Why should this last disappointment hang so heavily on my spirits? Why should I feel it more, why should it wound me deeper than those I have experienced before? Can it be that I have a greater affection for Willoughby than I had for his amiable predecessors? Or is it that our feelings become more acute from being often wounded? I must suppose my dear Belle that this is the Case, since I am not conscious of being more sincerely attached to Willoughby than I was to Neville, Fitzowen, or either of the Crawfords, for all of whom I once felt the most lasting affection that ever warmed a Woman's heart. Tell me then dear Belle why I still sigh when I think of the faithless Edward, or why I weep when I behold his Bride, for too surely this is the case—. My Freinds are all alarmed for me; They fear my declining health; they lament my want of spirits; they dread the effects of both. In hopes of releiving my melancholy, by directing my thoughts to other objects, they have invited several of their freinds to spend the holy days with us. Lady Bridget Darkwood and her sister-in-law, Miss Jane are expected on Friday; and Colonel Seaton's family will be with us next week. This is all most kindly meant by my Uncle and Cousins; but what can the presence of a dozen indefferent people do to me, but weary and distress me—. I will not finish my Letter till some of our Visitors are arrived.

Fireday Evening Lady Bridget came this morning, and with her, her sweet sister Miss Jane—. Although I have been acquainted with this charming Woman above fifteen Years, yet I never before observed how lovely she is. She is now about 35, and in spite of sickness, sorrow and Time is more blooming than I ever saw a Girl of 17. I was delighted with her, the moment she entered the house, and she appeared equally pleased with me, attaching herself to me during the remainder of the day. There is something so sweet, so mild in her Countenance, that she seems more than Mortal. Her Conversation is as bewitching as her appearance; I could not help telling her how much she engaged my admiration—. “Oh! Miss Jane (said I)—and stopped from an inability at the moment of expressing myself as I could wish—Oh! Miss Jane—(I repeated)—I could not think of words to suit my feelings—She seemed waiting for my speech—. I was confused—distressed—my thoughts were bewildered—and I could only add—“How do you do?” She saw and felt for my Embarrassment and with admirable presence of mind releived me from it by saying—“My dear Sophia be not uneasy at having exposed yourself—I will turn the Conversation without appearing to notice it. “Oh! how I loved her for her kindness!” Do you ride as much as you used to do?” said she—. “I am advised to ride by my Physician. We have delightful Rides round us, I have a Charming horse, am uncommonly fond of the Amusement, replied I quite recovered from my Confusion, and in short I ride a great deal.” “You are in the right my Love,” said she. Then repeating the following line which was an extempore and equally adapted to recommend both Riding and Candour—

“Ride where you may, Be Candid where you can,” she added,” I rode once, but it is many years ago—She spoke this in so low and tremulous a Voice, that I was silent—. Struck with her Manner of speaking I could make no reply. “I have not ridden, continued she fixing her Eyes on my face, since I was married.” I was never so surprised—“Married, Ma'am!” I repeated. “You may well wear that look of astonishment, said she, since what I have said must appear improbable to you—Yet nothing is more true than that I once was married.”

Carissa Sevar: Well Carissa sure couldn't infer anything about the world from this but maybe Keltham's outthinking her once again. 

Keltham: What the ASS, Golarion - he wants to say that the Conspiracy wouldn't be this wack, but that's a dangerous thing to think if they've been reading his mind.  He'll suspend judgment until he reads more of this wack shit.

Message to proprietor:  Any mysteries or romances that would deal heavily with magic, gods, or afterlives?

Maybe that just gets him Conspiracy-selected rewritten books, but even those might be enlightening if they give him a point of comparison to the other novels.

Carissa Sevar: Don't substitute rewritten books; they'll stand out too much. Yes, I know, we determined that they were reasonable for the genre, yes, I know that the Supreme Elect actually did say approximately that, doesn't mean we don't lose bits on it. They are not reasonable for the set of books that this bookstore has. We have a year to fix that, if we don't make him suspicious today. 

lintamande: " - well, in some of the romances people are religious, is that what you mean? I don't think we stock any romances about the gods - the gods aren't, you know, they don't have the bodies for that," the kid says aloud. "I can check if we have in stock any where the man is a wizard? Usually he's a noble, though, or an exiled noble, or an adventurer but not specifically a wizard." 

Keltham: Stories in which somebody dies, goes to an afterlife, gets resurrected.

Stories where the details of magic play a key role in the story.

Stories where somebody goes through priest training.

Anything like that, anywhere in the fiction section?

lintamande: Probably? They're not sorted by that, though. He'll try to find some.

He takes a big stack off the shelf and starts sorting through them, frowning.

Carissa Sevar: All right, time to at least take a stab at going on the offensive. If you do nothing but play defense all day, you lose. 

lintamande:         "Is the shop your father's?"

"My mum's."

        "Can you call her in, for a big purchase like this, where it'd help to have someone who knows all the books like the back of their hand?"

