The subtlety of wording doesn't escape the notice of Asmodia wearing a headband.  "Study dath ilani thought, not dath ilani knowledge?  That sounds like a daring thought to think, for somebody who hasn't sold her soul."  Who do you think you are, who are you in fact, to make promises like those?  You don't talk like a Keltham expert that Maillol bestowed with a little more authority over the rest of us.

"Asmodeus owns me, and owes me nothing in exchange, and I'll think whatever thoughts might serve Him, it being hard to know in advance of thinking them. Concern yourself with your fate, Asmodia, and if there's a promise it's worth making you then I'll tell you why I can promise it."

Asmodia gives a half-nod of acknowledgement; fair's fair, even if she couldn't say whatever Keltham would say about what exactly makes that be fair.

With a fraction of preliminary agreement to agree on something behind them, it's time to speak a little more frankly.

"What exactly are you looking for, from me?  I thought we were here to coax useful information out of Keltham to get transcribed for the real experts.  That requires us to look harmless to a dath ilani, to be pretty girls that men enjoy thinking they can teach, and to make fast progress and show it to him so he'll move on to more advanced lessons.  If you've got priorities that aren't the project priorities, and involve dath ilani thinking that we were told on day one was insane, I need to hear spelled out what kind of merchandise you want me to have on offer.  And then I need to hear confirmation that's okay from Security, with whom I'm not interested in being in trouble, though I'd agree to keep it secret from the other students if you wanted."

Maybe it's not obvious, if the thing you want most is to stop existing. Why is that even a way humans can be insane. "I suppose I don't need to tell you this, Asmodia, but most  people run into five kinds of heresy the first time they try having an original thought, and we presently have a problem that we can't solve without a fair bit of original thought. I'm not, of course, an exception, but I suspect that the five kinds of heresy I end up at are entirely different from yours. 

I want you to think anyway. You can end all your thoughts in 'and this is why I want my soul expended for magical power by the darkest of sorcerers', if you want, I don't care, though do mind that your only route to that is to impress me. I want you to try to understand the math underlying Law well enough that if we end up sticking more headbands on you you can derive things dath ilan didn't get around to teaching Keltham. I want you to do well enough at that Keltham notices, ideally, but I actually think I care more about the math than the Keltham noticing, and if you hate the idea of him noticing you in particular you can feed all your clever mathematical insights to Meritxell." Who will absolutely hate not having come up with them herself.

Asmodia thinks the same thing, and doesn't suppress her small vicious smile.  "Security, if you're there, I request confirmation that Sevar's sudden interest in Lawful Neutral thinking doesn't mean she got oracled by Irori, and that the Queen, the Grand High Priestess, and Asmodeus would be fine with this private trade."

A wizard remains invisible, but the spell hiding them and their Arcane Mark appear, as plain as sight to Asmodia without need of Detect Magic, which she prepared on sheer reflex this morning before realizing that she was being dumb.

"Confirmed," says Security.  And, just to fuck with Sevar in an allowable sort of way, "If the Queen wasn't fine with it, she probably would've mentioned it when she visited Sevar's bedroom this morning."

Carissa several weeks ago cared if her subordinates thought she was sleeping her way to the top but that ship has sailed, and circumnavigated the globe, and soared off to become an airship, at this point. Besides, sleeping your way that much to the top isn't even shameful. "So, I think I offered a look at my spellbook," she says instead. 

"Yes.  It was, in fact, very generous of you."

Asmodia follows Sevar to her bedroom - not the first person to do that, apparently!  But at the point where someone can nab Abrogail Thrune II while not looking any prettier than Carissa does, she is no longer a slut, she is a shapechanged ancient dragon slut with nine slut caster circles, and only a fool would anger someone who's as much of a slut as that.

And along the way, while she's still wearing the intelligence headband, Asmodia asks herself what she understands about dath ilani thinking.  There's obvious notions like, they've developed some inner thing like arcane sight that pierces through the Prime Material like a realm of shadows and sees Mathematics underneath it, but Keltham already knows that and isn't being shy about teaching it to them.  Figuring out what they lied to Keltham about, filling in the holes of his knowledge - there's some parts that are obvious if you were raised Evil, what a perfected Lawful Good society carefully hides from children and citizens of questionable loyalty: sadism, the possibility that you can hit people to get them to do what you want, that you can force people to go on playing games they aren't being bribed to play.  If Asmodia has an advantage in figuring out something like that, it will be the math that they censored from him.

