Keltham: "Well, obviously Conspiracy Carissa wants me to ask, but I suppose Ordinary Carissa does too, so: what insight?"

Carissa Sevar: "I know you know I know etcetera goes off to infinity, which means I have to throw out the entire approach of representing knowledge as probabilities assigned to propositions, I need a finite representation that derives the infinite series there. 

I'm actually, on a different note, really confused about your Conspiracy threat model, here? Even if you assume the Conspiracy put all the best liars in Cheliax on this project, I'm not on this project in my capacity as one of the best liars in Cheliax, I'm on this project because it might be that the gods picked your landing-place on purpose and if so we don't want to mess with that. So it'd be bizarre if I were the best person in Cheliax to pretend to be a seventh-circle priest of Abadar. Also, Abadarans always have a price, in the Conspiracy we've just paid this guy to lie to you and promised to exceed any bribe you credibly offer him." 

Keltham: "Imaginably correct as of the moment I landed on the Worldwound, but since then I've been teaching you in particular and also I plausibly landed on somebody who'd understand me better than other liars -"

Wait.  Has he been distracted enough by considering whether that particular response sounded less like Carissa than the previous ones, wondering if they read his mind and brought in a different actor to run that, that he's failed to consider the simpler possibility where the person he tickled was not Carissa at all -

A thought crosses Keltham's mind, and he quickly reaches out and grabs the hand of the possible actor playing Carissa Sevar, before they could be invisibly spirited away and replaced by the real one.

Keltham considers whether to use up his one Glimpse of Beyond to check on the true identity of the person whose hand he's holding.

Carissa Sevar: - she looks down at his hand, and then back up at him. "... new theory is that someone is impersonating Carissa Sevar so Carissa Sevar can impersonate a priest of Abadar?"

Keltham: "How do you get that off my suddenly holding your hand?"

Carissa Sevar: "You're not being affectionate, you're not going to be in the mood for that until you've satisfied yourself I'm not pretending to love you to further my nefarious Conspiracy ends. So, you suddenly want to be in physical contact, why, because that makes it harder to swap me out with an impersonator, except once you've had that thought it has to occur to you that maybe I've already been swapped out with an impersonator."

Keltham: "So why am I holding your hand then?"

Carissa Sevar: "Trying to think of a test- no, you've got one, you will've asked your god for Glimpse of Beyond this morning when you decided to spend the day looking for Conspiracies. But if you use it now then the Conspiracy can freely swap me out for impersonators after this. You could ask for a scroll of it."

She is, of course, actually Carissa, but that doesn't mean she has nothing to fear from someone looking at her with True Seeing; she is wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty, right now, and it will not look like her usual +4 headband. If he asks for a scroll, they'll have time to swap it. 

Keltham: "Harder to trust a scroll the Conspiracy supplies to me."

Keltham thinks about whether he wants to burn his Glimpse of Beyond spell on this, agonizes a bit, and finally lets go of Carissa's hand so she can resume her mathematical endeavors, feeling a bit sick and weary of it all.  He refocuses his attention on the priest of Abadar.

(Message to Abadar priest again.)  "It's also been claimed to me that the Pharaoh of Osirion has the legal right to take any woman of Osirion he likes, including foreign visitors."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "That is a consequence of how power works virtually everywhere on Golarion. The Pharaoh of Osirion does not exercise that right, that I've ever heard of, and the teachings of Abadar celebrate voluntary and mutually profitable arrangements, so it seems likely to me that anyone Abadar selected as His person in Golarion would exhibit similar restraint. But that he has the right - that's the way of the world. If anyone told you that it wasn't so in Cheliax, they lied."

- so Aspexia sends, while still in the middle of her hasty invisible flight back to Abrogail.

Aspexia did not allow herself to think any thoughts of triumph, when Keltham seemed to be accepting the words she was speaking through the cleric; she did understand that much of drama.  It was enough reply that Aspexia would predictably continue to behave with that slight deference to tropes henceforth.

When Keltham then picked that moment to tickle Sevar, Aspexia did wonder if the tropes were trying to encourage her.

Then when Keltham threatened in his mind to use Glimpse of Truth, and perhaps see through to the Crown - nor could any invisible Security dare dart in to quickly replace it, for Glimpse of Truth might see their invisible forms too, if Keltham cast it just then - Aspexia wondered if the tropes were playing her.

Abrogail herself didn't know whether the Crown's artifact status, or perhaps the true actuality of its transformation, would let it evade True Seeing.  The question had not previously been germane to the Queen's usual games, for anybody using True Seeing would see Abrogail herself beneath her seemings, never mind her Crown.

Abrogail had bid Aspexia then to fly invisibly and in haste to check on the Crown of Infernal Majesty from the edge of True Seeing's range, to learn whether they stood at risk, even if that meant leaving Abrogail less-defended for a few rounds.

And now that Aspexia has seen the Crown with the eyes of True Seeing, she does not know at all what to think of tropes -

- Aspexia reaches Abrogail again, and only then sends the message, to be delivered to Sevar when she's not imminently working, that the Crown's guise will pass even True Seeing.  (Aspexia could not send that message earlier, for that might have told some of the Security here that Abrogail was less defended in those moments.  The Queen of Cheliax is not truly undefended, but the Queen is far less defended than usual.)

Perhaps 'the tropes are beyond your comprehension, dare not to work them' is the message the tropes are trying to convey?

Or perhaps all of the events in this sequence were only ones that would have occurred regardless, in a very ordinary way, and Aspexia is only being a fool to think that any tropes were in play at all?

Nethys: Good luck figuring that out.  Nethys Himself isn't sure.

Keltham: "Carissa, does that match your own understanding of Osirion, Cheliax, and for that matter Golarion?"

Carissa Sevar: "It's not true at the Worldwound," says Carissa. "At the Worldwound Abrogail or the Pharaoh of Osirion are obliged the same as everyone else, to render aid to anyone fighting if they can safely do so, and to not do violence to them, or detain them except in the course of normal criminal investigations.

I - guess it's probably true of pretty much everywhere else. With - different details, and the details do matter, and at varying and in some cases quite high political cost, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you Abrogail couldn't have had me, if you hadn't gotten there first."

Keltham: "So why'd you tell me that about the Pharaoh of Osirion, then?"

Carissa Sevar: "If I recall correctly I was trying to explain to you why women being desired by powerful people is not particularly validating, and I said something like, 'for example it wouldn't be very validating to be chosen by the pharaoh of Osirion, because it'd only mean you're in the top couple hundred or that he was tired of the top couple hundred and wanted something new.' I didn't use Abrogail as an example because being wanted by Abrogail is, it happens, validating, because she's very picky."

