"And you don't think Keltham has read a dozen books back in dath ilan where somebody tries something exactly like this on the protagonist, what with him coming from a world of actual dath ilani where none of the thinking you're using is the least bit special."

"You don't get it!  Yes, Keltham can think that we just planned the whole thing.  But, if Keltham imagines a masterful intellect," like the one she has now, "the part where we previously told him about Cunning and had to execute the whole clever plot in the first place won't make sense.  The villains in dath ilani books will be smarter and more competent than we previously were in the actual Conspiracy world."

"And if he figures out that we really were learning as we went along -"

"That's the loss condition we inevitably reach eventually, where Keltham has enough information to figure out the exact world he's living in, but we can make that harder for him.  He won't jump to that conclusion right away.  It's like - putting extra coinspins on top of duck for lunch, merchant ships coming in from Absalom instead of merchant ships from anywhere.  A more complicated idea is one that he has to assign lower probability to start."

"And Keltham isn't a perfect dath ilani.  It may be possible to confuse him enough and win.  If I have a sufficiently powerful headband, and he doesn't use any enhancements himself, I mean."

"Right now, Keltham has seen evidence that, if the Conspiracy is real, it's not actually that competent, because we weren't.  The first time we do something smart, before any other time he's expecting us to be smart, we've got to get as much mileage as we can, out of that, because afterwards he'll be on the lookout for smart things."

"And besides getting him not to use enhancements, you yourself said that the most confusing thing we could do to him -"

"I regret all of the choices that led me here."

"No!  You were right!  Righter than you realized!  Right now, all Keltham's attention is on the idea that the Conspiracy world is trying to make him believe he's inside the Ordinary world.  On the simple truth, exactly where we don't want it.  At the very least we want to make it be complicated for him."

"So we make it look like he has Ordinary adversaries trying to falsely convince him the Conspiracy is real, and then he has to doubt all the evidence and not just the evidence we'd rather he didn't doubt.  And if the Conspiracy faking the Ordinary world faking a Conspiracy is exactly what they do in dath ilani romance novels, then those villains would never have told him about Fox's Cunning."

"And this is the point where they set somebody on fire even in Taldor."

"Let me guess, you think Maillol says that we want to keep the Ordinary world simple and believable and just not make Keltham think about things too much?"

"Sevar says that.  Maillol says, Abarco, hurt her."

"Well the ship of apparently simple and believable stories has sailed, what with Cayden Cailean handing out cookies.  And even if it hadn't, Keltham is a dath ilani.  He's going to think about things no matter what.  All we have is a choice of what he spends his Conspiracy-decoding time trying to decode."

"Okay, look, what are you actually thinking at this point?  Specifically?  Maybe it'll sound more convincing to me if you sketch it out the way Keltham would see it."

"Keltham wakes up tomorrow, is allowed a chance to pray first - we don't want to let him pick out spells after he knows what he'll be doing with them - and probably do some other things, eat breakfast, we can't time it precisely to after he prays.  Suddenly there's an emergency, no, they're not supposed to say what, he gets rushed straight to Maillol's office."

"Maillol says that he realizes exactly how stupid this is going to sound -"

"The fact that your plan requires this step should be a hint, Asmodia."

"I'll be sure to give you full credit for all of your ideas."

"Anyways, Maillol tells Keltham that he suspects they have an enemy upstream in Egorian, one who got their hands on, at the very least, yesterday's transcripts.  Because the day after Keltham talked about his Conspiracy analysis and told Security that if there was a criminal investigation he wanted to be in charge, even knowing that was tempting the tropes, there's now a dead body in Gregoria's bedroom, which looks like a suicide but that's not hard to fake and there wasn't any obvious reason for her to do that.  Last known interaction was that Gregoria finished preparing spells and then requested a simultaneous Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom early that morning, to see if she could solve any of Keltham's homework problems that way after resting the previous night.  She died sometime between then and a quarter-hour later, when Sevar tried to send a message to her about her availability for a morning meeting with Keltham."

"Keltham predicts that truthspells aren't going to turn up any murderer for some weird reason.  Maillol says yeah, and he bets when they hear back about Gregoria getting Raised or contacted in Hell, she has no idea who killed her, and he wants Keltham to be really fucking cautious about interpreting anything he sees here.  Somebody may be trying to fake the appearance of what Keltham seemed to expect."

"Or Keltham goes, nope, not buying it, and heads outside the Forbiddance to try to get in contact with Osirion."

"If he had that short of a probability-temper he'd have walked out after the Cayden Cailean candy thing."

"You would have walked out after the Cayden Cailean candy thing because you're a Golarion native who knows how weird that actually is.  Keltham will walk out after Maillol tries your line on him, because that will be the point where Keltham recognizes that he's inside the classic hilarious maneuver that dumb dath ilani kids think up the day after they find out about the Law of Probability."

"You're underestimating me, and you're underestimating me with that headband even more.  If Keltham is a bit above average for a dath ilani I should have been noticeably above average for a dath ilani while wearing it."

"Which your total lack of experience more than makes up for."

"I'm thinking using Law now.  It's fucking math, Ione, I don't need experience to tell me how the world works, what I'm doing works in all of them."

"So if Keltham actually says 'nope' and walks out, math itself crumbles with him and the universe ends?  This is not making me feel any more reassured about your plan."

"Fine, you don't get it, shut up about not getting it."

"I think we can rely on Keltham to worry on his own that it was maybe actually just a simple regular suicide, as searching through the whole installation fails to turn up any clues or even anything that was meant to fool him.  Then we find out that Gregoria is supposedly refusing resurrection and can't be scried or contacted in Hell, which freaks Maillol out and Maillol says he just has no explanation for that unless Gregoria's body was faked and this is a kidnapping.  Then unexpectedly two days later Gregoria is able to be Raised, and back with no memories of what happened, and Hell has been successfully contacted but says they're not answering any questions about anything."

"Keltham not only gets wary around Fox's Cunning - which was not what the Conspiracy was trying to make him believe as the whole point, obviously, because in that case we'd have just never told him in the first place - he also concludes that it wasn't a faked-up story to keep him busy, because it ended up being the case that there was no apparent mystery for him to solve and no exciting clues to follow up.  But the idea's been planted in his mind that maybe he missed something and maybe somebody is trying to make him believe in a Conspiracy."

"Whatever happened to the girl who incorrectly shot me down on grounds of being overly clever, back when I showed Keltham that the whole class wasn't too terrified to ask him any questions about his fascinating Conspiracy example?  We need some way to suspend time inside this fortress for one month, and send you off to learn how to do all this in real life, and fail a few times somewhere it's less important than here."

"Failing that, I am telling you now in my capacity as Nethys's chosen one that this is a setup that is inevitably going to explode.  Prophecy is broken - for everyone except me, I mean - and now Nethys alone can predict events in enough detail to be like, ah, yes, I will do this exact thing, and then Keltham will think this exact thing and react in this exact way.  The only way I'd buy this plan is if a god signed off on it."

"Hey.  Apparently I am supposed to give you cookies because that will serve Lord Asmodeus.  Make any comments on this and I will punch you."

"FUCKING GODS, PILAR!"