Is there any part of this that she has an elemental affinity for?  The first day - wasn't an unhappy one, was as happy as any day in Cheliax ever gets, between the moments of anxiety and being sure that Keltham was fucking with them.  They found out that it's possible to glance at a country of half men and half women, and pierce through the obscuring veil of matter to the Law behind.

And the thought occurs to Asmodia, then - if she is, for some reason, allowed to think about dath ilani thinking - that there's something about Keltham's dath ilani attitude in the face of difficult problems that's - indomitable?  Wrong word, and maybe Taldane doesn't have a right one.  Something that isn't expecting that students only get problems that they've been trained to solve.  Keltham does ask if Golarion has already tried and failed to solve problems, but only to know how difficult they'd be for him to solve, not to consider whether they might be impossible.  You never get the impression for a fraction of a second that dath ilan itself would respect all of Golarion's past hard work as meaning anything.  Why should they, when Golarion could stare at a country of half men and half women for millennia, bargain over shoes for millennia, and never see the towering structure of Law barely a step out of vision, that dath ilani seven-year-olds learn about from older boys?

A lot of people in Golarion have tried to get immortality -

(or get out of soul contracts)

- but they weren't dath ilani.

If nothing else, destroying a soul - if Abaddon, or the Starstone, can do that at all - or just putting a statue somewhere it will never, ever be reachable again even by the Hellknights or Hell - really doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a class of dath ilani children would give up on, if a teacher gave it to them as a puzzle they didn't know how to solve.

(Though it sure would serve them right if there was also some way like that to destroy everything.)

Carissa gives Asmodia ten minutes with her spellbook and then requires her headband back. And perhaps they've missed Keltham's magic lessons, by now, but perhaps they haven't?

Asmodia would rather think by herself than be around Keltham right now, if that wasn't an order.

(she's having way too many disloyal pre-thoughts and should stay further from Security's focus until they go away)

Keltham is trying to prepare Prestidigitation, this time, just in case he has more luck with other cantrips than Read Magic.  It looks more complex, that doesn't mean it's actually harder to set up.

Ione is in the library as always, running Detect Magic and trying to describe in words what she sees happening over the spellbook scaffold in response to Keltham's attempted motions.  She hopes one of the people with actual arcane sight can stop pretending not to have it, so they can cast an illusion of what Keltham is doing for Keltham to see.

Meritxell is present, trying to show it with thread, but an illusion would be a lot better.

Carissa has her headband back and likes it! Security having Arcane Sight won't be surprising to Keltham and leaves the option of claiming it's a ritual that takes a year or something; maybe one of them can cast an illusion?

Why would Security need to explain how Security's abilities work?  It's probably just all magic to the weird ignorant kid.  But sure, Security can do a realtime illusion of what's happening over the scaffold.

"Wait, so that was possible for more experienced wizards, and people didn't think to ask Security then because they were being invisible all the time?  I'd complain about all the time I expended with suboptimal efficiency yesterday, but that's actually kind of a hilarious Paranoia Cost and you get those when you're trying to be sufficiently paranoid."

Is Keltham having any more luck at spelling now that he can see what he's doing?

He sure is!! Obviously eventually he's going to want an intuition for it but it's much easier to develop an intuition for it when you can see it.

Is he having so much luck that he can actually hang a Read Magic or Prestidigitation cantrip?

After a while more of fiddling with it, yes!

Oh flamingpoop yes he's going to be a wizard!  Being a cleric was fun and all (most of the time) but having his own magic feels a lot less like he's depending on somebody else's charity.

How many cantrips can Keltham get?  He definitely needs Prestidigitation around for laundry but also hungers for Mage Hand and Mending and Message and Arcane Mark and Dancing Lights and -

He can prepare four in a day; that's not a hard physical limit, there are clever tricks one can spend months to years learning to prepare six or eight, but four is standard once you have the basics down and going past four requires doing a ton more work on things like finding overlaps in the spells so you can stabilize them against each other which aren't worth Keltham's time right now.

He can only prepare four a day, or only have four hung at a time?  Do his two cleric cantrips count against the limit?

The cleric ones don't count. He can only prepare four in a day even if he's let them go; if he tries, having let one go, to put something else in its place on the scaffold it will bend out of shape - actually, maybe he should try it so he can see -

Sure, he'll practice catching Read Magic a few times, and then dismiss it if he hasn't failed accidentally after 6 casts.  That spell doesn't obviously seem very useful, except that it was a spell whose look and feel he remembered.

Now prepare Mage Hand and Message.  Then if he tries to prepare Read Magic again, he'll be past the 4-limit, right?  What happens?