"...no.  No, no, no no no this isn't happening."

"I'd ask what has upset you so but I really, really don't fucking care."

"Asmodia.  Here's your cookie.  According to my curse it's a consolation cookie to cheer you up about not getting to carry out your brilliant plan that wouldn't have worked."

"Thank you, Cayden Cailean."

"Ione.  Here's your cookie.  It's a congratulatory cookie for your good foresight in having already made and carried out, a few days earlier, one of the key choices that enables solving your current problem in a much simpler way."

"Wait, what?  Can you be any more -"

"Don't tell me, talk to the fucking cookie.  I'm not the curse."

"Also my curse says it can't do this reliably so don't rely on it."

"I need to get back to sleep, try not to come up with any more stupid fucking plans requiring preventative cookies, bye."

"All right," Carissa says to Peranza, when they've gone down the list. "Last thing - I swear that everything I've said to you in this conversation has been true, as far as I know. I don't have satisfactory answers to everything, yet, but I mean to find them, and bring them to you - all of you - so that Asmodeans can be dath ilani. And if you think of something else I don't have a satisfactory answer to, you bring it to me so I can try to find one. If you wake up one day and realize that you aren't loyal anymore, you won't die for it, assuming you don't actually undermine the project - we'll just keep looking until we can answer whatever pulled you away. 

And if you undermine the project you will die terribly for it whether you're a heretic or not, so. All understood?"

"Understood," Peranza says from a place of inner numbness that is mostly not processing any of the many many words it has heard.

Peranza has now been thoroughly retrained to find any ideas about questioning Asmodean orthodoxy, or any thoughts about the relationship between that and dath ilanism, to be scary and painful and possibly leading to death and Hell.  Future thoughts anywhere remotely close to matching this pattern will be immediately shut down by early-bad-thought-detectors.

This will probably be pretty effective at preventing problems for a while!

Carissa has a bunch of halfway theological questions for Maillol and Subirachs but she needs to go see what idiocy the smart girls have talked themselves into first. "Had any bright ideas?"

"I developed a cunning plan to make it look like somebody in the Ordinary world was trying to trick Keltham into believing in the Conspiracy and tropes, so he wouldn't only be questioning evidence that points in a direction favorable to us.  The Cayden Cailean snack service which suddenly showed up claimed that my plan is unworkable, and that Ione already did some key thing a few days ago needed to make a better plan work.  Now Ione is trying to list out every choice she's made about Keltham and see if she can figure out what the fuck Pilar's curse was talking about.  I'd recommend not distracting her while she's working.  Pilar's curse also says it can't do this reliably and don't rely on it."

"I don't suppose you're ready to hear my report on Law of Probability which, also, the Grand High Priestess did like the way I performed in the last fifteen minutes too so if you're willing to deliver an accurately glowing report there's a chance I'll be able to get a good enough headband before this project collapses -"

(Asmodia looks kind of wired, like somebody who's been on for more hours and off for fewer than might be really wise.)

"I am ready to hear your report on the Law of Probability and you are one of those people who reacts to their first combat situation with glee and overconfidence, correct for it. Proceed."

Overconfidence?  Is that even POSSIBLE for a DATH ILANI?

"We should maybe step away from Ione and, before I start, how many of the seven did you derive math for, besides #2 I mean since that's basically already there, if you've already got formulas I can skip derivations on those and talk about meanings and implications -"

"I got the first five."

Message to Sevar as she's leaving the room:  Please don't reply I'm concentrating but if I was a fourth-circle cleric of Nethys and Asmodia was first-circle I'm pretty sure I'd be locking her away from any things that explode and forcing her to read books.

(They've now stepped into the next 'breakout room' over from Ione.)

"So #1 is, I assume you got this part stop me if you didn't, about the way that the implication-probabilities for all the different observations or things that can happen or different pieces of evidence you could get, all have to sum to 1, or no more than 1 if we're not assuming the list exhausts every possibility which in real life it obviously never can."

"Meanings and implications.  A world or a theory or a way things can be, has a limited resource like money, like it has one gold piece total divided into a hundred coppers, which it has to spend on all the possibilities that it wants to claim credit for having predicted.  I can't let you spin the coin and then say, Queen has 100% probability, Text also has 100% probability, that adds up to 200%.  That's why they try to train dath ilani out of assigning more probability afterwards, than they would beforehand, it's why that's contrary to the nature of Probability's Law, if you assign more probability to a happening, after hearing that it happened, then when you add up all the probabilities you'd assign to all the happenings afterwards, you'll get way over 100%.  Only if you do it in advance are you guaranteed to have it add up to 100%."

