What kind of person - no, broader than that - what kind of mind of any kind would answer 'yes' to that question. "No, Priestess."

Aspexia flies off toward the villa at speeds only slightly visually distinguishable from teleportation.

"I believe I shall see myself out," says Paraduke Rathus Ratarion.  "Enjoy your date.  Though that wasn't an order - you know, I think I should just go."

He gives Sevar a cheerful wave, walks just outside the Forbiddance, and vanishes.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh she's not just being stubborn and childish about the headband, she actually thinks that she is not capable enough to function at the level required for survival in her current situation and she doesn't really have a plan B - well. Plan B is to become as good at thinking as Keltham, who is not smarter than her. But it'll take time that it's not at all obvious she has. 

She stands up. Walks back inside. Tries to contemplate the odds that Asmodeus will, after all, tell Aspexia Rugatonn 'sure, kill them all' -

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has never heard of Otolmens, which was obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't know what this whole project is about, which was also obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't have much of an education, of course, and has not received any helpful revelations from a primordial inevitable who would have a harder time talking to him than even Asmodeus would, of course, and is having a hard time understanding what is even going on at all, of course, let alone why the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus would be trying to have a plainly spoken discussion with him, of course, and Aspexia could no doubt have foreseen this herself if she'd spent an additional minute thinking about it in advance, of course.

Aspexia keeps her temper under absolute control.  When she gets home for the day - if, indeed, she ever does get home for the day - she's going to order a dozen slaves sent to her, bask in their understandable fears for a while, and then set all of them on fire.

Why.  Why did Otolmens pick him.  Why halfling slave #958245?

...because Broom is a simple predictable mortal, who will do something predictable in the future, if Aspexia had to guess.

All right.  Aspexia will not modify her predictable initial plans unless Asmodeus tells her to.  Broom gets a greater invisibility ring and a dagger of assassination; and what Aspexia hopes is exactly the right level of gentle suggestion not to kill random Asmodeans without a reason, and that the reason is supposed to have something to do with his new god and Her purposes, not just Broom's previous grudges...

Aspexia is glad that she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, but, in fact, she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, so everything is fine.

Awww, Asmodeus's favoritest pet squirrel in all of Golarion has been spooked by Otolmens hanging around!  To be fair to His pet squirrel, this is literally among the most reasonable possible reasons for a pet squirrel to become spooked.  His pet squirrel is probably not deducing the context about how Otolmens freaks out every time the laws of physics do something She thinks they shouldn't, like throwing out the anomaly-squirrel, and now She is hanging around Golarion being upset about that.

He sends a faint nonsemantic touch of reassurance.  Gods are allowed to do this to their clerics without it being very costly from the intervention budget, so long as they don't do it often enough or reliably enough that it starts to form a signaling code.  The part about making Otolmens's new oracle be invisible is weird and unpredicted, but Asmodeus doesn't have time to pay much attention and His pet squirrel probably knows what it's doing.  It's not worth an intervention, almost certainly.

Broom has spent a long lifetime looking and sounding, and in some cases thinking, exactly as wise and intelligent as will not get a slave punished under a variety of circumstances.  This usually does not call for very much apparent wisdom and intelligence; it is better to let your masters look down on you, when that does not give them a reason to punish you.

When the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus explains matters to Broom using carefully dumbed-down clauses - about how he's been chosen by the goddess of preventing the world from ending, and he's allowed to kill an Asmodean if he thinks it stops the world ending but shouldn't do so otherwise, except that if he feels a very strong impulse to do anything he should probably do that whether or not it involves killing someone - Broom displays exactly the level of apparent wisdom and intelligence that makes him look like a gruff old halfling sweeper who was in fact able to grasp all that and will do it reliably.  He thinks he understands, mistress; some people might make a world-threatening mess that destroys not just Cheliax but all of Golarion, and if it looks like they're going to do that, Broom will clean it up.

Broom does not plan to do this as a masquerade, or think any worded thoughts about it; it's just a reflex by now.  Like so many others in Cheliax, Broom has become not a very distinguishable person from his mask, even to himself.  It may not occur to Broom for a while yet that he is now allowed to be wiser or more intelligent than he previously needed to look to his masters.

This, too, is mortal nature, if you put someone in a position where they are not allowed to look too intelligent or wise, and then take them out of it.  There is momentum, but a finite momentum, and it is hard to guess how far that momentum will last.

Keltham has now guessed, and then been shown, what happens when he tries to touch magic, on four different occasions.  He's burned his remaining Greater Detect Magic for the day on watching what happens when other people interact with spells above scaffolds, though he can't hold his concentration on Greater Detect Magic while trying his own magical manipulations; and before his spell ran out he also took another look at people catching cantrips.  He's not forming solid perceptual generalizations about what does what.

