existed separately from the previous Asmodia when she first introduced herself?"  That should get most of the doomy cases he's actually worried about, while permitting the one where her mind or body went backwards in time by however long, in which case yeah they could have legit temporal shenanigan reasons to desperately cover that from him, but should also probably be implicitly notified that he did think of the possibility.

Asmodia: "Yes.  I'm somewhat changed by things that happened to me, I haven't been replaced."

Keltham: "Obviously you have not been replaced by any person other than you -"

Asmodia: "I apologize for my genuinely unintentional stupid phrasing.  I'm the same person as the first person who introduced herself to you as Asmodia in the villa library."

Keltham: "Did whatever actually happened to you to make you sound different, reflect coercion of you, by the Chelish government or forces with which the Chelish government is cooperating, into doing something you'd rather have not done?"

Asmodia: "No," Asmodia states, feeling weirded-out by how much that was very nearly the only such question that could have been asked about her entire life where the answer is no.

Keltham: "Was it by your own choice that it began, whether or not the outcome was exactly what you had envisioned?"

Asmodia: "Yes."  She asked for a powerful headband and got one.

Keltham: "Did whatever happened to you alter your goals or - which god you're with?"

Asmodia: "Nothing external came in and did that, apart from - mastering the Law of Probability, rethinking things, seeing new opportunities.  Nothing like a Suggestion spell.  I want Project Lawful to be able to keep doing what it's doing.  That was true both before and after the event that you keep asking about and for the same reasons."

Keltham: "Are you basically with Asmodeus?"

Asmodia: "Decline to answer.  I request that, if you want to truthspell me on things like that, don't do it in public.  I'm not, to my current knowledge, opposing Asmodeus's interests in Project Lawful."

Keltham: "Sorry."

"Somebody can go ahead and dispel the truthspell now, after which there's one more test I want to perform."

Iarwain: Security does so.

Asmodia: "Keltham, you're scaring me slightly so please just -"

Keltham: "Sorry.  I want to tap you with a spell-based Owl's Wisdom and then try on your headband myself, very briefly, to see if that headband actually feels like +6 Wisdom."  It's occurred to Keltham that, given the supposed rarity of +6 headbands, if something happened to Asmodia that augmented her directly, giving her a fake headband to cover up her augmentation might have been something they tried to do.  "You can decline, but then we'll have a conversation about how if there's something you think I need to not know for good reasons, you need to just tell me that, seriously."

Asmodia: "...your 'prior' is kind of all over the place, isn't it?  For very understandable reasons."

Keltham: "My 'prior' was great, actually, flaming awesome, as ordered as the positive integers.  The problem was what it updated to after I got to Golarion."

"Anyway, about my important question -"

Asmodia: "It's fine, Keltham.  It actually is a headband of +6 Wisdom.  You don't even need to waste the Owl's Wisdom on me, I'll be totally fine if it's just six seconds."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is slightly worried about the consequences of Keltham wearing Asmodia's headband even for 6 seconds, but she's more worried, at this point, about the consequences of appearing to discourage him from doing that. 

Ione Sala: And Ione, extrapolating a possible tactic forwards, finally gets Cayden's riddle which really might have saved them all an awful lot of trouble if she'd gotten it earlier but - no time to ask permission she'll just have to -

"Nethysian advisory, Keltham, are you sure that's a good idea?  You've got a lot more Law in you than she does, and it might not take an artifact-grade headband to -"

Keltham: "I already tried Owl's Wisdom once when I was learning to catch cantrips, remember?  And, yeah, had something of a not-great reaction afterwards which is why I'm not mainlining it all the time, but if +4 for eight minutes didn't get me then +6 for a few seconds should be fine."

Ione Sala: "Maybe it's different for dath ilani rather than Nethysians, but there's an awful lot of Nethysians whose last words in Golarion were 'should be fine'."

Iarwain: Security to Asmodia:  Ione wants you to argue against her and says there's no time to explain her reasoning.

Asmodia: "I express that, in my own interests, I would actively like to see Keltham try on my headband for six seconds in order to reduce distrust here.  Given what happened to me, I think the odds of six seconds of just +6 Wisdom with no other Cunning or Splendour or thinking about anything interesting, doing any permanent damage, are extremely low -"

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham, Detect Anxieties, that your god gave you, gives a read on everyone in the room's Wisdom, and does that even if they're resisting the invasive part. You could check Asmodia with the headband on and with the headband off, to confirm she has a normal human wisdom with it off and 6 higher with it on, and she can block you on reading her anxieties. Also if you look at the headband with Detect Magic it's obviously the thing Maillol is wearing but more powerful but I've had spellcraft since I was ten and don't actually remember how obvious it'd be when I was new at it."