Keltham: Keltham to priest:  "Sorry, I'm trying to reconcile stories I was told.  How many women is the Pharaoh of Osirion - dating, or however this works?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Osirion doesn't do anything they or you would identify as dating. The pharaoh has eight wives, and hundreds of concubines, which historically was a social role that involved bearing him children but is more expansive these days. An Osirian would emphasize that to be a wife or concubine of the pharaoh means that he has obligations to you - to feed and house you and your children for life, to provide for your health and your dignity - and that your corresponding obligations to him are mostly about Osirion's legitimate interest in being assured of the paternity of potential heirs. It's not sexual slavery."

Keltham: "And what kind of - selection process, constraints, laws, or customs if there aren't any laws - determines who ends up one of those hundreds of concubines?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Historically, many of the pharaoh's concubines were women presented to him as gifts by neighboring countries  on his ascension to power, women who came to his attention in some other ways, women captured on campaigns of conquest and so on. But that was the ancient Pharaohate, which Abadar had no part in. Today, recruiters go out and look for eligible candidates, conduct interviews, and present the pharaoh with the most promising, and the majority are selected through that process, though I think some cases are more complicated. Qadira does still send some girls as gifts, and it'd be very rude to turn them down about it."

Keltham: "What happens if one of the gift girls from Qadira arrives in Osirion and announces that she's sorry but, having met the Pharaoh, she'd rather not be his concubine after all?"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "That really seems like a question you should ask of an Osirian. I know little of the inner workings of the Pharaoh's court. I doubt she would simply depart, but perhaps employment more suited to her could be found for her."

Keltham: "Carissa, is this matching your understanding."

Carissa Sevar: "If he doesn't actually grab girls he sees who suit him, then that's better than I knew. I sort of expect that if a concubine doesn't like it she gets told to grow up and do her job and not anger the powerful person who rules the foreign country she's been shipped to where she owns nothing, cannot legally work a job, and doesn't even speak the language. But I don't know anything firsthand, here."

Keltham: It's... not out of the reach of Ordinary possibility, for Golarion, in terms of different sides of different factions having different stories and maybe not understanding each other all that well, Keltham supposes.  His childhood training in the Way would not have emphasized so much the need to make sure you understood the other side's story, as they would tell it themselves and from their own mouths, if that was not otherwise a failure mode of human beings.

"Carissa, back to the math mines, please."

And to the priest of Abadar:  "Okay, and trying again to verify those words were indeed from a seventh-circle priest of Abadar, I don't suppose you can give me any analysis of what we've just been discussing that sees the world the way a high priest of Abadar would see it?"

Carissa Sevar: "I am tempted to analyze the dynamics between rulers and the lovers they take, or between men and women more broadly, through the lens of bargaining power," says Temas, as Carissa, smiling, turns back to her math notes. 

Keltham: "Go ahead," Keltham says to the priest.

Carissa Sevar: So she'll expound, from a relentlessly business-centric perspective that finds Law from the least dath ilani perspective she can conceive of with the Crown of Infernal Majesty helping, on how in navigating the supply of components or labor it's important which side has the better alternative to a negotiated agreement, and how differently the gains from trade might be distributed depending on that, and how the model can be applied to the hiring process that is romance, though of course Osirians don't really speak of romance so much as of household formation, along with some speculation about how Avistani gender norms are the consequence of a persistent deficit of men due to the way wars were fought in Avistan a few centuries ago differing from how they were fought in Garund, producing a population with more women than men and where the strategy of holding out for marriage was outcompeted. 

Asmodia: ...and the combined powers of half of Project Lawful have finished both Asmodia's question and Carissa's; they know now how to solve problems together that they could not solve alone.  They can give Carissa the outline of the solution path, down to the most plausible of the false leads they followed, and she need only write it at whatever speed she thinks Keltham will find plausible.

Asmodia is doing the same, with her own problem, in between looking over the Shadow Project's individually generated notes on a Conspiracy of Project Lawful girls, to see what the statistical structure there should look like, how much commonality and how much difference there is.  She'll be able to correct, soon, any relative anomalies in the main Project Lawful's stories of what they think the Conspiracy would look like; they're all working on their stories now, without waiting, of course.

Asmodia doesn't let herself think that maybe the worst is past, because tropes.

Keltham: That does seem like the sort of analysis he'd have expected from a 7th-circle priest of the business-god.  It's not even giving him the feeling of - staleness, of not seeing the new information he was really looking for - that he got from the earlier parts of the expedition.  So why is Keltham feeling not so great about the whole thing?  Because it's something that Carissa and Asmodia working together could plausibly have composed?  He tried to run a safeguard against that.  This should be some evidence for Ordinary, at the end of it, even if it's not decisive.  What was Ordinary supposed to do? - he should think of that later after it's too late for them to read his mind and do it.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa turns in her completed problem before Asmodia does, and while the priest is in the middle of a particularly detailed and clever discussion of the different incentives which produced norms of large harems among rulers in Casmaron and not among rulers in Avistan.

Keltham: ...at which point Keltham realizes that he's gotten around as much evidence as he's going to get, here.

He tells the priest they're done.

And tells Fennelosa to go look for whatever accessible library he thinks would have the largest flaming Chelish history section they can find.  And it would be nice if Keltham could buy or borrow books from that library.

lintamande: Fennelosa has no idea where the libraries in Absalom are, is it okay if he asks people?

Keltham: He can even pay people.  Fennelosa has free rein on this one; Ordinary Cheliax can put its best foot forwards here.

lintamande: All right, then, he'll go to the front desk of the Abadar temple and offer to pay for a list of suggestions, with extra money if the top suggestion is the same as the top suggestion of some other people he asks, and then he'll go out and over to the Nethysian temple and ask them too - god of knowledge, after all - and then the temple of Iomedae, who is after all a Chelish ascended human.

Keltham: Keltham is trying not to think of how he plans to check things.

Abrogail Thrune II: ...is planning to read ahead more than one page this time, do other spot-checks around the book...

Asmodia: Cheliax has some magic text-editing items by now, and Korva Tallandria has been working hard behind the scenes with basically all of the Imperial book-editors in Cheliax, to re-prepare for this.  It's down to her, then.

- nobody tell Tallandria that.  It won't help.

Carissa Sevar: Even the very early stage Project books that just replace the word "Taldor" with "Cheliax" everywhere and change the names of the rulers and cities should be on the shelves for this. They'll pass certain kinds of consistency tests that the other books won't, and Keltham already has low expectations for how much sense books make. 