But he's ever played hyperdimensional arcade games with lots of hidden information and subtlety.

"I get the impression that Detect Magic is not showing all of the - latent information, hidden facts - about what goes on with magical structures.  Like, two magical configurations that looked the same to me, in the illusion you're showing me, could have other different facts about them, not visible in the illusion, not visible in the detection spell, which would change how the spell reacted when I touched it.  In particular, I touched it what I thought was the same way twice, and even though it seemed to have reset to the same starting point both times, it reacted pretty differently.  Maybe I touched it differently, which could be true, obviously, but going on general behaviors and my intuitive sense of the pattern, I think that - something changed in the hidden background.  Does that sound right?"

"- maybe?" says Meritxell. "Magic is deterministic, but the illusion probably isn't conveying enough to fully determine it - if I touch it it'll do what I want every time, for something as simple as a cantrip, but I don't know what additional features of the situation I might be paying attention to that I'm not properly putting in the illusion. For the kind of spell where it won't do what I want every time, I'd be failing to pay attention to its momentum properly, or failing to pay attention to the viscosity it gets from having been recently manipulated, or failing to track an interaction it's having with other nearby magic, but cantrips are so easy that you don't have to account for all of that."

"Deterministic and fully-visible are different concepts and I maybe shouldn't have asked about them together.  Even if the parts I can't see are the same, and I actually am touching them differently, or those other parts are just reacting to changing things like viscosity - are there parts I can't see, in the information here?  I mean, even changes of viscosity from having been recently manipulated implies there's a current-viscosity state that isn't being shown, are there a lot of other - facts-that-can-be-true-about-it, hidden-information," he uses the Baseline term because he just can't stand it, "latentvariables, that I'm not seeing?"

"There are parts you can't see, yes. You have to infer their state, though for a cantrip you don't have to infer it very precisely."

Keltham is a very self-disciplined person who would not set anything on fire right now even if he had the economicmagic to do that without buying a flamethrower.

"I realize this may not be the usual order in which these things are taught to children, but can I just have a quick review of all the known equations or even rules-of-thumb governing all the properties that magic actually has?  Has any progress been made on getting a copy of any of the books like - Principles of Spell Design, I think was one of them - that would have information like that?"

- they can try but all the known rules of thumb are not quick and all the equations are not known. Principles of Spell Design lays out all of the heuristics you can use but you still usually fail, when designing spells with all of those in mind; it's speculated that gods can see all the hidden properties exactly as clearly as the visible properties and that's why it's not hard for gods to design spells. 

They launch into all the known rules of thumb, usually with the caveat that casting cantrips doesn't actually require this. You can think of one aspect of magic as lagging the visible aspects like so, requiring more energy to move and moving more slowly when it does but also requiring more energy to stop; you can think of another as reacting badly to close contact with itself, and resisting spell structures like such or such, which is why no spells have structures like that; you can think of this other thing as possible to tug into alignment only by sort of jiggling the spell, and you can tell you've got it when you don't get any reverberations when you do this -

And people have, of course, tried hyperdimensional representations that capture all that, but it's hard, and usually less useful to learn than the heuristics if you aren't specifically doing spell design, and none of them have arrived at equations that if solved for let you invent spells, despite having headbands and plenty of motivation. It's understood that the number of ways magic interacts with itself is just very very large, for high circle spells, and it's not reducible complexity.  

It is, someone ventures, sort of like the thing Keltham said, about how knowing how objects move doesn't let you catch them in the air.

No one has found Principles of Spell Design yet.

Ione Sala has now realized two things.

First, she knows where there's a copy - several copies, in fact - of 'Principles of Spell Design' in the Ostenso wizard academy's library.

Second, her oracle's curse allows her to borrow copies of nonmagical books in general circulation, from libraries Ione has already visited and spent time reading inside, if she's been inside the part of the library that has those books.  Though it's not teleportation, and she can't use it to write messages back; the books just temporarily disappear from their current libraries, and temporary copies of them get created in her own library.  She thinks she can do five books per day at the current power - circle? is it a thing that has circles? - of her oracle's curse, and a borrow lasts for a day unless she expends one use on renewing it.

Ione has the best curse ever.

It's tempting to imagine that Nethys did that because she would have wanted it.  But that's pathetic; Nethys isn't a Good god who would be thinking like that, even if Good's own propaganda was true.  If she has this curse, she's meant to use it for Nethys's benefit; which, so far as Ione can possibly guess, means using it to push Keltham's research forwards.