Keltham: "That... is a very sensible suggestion on the face of things, and the problem is, the fact that you suggested it means that, in worlds where more people were in on it along with Maillol, Ione, and Asmodia, you'd be suggesting that to me out of a dozen other equally plausible possibilities a Golarion native would think of, because those are the two possibilities that Chelish governance can easily defeat, where they couldn't defeat me trying on the headband."

"Sorry, this genuinely isn't meant to indicate - anything personal - it's just how Security reasoning in Civilization works.  If this comes up again, try telling me that you think I already have the tools to solve my problem and I need to try to think of it myself."

"Also I didn't prep Detect Anxieties today.  And if I wait until tomorrow, then on the it's-all-fake hypothesis Asmodia will have a +6 headband then."

Carissa Sevar: " - okay, but I think we should have a plan for if you somehow do manage to think the wrong thing in the space of six seconds and lose the ability to function without it."

Keltham: "...knock me out until somebody can get me a Wisdom headband, I guess."

Asmodia: "Keltham, was your previous bad reaction like - your mind being put into a new shape that it needed Wisdom to sustain?  Or you just thought things on Wisdom that you'd rather have not thought?"

Keltham: "Mostly the second one.  It wasn't at all like brain damage.  If there were things in me that wanted more Wisdom to sustain themselves, they were just regular new thoughts."

Asmodia: "Okay.  I vehemently argue, in my own interests, that most people are incredibly fine after doing something like this.  The sole reason we have to believe that Keltham is vulnerable to what happened to me, is on the theory that my understanding of Law was responsible.  If that's true, which I am not discounting to be clear, 40% maybe, then it should require thinking about Law and doing that for longer than six seconds in order to do the damage."

"Six seconds of +6 Wisdom blowing him up is not going to be the kind of bad thing that actually happens in real life, like Keltham was saying before we needed to learn how to distinguish.  It's not even something that happens to one person you know."

Keltham: "I... basically buy that.  All right, let's proceed, after twelve seconds for more objections if any."  Under other circumstances he might not, but it's occurring to him that maybe something is being hidden here and then maybe that thing is important.  At the very least, he wants to see if he somehow gets stopped before he can actually put the headband on, after Asmodia apparently argued so hard for that.

Ione Sala: "I was not going to say this unless it looked like you were really going to do it anyways, because it is still not safe but -"

"Um.  I mean, Keltham, you might have the tool to partially solve some of your problem here, but I don't know for sure whether you do -"

"Actually, I'm not sure if this is a thing where dath ilani Security means I'm not supposed to suggest it."

Keltham: "This sure is turning into a day."

"Ione, in the interests of sheer sanity even at the expense of Security, I'll ask for a hint, is the reason you're not sure, that you're not sure if I have a particular spell prepped?"

Ione Sala: "Yeah."

Keltham: Keltham mentally reviews all of his spells.

1st-circle.  Truthspells, Fairness, Sanctuary, Comprehend Languages in case Share Language fails on him.

2nd-circle.  Keltham didn't go all Owl's Wisdom on his 2nd-circles, today, because some people being fired did free up some space there.  And the obvious contingency 2nd for emergencies, to put in the freed-up space -

"You think I should do an Augury first."

Ione Sala: "YES I REALLY THINK YOU SHOULD."

...because she decided, some days ago, not to tell him about the 4th-circle False Future spell that can spoof Auguries, when she was listing 4th-circle cleric spells she could 'remember'.

They could've just warned him to try that before getting Fox's Cunning cast on him, given his previous bad reaction to Owl's Wisdom.

They did not, really, need the rest of this.

Carissa Sevar: And now she has a decision to make. 

Should Augury tell Keltham to try on the headband, or not.

There is some chance that when he tries on the headband he'll realize everything. His not trying on the headband is safer, that way. 

But if she were Keltham, at some point she'd take a step back from all of the details and check - did he get to test whether Asmodia's headband was +6, or did he not. And if the answer is that he did not, that's strong evidence that someone didn't want him to. It moves probability towards all of the worlds where someone had a reason to let him not. And it drags along - Carissa's credibility, Ione's, truth spells', now possibly Augury. 