"Call her in how?"

       "Well, is she in the back room taking a nap, or at the market, or -"

"Wealdays she takes off. Sometimes she goes to the temple, sometimes she spends it with Tateo, the man she's sleeping with. Sometimes she goes and scribes records in the temple of Abadar in the low district, for extra spending money."

Carissa Sevar: Come on, Keltham, bite -

Keltham: ...the kid is (allegedly) not even the real bookshop manager.  Right then!

Message to Fennelosa:  All right, let's abort here, buy the ones we've scanned so far, and look for a bookshop with an intelligent-looking proprietor who says they know a lot about their stock.

Playing information games where they would have to make up a large amount of information very quickly will go better if Keltham can find somebody who'll function as an index into that information.

(If they were trying to get Keltham to go somewhere a putative Conspiracy puppet was suggesting he go, good luck with that!  Keltham didn't even notice whatever bait that was, but that's in part because he was treating that as putative scripted Conspiracy chatter anyways, in the world he needs to distinguish.)

lintamande: Acknowledged, says Fennelosa, and he resumes the argument about the price of the books.

Keltham: Keltham will wait it out.  He's not that fond of overpaying for large quantities of books.

lintamande: "The way I see it," the boy says, "you're a powerful wizard and you're in a hurry for mysterious reasons so you aren't actually going to leave all your precious books here if they're four gold apiece."

      "I can get them somewhere else for two, disguised as not a powerful wizard, so I absolutely might be ordered to do that. He didn't find what he was looking for anyway, this is just for completeness."

".....two gold apiece and you tell me the big secret mystery of who you work for and what he wants with romances where someone dies and gets raised."

      "No deal. Two gold apiece and I get back to defending your stupid ass from demons and Kuthites, how about that."

"Absalom can defend itself just fine, thanks."

      "Two gold apiece for the books and two gold for you to buy yourself a treat, or a girl, whatever."

".....hmmmm."

       "Final offer, if you don't take it I will forcefully recommend to my mysterious patron that we leave without buying anything."

"Fine."

Keltham: ...maybe that proof his students gave for corporations being impossible in Golarion, because people would just bribe each other to act against corporate interests, was, in fact, correct.

lintamande: Different bookshop! By the time they reach it they've made arrangements with the proprietor, a kindly old man who will happily fish out a large number of romances and mysteries that involve magic, priests, or resurrection.

Keltham: Not the question Keltham starts with; he wants a book critical of Cheliax, ideally opened fairly straight to a section with the criticism.

lintamande: "- but of course, young man, let me get it from the back room. I keep all the politically sensitive material in the back room, you know, so no one can say I was flaunting it."

He leaves, and returns shortly with On The Manifest Failures Of Character And Leadership Of Abrogail Thrune. It's stolen more or less wholesale from a popular critique of Taldor's Grand Prince with the city names changed, but if anything they're currently thinking that's safer than trying to compose well-written critiques.

Keltham: ...somebody wrote an ENTIRE BOOK critical of ABROGAIL PERSONALLY.  Who DOES that.  Who the ASS does that?  How does Abrogail live on a planet like this?

Message:  Book critical of Cheliax not of Abrogail personally.

lintamande: ....sorry, what?

Keltham: Message:  I'm looking for books critical of policies and choices of Cheliax, the country.  Abrogail Thrune's character and leadership would only matter insofar as that led to Cheliax having bad policy stances, and I'd want the focus to be on Cheliax's policy stances rather than what somebody had to say about a person.

lintamande: "- that's just ....not really how criticisms of a country are written? You either write that the King is wise and being misled by unwise advisors, or, as the author of On The Manifest Failures Of Character And Leadership Of Abrogail Thrune, you write about how the King is bad at their job. Or you write about the necessity of uniting to exterminate the people of Cheliax, but I actually don't stock that kind of nonsense, I think it's deleterious to the national character."

Keltham: "...do you have any books critical of Cheliax which don't contain the sub-phrase 'Abrogail Thrune' in the title."

He can't buy this shit.  It's not just the implied disservice to Abrogail of rewarding an author who did that, it's the near-certainty that everything in the book is going to be wrong.  Sane people don't give books titles like that.

lintamande: "I assume you do not want a similar book on her predecessor?"

Keltham: "Her predecessor?"

lintamande: "Infrexus Thrune? When he was in power I had brisk sales of "The Scandals And Idiocy of Infrexus Thrune" and after his death I did well with "The Best Thing Infrexus Thrune Ever Did For Cheliax Was Drown" though if I still have any copies they'll be hard to find, they stopped selling well a decade ago."

Keltham: "Sorry, I'm not as familiar with Chelish history as I should be.  Infrexus Thrune drowned and then - his daughter Abrogail inherited the country?"

lintamande: " - his niece, and, no, there was a civil war which she won. Do you just want - an ordinary history of Cheliax, maybe -"

Keltham: "I'll take up to twenty different ones, if you've got that many."

lintamande: "I assume that doesn't count different editions of the textbooks issued in Chelish schools? I have ten of those alone but they only change a bit here and there, most years."

