"Yes," they chorus. 

(What are they supposed to think once he's not there?)

"I am confused by the math Keltham's using but I think this is a good deal if we succeed," Carissa says blandly, as she would in alter Cheliax. 

Oh, are they assuming Keltham might still be listening. "I want to read my notes again," says Gregoria. "One minute, please -"

Security notifies everyone that Keltham is comfortably out of hearing range; he grabbed a Security and went for a walk on the fortress ramparts.

"My curse says it wants to report somebody to her superior for non-Asmodean thought and claims that I'm obligated by standard regulations to pass that report along without delay."

"It reports Pilar Pineda for having considered donating almost all of her bonus and salary to the Church of Asmodeus without expecting to derive any personal benefit from that, which is, it asserts, heresy to Lord Asmodeus, and also to Cayden Cailean, and is what annoying Lawful Good paladins do."

...And suggests that she be corrected by a process which includes drunken revelry.

Pilar is not saying that.

" - I actually think I can't help you with that, Pilar, what with only the Grand High Priestess being authorized to correct you in matters of theology, though I do think I know what mistake you're making." It seems related to the secret story Maillol told her about the man who was pleasing because his only interest in slavery was in being a slave. Carissa thinks it is...not her thing, herself, actually.

"I'll report myself to the Most High, then."

Pilar was hoping to hear 'well your curse is obviously lying to you' and not 'I think I know what mistake you're making', but she obviously isn't going to argue with the answer she got.

"I am... not coming up with very much for alter-Asmodia to say here, she is mostly sort of 'eh complications' and 'wow money' and scheming to get a 2% share instead of a 0.2% share, but none of that is something she has to discuss with the rest of you.  Alter-Ione has established herself as not really caring.  Meritxell, do you know what we could be talking about while he's gone?"

Real-Asmodia doesn't like Meritxell but is a professional about her actual job.

Meritxell doesn't like Asmodia either but that sounds like a problem to solve once they're rich and powerful, by which time it might solve itself via Asmodia defecting, which will settle once and for all which of them is smarter. "Unless Cheliax requests pushback in some form because there's some angle on corrupting Keltham, I don't care about this and want to get to learning things and I think alterMeritxell would feel the same way."

"All right.  I doubt Keltham will actually ask us what we discussed, I think that probably violates the Civilizational procedure he's proposing, but if he does, we tried for another few minutes after this to find something to talk about, because Keltham seemed to think we should do it, and then gave up."

"I did want to say, hopefully quickly, but it seems like the sort of thing that could blow up on us again before we reach the end of the day and have time to talk at leisure - Sevar, I think I know what I did wrong and you're not going to like my fault analysis."

"Go ahead."

"When I was initially writing down my prediction I didn't process that as being especially clever.  Alter-Asmodia knew exactly what Keltham was up to, she's already called out Predictions in class, it's very clear that's what alter-Asmodia would do."

"And Keltham predicted that, I think, inside his Ordinary world.  Keltham - would need to be thinking in a completely different way than his latest thought transcripts show, for him to lie about his final probabilities, there.  I think that it must have incorporated the information from him seeing me start to write, because, if it doesn't include that information, it's not a real prediction, so - maybe I could've done better, if I hadn't written anything at all - but that really wouldn't be what alter-Asmodia would do, why wouldn't she."

"My huge mistake was when I saw Keltham starting to write."

"Alter-Asmodia knew what he was up to.  Alter-Asmodia wrote her own prediction of it.  Alter-Asmodia passed Keltham's test perfectly according to the probabilities he wrote down and won a ton of Ordinary points."

"Real-Asmodia thought that she didn't want to look too clever and stopped herself from doing what Alter-Asmodia would have done.  And I didn't realize, I didn't notice, that I'd suddenly started thinking in a different way, that I was making that choice a different way from the choice that came before -"

"My analysis is that we have to figure out who we are in alter-Cheliax and just fucking be those people period.  Everything which isn't that is the clever part where we think we're smarter than Keltham."

"You're right. I don't like it. But I like it better than what happened this morning."

"The problem we had this morning is that we tried to solve the problem of Keltham asking for a Fox's Cunning at the same time as we tried to solve the problem of figuring out what happened to alter-Asmodia in alter-Cheliax.  It should've just been the simplest thing that explained what Keltham would see.  If Ione had solved her riddle earlier -"

"I suspect Pilar's curse of having selected that riddle to be exactly solvable enough that I wouldn't.  Any comments on that, snack service?"

"Did you just fucking call me -"

"I was talking to the curse, not to Pilar.  Like you asked."

"Curse says it's not in the habit of answering such terribly personal questions, but it does observe that if you'd trusted more that the riddle was solvable and would be at a difficulty level where it'd be solved in time, you wouldn't have tried a complicated way of scaring Keltham off Fox's Cunning, like it warned you about once already."

"And did the curse select a riddle at the exact level of difficulty required for us to learn that valuable lesson about trust?"

"Snack service says no comment.  I say that when this is over, it dies.  Somehow."

"It's on my to-do list. I'm going to leave, because Keltham said you should talk without me; someone can come get me in a few minutes and say you're done, if you think that's what happens in alterCheliax."

"- in alter Cheliax do we all hate each other?" asks Gregoria. "Or is that, you know, an Asmodeanism thing."

" - I'm not actually sure. I think most places people do more gestures of liking each other, and those cancel out some of the gestures of hating each other. Or make them sting more, depending."