Carissa Sevar: And are preparations complete for the Ione-escapes-with-Keltham version of the Project collapse plans?

Ione Sala: Sigh.  Yes.

It's not going to work despite Ione trying her hardest, because tropes.  Ione wants that very clear before she tries her hardest.  None of this 'You will pay the price of failure in pain nonetheless' bullshit, if they want her wholehearted cooperation on playing this out, and demonstrating that it can't work even so.  Ione is not an Asmodean and if Detect Thoughts and truthspells showed she did her best, that's it, no horrible tortures afterwards, okay?

(Not to mention that Lord Nethys has no doubt arranged for Ione to depart with Keltham when he leaves, so she won't have time to hang around being tortured.  No doubt.)

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is not planning to have Ione tortured if she tries her best and fails because of the tropes, or because something outside Ione's control did not work out. 

However (she does not say) they both presumably know perfectly well that if this fails Carissa, who is an Asmodean, is going to be being tortured, and is not going to be making decisions about the disposition of her subordinates. Unless she, too, escapes with Keltham.

She is assuming she'll receive orders from the Most High or from the Queen about that; it seems awfully dangerous to think about herself, with this headband on and Security probably extremely twitchy about Dominating her on the spot if she thinks something like that she might, hypothetically, if she fled to Osirion with Keltham, at some future point defect. And the person deciding whether Carissa should flee with Keltham or not should not be unable to think about that.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Rugatonn... will consider whose call that should be.

(Aspexia knows she does not have a talent for dealing with tropes as story-patterns, rather than as a kind of divinity with unshattered prophecy.)

lintamande: Fennelosa's faked adventures have gotten him a recommendation for a military academy not too far away (they decided the extra minutes weren't worth the extra bits leaked) which he has been firmly assured by the fake Nethysians carries lots and lots of non-military history too, because politics and economics and social policy considerations are highly relevant to the military, and because it's a Nethysian-affiliated academy and aims to by its enormous library attract lots of wizards who mostly want to learn but are persuadable to defend Absalom and/or the world when relevant. 

Carissa Sevar: This lets them throw in a ton of bona fide writing on the Chelish armed forces, which adds some bulk at minimal risk. 

Keltham: (While this was going on, Asmodia finished her own math problem, and Keltham collected the Project Lawful Conspiracy Theories, even though the thirty minutes' weren't up; and Keltham glance-skimmed everything to try to fix the information content, though he didn't have anything like time to read it all.)

Keltham does not really get the 'military academy has the best library' concept, but it is not outside his general range of Golarion Weirdness and there's no obvious reason the Conspiracy would do that.  If Fennelosa thinks this is Ordinary's best foot forwards, let's try it.

lintamande: Fennelosa will head on over, or at least appear to. 

It's a very big library, much larger than the one in the archduke's villa, much larger than the one in the palace. The illusionist is drawing somewhat on the library in the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, which is even bigger, but this one is credibly big. Some levitating wizards are in midair, paging through books too high to reach without the ability to fly. 

He asks some people where to find Chelish history specifically. He's told it's a whole section, over there in the back behind Taldor and to the left of the River Kingdoms. 

"All right," he says tiredly to Keltham, on reaching it, "do I start pulling out books at prime intervals and ripping out the eighteenth page of each, or what?"

Keltham: "...is that allowed or does it cause you to get arrested?  I would sort of expect the arrested thing."

lintamande: "That will definitely get me fined an enormous sum of money. I wouldn't expect to be arrested so long as I pay it."

Keltham: "Ripping out pages is entirely pointless."  Once Keltham has seen that page, Fennelosa taking it home with him doesn't add to the amount of information the Conspiracy has to create.  "Can we borrow, or buy, books?"

lintamande: "We can commission a copy of any book for delivery later this week, which I assume is unsatisfactory to you, and buy or borrow them on the spot if the library already has two copies, which I was told was the case for most of the more popular books and a majority of the recent ones. I assume you didn't want to look at old books anyway."

Keltham: ...noticeably better than expected.

"All right, and does this section of the library have a - Living Library Index - person who knows which books contain what information, and can tell us if we ask them?"

lintamande: Fennelosa will go track down someone who appears to work here and ask!

The answer is yes, each section has a responsible party at the academy who makes all decisions about acquisitions for that section. The Chelish section is supervised by Tono Berlinguer, a retired Chelish military intelligence specialist who, it happens, reconsidered his retirement when Nidal attacked Cheliax and has taken a leave of absence from the academy to lend himself to the war effort. 

"I assume you want us to go and get him?" 

Keltham: "...Yes," Keltham says, after reminding himself of how scared and worried he is in fact feeling, and forcibly overriding a huge amount of internal reluctance to impose inconveniences upon others; of which it was said, once, that if dath ilan were ever to be destroyed, it would probably be because of somebody's reluctance to inconvenience others.

And meanwhile, because Keltham obviously isn't going to wait for that, he's going to try going through these books.  Question one, what exactly happened when Abrogail Thrune took over, what were the details of that fight, who died and why didn't they just come back the next day, what changes did the Church make immediately after coming to power?  If the books say it was all very pretty... Keltham has now been in Golarion longer than a day, and has seen a slave market for upwards of several seconds.

Korva Tallandria: Korva has been in emergency overdrive from the moment that Keltham first requested books from Ione, and has been commanding a small army of Chelish writers for at least the past half hour. She's fully aware that she has been given a task that it is not, actually, possible to do well. It's also a task that the entire project could succeed or fail on, and if the result is a failure, then she's not exactly going to expect to live a long life afterwards, no matter what the queen has said to her about how incredibly safe she supposedly is. Whether she lives or dies is, then, once again, quite possibly up to Keltham. At this speed, and this volume, a few missteps are absolutely inevitable, and Keltham, if he really cares enough to win this, should be able to find them. If Keltham doesn't catch whatever the mistakes happen to be (and she obviously doesn't know what they are, or she'd have fixed them), it's his own damn fault. 

Under other circumstances, she would probably be freaking out about all of that, but at the moment she is trying really really hard to completely ignore her emotions and act as a conductor for this entire ridiculous venture. She has books. Well, pieces of them.