No.

It reduces the odds of losing right now but it's a losing move.

Give him 'neither weal nor woe', she thinks. 

Iarwain: ...nobody on Security has False Future prepped and there's no scroll of it on the premises.

Well, at least they didn't notice that problem the hard way.

Peranza: "Do Auguries still work inside of whatever anti-hostile-gods setup we've got here?" Peranza recites a Security-passed message.

Keltham: "We'll revisit that question if I get a null result.  I will state out loud that I'll consider that suspicious and then probably proceed anyways."

Keltham takes a moment to consider various probabilities in advance.  Augury, in one sense, seems definitely very easy to spoof; they could precommit to doing something bad to him if and only if he tries on the headband, whereupon the Augury returns a doomy result and Keltham therefore doesn't try on the headband and they don't have to follow through on the precommitment... well, except for the part where Augury is noisy and they might have to follow through, but if they cared enough, they could do it and take the expected loss.

Probability of the Augury just failing inside the Ordinary anti-hostile-gods zone:  30% maybe?  Actually, should be higher because sometimes Auguries do that anyways.  No, lower, because, as he's just realized, Pilar's cake thing still works and he'd expect that to run off a similar mechanism.

More importantly, Ordinary probability of the Augury returning 'doom'?

Tiny.  He wouldn't have been set to do it otherwise.  A negative Augury here will be a very large update.

...actually no, they're noisy, but still.

Keltham: Keltham casts his Augury, effects if he tries on Asmodia's headband very briefly.

He can feel the Augury go through, this time, and it comes back pretty neutral.  Not failed, just neutral.

"I got a basically neutral answer.  Asmodia, ready?"

Asmodia: "Yes please."

Keltham: Keltham quickly takes the headband off her, puts it on his own head, leaves it on there long enough to verify that yep this sure is like the Owl's Wisdom he remembers but maybe 50% stronger than that, and puts the headband back on Asmodia.

"Okay, check passed, that was Owl's Wisdom but half again as strong."

Carissa Sevar: The girls, who could all see this very plainly using their permanent Arcane Sight, look exasperatedly back at him. 

(Carissa lets out an enormous entirely internal sigh.)

Asmodia: "Don't worry, everyone, it's not that he's inherently like this all the time.  He'll need to do this sort of thing less and less often as he narrows down which world he's inside."

And nobody here had better fucking forget it.  This was not a good day for Project Lawful, even if Keltham seems to have mostly pointed in some new wrong directions.  She's starting to appreciate on a deep level, these things cumulate and not just in ways that Keltham thinks about in numbers.

Keltham: "...yeah.  What she said."

He's worked out why he's sad now.  It's like having a toddler you were intending to raise, and then somebody puts an artifact-grade headband on it, and the next day it's talking in full sentences without you ever having had the chance to teach it more than a few words.

Asmodia: "So at some point soon, perhaps even, dare I say, now, while the memories are piping fresh and hot, we should segue into the question of how much I'm getting paid to put up with this sort of thing.  I may have shifted some of my previously expressed opinions on that topic."

Keltham: "I admire your attempted timing on compensation negotiations, but that doesn't work on people who are reasoning Lawfully."

Asmodia: "Be that as it may, 15 gold a week is not going to cut it.  To be clear, I'm not talking about the consequences of my personal decisions, I'm talking about all this Project Lawful weirdness in the first place, my not blinking at the sudden truthspell just now, the fact that I'm going to deliver this morning's Probability lecture in your place and literally nobody else on Golarion could, and that I come with a +6 Wisdom headband as personal equipment.  Anything less than 50 gold a week for me is downright disrespectful."

lintamande: One of the problems with Project Lawful is that - it feels like Ione sometimes, and Asmodia now, are just aliens. Not even the same way as Keltham, who knows that he's an alien and tries to compensate for it, some other and mostly unpleasant kind of alien. Predicting Keltham is hard, but not impossible: he's Abadaran, he wants to know that everyone who happens to pass in front of his nose is okay, he's paranoid. Asmodia and Ione are different unpredictably alien kinds of aliens, and what they care about is entirely incomprehensible, and they think that they're not aliens they're just smarter than you.

All of this to say that Meritxell hopes Keltham tells Asmodia she's fired, though obviously he's not going to. Asmodia is really annoying, see. Meritxell's pretty sure this is objectively the case and not just jealousy.

