The envoy, after the two go, informs Sevar that they are to follow soon and silently behind.  Sevar will watch this interview through a one-way wall, so that a nearby spellcaster running Detect Thoughts can keep half an eye on Sevar's own thoughts, in case she wants to loudly think anything important.  If so, the information will make its way to Isidre Thrune, who has one of the highest Splendours that could be found on this much notice.

Also Maillol is temporarily unavailable for a while and Sevar is back in charge for something like the next half-day.

- Carissa is confused, but right now she should probably focus on this conversation which is fairly high stakes and poke that confusion later. Here, while she's at it, is a shopping list for Keltham should Lrilatha approve his project.

"May I inquire what this is about?" Keltham says in his best Very Serious mode.

Isidre Thrune nods.  "I am, as you may have surmised from the headband, one of the highest boosted-Intelligence individuals in all Cheliax, and one of those who have been reviewing events on your project from here in the palace.  I begin by offering you the following piece of good news:  Ione Sala has awakened, and, though she is not quite returned to normal, the fact that she awakened at all is good news about her prospects of eventual recovery."

One of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, check.  It's sort of good to know they actually exist at all, and are optimizing stuff in Governance here at all.

"Sounds like apparently good news," Keltham replies.  "Though - did she seem like herself, at all?  Like, definitely Ione but afteraffects, or more like, didn't return to anything like being Ione yet?"

If they don't know about the Nethys thing, he doesn't want to mention it yet, at least, not if she otherwise recovers anyways; but he's still concerned about whether it's Nethys in there now, or Ione.

Isidre inclines her head.  "The former, I would say, though I'm going on the reactions of those around Ione Sala, rather than having very much acquaintance with her myself.  Did you expect otherwise?"

"I am not clear on what to expect from - forcible human-god interactions."

"Mm."  Isidre briefly sips from one of the fluted thin glasses laid out on her side of the table.  "Or perhaps you have a guess you arrived at by stranger means.  Pilar Pineda, I hope you've by now heard, has been resurrected after surprisingly having been located in Elysium, the Chaotic Good afterlife.  After reviewing a recent report from Sevar, on a hunch, I ordered a check on whether Pineda had a fetish for, as Sevar somewhat politely put it to you, 'being forced', though we would usually simply call it a rape fetish."

"Pilar does.  In fact it is what we'd term an obligate fetish, meaning that she has not much interest in sex without it."

"This is not at all surprising to us, however rare such a thing may be in dath ilan; here it is among the most common fetishes.  The fact remains that you may have been said to have somehow known it.  Apparently by similar and mysterious lines of reasoning that led you to worry about a hidden cleric of Zon-Kuthon, maybe even unknown to herself, among the student wizards you've been assigned."

"Sevar's report says that she asked, and you said it was too complicated.  I am wondering if you'd be willing to try explaining to somebody with higher Intelligence."

This random noblewoman is not, actually, going to be able to parse the explanation whatever it is, and possibly Carissa should consider the person casting Detect Thoughts to be likelier to get it than Carissa but - she's not sure she does expect that. They almost certainly haven't actually patiently read all the project logs. There aren't that many people cleared to do that and there's quite a lot of project logs and a war on. If Maillol (he has to be in trouble, that's the only reason they'd know how long he'll be indisposed) didn't know in advance who'd be able to do this then there isn't a wizard that powerful who's up to date on the whole thing.

So if Keltham does decide to explain it to Isidre then she's the one who'll have to figure out what Isidre should say. 

She casts Fox's Cunning on herself, just in case.

If the word 'rape' is translating at all correctly, Keltham is having some trouble seeing how the notion of a 'rape fetish' isn't as obviously paradoxical as 'asking somebody to rape you'; but presumably there's some elided meta/object distinction that makes sense of it, and in any case that's not the most urgent topic right now.

So.  Pilar has the fetish.  But it's very common locally, maybe it's 1/3 of the population, say, if he'd also checked Ione then taking the universe at face value there'd be a 55% probability of at least one of the two having the fetish.  But still, it should probably be called something like one bit of evidence favoring the eroLARP hypothesis.

