Keltham: ...well, part of him sure definitely thinks that if he does that it means he never gets to see Carissa again.

Keltham: Yeah, okay, enough of that, let's just actually walk through the evaluation of the evidence from today and from all other days.

Keltham forgot, in fact, to cast Detect Intelligence where he could verify that it just detected Intelligence scores.  Or get Detect Intentions cast on him by that Security.  Keltham is willing however to expect that this test would go the way that the Conspiracy said it would.  And if Keltham casts Detect Intelligence afterwards and it's hugely anomalous, he can change his conclusions then.

So step one is to review Carissa's and Asmodia's math homework, the other researchers' Conspiracy homework, and skim a random selection of the books that were actually bought or borrowed.  Just do his own homework first.  The longer he delays before doing that, the more time the Conspiracy has to finish the half-written books and transform the ones he has in here, using their eighth-circle wizardry that can in fact go right through a Rope Trick.

lintamande: Well, it's not trivial even with eighth circle wizardry.  Manohar is, presently, a gaseous housefly clinging to the bottom of Keltham's screen, just inside the Rope Trick, having been Polymorphed by Polymorph Any Object rather than Greater Polymorph as it lasts longer. Every half hour he has to fly out and get the Polymorph suppressed so he can recast Detect Thoughts and have Gaseous Form recast on him; more frequently than that he flies down an inch to deliver a situation report. 

Asmodia: Unfortunately for anybody who didn't want to think about probabilities, Asmodia has now realized something else they like totally forgot to do today!  They should have been running a prediction market and a conditional prediction market this whole time!

So now Asmodia is setting up a quick prediction market about the chance that the primary deception around Keltham shatters, and a secondary conditional prediction market about the chances that different versions of the backup escape plan work, further-conditional on those becoming necessary.

Asmodia's opening bid is 80% that the primary deception shatters before tonight / before they can turn Keltham into a statue for a year, with the second condition winning if there's a difference between them.

Keltham just has too much information, is Asmodia's guess, his thoughts about the Conspiracy were starting to track too closely to what was actually going on around him.  He's not limited to the information from today, he also has evidence from when the Conspiracy was younger and less practiced.  They don't just have to quell his doubts; they have to quell his doubts far enough that Keltham decides not to try an Owl's Wisdom, and then, Asmodia is thinking, taps himself with Fox's Cunning once the Owl's Wisdom makes him realize that's the wise thing to do.

(Keltham has by now had a chance to demonstrate to Asmodia that some of her probabilities were a tad overconfident; Asmodia's intuitive guess was 90%, and would have been 95% without that demonstration and some amount of correction-of-intuition.  80% is her weaker second-order probability after trying to compensate for her remaining intuitive overconfidence.)

So 80%.  Any bidders?

And Asmodia is basically not betting that the main unfixed version of the backup escape plan works, she'll sell anything over 10% on that, if there's any bidders; but she would maybe bid like 5% or 10% on a plan working if it involves at least Ione and Asmodia and Carissa in anti-magic handcuffs.

Asmodia: ...okay, actually Asmodia needs the Queen or the Most High to sign off on telling bettors that, in the event the primary deception fails and the backup fake-escape plan doesn't work, they aren't all going to be executed and will remain in a state to have some use for money afterwards.  Because otherwise people are placing bids at probabilities that do not make any sense.

Here is Asmodia's mind being totally sincere about how much she did not cleverly plan that and just legitimately tried to do this obvious thing, that they obviously ought to do, and then ran into herself not being able to do that correctly because people were scared.  She is not trying to extort any promises out of anybody, it just looks to her like Cheliax would obviously continue to have use for Project Lawful either way and is not going to kill off a tenth of all the Security officers in Cheliax, and if Asmodia is right about that, it would be useful to the betting market to say so.

Abrogail Thrune II: Diminished-Abrogail wishes she could sleep away the moments before she gets her Crown returned.  +4/+4/+4 is not two-thirds of her Crown.  But she would be less defended, then, even with the Most High standing guard over herself.  To remain awake and also guard herself is the wiser course, to preserve herself and her throne.  So Abrogail endures.  It is good for a soul now and then to suffer and endure; Abrogail probably receives too little of that to keep herself strong.

There are emotions in her, harder to keep in rein and check than they would be with her Crown worn.  This creature of Aspexia's will need some correction, at some point, in Abrogail's own opinion.

But also, the little creature is sincere on her surfaces, and she is correct that people are being stupid.

"I was not, in fact, planning to execute a huge number of the most valuable people in Cheliax, who only failed me and did not betray me, who will be needed whatever comes of this.  You will not receive any promises from me on the subject, fools, but I was not planning to be stupid.  I currently expect you will have some use for money in the future either way.  That is all."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa is at this point half-occupied in her own mind tying up knots trying not to think about things that it's probably not wise to think about, and is not going to let her mind go anywhere near the question of what's going to happen to her after she fails, if she fails, but it seems kind of obvious to her that you should bet with the actual odds you think are correct, so they are slightly more likely to succeed at this, whether you think you're going to be executed or not. 

Security: (Unfortunately several Chelish Security have now realized that money is more valuable to them if the deception around Keltham fails because they will get less rich if the Project is not a total success.

Nobody is reading their minds about this, and it's going to look to Asmodia just like Security is overconfident in their pessimism because they didn't get anti-overconfidence lessons.)

Merenre: "Well, I have good news for you."

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Guards? Throw this imposter out. Merenre never has good news for me."

Merenre: "Keltham's about to see through them. Well. Ninety percent that Keltham's about to see through them, if Chelish people understand how making predictions works. Though, if they did, hard to fathom they'd go on being Chelish people."

Merenre: "Are we ready?"

Ruby Prince Khemet III: "For Keltham? Yes. For a war with Cheliax? Readier than we'll be in a month. For whatever's actually going to happen? I doubt it. But - gods, at least he'll have the truth."

Keltham: Carissa's answer checks out, about rational agents with common priors and common knowledge of each other's probabilities having the same probabilities.  It's actually pretty clever, instead of coming up with the obvious formalism on infinite epistemic states over infinite propositions, Carissa did this whole finitary thing with partitions of possible worlds, each of which included facts about which partition of worlds the agents inside those worlds thought they were inside; and just arbitrarily declared that not all possible subsets of worlds were possible epistemic states to avoid putting a powerset of a set inside itself.  There's some rather questionable claims afterwards about how real people should aspire to behave more like that, but they're very Carissa-characteristic claims, at least.

Asmodia's answer checks out, about the standard central distribution being the maximum-entropy infinite distribution with mean 0 and deviation 1.  She proved it in a complicated way involving constraint multipliers, but she proved it, and went on to correctly note that adding up lots of different independent variables will tend to preserve the sum of their means and the sum of their variances, while throwing away most other information, such that the sum of lots of independent variables will tend towards the maximum-entropy distribution with the sum of their means and the sum of their variances, aka the central distribution.

The rest of Project Lawful... wrote up a lot of different versions of the Conspiracy, almost all of which are planning to milk Keltham for his knowledge and turn him into a captive if he ever tries to leave and obviously never pay him his real profits, but which are planning to do that in different ways.  In most stories Carissa is the chief field agent, senior to Asmodia who is the chief person on-site working to keep everything consistent, both of them ultimately reporting to a widely varying set of Crown officers none of whom Keltham has ever heard about.  In other cases it's just entirely a set of hidden officials running the whole thing.  The Queen is always in on it.  The Church of Asmodeus doesn't have nearly the claimed involvement, isn't actually powerful in Cheliax, and none of the purported priests of Asmodeus actually works for him.  In some cases there's no such god as Asmodeus.  Other details vary widely.  Shilira's version of the Conspiracy is not suitable for insufficiently perverted readers.

Ione first wrote what he asked for, a hypothetical-best-guess mostly similar to that of the others; and then wrote three other versions: the first about how 'Golarion' mostly borders the Worldwound thereby explaining away the coincidence of Keltham's arrival there; the second about how Keltham never really left dath ilan; and the third of which is a single sentence, 'Keltham is still inside the mirror takaral'.  Ione's postscript notes that she's a Nethysian and doesn't want to obey rules all the time.