Keltham: "Sure, I'll take them all."  He's impressed with the putative Conspiracy if they've produced a textbook series with slight variations like that - though Asmodia is that smart, as is Carissa for that matter.  "What else you got?"

lintamande: "A Tactical Account Of Thee Chelish Civil War, I don't know if military history is an interest of yours but it's acclaimed as a very well-researched work of military history, How The Church Claimed Cheliax, also mostly a military history but focused on the involvement of the church of Asmodeus, The Revival of the Empire, which I thought was shlocky nonsense, Avistan's Queen which gets indecorous in places but has some interesting details about court in Egorian..."

Keltham: "That's four.  Anything else?  Reign of whatwashisname the drowned guy?  By the way how does drowning manage to be a permanent problem around here?"

lintamande: " - he was drowned by his personal guard when they decided to go in for Abrogail. It wasn't itself militarily decisive, but, well, when that's how you die you can't particularly expect coming back to go well."

Keltham: Okay, that's kind of, um.  Attractive and worrying at the same time, really.

"Any other books on Cheliax, critical or otherwise."

lintamande: "I have specialty trade publications? Chelish grain imports by year for the last decade, Chelish wizarding education, Chelish military contracts..."

Keltham: "I'll take those too.  But just the four books on Cheliax, aside from the textbooks and trade publications?  Can you bring those out?"

A loss of internal cognitive control, a flash of betrayed thought; Keltham is planning to ask for literally any other books at all putatively by any of those authors.

lintamande: That's very good to have advance warning of because they did not attribute those books to specific noted historians but they totally can do that on ten seconds' notice.

Out he comes with the four books.

Keltham: Then he'll ask the question he was planning to ask.

Asmodia: A wordless flash of insight - people having different probabilities of using particular words, phrasings - it doesn't have to be that exact thing it just has to be any Law known to the far more literate dath ilan - or just wordless style or sheer assessed Intelligence -

KELTHAM MAY HAVE WAYS OF DETERMINING WHETHER TWO BOOKS ARE REALLY BY THE SAME AUTHOR!

Carissa Sevar: Yes, occurred to me too. Just the way teachers deliver the same lecture differently, it doesn't have to involve any Law. The actual author of one of them also authored a fake history of Andoran and a fake history of Galt for us, and another one's going to have been coauthored.

Carissa is not in general faster than Asmodia to Wall concerns, but with the headband on she sure is.

lintamande: "Oh, yes," the proprietor says. "- the author of The Revival of the Empire wrote a few other histories, which I thought were if anything even worse - I stock the ones for Andoran and Galt because people like reading those, they sell well, but they don't like reading the one about Absalom because it's so inaccurate, which should really make them think, if you ask me. And A Tactical Account Of Thee Chelish Civil War is coauthored by a Chelish general and the military historian Kaaris Thembley, and I know Thembley's put out one on the Galtan Revolution as well, though I don't  have it in stock."

Keltham: He'll take those, then!  Sure, the Conspiracy could've thought of that, but it's more competence than they necessarily needed to have.  1.7x to Ordinary or so.

Keltham: - now how many similar books does he have about Taldor, Osirion, or Nex?

lintamande: "Well, not the textbooks, since they don't have standardized education. I've got - let me see for you - eight volumes on the Nex-Geb war, A Guided Tour Of the Mana Wastes, Magic in Quantium, The Last True Princes of Taldor, Rot Behind The Great Walls - that's Taldor - Taldor's War With Qadira in six volumes... Osirion: In The Shadows of Giants, Osirion Land of the Pharaohs.... and trade publications for all of them, I suppose."

Keltham: All right then.  He'll pick all of those up.

How much does he have about theology, alignment, afterlives, such that Asmodeus or Hell would have significant coverage, like, at least one-twelfth of the book?

lintamande: "Asmodeus isn't a big god here in Absalom. I've got Asmodean Teachings, and Towards an Asmodean State, and then it'd be - harder to assure you you're getting a twelfth of the book, say, if I sold you The War That Made The World - about the sealing of Rovagug - or On Earthfall And How Civilization Survived It, which is largely about the gods who perished in Earthfall though it does discuss all the other ones who were around - or The Death Of Aroden -"

Keltham: That's five books with noticeable sections on Asmodeus, Lawful Evil, or Hell.

He'll take those, sure.

Any more?

Asmodia: A wordless vision of a cloud of density -

There's fewer alignments than countries!  Alignments are relevant in all the places including Absalom!  There should be more books talking about Lawful Evil in this shop then there are books about Cheliax or Nex!

lintamande: "Oh, I don't know how I forgot it, Guide To Devils And Indentures. For people thinking of selling their souls. I'm sure I have a copy somewhere, the Church releases updated versions of that regularly - hey, wizard fellow, can you spare an old man a Locate Object, I genuinely have no idea where I filed Guide To Devils -"

"Didn't prepare it," says Fennelosa irritably. 