...resulting conflict plunged the nation into a further two years of civil war, although much of the later fighting was contained to the province of Ravounel, where Infrexus Thrune had maintained a more significant base of political power, which continued to push for the recovery of Infrexus's remains. Throughout this time, there was also continued conflict on the border with Galt, primarily consisting of a series of skirmishes between ill-equipped military forces and local militia fighters. Although some have asserted that such skirmishes were a deliberate expansionist attempt by Galt, the pattern is more honestly understood as a result of underpolicing of the region by the Chelish military, which was otherwise engaged at the time. The smoldering ashes of conflict between Galt and Cheliax during this time are generally excluded from the casualty estimates given for the war of the succession of Queen Abrogail, as that fighting, though concurrent and related, was between Chelish and Galtan forces, rather than the supporters of Queen Abrogail and the supporters of Infrexus Thrune. As regards the succession war itself, estimates of the total death toll range from two to six thousand, with the majority of these casualties, as is so often the case, coming from the diseases which soldiers were subjected to during the campaign to retake Ravounel.

Egorian itself saw real conflict only a few times, much of it in the immediate aftermath of the coup against Infrexus. Although Infrexus's taxation policies and loss of the eastern provinces of Galt and Andoran had made him wildly unpopular, there were many at the time who believed that his niece, the rightful heir to the throne by law, was too young to rule responsibly, having celebrated her sixteenth birthday not three months before. Despite the full support of the Asmodean church, the first year of the young Queen Abrogail Thrune's reign was marked by a series of (unsuccessful) assassination attempts by everyone from Eastern revolutionary agents to a small band of extremists who intended to resurrect the previous queen, Carellia. The most notorious of these early assassination attempts may have been the incident on the 10th of Arodus, in 4709 AR, in which a band of Galtan agents disguised as members of the queen's own guard managed to infiltrate the interior of the palace walls before being caught.

It is difficult to say whether a successful early assassination attempt might have spelled doom for the young queen's reign, or what might have become of the nation of Cheliax afterwards. Certainly, if the queen were to die now, her resurrection would be almost immediate, and have no bearing on her legitimacy. However, at the time of her coronation, the queen's success depended not only on the military might of her Asmodean supporters, but on whether she could earn the support of the nation at large. As the demise of her predecessor had so recently proven, the leadership of the nation of Cheliax would depend not only on her unquestionable legal right to rule, but also on whether she could earn the respect and loyalty of the forces which ostensibly answered to her. While it is likely that the Church of Asmodeus would have recovered her remains and restored her rightful place even had she been assassinated, it is also possible that such an event might have served as a catalyst for further revolt, dragging out the civil war longer, or resulting in the loss of even more Chelish territory. 

Keltham: ...okay, is it just his imagination, or is the whole business with 'rightful heir to the throne by law' and 'unquestionable legal right to rule' not only a bit incongruous with there being a giant civil war and Abrogail needing the Church of Asmodeus's support, but also the author possibly kind of quietly signaling that this fact which requires so much emphasis is maybe not actually true?  In which case you could maybe also infer that it's illegal or otherwise threatened-against to suggest that Abrogail wasn't the rightful heir?

And is it his imagination that this book is - not so much better written, really, as - more informative, more alive-sounding? - than the previous set of Chelish history books?  Or just more interesting, somehow?  And should Keltham be attributing that to the library having better book-taste than the bookshop operator who stocked the book personally attacking Abrogail Thrune, or to the Conspiracy frantically upping the level of its game as it became clear Keltham wasn't happy with their earlier efforts?

Keltham will read a few pages ahead, and then skip to randomly later in the book, and then read the page before that, whatever it is.

Korva Tallandria: This excerpt has pages before and ahead; if he skips way ahead, they'll transition him to a different excerpt on a related topic. He lands in a discussion of the early stages of the modern Chelish education system, and the transition from a handful of private, paid establishments to a push towards public education available to the children of all subjects of the crown, which also has pages before and ahead of it.

Keltham: ...why is the Crown not just offering to pay for skill-mastery outcomes and letting anybody who wants to try their hand at producing those?  Does Governance, like, not have any adversarially resistant way of measuring whether learning has occurred, such that if they offered to pay for learning somebody would inevitably teach to the test without producing real human capital; and yet Governance does think they have some adversarially resistant way of measuring process inputs to education, where those inputs inevitably produce learning, such that they can pay people to teach but not pay for learning at all?

Somehow Keltham doubts that this is the case!  In fact he doubts that anybody in Governance even thought about it in those terms!  Somebody get a seventh-circle priest of Abadar in here!  'Never pay for the input when you can pay for the output, and if you can't robustly measure outputs you probably can't robustly measure inputs either,' goes the saying out of dath ilan.

It's still a good book, though.  Is it for sale, or borrowable?

lintamande: He'll ask! 

They don't have a second copy of that one at this time. Two gold to commission one. 

        "What's the fastest you could get me a commissioned copy? If I commission a copy, and pay triple, can I take this one just for today?"

"....no, sir, because we'd be using this one to make the copy."

At this point Berlinguer walks in. He's a plump elderly man whose eyebrows look a bit singed. "Fennelosa! I hear you urgently need me for something?"

     "Consultation on the books. It's a long story."

Keltham: All right, now he can try for more of a pattern of queries and answers that should be harder for Cheliax to have completely covered by trying to write books in advance.

Book with more detail on the specific aid provided by Asmodeus's Church to Abrogail, what concessions or policies they demanded in return.  Does Berlinguer know where to locate something like that?

lintamande: "Military aid provided in the war?" Here they've aggressively repurposed a lot of books about the original Chelish Civil War, where, thank Hell, House Thrune was led by Abrogail's grandmother also named Abrogail. "The best source is Campaigns of the Chelish Civil War, which is in two volumes, should be right over here..." He pulls them out. "We also have Hell Shows Its Hand, which is much more popular but, I think, worse, and Avistan's Queen. If you're interested in a more academic lens I like 'a realist account of the Chelish civil conflict'."

Keltham: "What exactly is a non-realist account - never mind, let's just try the 'realist' one."

lintamande: He pulls it off a shelf. "Realism is probably at your level of exposure best understood as the academic way of describing work that proceeds from the assumption that conflicts are incented, rather than ideological, that conflict arises where there's weakness and ends with an overwhelming show of strength. Someone analyzing the Chelish Civil War through an ideological lens would study the doctrine of the Asmodean Church and write about how it compares to the ideologies it displaced in appeal; someone analyzing it through a realist lens would focus on how the Church succeeded in establishing the Queen as an absolute monarch, by backing her up with the use of force. Sorry, no one explained to me - who are you, and what's your urgent interest in this?"

"Don't ask," Fennelosa says tiredly. 

"I'm not a soldier anymore, young man, I am allowed to be curious about things."