Asmodia: (Trying a variation of Keltham's question with the Shadow Project coming up with theories about an actually-false Conspiracy inside the Conspiracy world, with everyone instructed to independently do their best job at saying what that would be if it existed, showed that:  Virtually everyone said the Project Lawful girls were trying to escape Cheliax and evade Hell somehow; and that Sevar was the leader of their effort; and that Snack Service was the key to their escape plan.  Other details varied widely and without much structure that Asmodia could see.  Basically, obvious things are obvious and then people make up widely varying details on top of that, so far as Asmodia can tell.)

Keltham: He rapidly skims a random selection of the purchased books.  It's much easier when Keltham can touch and control the pages himself.

...they're not obviously fake books.

The fiction, including the erotica, is written in a hugely over-verbose style and does not really make a lot of sense at all and Keltham is not sure which aspects are meant to be realistic or unrealistic.

It's taken for granted that a bunch of countries exist, including Absalom and Cheliax.  Magic-in-the-background works largely the way it's been represented to Keltham - which he did mostly think was the case, he's come into contact with wizard spells and cleric spells very directly.  There are beings called 'witches' and 'warlocks' who get powers in much vaguer ways and Keltham is not sure if these are supposed to be standard tropes or real things.  This paladin acts a lot stupider than that actual paladin that Keltham met, but this could be because the author is stupid and can't write a paladin any smarter than that.  This character is a seventh-circle wizard at age fourteen because he's the reincarnation of Nex, that probably doesn't happen but Keltham isn't sure.

In the erotica section, Keltham has no idea if any masochist or submissive has ever, ever thought this way in reality; but either masochists exist or they're enough of a standard fictional trope for a poverty-stricken world to have this many different pieces of fiction featuring them.

...can Keltham find any hints of masochism in the non-erotic fiction.

Wow.  Okay.  Keltham is in fact glad that Carissa Sevar is not like this.  But this character sure is in passing a masochist, yep, in a novel that is apparently somehow not pornography by the standards of that bookseller.

Different parts of the books, different aspects of them, feel real versus unreal.  The fiction is incredibly badly written, but not in a way that feels like it would be lower-effort for the Conspiracy to write.  Keltham would bet that Carissa Sevar would find it easier to write good fiction than for her to write fiction that is bad in exactly this way.  The characters are deeply unreflective; they hardly seem to think about their own thoughts at all, let alone correct them.  It's terrifying to consider that maybe this isn't so much bad writing, as what the average Golarion person is actually like; Keltham doesn't know which possibility is true, how could he.

Various magical facts appear in places where they're important to the plot and the Conspiracy couldn't have just edited that in afterwards.

Nothing in it... really gives the Conspiracy away.

Asmodia: (The Conspiracy had time to do some emergency editing, using some specialized magic items, while Keltham was continuing his scry-trip.  There's now several sections of the fiction books that will seem to weirdly make no sense on a careful, actual reading.  Asmodia is hoping Keltham does not pick one of those books and carefully read it all the way through over the next several hours.  There is not much else she can do but hope that.)

Keltham: Okay, and now comes the labor-intensive part, which Keltham is frankly not looking forwards to.  Personally?  He does not actually like tackling epistemological problems rigorously.  It's work!  Not all of it is fun work either, when you've got to do this much of it!  It wouldn't be fun even if what he was trying to destroy with truth was not the seeming of things precious to him!

In a case like this, how that looks, is not that you pick a prior, and then go through everything you've seen and assign Ordinary vs. Conspiracy likelihood ratios.

What it looks like... is a large research problem.

dath ilan: According to Keltham's teachers on the subject of how to tackle Very Serious Problems, he should first try to collate all the points or observations that are potentially important:

- Observations or apparent facts that seem confusing even now;- Things that stuck out at the time;- Everything that caused him to update a lot, because any of that could be an adversarial Conspiracy move;- Anything interesting that was said early on, before the Conspiracy had time to plan a lot, or they knew what kind of target Keltham represented, or knew what was important to optimize-over about him.

Then Keltham should organize that first disorganized list into rough categories, using computer-based outlining software that he does not, in fact, currently possess.

Then Keltham needs to stare at that list, look for intersections and correlations, and write down a lot of possible questions or confusions.

Then Keltham is supposed to organize that rough list of confusions and questions, and look for interactions between those.

Then Keltham is supposed to try to figure out plausible Conspiracies such that a lot of those questions would be resolved, and make note of the ones that are still unresolved for each Conspiracy theory.  He's also supposed to figure out plausible Ordinaries that would resolve those questions, if there's more than one notion of what the Ordinary world would have to look like; though, in the Ordinary world, he can just ask.

Then he's supposed to pre-update each of those theories into 'latently detailed' background stories that would, ideally, make all the particular observations have likelihoods with no further dependencies between each other - rather than observations needing to update the particular details of vague Conspiracy or Ordinary pre-theories, such that later observations would have likelihoods entangled with earlier observations.  Of course, this pre-detailing step must further penalize the priors for each added detail.

Then he's supposed to sweep through all of his observations for the latently-detailed versions of all of his remaining plausible theories.

This sweep through all the evidence needs to include an estimate of the cumulative gradual evidence from all the minor occasions where something Conspiracy-ish could have happened but didn't, all the things that aren't confusing but could have been.  Because if you only look at the confusions given Ordinary, as will all tend to weigh against Ordinary, that's a methodology that will always conclude in favor of Conspiracy.

And then Keltham is supposed to throw out the final numbers and go with his brain's intuitive sense, once he's actually forced his brain to weigh all the pieces of evidence.

Keltham: Yeah, let's be frank here.

Keltham is not going to do all that.

Or rather, he's definitely not going to do it correctly.  Not on his first pass.  Not when he doesn't even have a computer that lets him rapidly type out all those thoughts, and easily reorganize hierarchical outlines.

He's going to half-ass it and hope that gives him a more definite answer without doing all that work.

Just like Keltham eighth-assed it last night, in his own head, in order to try to figure out which tests to do today.  Hoping that the experimental or observational results would change his intuitive sense of being stuck inside a fake world, or give him some important further insight, before he tried to half-ass this assessment today.

If half-assing it does not work, Keltham is frankly not sure he has it in him to whole-ass it.

dath ilan: ('Just half-ass it, or if that's still too much effort, quarter-ass it', was in fact given as an approved out, by his teacher, to the supermajority of the kids who were by then staring at the teacher in horror about all that work.  That's how it always goes.  It's just that only the remaining kids have any chance at solving important problems when they grow up.)

Keltham: Well, step one, try to write down all the weird-observations he can think of.  (In Baseline, but in a trivial cipher that Keltham can sight-read and sight-write.  It probably doesn't help much against scrying, with the Conspiracy also reading his mind, but maybe every little bit helps.)

He made a first pass last night, in his head; he didn't write it out, then, in case magic could read codes and Security was peeking at his notes.  Mindreading hadn't been as prominent in his hypotheses then.

Turns out, it gets a lot more detailed when he writes it all down.

Maybe he should've done that before his trip-by-scry, even if that would've given the Conspiracy much more time to prepare... no, Keltham is sticking with that first decision; if the Conspiracy was learning and preparing as fast as it looks, a quick early trip was the correct decision.  He can, if necessary, ask for another trip later.

Actually, doesn't that further imply that the Conspiracy wasn't reading his mind last night, if they weren't alarmed and alerted then?  Did he do something that tipped him off this morning, before he even got to Ione, that didn't tip them off last evening?  Add it to the list... actually, the part where he prayed for spells, if they can cheaply read the response from Keltham's god coming back, but mindreading him is more expensive, would be one obvious theory...  Say that mindreading requires Lrilatha around here somewhere, hidden, but Maillol, no, Subirachs because she was posted here later and could have special relevant talents, can read it off when Keltham's god grants him alarming-looking spells.

...his teacher did say to not let yourself be distracted during the observation-collation step.

Right.  Back to that long list of observations.