Carissa Sevar: (Carissa didn't pass along all the details of Keltham's salary plans; one less things for the girls to fake, and Keltham's Sense Motive is getting better.... still bad, but getting better.)

lintamande: Gregoria is pretty sure that 1) no compensation for this project could possibly be adequate and 2) Keltham's going to offer them a lot of money. Though it'd be nice if instead he cut Asmodia down to size. Overconfidence isn't a superpower.

Keltham: "That's an awful lot for a second-circle wizard, as I'm given to understand it, but I suppose you now have a sufficiently vital role on this project that I do want to keep you happy.  Is 50 gold a week going to make you happy?  Will you be positively cheerful about that, Asmodia?"

Asmodia: "Cheerful is more like 75 gold a week."

Iarwain: Okay, you know what, Manohar's Detect Thoughts has run down, he's not bothering to cast another one, and he's going to show himself invisibly out and then write a scathing report to the Queen about this clownshow operation, in lieu of slowly burning a number of different people here to death.  He truly does not want to listen to especially this part of this shit for one minute longer.  Asmodeus ought to smite this place.

Keltham: "If that's what it takes to keep you cheerful, fine.  75 gold a week."

Asmodia: Asmodia has a sudden sinking feeling.

It occurs to her that it sure is unusual that she can't tell whether or not Keltham is hiding something, Keltham usually has no Bluff so why does he suddenly have any Bluff now?

Keltham: Bluff in general, no.  Skill Focus: Trolling, yes.

Keltham turns to address the group; Paxti and Pela have been brought here too, now, and have been standing back and staying quiet with a permanently slightly cheerful expression which, it is only now occurring to Keltham, must have been concealing nearly total bewilderment, unless somebody briefed them while he was out, which somebody hopefully remembered to do... anyways.

"So, the announcement I was planning to make before we all got distracted."

"Bad news first, four of you have already been notified that the rate at which you're absorbing Law was, in my judgment, not sufficient to keep up with the speed at which I intend Project Lawful to go.  You remain the brilliant high-Intelligence wizards who were considered good candidates for this operation in the first place, but that doesn't correlate perfectly with aptitude for Law, either here or in Civilization.  All of you took the risk that it might not work out, when you came here, and some of you won that gamble and some of you lost it."

"Some of those leaving the main Project are currently planning to stay in this fortress and work on some new project - thereby among other things allowing those who stay on Project Lawful to have some people in their cohort they can hang out with, who are not quite as close to the center of all the craziness.  Others of those departing say they may explore other possibilities, but are considering that one as well."

"I don't know how people express gratitude here for having meta-successfully completed the hard work of trying at something you're not sure you can do, and failing, and giving up when the time comes - as one must be able to promise to yourself you will do, says a proverb out of dath ilan, if you're going to dare to try things like that in the first place.  This attempt, in particular, is going to have more of an impact on their lives than most such, and now it's up to everyone remaining to produce results which justify the risk they took and realized.  In Civilization there's rituals for this, but they're not single-person rituals and I don't want to pause to explain and it should be your own way anyhow - so, however people in Cheliax say thank you as a group and not just individuals - may the rest of us all please thank Jacme, Pela, Paxti, and Yaisa now."

lintamande: People in Cheliax don't thank each other at all and certainly not for failing. 

Carissa Sevar: Carissa summons a flock of dancing lights at her fingertips and sends them off to gather around the four of them. Should be easy enough for everyone to imitate, seems like vaguely the kind of thing Good people would do if they had a lot of wizards which they don't.

Keltham: ...well, he can't join in on that one, he doesn't have Dancing Lights at the moment.  And stamping his feet probably seems odd if he's the only one doing it - no wait, actually, he's got a Light cleric cantrip at the moment.

Keltham casts Light on his hand, and waves gravely at each of Jacme, Pela, Paxti, and Yaisa in turn.

lintamande: This is the worst thing that has ever happened to Pela in her entire life which is weird because she's been tortured quite a lot. But she hasn't had to pretend she likes it!!!

Carissa Sevar: "We may most of us be joining you sooner or later so get a good tutor. I recommend rings."

lintamande: "I thought you had to be fourth circle to learn rings," Jacme says, blinking rapidly at the suddenly many lights.

Carissa Sevar: "The curriculum says that but it was written by cowards."

Keltham: "I'll protect you all from Carissa if that becomes necessary."