Carissa Sevar: The banter is very well-executed but it won't help at all if he looks at the wrong book.

Keltham: Keltham will open that one to a random place, read for seven pages, return it.

Keltham will then have the thought that next time he needs to just flip through a lot of pages rapidly, skimming just enough to verify rough continuity of text and subject, to avert the Conspiracy being able to cheaply manufacture a bunch of short excerpts.

Unfortunately, Keltham is juggling a lot of cognitive balls right now, and has temporarily forgotten the juggling ball that is the Conspiracy reading his mind.  He thinks about his next intention to read a lot of the book overtly, loudly enough that you could pick it up from his mind even if you weren't Abrogail Thrune.

"Abrogail's first major policy shifts during her early years," Keltham says.

Carissa Sevar: Feed him something we have the complete book of. 

lintamande: There's exactly one book they have complete on even remotely that topic. It's on the shelf as Avistan's Queen and The Early Years of Abrogail Thrune II's reign and as The Uncensored And Thoroughly Illegal History of the Chelish Civil War. They'll take the second one off the shelf for him.

Keltham: Keltham will read a few pages for real, then (tell Fennelosa to) flip through pages starting from whatever they showed him, leaving each page spread to be scryed only for four seconds or so for Keltham to skim-speedread.  (He once wrote a computer program as a kid to help him learn to move his eyes faster, and was disgruntled to learn that when he followed the shifting blue word as fast as he could, he couldn't understand what he'd read.  Nonetheless, Keltham can skim pretty darn quickly if he wants to, and can still notice anomalies at that speed.)

Keltham will speed-skim about a hundred pages that way... they do all seem to be there...

Wait.

Shit.

He thought about that tactic before he did it.

Asmodia: Meanwhile Asmodia is in a state of very calm total panic, considering what will probably be Keltham's obvious next move:

He asks for particular topics, and then, after reading each excerpt, generates a random number to decide whether to spend three minutes skimming a hundred pages from there.

Asmodia is not in fact seeing a counter to this particular tactic.  They can't just hand Keltham complete books open to different places, each time, because even at the speed he's skimming, Keltham will notice if he reads ahead and sees that he's reading an excerpt he's already read.

And then - then that just works, so far as Asmodia can see, Keltham wins, the Conspiracy can't counter that unless they actually have that many completed books and they don't -

She can't think can't think can't think of any counter - does Sevar have a counter -

Carissa Sevar: The books that are complete but just about Taldor with the names changed. There's a bunch of those. It's ...not likely to hold, though. 

Asmodia: ...Asmodia can think of one desperate thing to try.  She requests permission to gamble the entire mission.

((She has the Gardens, she can suicide if this fails and it's her fault, she does dare do this -))

Carissa Sevar: - it's not like charging into this without a plan isn't gambling the whole mission. She should do what she thinks gives them the best odds, even if it makes failure more spectacular or more embarrassing.

Asmodia: "Uh, Keltham, I have an idea that so far as I can tell means the Conspiracy just loses.  Am I supposed to tell you about it or wait for you to think of it?  Because I don't have any way of knowing if you've already thought of it, and this idea seems to me like a strong test even if the Conspiracy thinks of it first.  I could be missing something of course."

because even if she can't solve it maybe Keltham CAN

Keltham: "...okay, sure, tell me that one."

Asmodia: "I mean, possibly you already thought of it, because it seems pretty inevitable to me.  The idea here is to check whether all the books actually exist, right?  But if you only read a short way, they could be handing you much shorter fragments, since not all books are buyable to check afterwards.  If you try to read much longer than that, it takes a long time to do that check, plus if you intend to do it in advance, the Conspiracy can read your mind about it."

"So go on asking for information about particular subjects, but then after you've gotten the answer to your question, generate a random number, like 1-6, and try to speedread that whole book if it comes up 6.  They can't just hand you underlying real books open to different places, each time, because even skimming really really fast you'd probably recognize if you reread something you already saw.  So a library can't pass that test with high probability unless it actually has that many complete books."

Keltham: "...okay, I probably would have gotten that one in another twenty seconds because you're right, it seems pretty inevitable, but it's still a good idea.  And it's good for me to know the Conspiracy would see that tactic too."

Does the proposal have any flaws?  Keltham considers this problem mentally.

Asmodia: Asmodia almost, but not quite, prays to Otolmens about it.  She remembers in time that sometimes her prayers get answered, and this wouldn't actually be a great time.

Keltham: ...he's actually not seeing it offhand, if he uses a random number generation method that they can't plausibly predict.  And picking a random random number generation method that then uses some environmental entropy seems like a pretty powerful way of doing that even in a low-tech environment that's reading your mind.

For that matter, if there is some very clever way to defeat the proposal, he shouldn't think of it now, he should think of it afterwards.  Maybe Asmodia asked that as a last-ditch desperate attempt by Conspiracy to make him think of a solution to a problem they couldn't solve themselves, though, also to be fair, that's sort of a nitwit clever tactic he can't see Conspiracy Asmodia actually being reckless enough to try.

Okay.  Let's try that then.

Asmodia: There's an instant of spinning horror before Asmodia stops trying to see the world from Keltham's dath ilani viewpoint quite so hard, and remembers that she is of Golarion.

'Random' numbers?  Prophecy is broken but it's not that broken!

AUGURIES!  Use Auguries every time to check if it's the right time to hand him an excerpt!  They're fallible but if Keltham doesn't do too many checks we'll have a CHANCE of fooling him!

...if they've got no Auguries prepped and no scrolls of those, then they're all going to die, but that won't be Asmodia's fault.  She really felt like she was doing an unusually good job here, involving her taking some huge professional and hence personal risks, that gave Cheliax the best chance it could have had, if other people did their parts and prepared adequately.

Ferrer Maillol: ...the facility has three Auguries prepped daily, two for Project Lawful's use on weird experiments, one for actual Security reserve.  They've got a couple of scrolls of Augury in storage as a backup to that.

That's enough to check the next few cases, while somebody Teleports to Egorian and back to fetch more scrolls, ideally along with an arcane savant to cast from those scrolls.

Asmodia continues to show promise, and yes he appreciates that she risked herself there.  But those other thoughts verge on attempted self-defense against punishment, and would get her lit on fire most places that aren't Project Lawful.

Asmodia: Acknowledged, Asmodia thinks back at him.  ((She'll go on being smug, just more privately.))

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia's spells, even the low-circle ones, are really quite valuable at her caster level.  With few exceptions, she only requests spells from Lord Asmodeus that she plans to use that day.