"Should I go look for it?"

Carissa Sevar: A possible lie is that the Church formally disapproves of non-Church writing about Hell, because so much of it is incredibly wrong and misleading, sometimes hazardously so. What do you think, Asmodia.

Asmodia: He's going to consider the likelihood that Conspiracy doesn't want there to be any books, versus his prior expectation that Ordinary would manage not to have those books for any reason.  Then he's going to look at the reason and see if it's a surprisingly good one or a surprisingly bad one, and I'd say that one leans surprisingly bad.  If there's people running around writing books personally critical of the Queen, is he going to buy that everybody just fell into line about the Church not wanting people to write about Hell?

Carissa Sevar: Well, there's a lot more access to information about the Queen than to information about Hell! And the Queen doesn't have power in Absalom but all Absalom's churches collectively do, and might agree not to spread nonsense.

Keltham: Message:  One more book -

(and one the Conspiracy would have obvious reason to prepare)

- is not worth a lot of searching, no.  Keltham was hoping there'd be more like 20 books about comparative major gods, somebody's pet theory about the nine alignments, that sort of thing.

lintamande: "Well, you'd best take that up with the churches, son, because I'll stock the books if they change their mind. Same goes for pornography, actually."

Keltham: "The Churches object to there being books about gods?"

lintamande: "The Churches object to books purporting to describe the gods and the afterlives which aren't issued by the Churches, because of how most authors will make up lots of details to fill out thin bits of the books and then you'll get lots of people believing nonsense. Now, I think there's a case to be made that maybe the gods should learn something from the kinds of stories about them that people want to tell. If people desperately want to believe Iomedae sends songbirds as signs, maybe She should start! If they want to believe Norgorber only does crimes that don't hurt people, maybe He should mind that! If they want to believe Sarenrae marked their enemies with an irrevocable blood taint back in the time of Rovagug - well, I guess I see how that one's no good. But you could only ban that kind of thing and leave the nonsense be."

Keltham: "Have you by any chance got Church-issued books about each of the afterlives, then?  And are Asmodean Teachings and Asmodean State both Church-approved?"

lintamande: "Yes, they are, that's why we carry them. Asmodean Teachings has a lot about Hell, some places it's published in two volumes where one is called Asmodean Doctrine and the other is called Hell. I can get you the approved books for most of the other afterlives except Abaddon, Norgorber's church doesn't bother putting one out and I've never bothered looking farther. It's not exactly a bestseller."

Keltham: It would explain why Ione couldn't find books of comparative theology either.

It also sounds an awful lot like an excuse.

And if the Conspiracy isn't trying to deliberately misdirect Keltham's attention - and they weren't that clever, at the first point when books of comparative theology started not being in the archduke's villa or the Ostenso library - then it implies that the Conspiracy is trying to hide something about afterlives, gods, and theology.

It feels like the worst news of the day, so far, worse than Ione not being in her usual place in the library, to the point where he should wait for it to stop feeling bad before he tries to put numbers on it.  This can't be that improbable in Ordinary, right?

Keltham will take the standard set of Church books then.

On to fiction.  What's has the proprietor got with magic, gods, afterlives even if a Church had to approve the book, people going to magical academies, mysteries that hinge on facts about magic or at least involve technical discussion of those, people going to afterlives and coming back, a character goes to a temple for training at some point, romance novels with Chelish protagonists or love interests -

...also anything that would be.  Like.  Fun to read if you had high Intelligence and Wisdom.  But that's a separate question so long as he's here.

lintamande: Magic's easy, he can recommend a solid dozen works of fiction that are about adventurers having terrifying very much magic adventures, and this is a series of teen adventure books about a cruelly treated wizard's apprentice, and here are some court intrigues that involve magic spying and murdering and so on. 

They have precisely one Chelish romance novel for alter-Cheliax. He drags it out. "If you like this one let me know and I'll arrange copies of the rest of the series, there's - five or maybe six by now?"

He's much more at ease trying to recommend books Keltham might like. He's curious what books Keltham has liked in the past, whether he likes serials, whether he likes books to be about redemption and moral dilemmas, whether he likes them to be about people getting hurt and then slowly recovering their health, whether he likes books about attaining enlightenment, whether he likes books about elaborate revenge....

Keltham: Keltham may send back later, at some point, for those.  He's - not quite in the right mood for it now.

He'll take a couple each of adventurers and mistreated apprentice and court intrigue, a dozen books about redemption and moral dilemmas if that many are available, a couple of hurt/comfort and attaining enlightenment, and whatever the proprietor thinks is the most intelligent book about revenge.

Any novels set in Galt?

Asmodia: If there was one novel in Cheliax there should not be ten in Galt!

lintamande: There's .... two about people who fled Galt when the revolution started, one in which they're now in Taldor and one in which they're now in Absalom?