Keltham: First, items he remembers thinking about last night, but written down this time:

- Somehow Keltham ended up confined to a very small location and without a lot of outside information.  Okay, admittedly Keltham didn't push on this.  By the time he had any money he could have spent on a shopping trip including the cost of Teleports and a scry, he was busy storming for spellsilver.  But still.-- This had loomed very large in Keltham's notice the last night - the sense of being confined to a tiny world, deprived of observation, it felt like that was the circumstance that made Conspiracy continue to feel so possible.  Was there some truth of the larger world that they were trying very hard to hide from him, by keeping him inside one fortress?  Possibly even along the lines of there existing no such country as Cheliax after all?

- Similarly, Keltham has somehow mysteriously ended up inside an 'interdiction zone' maintained by Broom's god, Otolmens, which explains why Keltham's own god is no longer able to contact him or pick out helpful spells for him.  It would be terribly dangerous for Keltham to leave this relatively narrow zone around Ostenso.  Possible in Ordinary, but.

- The critiques of Cheliax that he got from the lantern archon and the paladin felt sort of weaksauce for Golarion.  This is something that it took a long time for Keltham to notice because those would be totally reasonable interfactional critiques in dath ilan.  'Lawful' Good, 'Lawful' Neutral, and 'Lawful' Evil in Golarion are not actually that Lawful and should be in much sharper states of disagreement than that.

- Carissa talking about pitting rats against rats and them fighting to the death in a cannibalistic frenzy, to which she'd sell tickets.  That stood out under Owl's Wisdom, and even in retrospect, knowing that Golarion has afterlives, there's something darker about it than just - a relaxed attitude towards violence.  It implies - not so much being a spectator but more like - hating the rats - Keltham doesn't know.  He couldn't figure out how to investigate this.

- The Zon-Kuthon god-war.  This is supposedly an incredibly rare event in Ordinary, the last god-war having happened a hundred years earlier.  Even if you say it happened because Keltham showed up, Keltham showing up is itself then necessarily a much rarer sort of event in Ordinary, versus Conspiracy where it could potentially happen every five years or whatever and they haven't told him.-- The way that Nidal ending up attacking at a moment where Keltham could see it happen, instead of being hidden inside while it happened, supposedly was triggered by Ione's prophecy; but it's never actually been explained how Nidal had eyes on Ione.-- Ione giving prophecies in a world of 'shattered prophecy' is a further improbability in Ordinary.

- When he first arrived at the villa, he'd already formed a hypothesis that Carissa might be hiding facts about gods from him, and then lo and behold there weren't any books detailed in theology in the villa library.  This is maybe excused by it being a really awful library with respect to having any broad reference coverage of basics, his future researchers had better books about wizardry in their bags, but it stands out as a successful advance prediction of a very early Conspiracy theory.

- Supposedly Ostenso academy's only book with a list of cleric spells was out, borrowed, and not returned for a few days.  At the time Keltham assigned that 0.75/0.30 likelihood for Conspiracy over Ordinary, but in later reflection it seems even less plausible.  Cleric spells can be used in synergy with wizard spells, cleric spells can be built into magic items by wizards working with those clerics, arcane magics are constructed in imitation of divine magics, Ostenso academy should have had more than one book with a list of cleric spells.

- Ione's confession to him.  It feels weird, anomalous, even in hindsight, and even with Ione having tried to carefully explain away why she'd done that.  It renders it explicable in Ordinary, yes, but it also feels like - a latent explanation carefully constructed after the fact.

- Manohar and Asmodia.  Same feeling.  There's a story where that happened in Ordinary; it's a possible story; it nonetheless has the feeling of a story constructed after the fact.

- Carissa trying to mimic outward sexual responses she wasn't really feeling.  There's a story after the fact for why it happened, that story holds together, it rhymes with Chelish 'dignity', but he was still surprised at the time and it still has that feeling of something that potentially has a different explanation.

- Pilar going to Elysium... okay actually nothing about Pilar has that made-up-afterwards feeling.  It doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't give off the feeling that any other explanation would make more sense.  Still, it's weird and surprising.

- The Queen of Cheliax like totally decided to go on a Sadistic Date with his girlfriend.  Abrogail supposedly insisted on this against the counsel of her advisors.  This is not impossible in Ordinary, but it is clearly not what was going on in Conspiracy.  If there are tropes producing this kind of impossibility, if that's the real explanation, then it shouldn't have been possible to defuse the whole thing without any conflict; if there are no tropes then why was the Queen trying to date Carissa.-- Today there was a whole book specifically about Abrogail Thrune for sale, like somebody was trying really hard to convince him that a person like that existed.

Keltham: ...and Keltham goes on trying to complete that list, potentially including items from today's trip too.  Not really trying to organize them as yet.

- His personal shopper kicked a child.

- Ione not being present in the library.  Keltham is still wobbling between how much he wants to call that a total coincidence versus evidence of Conspiracy mindreading.  People do spend some minutes in the bathroom after waking up, right?  It just feels like - the Conspiracy read his mind, panicked, told Ione to be in the bathroom.

- More generally, there was a feel of the Conspiracy being bad at things early on and then getting better at them later.  The Ordinary version of the story is that the first bookseller was bad, the second bookseller was better, and then Keltham allowed his representative to go looking for a real library instead of steering him into random bookstores.

- He still basically feels like he is surrounded by a veil that he hasn't been able to pierce.  He doesn't feel like he understands Cheliax, or like he understands what the rest of Golarion is like.

- If you can use a lead helmet or a 1-inch iron helmet to guard against mindreading, or emanation spells in general, is it really the case that nobody mentioned this to Keltham until now?  Security isn't wearing helmets?

- Now that Keltham has seen a Bag of Holding in use, used to store books in particular, it's much more salient that Ordinary could've offered to, like, Teleport in a roomful of books from a major library in Cheliax on subjects of Keltham's choice, and let Keltham have the run of those books for a week.  Fine, Keltham didn't ask, and it would have distracted him for a week during which spellsilver work would've slowed down.  And yet.

- His knowledge about afterlives still isn't at a point where Keltham would feel remotely comfortable entrusting his mind-state and Future to one.  Even though Early Judgment apparently gave him a full video view of his own, even though there are outsiders walking around in Golarion, and even though Keltham kept trying to ask.  He got an assurance that enhancements were voluntary, and for sale, and that seems almost tailored to Keltham, albeit it was the Abadaran and not the Irorian priest who said it.  Maybe people here just don't know how to be specific?  And yet.-- "Churches don't like it when you speculate about afterlives" has that made-up-after-the-fact feeling about it.--- Interesting to contrast that to the business with Sarenrae's Church disliking pornography for no disclosed reason, which also makes no sense, but in a way that feels more like Golarion Craziness than like this was Made Up Afterwards.  Maybe it's because it's hard to visualize Maillol or Subirachs getting angry about somebody making up wrong facts about Hell, instead of carefully explaining things to them.

Okay, that feels disorganized, like he should maybe defer it to a full consideration of today / today's trip, in a more ordered way that involves reviewing the transcript.

Maybe instead he should go back to...

Keltham: ...trying to complete his list of the big items, that frame the hypotheses that today's fresh-in-memory observations could update against:

- Keltham arriving in Golarion, instead of being dead, was a pretty large surprise to him at the time.  His explanation for this surprise is not necessarily correct; for him to postulate that the Keepers have figured it out as an a priori necessity is not the same as Keltham having really understood that a priori necessity for himself, even if he has a plausible theory about how that could be the case.  This is mostly not the sort of thing that Keltham is expecting to explain today, but it's still a big deal that should always be somewhere on any list of major confusions.

- Similarly, his landing at the Worldwound, on Carissa, who seems very romantically compatible with him, is thought in Ordinary to form part of that same weirdness and improbability; that apparent observation could still be better explained by some Conspiracy theory.

- Everything to do with Snack Service.  Supposedly if Keltham thinks about this too much, Snack Service is retroactively allowed to help him less.  Keltham is skeptical, but he will try computing everything without Snack Service in it; and if it looks afterwards like Snack Service is a huge missing piece or an obvious Conspiracy tactic, then sorry, but Keltham is going to add in the Snack Service part.