There's relatively little need for preparing against such contingencies by wasting your spell slots, when you can afford to carry around a bag of holding containing, among a lot of other things, two dozen Augury scrolls.

Ferrer Maillol: Acknowledged, belay the previous request for scrolls, just get us the arcane savants.

Auguries take a minute to cast, though, how are we -

Asmodia: Number the books Keltham requests, do Auguries in parallel across our clerics about the result of "using an excerpt on Keltham's Nth request".  That should still work so long as the request and its consequences are within the half-hour prediction window.

Keltham: ...all right, the library seems to be passing Asmodia's Obvious Testing Method.  So far.

Asmodia: They're getting some errors, but so far all of them have been of the form where they use a complete book and didn't really need to.  So far.

Keltham: At some point, Keltham's intuition informs him that he's gotten about as much evidence out of this as he could get; his randomized random number generators have fired three times, and three is well-known to be the largest possible number.

He's asked Fennelosa about ability to buy six books, and three of those have been for sale.

All right.  Let's call it here.

Next up... is... that.

Carissa Sevar: Praised be Asmodeus. Also them. She's not going to think 'they're doing well, this is going to work out', because if she thinks that it definitely won't. But she thinks they earned some sorely needed twos there and will earn more from the erotica.

Keltham: So!  Time to carry out exactly the same procedure on somebody's pornography collection.

It doesn't feel like a deadly challenge to the Conspiracy, this time, more like - he basically knows that this test is going to be passed, Snack Service wouldn't have suggested it otherwise.  But still.  Sure, let's try it.

lintamande: Fennelosa will go across town, then, at a brisk walk, and declare himself calling in a favor owed to Lady Sali.

The illusionists might want to edit out the exchange that follows.

"You look - Chelish."

     "Straight from the front. It's a long story."

"Do you need anything?"

      "Just the books."

"How do you know Lady Sali?"

      "Through Cayden. Like I said, it's a long, long story."

But once that's worked out, Keltham can run his tests on the erotica collection. 

Keltham: It actually goes noticeably easier than trying to launch Chelish history queries.  Mainly because Arnsen Puddleton has read every one of the erotica books in his collection, to the point of doing better than a dath ilani computer's search index.

For example.  At one point - inspired by Carissa's idea about asking to interview children with pox marks specifically - Keltham asks via Fennelosa if any of these books have a section where a masochist gets tied to a bed and then fed chocolate.  Arnsen cheerfully plucks one of his books off the shelf, and promptly flips through to exactly that.

Why Snack Service is allowed to help with this but not -

Pilar : "Snack Service says it's decision-theoretically complicated, and the more you think about it or try to draw implications from it, the less it's retroactively allowed to help you as much as it has already."

Keltham: "I wish to register that in the corresponding lessons in dath ilan, in which we do exotic thought experiments intended to teach us about this sort of theoretical possibility, the teacher always ends the lesson by reminding everyone that this has essentially never happened to anyone in real life throughout the entire history of time, and if you think it's happening to you, you're mistaken."

Pilar : "If you come up with any effective way to register things at Snack Service, let me know, because I've got things I'd also like to register."

Keltham: And he's done.  The Conspiracy has done an even better job of making it look like masochists exist, than making it look like Abrogail is the ruler of Cheliax in cooperation with Asmodeus's Church, which says something about their priorities if nothing else.

Keltham is... sort of brain-tired at this point.  Trying to think of all these things while not thinking of other things is sort of excessive for a mental control exercise.

But.  So long as Fennelosa is in Absalom, should Keltham be buying any scrolls that he could potentially use today?  Delaying a while about that gives the Conspiracy all sorts of chances to get up to all sorts of shenanigans, like trying to quickly write or complete the books Keltham 'bought'.  The Conspiracy has a chance to claim that his scrolls can't be found at the next shop or two that Fennelosa tries.  Still potentially worth doing; they leak bits if nobody has Sending, you'd expect that to be a very common spell.  Some more Purge Invisibilities.  An Arcane Sight, Keltham has kept wanting to watch himself hanging a spell already with his own Arcane Sight instead of a slightly delayed illusion... well, no, he can requisition that later, if Ordinary wins on review; but Arcane Sight is potentially useful against the Conspiracy.  Early Judgment would be useful if anyone has that, it would give Keltham an emergency psychological buffer that doesn't take up a spell slot all the time... a psychological buffer that Keltham could very well need, if things go poorly.

Scrolls are expensive, but Keltham has some money and needs to be willing to spend some money, here.  He can afford a few low-level scrolls.  Is he missing anything from his shopping list?

Keltham: Alarm x2, Detect Charm x4, those are first-level and cheap.  All of those together cost the same as one second-circle scroll.  Kind of crazy, really.

Status, Dispel Magic, Suppress Charms and Compulsions, Lay of the Land.  A backup Owl's Wisdom and a Fox's Cunning, both things he should have in emergencies, and it's not impossible today will turn into an emergency.

Another Invisibility Purge... another Detect Intelligence accomplishes much the same thing, probably, and is cheaper?

An Early Judgment, also because he might think of something to do with that, some test; the Conspiracy if it exists may be somehow nervous about afterlives.  Though the fact that the Conspiracy told him about that spell, suggests that it has no obvious-to-them win-ability... well, they could have expected that his god would give it to him anyways at some point, before that whole interdiction zone happened.

Keltham... cannot really afford a Sending or an extra Glimpse of Beyond, both 4th-circle, with the amount he's already spending.  Or an Arcane Sight when he doesn't have a specific plan or time in mind to use it.

(Keltham doesn't really like spending large quantities of money.  That is probably some kind of important character flaw given his changed life circumstances.  He may have to work on this?  But it will be a lot easier to work on this once he has those large amounts of money in his liquid-asset account.)

Okay he'll buy the Arcane Sight too, fine.

Carissa Sevar: Fennelosa will make all of these purchases; such spells are available in Absalom, and it's be a loss of bits the Conspiracy can't afford to pretend otherwise, and - 

- well, either they've won or they've lost. At this point, it's likely beyond further manipulation. 

Carissa Sevar: .....if Abrogail concurs in that assessment she might want her headband back. (This feels like dying, but that like all the rest of Carissa's feelings are COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.)

Aspexia Rugatonn: I will not trust that this event is over until Keltham has arrived in a state of mind permitting us to statue him, or left for Osirion.

Maillol.  Have you made progress on determining the conditions for that, under our Lord's will?

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol does not complain about impossibilities or his own incapacity.  He simply reports what he can.