"I wasn't saying Sevar was too stupid for it," Keltham replies after taking a moment to think.  "I was saying the concept structure came at the end of a long series of other concepts, that would take too long to explain.  Higher Intelligence doesn't let you bypass that sequence, what would be needed is that you have a lot of prerequisites that I'd guess to be outright unknown in Golarion."

There's also the concern about whether explaining the notion of an eroLARP to people inside the eroLARP will drive them insane or cause this universe to collapse.  But if Carissa is able to hear him talking about his weird theories and the very smart people immediately investigate them in Pilar and report back to him, it doesn't seem like that kind of eroLARP; they're apparently allowed to know.  Anyways, though it seems kind of foolish in retrospect, he already published that private key.

WHAT.

Cause the universe to collapse, WHAT.

What the ABYSS is an 'eroLARP'.

Many thoughts Keltham thinks have pieces that are completely opaque to Abrogail Thrune because they refer to concepts that Abrogail Thrune simply doesn't have.  Like 'private-key' or 'one bit of evidence' or, unfortunately, 'eroLARP'.  It parses to her essentially as 'private-~~~', '1 ~~~ of evidence', and in the most important part 'sex~~~~'. 

"Is there perhaps some metaphor you could use to explain?" says Isidre Thrune.

Metaphor, huh.  "Maybe something like - pattern recognition?  I'm not working off a fundamental Law that reduces to simple math like the things I've been lecturing on.  More like, I'm recognizing pieces of the universe that match part of a pattern I know about, and guessing about how the rest might get filled in.  Like - actually I don't know if you have fictional novels here, there weren't any in the archduke's library.  Do you have, like, untrue but popular stories about, I don't know, some girl who wants to rule her own planet when she grows up, and then she's abducted by aliens with lots of problems and has to solve those problems to become ruler of their planet?  I mean, those wouldn't be your stories, but I wouldn't know what Golarion stories are about."

"We have novels, certainly," Isidre replies.  "Though in Cheliax most of the novels we have on hand predate the recent ascent of the Asmodean Church here, and are somewhat appallingly written; we have not considered it the best use of Cheliax's sharply limited resources to make better ones exist, just yet.  An example of the sort of thing that might be in one of those novels - maybe a boy finding a magic sword, falling in love with a beautiful princess, using the magic sword to slay a dragon, and presenting the dragon's death to the princess's father to win her hand in marriage.  I admit, I have not read many of those myself."

(Carissa is pleasantly surprised - the answer suggests someone in the loop in fact has read all of the conversation transcripts, and maybe a bit of the Taldane books besides.)

'Certainly', huh, Keltham's sort of disappointed, he was hoping a Very Smart Person here would know better than to talk with the probability-1 declarations sprinkled all over the crazy books here.  He guesses that's a matter of Law more than Intelligence.

"Then if someone has read a number of stories like that, if they got to the point where the boy falls in love with a high-status woman, after having earlier obtained a magic sword, they could guess the boy was going to do something with the magic sword to impress the high-status woman."

"I see, or think I see.  But - where are you getting the patterns that you're using to determine that Pilar has a rape fetish or that one of the girls is a Kuthite sleeper operative?"

From reading his friends' fanfictions about a currently-superpopular novel deconstructing eroLARPs; eroLARPs that, by comparison, almost nobody must have actually played, compared to how many people found out about them by reading some of their friends' fanfictions so they wouldn't be left out of discussions about it.  But that's not really what she's asking, anyways.

Now, how to reply without panicking her over the idea that her universe might be fictional?  Which isn't even actually the idea here; but if you don't know about computer simulations, and the generalized notion of laws of physics that let you imagine alternate such laws, and equivalence classes of causal structures embedded in other structures, and realityfluids generalizing quantum amplitudes, what do you even say that the smart-but-ignorant Golarion native doesn't just parse down to 'possibly we're all just a generalized illusion or maybe trapped in some sort of book, sure go panic now'.

