There's no free chairs.  Keltham will sit down on the ground, breathe to recover, and try to figure out everything he just did wrong.  Was he supposed to use the Owl's Wisdom?  Could he have seen this all coming if he'd used the Owl's Wisdom on himself at the right time?  Why put Keltham right outside the Forbiddance when this all happened?  How is anything being predicted that finely, even by gods, quantum indexical-uncertainty doesn't let ideal agents pull that kind of shit, isn't prophecy supposed to be broken around here?  Possible answer, that was an event triggered whenever Keltham went outside the Forbiddance but then - then -

Keltham really doesn't get it.

Carissa sits down next to him.

"The other room of the library's clear and free. If you want to go rest somewhere."

He - is he in more trouble than others who'd pay more for that room if it were priced?  Plausibly yes, he is from a Civilization with no Worldwound and was squarely caught in the middle of things.  Also if Carissa thinks he should, maybe he should.

"Make sure they know where to poke the healer."

Keltham pushes himself to his feet and goes with Carissa to the library's other room.

How to do this without being pushy in a way that he won't be into, or without seeming like she needs comfort - she finds a sufficiently large chair and sinks down into it next to him, and puts her arm around him and rests her head on his shoulder. 

"I don't understand much about what happened or what we were supposed to do," she says after a moment. "But this is... a pretty good outcome, from the space of possible outcomes of a force of that size trying to take you. And we'll get the dead back, assuming they want to come back."

"Probability that Asmodia and Pilar want to come back?"

"To life? Uh, ninety percent, they're young and they're wizards and I don't know either of them to have been really excited for an afterlife or anything. To the project.... maybe lower than that." Which allows for not raising them, if it seems not worth it on reflection, though Carissa is very reluctant to authorize a lie that big and that total which isn't utterly necessary. 

19% on one of them not coming back is an awful lot of probability mass on - he's thinking about this the wrong way, they're in another continent where one of them might choose to stay, that's all.  He just needs to see one of them come back and he'll believe it.

"Did my god.  Set me up.  Not to die obviously, but to trigger - at that time -"

"What just happened, which parts of this could a god predict and choose."

"I have no idea. They shouldn't have been able to - with prophecy gone - they could've been able to see that Zon-Kuthon was planning something, and - maybe seen that you were going to attempt to leave and that when you did you'd die or be captured, if you were intending that, especially if you were intending it in prayer? Otherwise I don't think they could've operated even at that level of knowledge - before prophecy you could have things like, they thought it was better if you were outside for the attack, but not since prophecy broke. If they knew it'd be because Zon-Kuthon was amassing his forces and They could see that."

Keltham is tempted at this point to poop out all this shit and tap himself with the Owl's Wisdom and to hell with personality integrity, shit just got visibly really serious instead of quietly really serious.  He doesn't consider the thought for very long; the time to tap himself with Owl's Wisdom, if he hadn't been an idiot, was either the moment when the crisis started, or sometime before then.  If it's not an emergency you don't take mind-altering performance drugs in the kind of state that Keltham is in right now.

Were the two Auguries meant to indicate that this particular Augury was really important - that's plausibly - that's plausibly it, if he'd cast the second Augury then, and got a result of massive disaster from heading outside the Forbiddance, that would've - maybe that was what was meant to happen but how was Keltham supposed to know, he'd thought it was one spell to figure out what the spell was and then the second one when he'd had time to think of a question -

Not his fault, plausibly, in a way that makes sense to blame himself for; there's no obvious actually-general heuristic to update, here, that isn't just "use both Auguries on the first question to enter your mind".  Keltham's god might not have been able to exactly predict -

"I got two Auguries.  I thought the first one was to find out what the spell was and the second one was for when I'd had time to think of the right question.  If my god thought that three-quarters the first Augury wouldn't fail, but if it did fail, I would use the second one - or if people just always get two Auguries for redundancy - then maybe we weren't supposed to go outside, we were supposed to get a result showing disaster if we went outside and that would have tipped us off without us going outside.  If that's true then my god is not a perfect predictor, they're not looking into the future, they're working off a fallible model.  In that case they wouldn't have been able to do exact timing, and that attack was set to go off the moment I went outside, not because my god predicted the timing that precisely."

"Similarly, when it comes to Zon-Kuthon, our two obvious hypotheses are, one, attack was building since yesterday, god warned us of it yesterday.  Two, that spell was a warning of something else, I misinterpreted it as Zon-Kuthon, and somehow that triggered the attack by Zon-Kuthon, like by my thinking of him loudly enough that he heard it like a prayer, which does not seem particularly plausible to me but I'm saying it out loud anyways because Golarion."

Or, of course, somebody in Governance heard him say it, and thought it would be a great thing to fake without the slightest use of subtlety.  The light shows overhead - could have been locally faked to look global.  Maybe Ione can grab a newspaper from Ostenso library and see if it mentions -

Well, that might work if Ione is still Ione.

"So.  How did they know the moment I went outside."

" - I don't know. Security cast - really cast, I'd have noticed if he did something weird - a bunch of standard detection spells, at the edge of the Forbiddance. There wasn't a scry up on the other side, or an alarm spell set to trip, or any magic at all, or anyone hidden and waiting - could've been someone's bonded familiar, a ways off, with vision enhanced to see through invisibility. Or could be Security was compromised, or Pilar, or me. Or you, I guess, if we're being thorough, though even then, they'd have had to have activated a magic item or something to alert people, and the others ought to have noticed. 