If Keltham returns to a state where he is not - actively determining whether to leave us, especially for Osirion, through planned deeds that have not yet been performed and resolved themselves - if Keltham is not holding concrete plans to decide about that matter the next day, at a particular time, or if he's made whatever decisions he intends to make and has become again our indefinite guest - then, Maillol thinks, they would no longer be in the ambiguous fringes of Asmodeus's command.

It is not clear to Maillol that they have been definitely commanded not to statue Keltham now, for just a year, while Keltham hasn't yet made a decision to depart but has decided to make a decision about it...?  The stakes here are unusually, exceptionally high -

Aspexia Rugatonn: Your report is heard.

Listen and be educated, fool.  It is likely that our Lord was paid for some outcome less stringent than this, in one regard or another, in the negotiations as of between gods; and yet our Lord issued us such stringent orders as these, because of the past tendency of fools like you to try to work around the edges of His instructions.  Do you behave so now, our Lord will learn and His expectations shift, and the next time He sells an expectation to gods, He will have to use yet more stringent instructions.  Were I the sort to behave so, our Lord would have predicted that and issued even more stringent orders originally.

Keep firmly to our Lord's directions and path, when He has given orders.  Obey Him strictly and do not try to work His interests around His orders' edges; yes, even if it is in His interests.  For that is not His way and His nature as a god; and when we work counter to that, we become less visible to His eyes, more slippery to His hands, more costly for Him to manipulate.

Ferrer Maillol: ...acknowledged, Most High.

lintamande: When his shopping is done, Fennelosa Teleports back to just outside the Forbiddance, steps into it, and starts unpacking his fairly absurd collection of books and scrolls from Absalom, as quickly as possible. 

Carissa Sevar: "Dare we hope for a verdict or are you going to need to read all the books and check over our math problems and so on first?"

Keltham: "Second one."

"Ferrer, I'm taking all that stuff into a Rope Trick just outside the Forbiddance, I do not mind you stationing a lot of Security around the entrance but, obviously, please don't send anybody inside unless it's a huge and frankly improbable emergency.  Oh, and I'll want the transcript of the trip."

"And, Fennelosa of the Ordinary world, thank you on behalf of myself and Cheliax for going through all that, it meant a lot."  It hasn't been explained to Fennelosa what the 'Ordinary' qualifier means, Keltham doesn't think, but the sentiment is sincere.

lintamande: Fennelosa is hard to read, but he looks slightly confused and slightly exasperated. "I serve where I am commanded," he says flatly.

Keltham: Well, Keltham has now spent enough time around Pilar to have any idea of what's going on there.

"And I expect your Lord Asmodeus appreciates that, just saying, I do too."

Keltham will quickly go get some things from his bedroom, like Ione's borrowed books among other things, and then cast his Rope Trick.

Carissa Sevar: If he throws an Alarm and an Invisibility Purge, he shouldn't notice someone who is Gaseous and also turned into the fingernail-sized species of tropical bat. But they'll have to wait to go in until he uses Glimpse of Truth, or plan to rapidly leave when he forms the intent to do so.

The key to winning is trying harder than anyone has any reason to suspect you can.

lintamande: A Rope Trick resembles a box, about twelve feet by twelve feet by twelve feet. It's dark. It has a window in the floor, three feet by five feet, from which the world it's connected to is visible. Keltham can see Security pacing anxiously under the entrance, and Carissa sitting down on the grass to run her fingers through it and look up at the sky, like someone who doesn't get the chance to do that much. 

Keltham: Once he's up there with his stuff, Keltham casts the Alarm spell on the space, from scroll.  (Keltham has spent a noticeable chunk of his salary on practicing with practice scrolls; it's a huge power amplifier if you've got money, and he expects to have money.)

Keltham considers, only then, if there's more he can do to protect the space...

And then starts to Prestidigitate the air around him, forming fragile shapes from it.  (As ordinary wizards may also do, even not knowing what they're doing, just binding air molecules together to form a very fragile solid.)

By this means Keltham lays down a screen over the opening to the ground below, fine enough that it will let through air, and very little else.

He casts Invisibility Purge, also from scroll.

When nothing then appears -

Keltham carefully lies down, in a position he's going to keep for a while.

And Keltham fills the whole volume except himself with fragile strands; webs that would shatter, visibly, at a touch.

...the Conspiracy can probably still beat that, with a nation's resources, but he's hopefully made it a bit hard for them.

Keltham needs, very much, to lie down and rest for a time.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa finds herself suddenly with lots of excess cognitive capacity and Wisdom not being employed for the project, which does not feel like a stable state to be in. She'll....review the last ditch fake-escape plans, and alter the earrings, and try very hard not to think any thoughts she won't be able to keep thinking once the headband's off.

Asmodia: AlterAsmodia would be tired, after all this, and would be found in her bedroom trying to take a short break herself, not sitting beside Sevar.  So Asmodia staggers off to her bedroom, in case Keltham runs right out of his Rope Trick to check on her, and lies down in her own bed.

She... really is a little tired, after that.

Asmodia wishes that she could blank her mind.  There's probably a dath ilani discipline for it, and it's probably considered dangerous to teach to children because they'll hurt themselves.

They should have been so much more prepared, before this, she should've just told the Chelish Imperium up front that she was taking all of their writers and permanently exposing them to the truths of history only Korva was cleared for and they'd just have to train new writers, and put them on nothing except producing and altering enough books to have a chance of fooling Keltham.

Is that - hindsight bias?  Was there something else Keltham could've tried, just as likely in foresight?  Maybe Asmodia wouldn't have seen through to Keltham's ideas about forcing Cheliax to create too much information too quickly, maybe she would've focused on the possibility of an Ostenso visit... an Ostenso visit probably would've helped win some 2s.  Maybe she was supposed to have closed the Ostenso ports, redirected most of the traffic elsewhere.  Or she was supposed to have fake ships ready for the Ostenso ports, and have rehearsed everyone in Ostenso already.  Or just, have already built a fake Ostenso.

One of her superiors should've told her, if Asmodia was allowed to play with nation-level resources to do her job.

One of her superiors should've told her, if those points were so obvious in advance to everyone, and not just in hindsight.

That's what she'll say if she's - questioned about it?  She'll - try to explain, about the Law, governing that, how only ilani are trained to counteract hindsight bias, how only their Keepers can do it indistinguishably; how, without training, children often can't counteract it at all.  Maybe she'll leave out the part about dath ilani children.

If something this stressful had happened to her, that also happened to alterAsmodia, she'd ask Keltham to just hold her, that night, and be a warm thing for her.