"I'm not really sure how to say it, except that the patterns are in my memories out of dath ilan, and their origin in dath ilan was complicated," Keltham replies.  "I would not have particularly expected to find facts and events here, corresponding to those memories.  And a lot of things don't correspond in that way, to be clear, I'd have been much less confused, getting here, if this world was even 5% made out of things I was expecting to see.  But there's bits and pieces of this world, all over, that fit into one pattern or another.  And the danger is that I'm just looking up at random clouds, and seeing faces, trees, patterns in the sky that are pure coincidence.  As you say, if the fetish is very common here, then Pilar having it isn't much evidence."

Now, how to reply without panicking her over the idea that her universe might be fictional?  Which isn't even actually the idea here; but if you don't know about ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~, and the generalized notion of ~~~~ of ~~~~~~~ that let you imagine alternate such ~~~~, and ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ of ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~ embedded in other ~~~~~~~, and ~~~~~~ generalizing ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~, what do you even say that the smart-but-ignorant Golarion native doesn't just parse down to 'possibly we're all just a generalized illusion or maybe trapped in some sort of book, sure go panic now'.

This is the most disturbing Detect Thoughts that Abrogail has ever cast.

Is Sevar thinking anything helpful?

If you're a boy with a sword, you'd be an idiot to conclude you're in a story where you slay a dragon and marry the princess; there are lots of boys with swords, and almost none of them pull it off. You can just look up the odds.

If you're a boy from another world, who has already started a war between Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon....

What would it even mean to be in a story where you change the world, as distinct from being in a world where you change the world?

The only thing that comes to mind that feels at all Keltham shaped is that it's an answer to what put you there. If Asmodeus copied Keltham into the world to explain Law, then the girls are - not exactly a side point, they're supposed to seduce him to Evil after all, but they're not a source of - if Asmodeus copied Keltham there then you wouldn't expect one of the girls to be a Kuthite spy, because the process that produced the girls wouldn't have any interest in that, and most random Chelish wizarding students are not Kuthite spies. 

If Keltham ended up here because - she has no idea how to finish the thought but it's at least a question -

Ask him, is this in part a hypothesis about what process caused you to arrive here instead of nowhere or instead of somewhere that was systematically catching dead people -

"Is all this - tangled up with theories you have of how you came to be here, instead of nowhere?  Or instead of somewhere that was catching dead people from your world more systematically than Golarion seems to?"

All right, that's slightly impressive, maybe the bigger headbands are actually good for anything.

"It would have to be, yeah, but I don't exactly have a lot of specifics and what specifics I have... aren't something I'm thinking of a good metaphor for... let me think."  Sure, if you've got enough prerequisites, it's obvious in retrospect that the explanation for what happened to Keltham is that almost all of the copies of him ended, across the multiverse of everything being infinitely embedded all over the multiverse, and this is one of the Kelthams that didn't end, in some universe that's either higher-complexity than his original universe or of course a higher-complexity specific embedded somewhere simpler than that, and then, arguendo, if the EroLARP Hypothesis is correct, he was localized to somewhere such that it has convenient evolutionarily-implausible 'masochists' who are super okay with not being let out of their chains when they struggle, so that hurting them during sex, which it turned out you really wanted to do, doesn't get you kicked out of that city or exiled to the Last Resort.

Keltham has not figured out why this would be the case, but he doesn't need a specific hypothesis of why to notice what it looks like and start generating predictions.

And then, of course, you have the problem of explaining this to a Golarion native who has no idea that her own world sure looks like it runs on quantum mechanics the same as dath ilan, and how that means there's an exponentially vast number of near-exact copies of her spread all over the local amplitudes to say nothing of the alternate laws of physics that embed each other as substructures.

Does Taldane contain the word 'fanfiction'?  No it does not.  Well, there goes that metaphor for 'this world is a continuation fic of my life because in an infinite multiverse containing an infinite number of fanfiction writers no book can ever truly end', which, on reflection, would probably have been an overly disturbing thing to try to explain anyways.

There are how many of her all over the place?  Where and what are they even doing, does dath ilan actually know all this or are they just making it up.