- Masochists.  Damage-resistant masochists.  Okay they demonstrated that Keltham himself has now acquired the same damage resistance, and there sure does seem to be a reasonable corpus of erotic novels to read on the subject, but it remains incredibly not expected in advance and goes on the list.

- The whole eroLARP thing, with Keltham having an unreasonable number of interesting girlfriends who were all supposedly quickly collected out of Ostenso wizard academy.  Okay, fine, Pilar was supposedly oracle-cursed afterwards and Meritxell (or as Keltham refers to her in private, 'All Other Girlfriends') maybe isn't that interesting in an objective sense.  But Ione is supposedly Nethys-touched and Asmodia is... Asmodia.  That's still a lot of interesting girlfriendness to have been randomly collected out of a wizard academy's top female students.

- Yaisa seems totally unproblematic in any way; except for being way too perfect at what she is and does, while not having any problems.  If this whole investigation ends up resurrecting the tropes hypothesis, then there is some kind of huge deal about Yaisa that is being hidden.  There have been no hints of this, unless Keltham is really missing something, and it should arguably go down as a point against some more paranoid hypotheses.

- Golarion continues to seem to be overall worse off than the number of Golarion Doomfacts that Keltham knows about can account for.-- Keltham did tell Carissa it was okay not to dump all of the doomfacts on him at once.  He should at the very least be trying to keep around a Possible-Ordinary hypothesis where some things are being lightly obscured from him in a friendly way, so that Keltham doesn't, like, get suddenly hit with something 100x worse than a slave market.-- No he should not just put on an artifact headband if there are things around 100x worse than slave markets.  He.  Doesn't think.  He still doesn't think.  For now.

- Korva Tallandria, who was presumably heavily screened before being offered to the Project, publicly burst into tears supposedly in an 'ordinary' way not indicative of a huge mental break.  Keltham doesn't see what this points at, but it surprised him at the time, so it goes on the list.

- He's been promised a trip to Ostenso in 1 day, which might turn into 2 days.  He can supposedly get lots of books if he's a little patient.-- In Conspiracy worlds, this means either that they can fake a lot more things on a day's notice to prep new spells, or that, on a day's notice to prep new spells, they can mind-control him... in some way that would have been too expensive or too risky or have downsides which is why they didn't do it immediately.

- Keltham was recently surprised, and should have maybe noticed a trace of confusion, when Cheliax said they wanted to make a massive nation-scale push at spellsilver, without having offered him nation-scale resources earlier on, even when it should've been apparent that Keltham was headed there.  And why one month?  That's a weird time interval in which to try to scale, given Cheliax's apparent level of state capacity and how urgent they've been about things previously.  Keltham doesn't have any idea of where that's going, he's just noticing a trace of confusion about the whole thing.-- Seems worth noting that this new deal kicked off Keltham's own attempt at Conspiracy review.  If the Conspiracy is gauging him very exactly, that could itself be some sort of plot.  Like, Keltham isn't seeing it at all, but he's still noting it down.

Keltham: ...feels like some of thoughts, while productive, aren't maximally productive.  He should maybe be trying to take more low-hanging fruit.

So Keltham tries to remember, think back, notice things that surprised him very early on when the Conspiracy might have been worse at hiding things.  If you suppose that they got better at hiding things over time, even today, and then extrapolate that backwards in time, they'd have been very bad at it during the early days.

- It surprised Keltham, on the evening of Day 0, that Asmodeus was supposedly the only Lawful Evil god worth mentioning, except for one incredibly awful exception, and that all the other Evil gods were totally unworthy trade partners.  Are they possibly hiding Evil gods who would be decent competition with Asmodeus as trade partners?-- In the same way that he's not hearing about other Evil gods worth dealing with, besides Asmodeus, why is Keltham not hearing anything about other Evil countries, besides Cheliax?

- Back when Keltham's unknown god could select spells for him, it selected (Day 1) Sanctuary, Aura Sight, Invisibility Purge, Spell Immunity, Glimpse of Beyond, and a spell that gave him a vision of horror that was supposedly Xovaikain; and (Day 2) 2 Auguries, Detect Desires, Detect Anxieties, Protection, Summon Monster III, Enchantment Foil.  Invisibility Purge and maybe Aura Sight is supposedly explained by Broom... or the Aura Sight was to tell Keltham his god was Lawful Neutral since his hosts didn't tell him that right away.  Sanctuary, Protection, Enchantment Foil, Summon Monster III, and Vision are explained if the Zon-Kuthon war was real.  Why were those spells there, in the world where the Zon-Kuthon war was fake?  The entire spell list should go into the set of things to be potentially explained in different ways.

- Galt has the only army that doesn't rape and pillage, because they're zombies... no, that was Ged, or Geb, or something.  If that's true there should be much harsher criticisms of Cheliax in the books, right?  Unless other countries are refraining from that critique because they know their own armies are no better?  That seems fairer than he'd expect Ranting Golarion Authors to be.

- It's supposedly surprising that he got 4 cleric circles overnight.  Carissa said this was incredibly rare, and explained it as Keltham's god worrying that he might need to fight.  This continues to seem well-explained by the Zon-Kuthon affair or just by Keltham being incredibly important, in Ordinary, but may have a different story in Conspiracy.  In particular, Keltham now knows that his saves against various spells depend on his caster circles.

- The wacky wizard teacher boasting about himself, in his book about teaching wizardry, said something about punishing students after class... because they couldn't concentrate if you did that during the day, which doesn't sound like the point was just teaching-to-intuitive-mechanisms, and... is Keltham remembering correctly that the wizard teacher said something about keeping them after school so they couldn't just get healed?  Okay now that Keltham is actually thinking back on that, WHAT.  At the time it was just blurring into everything else being weird and wrong and incomprehensible, but now Keltham has some context and that doesn't sound like... Pilar... maybe it does sound like Pilar but it doesn't sound like Carissa and supposedly not everybody is like that.-- Maybe this is Keltham misremembering something, and he should ask for another copy of that book.  Or test Conspiracy/Ordinary on whether that book happens to be one of the ones destroyed in the attack on the archduke's villa.-- okay, but meanwhile it still goes on the list, in case this is somehow the one piece that causes everything to make sense somehow

- He was surprised by the whole Chelish 'dignity' thing, where everybody seems relentlessly cheerful even if they're actually confused and bewildered.  If that's a dead giveaway of anything, the Conspiracy might not have realized at the time they needed to hide it.  Keltham doesn't see where it goes, but it's a surprise so it goes on the list.-- People in the streets in Absalom did not have the Chelish 'dignity' thing going on.  People had all sorts of facial expressions.

Asmodia: Okay, yeah, the Conspiracy looks kind of fucked at this point.

Keltham is hitting like 5% of the problematic points that Asmodia identified in the complete transcripts (that everyone carefully edited in case of Keltham demanding transcripts).  But Keltham is hitting some of the largest points.  If anything that's worse, it means Keltham will be thinking about the important points without a lot of distractors.

...maybe Keltham can still manage to get everything wrong, if he puts together those pieces without knowing what the correct answer is supposed to be?

Maybe.  Maybe they can get that miracle.  But then is Keltham going to get his guesses wrong enough that he doesn't - just conclude that things still don't make enough sense on any known hypothesis, and that he needs to try an Owl's Wisdom and a Fox's Cunning to work it out.  Does Keltham not demand that Cheliax go Teleport to an ordinary Chelish library in the Queen's dominion, today, and grab all the history books that fit into a bag of holding, like he just thought about?  Does he end up wrong enough to go to sleep tonight without answers?  That's the miracle that Asmodia isn't seeing and that she doesn't think they can get.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa seconds that; this is just what a loss scenario looks like, with the only remaining possibility being the fake escape plan. Keltham in fact picked up that they might've been making mistakes early on; they were making mistakes early on; they lose. 

They should still try the fake escape plan, modified to be as tropey as possible, because a 5% or 10% chance is much better for Cheliax than nothing. But they should also probably be preparing to invade Osirion. 