....why was Pilar there. She isn't usually - when you test your spells - she wasn't when we did Detect Anxieties or Detect Desires -" Pilar had been checked and had totally satisfactory Anxieties and Desires but the plan had been not to have her mostly because there wasn't a good excuse to have her and not the other girls. Oh and now that Carissa thinks about it the reason Pilar was there was obviously 'some weird thing to do with her oracle powers' and she should not have completed that sentence aloud, though probably Keltham would himself have noticed the discrepancy, at some point...

"Oh, that's amusing.  So all of us got tagged by mind control at least once tonight, possibly including Pilar herself, possibly excluding Security if he was the source, and it either went right through anti-enchantment or it wasn't enchantment or it happened before I cast that blocker -"

"I am - trying to figure out if my successful prediction about the results I'd get from my poll, about people's surprising revelations if I date them, also implies things like 'It's not Carissa's headband because that's too obvious of a red herring' or 'It won't be Pilar it will be one of the other girls and you already have enough information to figure out who, but you're not actually going to figure it out before dating her because the information was too subtle'."

" - I don't really understand what you mean," Carissa confesses after a little while spent internally panicking that that is an accusation of some kind though it doesn't exactly sound like one.

Of course not, you have to be really far into a relationship with a girl before they can hear you talking about the eroLARP itself.

Actually he should just check that.  "Can you repeat back what I just said using your own words, and then make some sort of inference about it which shows your brain is processing it?"

"You said you're wondering if an implication of your successful prediction with the poll about peoples' surprising revelations is that the cause of the Kuthonites being able to track us is not my headband, because that's obvious misdirection, or if another implication is that one of the girls betrayed us, but you will have to date her to learn that. Uh, it sounds like you think" Cheliax is lying to you "...some god or entity is - trying to communicate with you? But - in a way that I don't think would work, with prophecy broken - and I don't know what you mean about my headband being misdirection, whose misdirection?"

"That which is above all gods, but if you can hear me talking about it then that's some evidence against 'tropes' being a thing here.  Never mind, mostly a stupid thought and if it wasn't then I almost certainly have to see it on my own.  What would you say in real life is the chance you should swap out that shiny new headband that bypassed government Security checks."

"I would've said very low and that Acquisitions was being way too paranoid but I would also have said that about a Kuthonite attack and - and I wouldn't even have put a probability, on a war among the gods, that's happened once in recorded history. So if you think I should then I think I'll just concede you're better at thinking about this stuff, and do that."

"It almost certainly wasn't the headband.  That said there's no reason not to swap it with a headband that has been in ordinary quiet use somewhere much less sensitive, which you personally selected to make sure nobody in our supply network or command structure slipped in an evil headband for what would actually be the first time.  Never trust what you can verify."

"I'm reluctant to leave the Forbiddance again right now but I'll take one off one of the dead Security and maybe swap again later once it's safer to leave."

Can she just do that?  "And - leave a receipt about the swap?  Wait do we feel comfortable around that giant sharp thing you're carrying, in Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festivals it is often very not safe to steal weapons off dead aliens, and for that matter if somebody actually invaded Civilization I expect they'd have a bad day trying to swipe weapons off Exception Handling."

"Yes, I'll have to leave them a note, and they'll be annoyed but see the logic, it's not like they wouldn't do the same thing if I were dead and there was cause. The sword's a +3 vicious cruel longsword, it doesn't have an innate personality or defenses against being stolen and I already used it to kill its bearer so if it were going to manifest any it might've done so then. If it's got tracking it'd be impressively subtle tracking but I guess I shouldn't rule that out confidently. - I was a weapons enchanter, by specialty, so I've looked at a lot of really fancy swords."

What is a manufacturer doing at the site of combat... nevermind, economicmagic.

"What do we - actually do now?  When does the project restart, when do Asmodia and Pilar get back, where do we sleep tonight?"

“When Asmodia and Pilar get back depends on whether we’re at war with Nidal. If we are they’re going to be using all our Raise Dead and Resurrection capacity for the military for a while. I don’t know how badly the villa is damaged, but I think it’ll be in repairs for at least the next couple of weeks, and they might decide to relocate us to the Imperial palace - which is the only other place in Cheliax with a Forbiddance up, and which has security adequate for an invasion from anywhere I’ve heard of. We can ask for that now, if you’d rather be somewhere where something awful didn’t just happen while you rest and recover.

And that’s what I think you should do next, is rest and recover. People often need a couple of weeks off after their first real battle at the Worldwound, and that’s people - born to our world, with some dead siblings, who’ve attended some public executions -“ (She looked it up, they have those in Taldor too, though they only make it really slow if the crime is treason or something.) “You’re from farther, and you might need longer, and you’re our most valuable resource, it’d be stupid to run you too hard.”

"Ordinarily I'd ask why you thought you knew the complete list of everywhere in Cheliax with a Forbiddance, but I'll skip that since you think the complete list is the center of Governance plus one single secret government project that started up a couple of days ago and which you happen to work at.  You know, I think that's the first time I've ever heard you say something that sounds adorably naive and trusting compared to the mature cynicism of a wise young boy like myself."

- giggle. “Fair. It’s a really really expensive spell but I guess I don’t know there aren’t half a dozen other secret places they can relocate us to, except that I think they might have done that rather than casting the Forbiddance here, if any of them would have done. I think probably the decision will be made once the site director is no longer dead, unless you tell people you want to be somewhere safer right now - which you should do, if you think it’ll be good for you.”

"I'll think about it while you immediately swap headbands before anyone listening has a chance to pull their own substitution ahead of you.  Should've thought of that faster."