This is... also going to make her a lot harder to replace with an imposter that can fool Keltham.  But that is not why she is doing this, she is not trying to make Chelish security's life more difficult for her own benefit.  Her god has given her an ability which is clearly meant to be used for the benefit of this important Chelish project that Cheliax is spending lots of money on, and she is only going to use it for that.  She is completely not going to argue if Cheliax tells her to pretend that a book isn't there or can't be retrieved.  In fact, she's going to lie to Keltham and say there's sometimes unpredictable exceptions in which books she can get, specifically so Cheliax can order her not to get something and she'll have an excuse.  She is a very good and obedient oracle of Nethys who doesn't want Chelish security to gouge her eye out again, it was very unpleasant, and Ione definitely feels very scared and threatened by that (even if they can't destroy her the way Nethys can).  Even Nethys is clearly being somewhat cooperative, since the inability to write any messages back is probably there to reassure Chelish security against information leaking out that way.  But it also wouldn't be the best possible service to Nethys to ask Chelish security's permission to reveal this ability; they might say no, and that is clearly not Nethys's will here.

"Keltham, wait a second," Ione says out loud, "let me write you a note about something."

She starts to scribble:

I have a secret ability to borrow up to five ordinary books, for a day each unless renewed, if they're in a part of a library that I've been to.  Though they're just temporary copies, you can't write things in them permanently, and there are weird exceptions about which books it works on.  I think for a project this important, I'll accept if the other girls get suspicious I can do it, or even if you just want me to announce outright that I had a secret like that.  Do you want me to get you Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library?

Is security stopping her?  She's really sorry about talking to Keltham first like that, she really is, she didn't do it to make their lives harder, but she doesn't believe that Nethys would want her to offer Chelish security a veto on using her powers to help this important Chelish project at all, which is how Nethys obviously intends them to be used, for Cheliax's benefit, Nethys even made it not involve real teleportation, there could be a pact about this between Nethys and Asmodeus for all they know, Nethys obviously has an interest in Asmodeus succeeding here, and she's very happy to not retrieve particular books in the future if Chelish security says so, and she even lied to Keltham about that like a good obedient Nethys oracle should, without anybody needing to tell her that, please don't hurt her.

Security is not stopping her though if a halfling were to stab her they would NOT BE SORRY, just saying.

Keltham gets the note.

Keltham reads the note.

Keltham stares into the air for several seconds.

"Yes, please," Keltham says.

This is just so reminiscent of an ero-LARP where the potential romantic interests all have special powers, and Keltham accidentally hit on this girl's unlock condition unreasonably early, and now she's going along with the script and revealing some of her hidden story and offering him the scripted level of in-game abilities and sexual access.

Not that Keltham has ever had anything remotely like the money to pay for sex work on that level, of course.  And he's not the sort to read the scripts for LARPs he's too poor to play as the protagonist.  But it's such a trope to subvert and parody that it's spawned entire massive genres of secondary literature, some of which has become really good and famous and a topic of widespread discussion in its own right; to the point that people who've never read a summary of a novel deconstructing the storylines of actual scripted-longterm-multiplayer-sexwork, nonetheless know all about the tropes for Capability Harems.

Ione walks to the other room of the library, why is there a spring in her step, there should not be a spring in her step, she should be terrified right now, borrows Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library, brings it back, hands it to Keltham, and quietly sits down again.  She's at least managing not to smile, she really would not blame security for killing her on the spot if she looked the slightest bit smug right now.

Carissa walks in. She looks - well, to untrained eyes, perfectly normal, perhaps like she spent slightly more time than usual on her hair; to Chelish eyes, like she went to Hell and back - which does happen sometimes, Dis occasionally extends an invitation to the living for its own reasons. 

By the time she's walked into view of Keltham and sat down she has it under control, mostly.

" - you want page ten," says Meritxell, who is going to be daunted by NONE of this. 

They're all looking at Ione. Why are they all looking at Ione? Carissa prefers not to be looked at, all things considered, but she really expected to be looked at, at this point. She looks at Ione too, in case whatever they're all looking at is actually evident. 

"There's a Forbiddance up," says Peranza, trying really hard to sound confused rather than angry.

Ione smiles at Peranza.

Oh god she shouldn't have done that Nethys is going to smite her now.

"Page ten and some more on page thirty eight, I think," says Meritxell somewhat loudly. 

"Thanks, Ione, Meritxell," Keltham says, and reads as directed.  He is a stern soul and can worry later about whether or not he's now living inside a Walker novel.

Ione is not saying anything to anyone, unless they ask her explicit questions and admit to everyone else how much less they know than Ione, in which case Ione will still not tell them.  Or maybe she'll tell them something true that makes them be even more confused, or just lie?  It's hard to decide when you have so many tasty options.