She feels sick, but not in a way that's very impairing. 

The books in Tien have shown up. She orders them placed beneath the Rope Trick with a note Keltham can read, rather than interrupt him.

Keltham: Keltham sees it through the screen, out of his peripheral vision.  The note is in large letters, but it's hard to read up here, through the screen.

Not particularly thinking about what he's doing, Keltham casts Prestidigitation, then turns the screen near-invisible.  A fly, apparently startled by the event, buzzes away.  Keltham isn't focused on that part consciously; he's still having a bit of trouble reading the note, so he grabs a lens-shaped volume of air and changes its refractive index until the note enlarges in his vision and becomes visible.

Something in the back of his mind notes that Keltham really is become a magic-user, now, something that belongs in Golarion and couldn't use all of itself elsewhere.

...his books and newspapers from Tien have arrived.

Good, Keltham guesses.

There's a developing sick feeling in him like maybe he doesn't need them.  Is there a point?  A Conspiracy that could fake the Chelish history section of a library has had time to pick nonproblematic books out of a distant place that doesn't think much about Cheliax, and maybe try to quickly censor or edit those...

And yeah, if Keltham is feeling that sick way about things - like things are going to fall apart as soon as he takes the items on his list, and starts looking for connections and ways to fit them together - then maybe it's time for him to, go ahead, and finish this, if his mind already knows where it needs to go.

Carissa is sitting on the grass, below him, looking cheerful, as Chelish people do, messing with her headband-manufacturing-assistive devices.

'His' Carissa.

Keltham's not - not really reasoning it through carefully, when he does what he does next.  Before that.  It might be a giveaway.  The Conspiracy is reading his mind anyways.  That's not certain, the Rope Trick could defend against it.  The Conspiracy wouldn't have told him about Rope Trick if that was a real possibility -

Keltham just does it anyways.

He writes a note, and carefully pushes it out of the Rope Trick, underneath the edge of his Prestidigitated fragile screen.

So, what does Conspiracy Carissa think of Keltham?

Obviously Conspiracy Carissa's simulation of Ordinary Carissa, won't really know.  Or will say something Conspiracy Carissa thinks is useful, though, if it's visibly useful, to him, it leaks bits.  Maybe, if they're reading his mind, and if they're expecting him to figure it out, they're past worried about leaking bits, and will say something else carefully designed to manipulate him -

Keltham doesn't know why he's doing that.

For whatever it's worth, if they're reading his mind, he intends - to compute things without whatever Carissa says, he won't consider it in his evidence for Conspiracy, or against it, just like if he found somebody with a missing head and needed to figure out without that whether they'd been murdered.  Keltham can't really do that, he's not smart enough or wise enough to be a judge in a court of Civilization, but he can just, read whatever it is, and then put it aside and not think about it while he's adding up the rest of the evidence.

She said that to him, that she knows exactly what Conspiracy Carissa thinks of him.  Maybe there was a reason Carissa said that.  So he'll ask.

Carissa Sevar: Sure. Okay. 

Her instincts have always been the only thing that's any good for fighting Keltham, anyway.

Carissa Sevar: Conspiracy Carissa wants you to beat her fair and square, so she knows you'll win when we're both trying.

And she'll have been hoping, all along, that when you learn the truth you'll go to her superiors and say, all right, now if we're going to get started on restitution, here, the first thing I want is Carissa, body and soul, to sell in those markets in Absalom if I like, because she should never have been yours. 

Keltham: That could be Ordinary Carissa, guessing at what exactly-herself inside the vaguely-defined-Conspiracy could be thinking, sure.

If it means anything else, Keltham will figure it out after he figures out the Conspiracy.

Keltham: First, because it sure would be tragic to arrive at a grim conclusion by mistake -

Actually, no, that would not be too tragic, not unless it leads him to do something disastrous - which - there's things he can do, that one would not think would be disastrous, rechecking conclusions under mental enhancement for example -

- anyways, to be balanced, he's supposed to also list out the things that weigh against Conspiracy.

Most prominently among them:

Why didn't they just cast Suggestion on him?

...

- because people develop resistance with repeated exposure- because it in fact only lasts a few minutes rather than hours, and Lrilatha or whoever would literally run out of spells- because people affected by it are stupider about related subjects, in a way that would've affected Keltham's useful spellsilver research ability

It's evidence, strong evidence even, but not infinitely strong.

It would've just felt - like if he'd said any of those things, back then, after Lrilatha's demonstration - that it would've been like, he was trapped forever in maybe-Conspiracy, immune to all evidence, and unable to be happy with the Carissa who apparently loved him.

Peranza said that she realized she wasn't happy and wanted to go to Hell.  A very ordinary thing to happen in Ordinary.  In Conspiracy there'd have to be - some reason to pull Peranza, who isn't in Hell at all now - well, there could be a reason Keltham doesn't know, why Conspiracy would do that.  But it stands out as something that feels more probable in Ordinary than in Conspiracy, pointing to something else that has to be true in Conspiracy, if the first part is true.  Actually you could say the same about Korva breaking down in tears; that's strange in Ordinary but it's even stranger in Conspiracy.

If they're just lying to him about everything, why haven't - Keltham is having trouble figuring out how to pin down the exact discongruity here.  Why not have Lrilatha swear an oath to him that there's no Conspiracy?  Okay, maybe Lrilatha didn't do that because it would directly stake her credibility against Conspiracy's credibility, highlight in his attention that in Conspiracy worlds the oaths also aren't real.

Cheliax negotiated with him and had some weird asks in the Project contract, if they're just planning to steal from him, like the clause about two-thirds of Chelish profits going into a Cheliax-only investment fund, that Keltham negotiated down to half.  That made him slightly suspicious, and doesn't gain them anything if they're planning to steal everything anyways, so why include that if the Conspiracy just lying about everything?  Because there had to be some weird pushy asks or it would have felt suspicious to Keltham, if 'Cheliax' had just given way on all his asks immediately?

...Carissa did say very early on that Asmodeus's domain includes compacts.  Carissa talked about there being a 'Lawful' alignment axis very early on, and gods and afterlives falling on those axes.

Maybe Keltham can offer to pay Lrilatha 1000gp for ten minutes during which she either gives true answers to his questions, or says nothing, and then she actually does have to follow through, or refuse the compact.

...why wouldn't they just use an illusionary Lrilatha?  Or is that also not allowed?  Keltham can - sort of see it being not allowed - on some plausible background assumptions about how Lawfulness and Lawful gods work.

Well, among his options if he ends up uncertain are to request a paid truth-else-silence compact with Lrilatha, and see if she's mysteriously in Hell and can't get back until tomorrow...

Asmodia: "Welp.  We're fucked."

Keltham: ...Gorthoklek will of course also be unavailable, nor will they be able to summon whichever devil supposedly bought Carissa's soul...

...phrasing it as 'buying souls' is starting to make him more nervous, after seeing the slave market in Absalom.  You would think, people would not phrase it that way, or would find some way to rephrase it more reassuringly, in a world where slavery was also a thing.  Maybe Hell phrases it that way, because nobody in Hell is worried about slavery, and the mortal world follows suit...

...that slavery market really didn't look like a place that people could escape, just by walking out of Golarion, and into an afterlife where you buy consensual enhancements over thousands of years.

He was supposed to be listing out the evidence incongruous with Conspiracy.  Not starting to connect the pieces together, until he made sure he had all of them.

It no longer feels to Keltham like he'd be defending his world disintegrating, by doing that.  It feels like he'd just be delaying the destruction-by-truth, delaying the pain, for longer.

Keltham: All right.  Connect the pieces, as they'd be connected in Conspiracy.

Obvious statements are obvious:  The person he knows as Abrogail is not the Queen of Cheliax, the Zon-Kuthon war never happened.

- Asmodeus is the god of compacts, the contracts Keltham signs with Cheliax are binding on them when it purports to be somebody representing Cheliax, and they can't just lie about that to him.  Abrogail, herself, never signed any contract except the one stating consequences if Carissa fell in love with her; the rest was all Lrilatha, or one time a supposed representative of Chelish governance.