Keltham: Good enough.  Not novels the Conspiracy could've prepared, unless they were covering an impressive number of bases.

Purchase it all if the price is reasonable, haggle briefly if required, I can and will buy much fewer of these books (ping back for instructions which ones) if he tries to gouge us on it.

...Keltham is trying harder now, not to think of his next steps.

Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail sends that she thinks she can do a better job of reading Keltham's mind even if he is trying to conceal his thoughts.

(She does not add that things are looking increasingly serious to her; that would be policy advice.)

Carissa Sevar: Things are definitely increasingly serious. Not that she was in any sense not serious about them an hour ago but Keltham is trying very very hard at this and the Conspiracy is a thin layer of paint, in many places. 

Carissa would be very grateful to have Abrogail and not an eighth circle wizard from the front reading Keltham's mind.

Abrogail Thrune II: She's wearing Carissa's old headband, now, and boosted to +4/+4/+4 in Wisdom and Splendour as well.  It's not nearly two-thirds of her Crown, but it's enough that she can be useful.

...Keltham is planning to try an expensive proprietor, the sort who'd need defenses against people coming in and taking their stuff using mind control.

Carissa Sevar: Great. 

(It's not great.)

What's the time estimate to mock up a magic shop in a much-cheaper shop they could pay the proprietors to clear out of? It can be mostly illusions, but they need to beat Keltham's determined effort to disbelieve them as illusions. He's likely to want them to hold items up to the scry for Detect Magic, which can be faked with Magic Aura, and he'll have endless questions about the prices -

- no, wrong line of thought -

- find an actual Absalom magic shop. Use an illusion to make the purchased storefront immediately and exactly resemble it. Copy their security situation. Copy their customers, if they presently have any. 

And tell her how long they need the bookstore to stall.

lintamande: "Two gold per, my time is valuable and I'm going to get annoyed if you haggle about it too much, I can leave half these behind and make sure you get less pay overall even if I end up having to pay you an inflated price."

     "The textbooks sell for three."

"- what, really? Why?"

      "Diagrams, maps, visual aids have to be copied by hand. And there's a lot of diagrams in there."

"Huh. Fair enough."

Keltham: Keltham does not presently seem suspicious of this; a lot of his attention is going towards thinking of things that are not his next action.

Asmodia: - do we have anything planned if Keltham wants to spot five expensive shops, and randomize between them only after he numbers them.

Carissa Sevar: Greater False Vision. Just waiting on giving the illusionist who's going to cast it a bit more practice with Keltham's weird visual, which she strongly expects has to be exactly right or he'll notice, and with mirror-reflections inside a scry. Somehow, this isn't something even senior illusionists have prior practice with.

Asmodia: Somehow Asmodia was thinking in the back of her mind that if they just resorted to Greater False Vision, the tropes would make them lose, somehow, because that was too much like cheating.  But if the real nature of the game is that Keltham has a timer he doesn't know about, until the Conspiracy can start faking everything, that might be a fairer game from the perspective of the tropes.

((It'd be relieving, except for the part where she does not in fact want Cheliax to win.))

Carissa Sevar: That possibility had also crossed Carissa's mind though she's mostly not trying to reason with it, she's not sure it works to reason about how to be in the story you're in even if she is reluctantly angrily going to concede that there seem to be story-like forces around doing things. (Is she somehow a secret cleric of Irori? Consider question later.)

Anyway, Greater False Vision doesn't make things easy. They'll need to have the original guy going around doing things in Absalom for the illusionist to tweak on the fly. 

Curse of Laughter: Okay everyone!  We're coming up on a part of this flag event that's particularly dangerous for Asmodeus's interests!

Pretty soon it's going to occur to Keltham that the real reason why bookstores don't carry pornography isn't that the churches dislike it, it's that the Conspiracy wants to prevent him from checking whether masochists are real!

Carissa Sevar: Yep. Luckily for the Conspiracy, masochists are real, and some churches really do frown on hardcore erotic works, which nonetheless exist and Keltham can be presented with them. Furthermore Absalom has an entire underground network of brothels specifically for beating up wealthy men who are into that. Carissa checked. She's pretty sure that if Keltham turns his mind full-bore on the question of whether masochists exist, that's a good development.

Curse of Laughter: You'd be right if Keltham had unlimited time to look at things and think about them!  Unfortunately, even when arguing with Keltham, being right doesn't mean you win the argument, if Keltham has limited time to think.

Keltham has to worry about the Conspiracy's illusions.  He has to worry about the Conspiracy's operatives running ahead of him and telling brothels to claim they offer that service.  He has to worry about whether the Conspiracy commissioned the existence of around the same number of fiction books, like that, as they commissioned for Chelish history books and books about Asmodeus.  Keltham has to ask himself how likely it is that churches frown on hardcore erotic works and that's why the small disreputable bookstore you find has only a small handful of hardcore erotic works written from the viewpoints of masochists enjoying themselves.

