"I guess I could in the middle of our shopping trip decide to rent an apartment there and move into it and not give him a minute to go 'what the fuck' without making it conspicuous to third parties but our friends would at some point come looking for him. But that's also true of slaves drow acquire through ordinary kidnapping, that someone may come looking for them."

" - it matters a lot how likely it is? And how - I don't know. If I'm sparring with a friend, that's pretend. If we go to some country where murdering each other in duels is legal, and we're sparring, that's pretend. But I don't know for sure it's pretend because he might at any moment decide it's real, and then it would be, his deciding would make it so. I think if someone else's deciding would make you a slave it's not entirely pretend anymore."

"So I guess it's kind of a spectrum of pretend and the thing you described sounded kinda too pretend. Presumably you have less-pretend beliefs about, like, what the word 'potato' means, even though you also have only everyone's say-so to go on there and a sufficient conspiracy could have fooled you, or... how many siblings you have, so you'd be genuinely surprised if your dad were hiding a second family with a bunch of extra brothers somewhere even if that's probably happened to somebody at least once and you wouldn't have said you were certain-sure your dad would never..."

"He has three acknowledged children? It wouldn't actually be surprising at all if there were others he has nothing to do with. A secret family would be surprising because I've lived with him and I know how he accounts for his time. I guess it wouldn't be surprising if it was recent. If I've directly observed things then reality is going to be consistent with what I directly observed, obviously counting that people might've been trying to trick me."

"Are there things you can think of that are consistent with reality but that would surprise you?"

"If ...Kyeo weren't gay that would surprise me. If Mahdi were that would surprise me. ...making predictions there is extra important, right, I think I try harder at it.

"How did you identify Kyeo as gay, it didn't sound like he confided this to you -"

"Mostly that he wasn't into me at all, not even halfway in the 'but for X she'd be my type' way. ...I know in principle some people just have different tastes but in practice people who are attracted to women are - evaluating me in a way that he wasn't."

"And you've honed your ability to tell whether people are into you because historically that's been relevant to you, and you get - feedback on it - yes?"

"Yes. And I read sixty peoples' minds every week."

"Bleah. - I don't think Good people are in general anti-divination, that's just a me personally thing. Uh, anyway, the kind of belief that I think is not pretend is the kind where you would be surprised if you found it was false. Doing this with moral beliefs is hard mode because so little of them is - empirical -"

"I cannot imagine possibly believing anything about politics or gods so determinedly I would be surprised if it were false."

"Gods don't actually exist? Ihys is alive and well? Norgorber is secretly an azata filling the niche so someone worse won't. All politicians are sincerely motivated by a desire to do right by their people and every election is legitimate in places that have those. Taxation has no effect on consumption. Political assassinations are rare and monarchs are just really bad at labeling their decorative arsenic."

"I guess I would be surprised if gods didn't actually exist, not by the next two, I'd be surprised by...all politicians having a desire to do right by their people...because any time all people turn out a way is surprising and that's not a psychologically plausible way for humans to be. I don't know anything about how taxes work. I don't have expectations about how often people get assassinated. Probably poisoning them would be rare since they can just get raised and now they're mad at you."

"Drow princesses get poisoned all the time, usually when their enemies control the church or the diamond mines or when being assassinated is such a bad sign for her competence that it'll ruin her anyway." Sigh. "Mahdi had the idea that you give a day-by-day rundown of what you normally do so we can see if any of it is sneakily evil, does that sound workable?"

"Sure. Uh, at the Worldwound I wake up, I attend morning prayers, I - pray to be shown Asmodeus's will and to be worthy of it, I eat breakfast, I work on my existing enchanting project for the bulk of the day, with a lunch break, I finish my enchanting project for the day, I go to dinner, I randomly select and interview eight of our soldiers, I go socialize with adventurers and try to convince them to tell me about all of their magic items and where they got them and what behavior they exhibit."

"...okay, praying to Asmodeus could be evil but probably doesn't do it, doing your mindreading interviews thing is probably more Law than Evil but might be any evil... do you take days off, what do you do then..."

"One a week, we spend more time at services and then usually we hang around and get drunk and listen to the adventurers trade stories. Some nights I do a Rope Trick and go see my girlfriend?"

"Also not evil unless the services are doing it all on their own and I spent a long time attending Demon Church and not that long adventuring..."

"If the interviews turn up someone planning treason or desertion I have to report them, and I have done that sometimes. It's my job and if I didn't do it they'd catch it anyway the next time it was a different wizard on duty, and kill me too for joining in on it, but - maybe that's irrelevant?"

"Could be, she doesn't grade on a curve."

"But it makes it hard to repent of since I don't really wish I'd done something stupid instead. I guess probably I can come up with something for it."

"Paladins might know more about what counts."

"I can ask. 

Most Chelish people aren't wizards and don't have responsibility for unit discipline and they still all go to Hell."

"Yeah. Imagine - a random Chelish florist, what do they do all day."