- There isn't actually an interdiction... no, Keltham can't quite rule that, so early.  Broom has no obvious Conspiracy-purpose if Otolmens doesn't exist, and even the Conspiracy might hesitate to lie about that.  But something is keeping Keltham's god from him.

- The Conspiracy can read his mind, but doesn't do so at all times, they weren't doing it last night when Keltham was first thinking about this.  They panicked when they got the information on which spells Keltham prayed for this morning, started reading his mind then, and told Ione to supposedly be in the toilet.

- Fennelosa kicked a child; Carissa talked about feeding putatively sapient rats to other rats and selling tickets; the slavery market, the wizard teacher hurting his students after class.  It points to - anti-Light, the thing that 'Zon-Kuthon' is supposed to be - being present in Absalom, in that wizard teacher whose book talked a bunch about Asmodeus, in the mind of Fennelosa, in the mind of Carissa.

- If Conspiracy, they're probably lying about being unable to identify his god.  Can Keltham figure out which god it is?  They wouldn't have first said the name after Keltham got clericed, so if this is solvable, it'll be a god that got mentioned as Lawful Neutral before Keltham got clericed.  Which Keltham thinks narrows it down to Abadar, maybe Irori, he doesn't remember if Erecura was mentioned before he got clericed... he thinks after... and then after Keltham did get clericed, they'd cast whichever god it actually was in a negative light, because any accurate representation would start Keltham moving in that direction.  Well, that makes it obvious that, if it's one of Abadar / Maybe Irori / Possibly Erecura, from among those three, his god would be Abadar.  Banking is the obvious fit for Mad Investor Chaos.  It's the thing that could be a misrepresentation of the god of Honorable Trade.  Could also just be that the Conspiracy didn't have the bad luck to mention the real god of Coordination to him before he got clericed.

- Cheliax telling him about a huge push to manufacture spellsilver over one month.  Why tell him that?  It makes no sense on Conspiracy...

If they have to report revenue to him monthly, because that was in the compact, and they expect a lot of revenue in one month, they would need an excuse... for what reality?  Revenue from a war, using ultimately Project-derived weapons?

That's - that's really not good, at all.  Keltham would be responsible for stopping that, one way or another - but the contract isn't written in a way that implies that Cheliax owes him revenues from stealing other people's stuff using Project-derived weapons - is it?

Table that one, keep thinking.

Keltham: The spells his god sent him, in the version of Conspiracy where his god is not on the Conspiracy's side and they faked the Zon-Kuthon godwar:

- Sanctuary, Protection:  You are not physically safe where you are.- Invisibility Purge:  People are hiding from you.- Glimpse of Beyond:  In other dimensions / behind secret doors / the people around you are not who they seem.- Spell Immunity:  Spells are being, or may be, cast on you that you wouldn't want cast.  You need to figure out what they are.- Aura Sight:  Your god is Lawful Neutral... maybe, you are Lawful Neutral, he has only the Conspiracy's word that Aura Sight says anything about his god.  Or also the Conspiracy could have been spoofing that spell.  He does not know for sure even that his god is Lawful Neutral.  His god could straight-up be Iomedae... though his god's presence back then didn't really feel like something that used to be human at all, let alone ex-feminine.-- Or he needed to know somebody else's alignment, somebody who wasn't really Lawful Evil.- Detect Desires, Detect Anxieties:  The people around you have desires and anxieties unknown to you and which it is important that you know.- Summon Monster III:  Get outside the Forbiddance, talk to something that is not one of your hosts... or the obvious other use of the summoned entity (Keltham's mind is by now used to not thinking of this specifically, lest it be mind-read).- Enchantment Foil.  Be wary of mind-control being used on you.

...could everyone around him actually be Chaotic Evil?  They sure didn't seem 'Lawful' by his standards...  Doesn't quite seem right, unless Carissa was lying about very basic things very early... and that remains a possibility.

Keltham: And then there's the last spell:

Vision of People On Fire, Burning and Being Healed, In Terrible Pain, Begging to Die.

If it's not meant to communicate Zon-Kuthon's afterlife, what it's meant to communicate - there's other possibilities, but - that could be the afterlife that people around him are heading to, or, some bad future that happens if Keltham works for the Conspiracy - but the seared wounds healing to be burned again, didn't look like that was mortal Golarion -

- the message is not that all the afterlives are like that, or at least, Keltham doesn't think his god wants him to think so, because there was the Early Judgment spell, the beautiful city - did Keltham touch a god from beyond known Golarion, are all the Golarion afterlives like that -

Keltham: Maybe he can resolve that last question, using the overly-clever-combo that occurred to him last night, after thinking about how different people tapping him with Share Language sometimes had different connotations for words like 'Good' and 'Evil'.

Tongues, plus linguisticanalysis.

Keltham: Keltham takes the five torn pages out of his shirt, from five different phantom library books in five different languages.

He may need to flip through the whole books to find words to analyze.  But Keltham is also hoping that he can just use the pages to anchor that language in his mind, and Tongues will give him the rest.  It will not make him as fluent a speaker as Share Language, Keltham doesn't think; Carissa's Baseline did not sound right, did not sound native, when she spoke to him using Tongues.

- as the very first thing Carissa did, before she had any idea at all who Keltham was, before she knew he was not of Golarion.  If showing him the capability of Tongues was a terrible idea for the Conspiracy, good luck hiding it from him then, Conspiracy Carissa.

Keltham: Keltham casts Tongues.

Picks a random torn page, anchors a language in his mind.

And goes looking, within this language he now sort-of-speaks, for words that sound phonetically similar to (among other potential roots and cognates) 'Asmodeus', 'Hell', 'Zon-Kuthon', 'devil', 'compact', 'oath', 'Cheliax', 'Lawful', 'Evil', 'LawfulEvil', 'LawfulNeutral', 'Abadar', 'Iomedae', 'Good', 'Sarenrae' -

Ferrer Maillol: "Sevar, if you want to try the fake escape plan, I think the time is now.  If Keltham decides within his mind that he's heading toward Osirion or a church of Abadar, our options get a lot more constrained.  Even statuing him for a week at that point - doesn't feel explicitly forbidden by Asmodeus, but it sure would be flirting with the edges of our Lord's commands, meaning we don't."

"If Keltham explicitly says he's planning to leave the Ostenso region and invokes the contract Lrilatha signed on behalf of Cheliax, we're separately bound by explicit compact with him to not hinder whatever he does in order to book passage out."

Carissa Sevar: “Understood. Get a Telepathic Bond between Manohar and Ione up and then - Ione, go.” She won’t be able to feed Ione lines inside the Rope Trick but they’ve rehearsed this.

Of course, it’s still not going to work.

Keltham: The Chelish dialect of Taldane has been optimized by something akin to natural selection, over the last decades, to no longer contain openly uncomplimentary meanings of 'Hellish' among the bourgeoisie whose children sometimes become Security wizards.  In the first couple of generations, things became hellishly challenging, hellishly relentless, hellishly sadistic and cruel.  Not hellishly bad.  You didn't say that where an Asmodean priest could hear you, meaning, anytime, and your children grew up not hearing it used that way.  In the couple of generations after, Infernal loanwords into Chelish-Taldane started to displace less precise, less useful, overly general terms like the Taldane 'hellish'.

Three of the five other languages Keltham can now anchor his mind on, have adjectives that obviously sound a lot like 'Hell' and mean 'torturous' 'painful' 'hope-crushing' 'soul-destroying' 'very extremely bad' -

Keltham: The screen on his Rope Trick entrance shatters, and Ione pokes her head up through it, holding her mouth open to display a small cookie.