Keltham has to ask whether the Conspiracy is stalling him, so he doesn't get done the rest of what he wants to do, or so he'll slip up and think of what he's planning to do next.

Keltham will probably decide to give up on going through the whole tour you're planning now, of the real evidence that masochism exists, and go ahead with the rest of his scheduled plan for checking on things, while fighting an increasing sense of internal horror and his mind trying to take refuge in the thought that maybe none of this is real.

Carissa Sevar: ......that doesn't really seem like the dath ilani thing to do. Looking into a question shouldn't predictably update you in the wrong direction. 

Curse of Laughter: It's not predictable to him!  Most of Keltham's update will happen at the point where he thinks of how convenient it is for the Conspiracy that the bookshop doesn't already carry erotic fiction.  Then Keltham tries to think of ways to check on things quickly, and later tries to find an erotic bookshop that's large enough to have more submissive-viewpoint erotic novels than he thinks the Conspiracy would have prepared.  Keltham isn't expecting to be able to find a bookshop like that quickly, and Lord Fennelosa won't be able to.  Since Keltham was expecting that result even in the Ordinary world, he doesn't update much on it.  That leaves Keltham with mostly the same probability he got after he realized the Conspiracy's reason for saying that bookshops don't carry pornography.

Keltham won't think of looking for brothels that cater to male masochists without you suggesting that, and if you do suggest that, he'll think it's something the Conspiracy could illusion or send somebody ahead to mind-control people about.  Or bribe them, now that Keltham has seen that Golarion employees will take bribes.

Carissa Sevar: Absalom has trashy tabloids that report on the sexual exploits of prominent people. They have a published guide to all the best ladies in all the brothels in the city. A couple years ago, a particularly lurid book prompted debates -- which were reported on in the newspapers -- about whether there should be more of a crackdown on the brothels where you have pretty women beat you up. And those are just the things Carissa learned on a cursory look; Keltham, turning his full creativity on the question of whether there are masochists, in a city that in fact has hundreds of thousands of them, is not going to just ask if there's a single well-stocked well-known bookstore with hundreds of books and then give up entirely. 

Curse of Laughter: Keltham doesn't know the rules of magic or the rules of illusions except for what the Conspiracy has told him.  From his perspective, anything he sees can be fake, anything he hears can be fake, all of his Messages can be intercepted.

The only thing that Keltham can trust even a little is information that would be expensive for the Conspiracy to create or edit.  A single published guide on prostitutes isn't that, because it's easy for the Conspiracy to edit a guide like that to say that some prostitutes offer the service of beating masochistic men, without them having to edit the rest of the book.  Keltham is thinking about informational things that are tangled up, where changing one aspect of the thing would require lots of other changes throughout the structure of information.  Keltham is thinking about being able to ask lots of questions with an unpredictable structure, that the Conspiracy couldn't have traced out in advance.

Snack Service can guide him to something like that, about masochism, since it actually exists for that.  If Carissa Sevar can think of where Keltham should look to find it quickly.

Snack Service can't actually tell Keltham exactly where to look inside a library's archive of all the newspapers to find all the debates, though, that's not really in Cayden Cailean's domain.

Carissa Sevar: Well, someone in Absalom almost definitely has a very large private collection of erotica, they'll just have to figure out who and then - steal it and put it in a bookstore? She doesn't like that plan at all, maybe Keltham'd be too relieved to find the evidence he was hoping for to think about the coherence of the world, but it's not actually coherent, for it to be in a bookstore, the way it's coherent for it to be in a private collection -

Curse of Laughter: Orrrrr Snack Service could just tell Keltham where to find a person who has a private collection of erotica like that, and tell Lord Fennelosa to say he's calling in a favor owed to Lady Sali.  Lady Sali is a worshipper of Cayden Cailean and she'll forgive Him about it eventually.

Carissa Sevar: Okay Carissa does not trust that at all. 

Carissa Sevar: How is Snack Service purporting to have Lord Fennelosa know this?

Curse of Laughter: Snack Service is suggesting that Pilar literally just hand Keltham a cookie and tell him.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa needs a minute to think.

Carissa Sevar: It does not actually seem to her like an impossible task, even with a conspiracy messing with you, to figure out in a large city with a major underground flogging scene that masochists exist. Keltham is very smart. Generally he thinks of the things she thinks of and then some. If he tries to think of every possible way to test whether masochists are a thing, he should determine that they are. It is nothing like what Keltham tried to teach them about how to think, to pose only tests you expect Reality to be unable to pass and then stop testing and apply no further creativity to the problem.

But Keltham is - clearly not at his best, and his efforts to not think about his own plans are plainly hampering his creativity enormously. And he has some kind of irrational utter horror of specifically the masochists-don't-exist scenario -

- no. He knows how to correct for that. He's not going to steer with that. He's not going to decide Conspiracy on the basis of a fact about the world that's actually true because Absalom, a city that has mostly small bookstores with a handful of books on history, entirely predictably doesn't have enormous bookstores of obscene literature. Even under pressure her Keltham doesn't make errors that silly.