Asmodia wishes she could just, rest her head on somebody's shoulder, at least.  Somebody who was safe to be around, and wouldn't hurt her, or hold her in contempt for being that pathetic.

If Keltham leaves, she won't have that from him, anymore.

((It's only then that she remembers that she was supposed to be secretly hoping that Keltham would win.))

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is not letting herself do a failure analysis, not yet. It seems like a very dangerous thing to do with this Crown on. She's - also not letting herself estimate the odds that they've won or lost, apparently. She keeps flinching away when she tries.

Asmodia: Asmodia's thoughts have wandered to how she could breach to Korva the subject of her being Asmodia's replacement snuggling partner.  They're both probable-asexuals so it should be safe, right?  Asmodia is Korva's superior, but she doesn't actually want an unwilling snuggling partner.  Asmodia does have Detect Thoughts and some proficiency with it, it was a very useful spell at Ostenso academy.  Asmodia could just order Korva to fail her Will save, to determine how Korva really feels about a proposal like that... no, that's a bit overt and aggressive, Korva might not like that.

Asmodia will just order Security to read Korva's mind about it, when the subject comes up, and report to Asmodia.  That seems less likely to offend Korva, if Security can do it without Korva noticing.

...it feels like Korva couldn't replace Keltham, any more than Keltham could replace Korva.

Hey, Asmodia says into her Telepathic Bond.  I notice that I've seemed to start actually caring about Keltham, in the sense that the thought of not being able to snuggle Keltham any more feels bad and it doesn't feel like anyone else could actually replace him about that.  I register that this matches a correct, purely-trope-based prediction that I made earlier about what would happen to me by the time we needed to run a fake escape plan.  I predict that any fake escape plan is going to fail unless it has at least me and Ione, possibly Yaisa I'm not sure somebody needs to read her mind about it.  Everyone who's started actually caring about Keltham.  The tropes won't let it work otherwise.

Carissa Sevar: Thaaaaaaaat sure does sound wildly self-serving, Carissa notices distantly. 

Also if we're going to use that style of reasoning, which we PROBABLY SHOULDN'T, then any escape plan obviously needs Carissa. She's the one Keltham's scared of losing. 

The problem is that it's much easier to sell Keltham on Ione and Tonia being innocents than on Asmodia and Carissa. 

The other problem is that the escape plan is very obviously doomed. She's going to try it anyway, not much to lose, but while she's refusing to generate a probability estimate about whether they've lost already her brain is happy to generate one for whether the fake-escape will work, and the answer it produces is 'no chance in Hell.'

Asmodia: I'll also register for what it's worth that an escape plan probably involves an apparently unconscious and stunned Sevar being carted along with him in magic-neutralizing handcuffs or... something.

She's the only one Keltham is truly afraid of losing.  His thoughts said that, over and over.

And any fake escape plan - has probability practically zero of fooling Keltham unless he wants to be fooled.  Desperately wants it, needs it, to the point where he doesn't want to use dath ilani disciplines to know better.  If he's already lost his Carissa - we might as well not bother, is my sense.

Carissa Sevar: Then we want to interrupt him before he has, emotionally, already resigned himself to losing me.

She lies down on the grass and looks up at the sky. She's kind of worried about what feelings she's going to have once she stops trying not to have feelings. 

Jacint Subirachs: We can put you to sleep for a brief time, Chosen, if you'd rather not think.

Carissa Sevar: Let's run through the fake escape one more time, see if we can poke any more holes in it. Then - 

- it feels like admitting weakness. But perhaps it's better to admit weakness than to pretend you possess strength you don't. 

Keltham: Keltham sits up.  He didn't sleep, and didn't much succeed at quieting his own thoughts.  There are disciplines for that, but it seemed like - the wrong time, the wrong situation, to use them.

Part of his brain sure does seem sad about how the day went.

Is this, possibly, probability-theoretic nonsense?

Keltham took a fairly hard run at the Conspiracy.  That could've broken a veil, if there'd been a veil there.  No such blatant break occurred.

On some very basic level, that ought to count in favor of Ordinary, not against it, and he should be less emotionally worried about Conspiracy than he was this morning.

Does Keltham's brain buy this?

Keltham: ...nope.

Keltham: Why is that, Keltham's brain?

Keltham: ...apparently his brain thought he was supposed to get stronger first-order evidence for Ordinary, than he was able to get, and his failure to get that first-order evidence second-order weighs against Ordinary.

Keltham: ...can his brain possibly give an example of what that expected first-order evidence was supposed to look like.

Keltham: It looks like... the booksellers having a broad selection of Chelish history books.  Right away.  Rather than that having to wait for the library, after the Conspiracy has had a chance to frantically produce a lot of new books, half of which aren't for sale or borrowable.

It looks like there not being totally logical and rational in-universe reasons why a visit to Ostenso has to wait until tomorrow.

Or the first bookseller's book 'critical' of Cheliax sounding a bit more like the book 'critical' of Qadira.

Keltham: ...this does not seem like it quantitatively justifies a major increase in despair, brain.  These are not things that must happen in the Ordinary universe.

Keltham: It just felt on an intuitive level like what was going on today was Keltham failing to pierce the veil and not finding decisive evidence, not like he was walking freely around in a world where no veil existed.

Keltham: You know, if there's an actual Conspiracy they're probably going to be pretty annoyed if Keltham ends up walking out on them for reasons like that.

Keltham: ...what, is the Conspiracy supposed to think that we should now resolve this battle fairly, determining in a Lawful way who won the contest, by iterating through all the events of the day, multiplying together the likelihood ratios we assigned at the time, multiplying by whatever prior we previously assigned, and coming to a decision on that basis?

At least Conspiracy Asmodia has to know better than that.  Or Conspiracy Carissa.  It's not like we haven't told them that the rule even for small cases is to make up a prior and a likelihood ratio, multiply them together to get a posterior, and then throw that number out and go with your intuitive feeling once you've forced your brain to actually ask all of the correct questions.

And this is a huge case, involving a huge number of conditional dependencies between all of the things going on.  You can't just take the likelihoods your busy brain was making up without keeping running track of how the most likely Conspiracy and Ordinary universes were shifting with each update, and multiply all of those likelihoods together.  They know that too.

Finally, if there's an actual Conspiracy on the other side of this, we are absolutely not supposed to be having a fair fight with them.  We should just boost Wisdom and possibly also Cunning, try to focus just on this one issue, and then if that starts to go wrong quickly drop out of the Rope Trick and ask for an emergency Dispel.