Ione Sala: Ione Sala quickly finishes climbing in, swallowing the cookie, and says,

"Swore an oath not to tip you off if you didn't already know, Snack Service says the decision theory is still complicated so it can't help directly but it gave me a cookie to celebrate you finding out, mindreading spell is fifth-circle they don't have a lot of it I'm gambling everything on it not running right now, I faked a dropped paper slip from you in your handwriting saying that you wanted Ione Sala to come up and answer some questions, we've got only minutes at best, step one of my plan is for you to poke out your head and call in Sevar and Asmodia with Sevar coming in first and Asmodia following a minute after, Sevar's new earrings look genuine to my Detect Magic and there's a complicated reason in their game why the earrings would actually be real, so you'll do things that count as Evil, there'll be some other tactic to make sure you can't just order Sevar to speak truth, but maybe it doesn't work if Sevar doesn't know it's coming, or it's just a special exclusion in the earrings, step two of my plan is stun Sevar, put the earrings on her, have her get the drop on the Security outside and use their Teleport scroll, unless you've got a better plan, this one is me making the entire thing up since I got the cookie, they read my mind too."

Keltham: The feeling, of all of Ordinary's remaining probability mass vanishing, the moment Ione starts talking, is like -

Already know?  Keltham didn't already know - did he?  He wasn't finished already knowing.  Didn't have a chance to have a proper moment of realization.  He was still supposed to integrate everything and double-check.

It was just supposed to be a misleading line of thought that would have an obvious better answer, once Keltham finished thinking it through.

dath ilan: There's an emergency ongoing.  Execute a core fallback.

Keltham: The emergency is unfortunately too complicated for Keltham to fall back on simple methods of reasoning, but he does switch off all of the emotions he can, leaving only distant sadness and delayed pain and a sickness in his stomach, a trembling in his hands.  The body can't be denied as easily as the mind, but then, you can also do an awful lot with your mind.

Does he believe Ione?

dath ilan: You would really, really, really have to not think very much of dath ilan to imagine that the answer is 'yes'.

Keltham: 10% that it's the simple truth, and even that much is only because of tropes and how much he doesn't know about True Reality.  90% that it's a Conspiracy salvage attempt.

Within the Conspiracy side, there's - possibilities that he shouldn't let them read his mind about.  (Will he see an opportunity for a real escape inside the fake escape.  Can he get Carissa and innocent!Ione with him when he goes.  Does innocent!Ione go to the Fire Afterlife / Hell if Keltham doesn't play along.  He won't do anything that reduces his chance at his primary escape plan.)

Keltham: "Okay.  So the next step of the plan is for me to tell them to send up Carissa, and then Asmodia a minute after Carissa comes in."  Keltham starts to lean down towards the Rope Trick's opening -

Ione Sala: "Control your expression.  Control your voice.  Security would notice instantly that something's wrong with you."

Keltham: "Like this?"

Ione Sala: This sure is an earlier point for the plan to fail than the earliest point at which she imagined it failing.

Keltham: Yeah, okay, he can read that expression, no doubt because Ione is making an effort to be readable to him.

Keltham casts Eagle's Splendour on himself, only thinking when the gesture is half-complete that he's expending a resource for the sake of playing along with a lie, but it's not a key resource and his hands have finished the motion before his worrying cortex can manage to inhibit it.

He's not really at his best.

Keltham: Keltham had wondered before why Splendour/Charisma was a reasonable characteristic to be one of only three major mental attributes at the center of Golarion's conceptualmagic.  Splendour didn't seem on par with Wisdom, let alone Cunning/Intelligence.  He didn't see what manipulating people, or pretending to be other people, had to do with, like, sorcery casting, or paladin casting.  It seemed like a case of there just being Three Attributes, two of which were in use by wizards and clerics, so the third one got assigned to sorcerers and paladins even if that made no sense.

That, of course, was when Keltham didn't need Splendour.  When his mind wasn't in a posture where increased Splendour would make a difference to anything but play-acting.

Keltham's hesitating will firms itself, his faltering drive moves back into motion -

- his emotions grow stronger, but the spell also increases his ability to crush his emotions down and his ability to continue despite them; and when that's added to dath ilani disciplines, it's enough to go on delaying the pain.

"Better?"

Ione Sala: "It'll have to do."

Keltham: Keltham sticks his head out of the Rope Trick and asks them to send up Carissa, followed by Asmodia one minute later.

Keltham: "- okay now what's the plan for subduing Carissa."

Ione Sala: "Wait until Sevar is far enough in not to fall down, then rip off her headband, it's an artifact headband instead of her usual one.  Losing it should disorient her enough that you can, uh, subdue her, if that story was true, and get the earrings onto her.  And then command her to take no voluntary actions, and then heal her."

Keltham: A spark of real interest lights in Keltham.  "And then we put the artifact headband on you instead?"

dath ilan: (Getting your hands on the cognitive-enhancement device, even for a few exciting minutes, is not uncommonly a key turning point in dath ilani stories - though with protagonists who have more Carissan and less Kelthamian attitudes towards cognitive enhancement.)

Ione Sala: "...too risky," Ione says with great regret in her voice.  "It strikes me as the sort of 'Exception Handling weaponry' that might possibly have safeguards against 'unauthorized users'."

(After a couple of months of Communal Share Language from Keltham, everyone on the Project has started to pick up some phrases in Baseline; and concepts too, of course.  Ione more than most, again of course.)

Keltham: The spark of interest-hope-curiosity fades.  Is this really worth delaying his primary escape plan?

- maybe it is, if he can haul Carissa with him on his primary escape.  Asmodia - why Asmodia, why is the Conspiracy -

"Ione, why Asmodia?"

Ione Sala: "Asmodia is the other one who strikes me as - redeemable is the wrong word, that she doesn't really want to be here - and who I think actually cares about you, which I suspected would matter to you.  Was I wrong?"

Keltham: "No, that would matter to me, if" it was real "you were right."

A small flow of probability shifts from ConspiracyConspiracy to OrdinaryConspiracy, though not much.  ConspiracyConspiracy he'd expect to try tempting him with keeping Yaisa - or had he actually come to care more about Asmodia, and did they know that?

The sadness hits him like a punch in the gut; with the added Splendour he withstands it more by inner force than by inner fiat.

Here comes Carissa.  Time to play out this next part, he guesses.

And hurt Carissa, not for the sake of their relationship, but for - he's just not going to think about that, or whether he meant anything to her.

Carissa Sevar: "- wow," she says quietly as soon as she sees Keltham's face. " - what - do you want -"

Keltham: Grab her and haul her in.

Ione Sala: Rip off the headband.

Carissa Sevar: - Carissa makes a small horrified sound and then lunges bodily at Ione. She's clumsy; if you had absolutely no context on any of this you might think she was on drugs, or possibly had rabies. 

Keltham: Without Bull's Strength some of his martial options become more limited, have to be done in particular ways.  Grab Carissa's right arm, bring up his fist in a powerful blow to break her right elbow, to make it harder for her to draw and use her dagger.  Then put Carissa into a chokehold that Security insisted on training Keltham in, as an anti-spellcaster technique.  Were they planning this fake escape that far back?

(...why is he playing along, to this extent... because maybe he can turn it real, or, real enough to take Carissa with him when he actually leaves...)

Carissa Sevar: She doesn't actually fight him, though she does keep trying to maul Ione. 

Keltham: Somehow that makes it hurt worse.  Some deep part of him doesn't believe in anything that's in words words words, it just sees him beating up Carissa who isn't fighting back.

dath ilan: Dath ilan hopes most of its people don't experience this stress level at any point in their lives.  But always some people do, and when that time comes for them, their ability to continue operating seems like a key figure of merit for whether dath ilan has made its people stronger, or weaker, in the end.

Keltham has been shaped to continue even now; Keltham's society has shaped itself to accomplish that quality of the people within.

Keltham: "Ione.  Earrings.  Left pocket last time I saw her put them in there."

At some point he's going to find whoever planned out this particular pantomime, and made him do this to Carissa -

- possibly Carissa, now that he thinks about it -

- or were all her lines, everything she was, scripted by that same scriptor -

Ione Sala: She'll look for them and not say anything.  Still there?

Carissa Sevar: Still there. She finished them, while they were waiting for Keltham to realize the truth. 

Ione Sala: She will attempt to apply the earrings to Sevar... how easy are these earrings to apply to somebody who is (possibly pretending to be) not cooperative?