.......is what using her own reasoning skills to think about the question produces as an answer. 

Carissa Sevar: But Snack Service hasn't been wrong before. And what is Asmodeanism about, really, if not ignoring all reason and obeying?

Carissa Sevar: We'll take the cookie. If - substantial if - Keltham doesn't in fact think of any creative ways to check, once this occurs to him. 

lintamande: Fennelosa heads out of the bookshop with his purchased books. "Requesting permission to get lunch from a street vendor," he says as he does. "Should only take a minute." And they've planted a vendor just in case Keltham wants to ask the vendor questions.

Keltham: - does the Conspiracy need one additional minute to complete a task, Keltham could have slipped up on avoiding mindreading -

- chance that somebody in Ordinary would arrive for this mission while having still not eaten -

- no, Ordinary was trying to move very quickly per Keltham's request -

"Sorry about this, but you okay if we complete the next task in the sequence, which I'll try to keep quick, and then lunch?"

lintamande: "No problem."

Keltham: "All right.  Next up, spend a minute striding around and giving me a mirror-look at the shops around here."

Keltham would be doing a very good job of not thinking about why he's looking for more upscale shops, if anybody not on the level of Abrogail Thrune were trying to read his mind -

Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham is thinking about shops that sell scrolls more than shops that sell magic items.

Carissa Sevar: They'll be the same shops, what difference is he thinking of -

lintamande: Fennelosa is happy to do that. Look at all these people, all these storefronts, that Absalom skyline in the background, those brothels over there, that man towing a herd of goats through the street...

Abrogail Thrune II: - he doesn't know they're the same shops.  Keltham is - planning to check prices, he thinks the prices on scrolls are weirdly high and that we're maybe trying to control what magic he can access, he can ask the scroll be brought back and verify it was a real scroll shop that way.

Asmodia: He can look around in the shop and buy an obscure scroll, look at it in front of the scry to verify it's the same scroll that will be brought back, that would help verify the storefront wasn't just illusion because the whole trip was just illusion - but it sounds like we've got that covered -

Carissa Sevar: The special shop can have a gorgeous obscure scroll display in the front window. To your left, Fennelosa. 

lintamande: Sure, he'll walk down this street to get out of the way of the goats. Pass a weaver, a shoemaker, a magic shop with lots of scrolls in the window...

Keltham: Keltham does notice!  But the earlier sight of what are obviously sex-work shops, in a city supposedly too prude for written pornography, has now started Keltham down the road to inner panic by a completely different route.

Can he - is there any way, if the Ordinary world is true at all, could the Ordinary world prove itself to him - obviously, by having enough erotic novels written showing the character viewpoint of a masochist - but Keltham hasn't been having much luck with his previous literary queries, as is, of course, not a very good sign at all, but it does mean that the surviving Ordinary worlds are just like that - how would Fennelosa even find a shop that carries church-disliked books, this city has no searchable index and that shop might not be listed in the regular index even if the city was searchable - and then that shop will only have four erotic novels written from the viewpoint of a masochist and that'll be the same quantity that Conspiracy faked for Chelish history books -

If Carissa is right then half the people in his field of vision are genuine masochists.  But how does Keltham verify that, in the presence of mind control and illusions and mindreading and alternatephysics that the Conspiracy could just be lying to him about?  Is there any equivalent of a move-countermove search-tree that - the sex shops could be real, the Conspiracy has no reason to show those to him, after making that claim about pornography, if they're not in a real city or at least not basing all this on a real city - but if the Conspiracy passed the test with that priest of Sarenrae, they've obviously got control of questions and answers - any question Keltham knows how to ask a masochist, is one whose Keltham-sought answer the Conspiracy can guess, especially if they're reading his mind - there'd have to be some way to ask a question that only a real masochist could answer quickly, that somebody pretending to be a fake masochist couldn't answer quickly, and whose answer Keltham can verify after the fact, without himself knowing the answer beforehand to expose to mindreaders -

Nothing like that is going to exist, obviously, and if Keltham hares off on that, it gives the Conspiracy more time to fake things inside that scroll shop.

He should just go ahead and try the scroll shop, where things might actually work, and consider what to do later on the impossible problem of checking for masochism when there's no reasonable way to locate a high concentration of Ill-Advised books inside Ordinary, when Ordinary can't even locate a high concentration of Chelish history books -

Curse of Laughter: Can Snack Service please intervene now?

Carissa Sevar: Yes. 

Pilar : "Hey.  Snack Service says that a retired Worldwound warrior named Arnsen Puddleton, who lives in the mini-manor on the other side of the alley back of the Laughing Sword shop in Ivy District, has an exhaustive collection of erotica featuring submissive protagonists, and would let Lord Fennelosa in to browse through it if Lord Fennelosa says he's calling in a favor owed to Lady Sali."