Carissa Sevar: Well, obviously, they were designed to be possible to put on an uncooperative person should that seem like fun. 

Keltham: "Equestrian pumpkins.  Take no voluntary action."

Channel healing.

"What's the plan on Asmodia?"

Ione Sala: "Several possibilities but the one I was betting on was that you've still got that magic item you used to cancel Sevar's magic, and you brought it along with you into this place along with all of your unbanked money.  Fallback, that Sevar has a spell or item that makes Asmodia safe to take with.  Worst case is killing her and taking along her body so we can resurrect her at the destination."

Keltham: "If you predicted I had the Curse of Magic Negation item, why did you just make me break Carissa's - because I didn't prep Remove Curse and we need Carissa's magic to Teleport, never mind."

Asmodia: One may now see Asmodia approaching the Rope Trick.

Keltham: He'll get out the rod of Curse of Magic Negation, which, yes, he's got with him along with all of his platinum pieces.

Asmodia: Asmodia pokes her head into the Rope Trick and -

Asmodia: "Sorry I'm late, had to get my spellbook and my money first for obvious reasons."

Keltham: "Sure.  Whatever.  Come on in."  He'll lend Asmodia a hand to pull her up.

He's glad he doesn't have to hurt Asmodia, in this skit.  They didn't have that kind of relationship.  Well.  If they had any kind of relationship, it wasn't that one.

Ione Sala: "Keltham -"

"Asmodia, why would you actually be defecting just like that, Hell owns your soul."

Asmodia: "Not even slightly the kind of problem that'd stop an ilani.  Worst case, I get a Plane Shift to Abaddon at the end of my life, and gamble on ending up somewhere else just like Keltham did."

"The part where we're still in Cheliax surrounded by Security is more of a problem.  Is there a plan for that?"

Ione Sala: "All of us against one Security.  Sevar uses his Teleport scroll."

Asmodia: "I'll admit, I was hoping there would be a better plan."

Ione Sala: "Is there a reason that plan can't work, because we are short on time here, Asmodia -"

Nefreti Clepati: At this moment a tiny glowing circle appears on the wall of the Rope Trick, and then grows abruptly into a much larger portal, through which an elderly woman is visible. She's sitting in an armchair with a thick book open on her lap. "Were you looking for a scroll of Teleport? I sell those."

Keltham: "Cost?" Keltham says.

Chance this is real... possibly higher, he'd go to 20% because it feels more like Snack Service and less like the usual Conspiracy.

Nefreti Clepati: "For each scroll of Teleport, you must promise to entertain an old woman for one minute while she tries to persuade you that your plans for it are a terrible idea."

Asmodia: "Right, so, okay, creating common knowledge, the previous escape plan was fake, this was not part of it, I hate Cheliax, for all the obvious reasons that's why, Ione likely hates Cheliax too, do not free Sevar she's complicated, there's very few people in the Inner Sea who can cast Gate and only one who'd look like that, who's also the one who'd plausibly know where we are, that's Nefreti Clepati, high priestess of Nethys hence why Ione is kneeling to her, she's plausibly one of the relatively better mysterious figures to make a weird deal with, you should not do that with an Asmodean."

Nefreti Clepati: "Creating more common knowledge, Gate is actually a spell for transportation, not for talking! You can just walk through it!"

She stands up, sets the book down, and does so. Then, for some reason, she frowns at the floor of the Rope Trick and -

Nefreti Clepati: Steps on a housefly. 

Nefreti Clepati: "I hate to be pushy, but Gate's duration is two rounds per caster circle, so if you want to buy a Teleport scroll, or escape to freedom, you should probably do that promptly."

Keltham: "I'll ask, briefly, what's on the other side of that Gate and why I shouldn't Teleport."

Nefreti Clepati: "You shouldn't Teleport because there are, in fact, nine different gods that will descend on you as soon as you leave the interdiction zone and some of them eat people. On the other side of this Gate is a temple of Nethys in Andoran, near the border with Ostenso, and therefore in the interdiction zone, but outside Cheliax. It is possible Cheliax will start a war with Andoran about this, but probably not because they didn't risk the actual Crown of Infernal Majesty in their last-ditch deception. Which is too bad. In some nearby worlds I get to steal it and wear it around now, and I'd like that very much."

Asmodia: Asmodia's just going to walk through that Gate, actually.

Ione Sala: Ione will glance there, glance at Keltham, and say "Please."

Keltham: "Andoran's border does not look that close to Ostenso -"

Ione Sala: "Faked all the maps you saw because you'd want to visit if you knew."

Keltham: "Would you happen to want to swear to me that the destination of this Gate is still within the interdiction zone?  No is fine."

Nefreti Clepati: "I swear to you, Keltham, that the other end of this Gate is within the interdiction zone set out by Otolmens."

Keltham: "Carissa, follow me and otherwise take no voluntary action," and Keltham walks through.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa follows. 

Ione Sala: Ione follows very quickly.

Nefreti Clepati: She follows too!

This room is a big, big library, probably not quite as big as the one he briefly scry-saw in Absalom. There's a fire crackling in a very large fireplace, and a thick woolen rug on the floor. There are windows; they look out on a grubby city-or-maybe-village with a lot of horse poop in the road.

Keltham: "So if, hypothetically, you wanted me to believe that any of this was real, you could earn a lot of credibility points by presenting me with a complete story about reality all of which made sense in retrospect."

Nefreti Clepati: The Gate closes behind them. "That is what I got all of these books for! But I can tell you what the books say, if you would like. Hell is not voluntary, and is full of torture. The Church of Asmodeus had little purchase in Golarion, until Aroden's death plunged Cheliax into a thirty year civil war so destructive that by the time the Asmodeans won it, less than half the pre-war population remained. Since then, under Abrogail's grandmother and her successors, they have shaped Cheliax into a place where everyone lives in obedient terror or dies."

Nefreti Clepati: "They realized immediately that they would have to keep this from you. Nethys knows everything, but not all at once, so I can't tell you exactly how they did that; but I think Ione will know. Nethys picked Ione just before the interdiction was placed, and was not able to give her any instructions, but I think she has done very well."

Nefreti Clepati: "Do you by any chance aspire to someday cause some very big explosions in Cheliax," she adds to Ione. 

Ione Sala: "Haven't really had a chance to form any aspirations like that before, what with all the mindreading.  But just on immediate reactions, rescue operation on Cheliax.  Explode Asmodeus."

Keltham: "How did I get to Golarion, why did I land on Carissa, especially if she's not real, why didn't you intervene earlier if you could have intervened at any time, what is up with Snack Service, who's my god, what am I allegedly supposed to do next on your theory?"

Nefreti Clepati: "The powers that brought you here are beyond the gods. I think you called them tropes, and thereby got closer to looking straight at them than most people ever do. Carissa is a real person, who is really in love with you, and also she's a loyal Asmodean who wronged you terribly trying to obey her superiors; I think probably you should try to change her mind about that, now that she's allowed to think. I was not allowed to seek you out using knowledge from the fragments of Nethys that I am, as they are subject to the interdiction; however, today knowledge of you came to me via a path not touched by gods at all, so I scried you, and waited until you had your girlfriend because you'd be so sad if you left without her. 

Cayden Cailean decided to commit himself wholly to the task of making sure you didn't rape anybody despite having lots of sex in Cheliax which doesn't really understand how not raping people works. He told Asmodeus this served Asmodeus's interests too, presumably because you in fact could be even more mad at them than you are, somehow. Your god is Abadar. I think the next thing you should do is read a lot of books, though the next scene I am looking forward to is you talking Carissa out of Asmodeanism."

Keltham: "Mmhm.  And this story's reason why Cheliax doesn't use Greater Scry to see me here, Teleport in, grab me, Teleport out again?"

Nefreti Clepati: "The temple is shielded from scries and Sending and bars teleportation. Also they would be starting a war with Andoran, but in some worlds they do that, so I don't want to rely on it!"

Keltham: "And if I asked you about the result of my picking a random book, opening it to a random page, and reading out the first sentence there?"