Keltham: "Can Snack Service please tell me where I can find a similar concentration of Chelish history books." 

Pilar : "It says that's not in Cayden Cailean's domain the way that Arnsen's erotica collection is, and also that the decision theory continues to be complicated.  You're inside a lot of different possible worlds right now from your own perspective."

Keltham: "How were the impending Rovagug cultists inside Cayden Cailean's domain?"

Pilar : "Snack Service says they weren't, another god watching out for that saw the Rovagug cultists, and pointed them out to Cayden Cailean, who got permission from Broom's god to tell Snack Service."

Pilar : "I really, truly, sincerely, honestly, and wholeheartedly wish I had some way to let you punch my curse in the face, for whatever that's worth."

Keltham: "...am I going to be able to borrow any books from this collection, just to verify that they all actually exist and the Conspiracy didn't just have twenty erotica authors write a page apiece for twenty fake books like that, once they saw how my book-browsing habits worked just now."

Pilar : "Snack Service says Lord Fennelosa can probably talk Arnsen into that, if Fennelosa says it's for important research purposes and promises sincerely to bring the books back within a week."

Pilar : "Yes.  I know."

Keltham: Keltham has simultaneously been keeping an eye on the scry, while this was going on, and hasn't spotted any other shops with scrolls in their display window.  Yes it could be a Conspiracy plant because they were reading his mind, Keltham is aware.

Message to Lord Fennelosa:  Head into that scroll shop from a block or so back.

Keltham will look into this erotica thing later but he is already pretty sure it's going to work out exactly like Snack Service says.  Keltham is not even sure why he is trying to hold onto his feeling of annoyance, unless it is so that he cannot feel desperately relieved, it just seems like annoyance with Snack Service is really truly warranted at this point.

lintamande: Lord Fennelosa turns around and heads back to the scroll shop. 

Carissa Sevar: "I'm not entirely sure I followed all that," Carissa says quietly to Pilar, "but - thank you, Cayden, if you just made it possible to convince my boyfriend masochists exist."

Asmodia: Thaaaaat's totally heresy even by Project Lawful standards and literally the Queen and Aspexia Rugatonn are both listening - oh she just said that for Keltham's benefit, right.

That thing Keltham said about quickly writing twenty pages each apparently from different books?  That's smart.  They should do that right now for Chelish history books and have those ready to go in case Keltham thinks of visiting a library.  Keltham may not bother, if he can't buy or borrow books from that library, especially now that he's described that strategy out loud.  But we should actually do it in case he actually does it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa's not very worried about heresy right now; if she wins it doesn't matter and if she loses it doesn't matter. If alter Carissa would have no reason to hesitate to thank a Chaotic Good god barely in her boyfriend's earshot, then neither does she. 

But that said - yes. One of the big errors was not really having a defense in depth - it would have been ludicrously expensive but that's precisely what would've made it credible. It wouldn't exist in alter-Cheliax either, not in random bookstores in Absalom, but it'd be a smart place to depart from it. They should have twenty pages of ten different books on every possible topic.

Asmodia: ...though Keltham may also, having said that much out loud, carry out the strategy of starting from a random open-page flip like that, and reading forwards from there, or backwards.  Which means we need several pages forwards and backwards in each direction if we don't want to get caught like that immediately...

First priority, single two-page spreads of open books.  Second priority, sections that go two pages back and ten pages forwards - the further forwards they can go, the sloppier they can be, because the faster Keltham will probably be reading.  If they produce those by rewriting another book, then maybe, if Keltham is reading through all of the ten forwards pages, they can manage to rewrite more of that book by working in parallel, fast enough to keep up with him -

Cheliax and its history, books about gods that will mention Asmodeus, books about afterlives that will mention Hell -

Korva Tallandria should be looped in on supervising this.

lintamande: The scroll shop, it transpires, is an all-purpose magic shop. It has a wizard in his sixties posted intimidatingly at the door. "What're you looking for," he asks Fennelosa, a bit suspiciously. 

"I don't know yet, I have a mysterious patron who will communicate instructions either to me or to you by Message."

Keltham: Good morning, this is the mysterious patron, shopping by scry today.  My overall plan is that I'll look around your shop, stare at a lot of things, ask a lot of prices if they're not already marked, eventually buy one of the weirdest scrolls you have for sale if sanely priced, and maybe ask you a couple of strange not-personal questions about topics like the Zon-Kuthon godwar.  I'm first-circle wizardry and fourth-circle divine, but am still somewhat interested in scrolls and items that somebody like me couldn't normally use.  Sound good?

lintamande: He scowls even more suspiciously, but Messages back. I don't want to get involved in the war. I've had enough of that. You can buy things at the listed price if that's all you want.

Keltham: Then let's see what Golarion has for sale, at what prices.