"Golarion doesn't understand that Law.  Golarion doesn't know that Law.  Which means that everybody who's got a belief in their minds, is looking at, whatever happens, and trying to convince themselves, sure, that thing there, that is just what ought to happen in the world I think I'm living in, that should happen with 100% probability.  They'd say that for anything just the same.  So if you try to - turn that back into coherent math - it says that every outcome has the same probability, and if there's five outcomes, maybe each of them gets 20%, after you're done telling somebody it can't be 100% for each.  But 20% for each of the same five outcomes is the same as if you just said 'I don't know' for each of them, instead of, in every case, there being a clever way to twist things around to make it sound like that thing is totally what should have happened."

"The poetry Keltham quoted us for #1, I suspect if he said it in his own language it would rhyme, or there's a version of it that does, it had that feel to it, and I think I've got it memorized by now:  Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.  If you're equally good at explaining any outcome you can see, that's the same as not knowing anything.  It's not about how good you are at explaining away whatever happens, the only thing that - focuses, concentrates - the limited supply of what you can predict, into some predictions and not others - is that your explanations will sound more plausible for some things and less plausible for others, if there aren't some things you can't explain, that's the same as not being able to predict anything will happen, because you can't predict anything won't happen.  Explaining and predicting are the same thing to a dath ilani, the degree to which a belief says, 'I'm great at explaining that, you should credit me for being totally compatible with that thing you saw', is, to the dath ilani, just the same number as the probability that got put on there, and probability is conserved, so you can't be equally good at explaining everything.  To predict reality you have to be the sort of person who, if you were told a fiction instead, would go 'wait what I can't explain that thing how surprising' instead of coming up with a clever explanation of that thing you were told that wasn't real."

"Ione thought that only #6 and #7 were going to be deadly to Asmodeanism.  She's wrong.  All seven are going to cause problems if the others in class really understand them.  Everything that people see, they're trying to explain how their version of Asmodeanism predicts that thing, so Asmodeanism can claim credit for having predicted it, but if they'd seen something very different, they'd predict that too.  Keltham's world trains Keepers out of that all the way and it trains people like Keltham four-fifths out of the way of doing that, and when you've started practicing with numbers and maths for some things, it affects all the rest of your thinking, the way you think in words.  I remember seeing it when I wore the headband, it was so vivid then and it's faded now but I remember what I saw, the way that - the beliefs inside me - were trying to warp and distort themselves and pretend to shove more probability into the things that they knew had already happened, that they'd never have predicted or never have predicted that strongly, and the more that people are lying to themselves the more that distortion is going to be holding all the lies in place while they try to suck the credit of being right out of whatever-happened by explaining it - and dath ilanism trains that out of people, Keltham's going to make people play some game and when they're done playing the game they'll do that less and then everything that was held in place before becomes shakier - if you had a headband like the one I borrowed, you'd be able to visualize the right Law as math at the same time you watched your own mind trying to do it wrong -"

(There's no obvious sign that Asmodia is ever going to stop talking about problem #1 in particular.)

At the Worldwound they solve mania with lashes but she's not actually sure how they do it in Taldor. 

Message to Security for Maillol if he's awake: this is a standard problem with a standard solution, right? What is the standard solution. 

"Problem two?"

Reply from Security:  Maillol's asleep long since.  But while I don't exactly understand your policy against torture, by this point, slapping her hard enough to knock her over isn't torture, it's medicine.

She wasn't FINISHED but FINE "Okay but before we go on to Problem #2 you didn't get that far, right, you didn't get all of that without the more powerful headband I need, you can see I'm talking like Keltham and completing the Law of Probability and maybe I'm not really a dath ilani but I'm also not really not a dath ilani anymore -"

Carissa hits her. Not hard enough to knock her down only because she's a wizard and doesn't do a lot of hitting people with her actual hands and isn't that strong. 

"Asmodia. You are not a dath ilani. You are in an altered state. This was conveyed to you, by me, ten minutes ago, but you did not listen because you are being impervious to information, which is not very dath ilani at all. I'm very close to locking you up until you sober up, but I'm curious if all this Law you've learned will let you react appropriately to this information all on your own."

Being hit is like a cold rush of water, interrupting the cycle of whatever part of her had won and won and been terrified by Rugatonn and then won again, and stayed to try to win more, and devised more and more complicated plans with Ione arguing but not actually authorized to hurt her, at some point she'd started thinking she was immune to everything and not just to Hell.

"I... suspect I need to try not to do anything for thirty minutes, maybe reading will work, I don't know, and if that doesn't work somebody needs to set my hand on fire for thirty seconds, and if that doesn't work somebody needs to hit me with a sleep spell for an hour.  I apologize.  I can show you the equation for #6 and sketch the theory for #7 but should not try to explain any implications."

Carissa feels enormously relieved. Not just that Asmodia is recovered but that hurting people works. Not that she didn't believe that. 

"Sure, write it out for me and then go read a history of Taldor or something, one of the dry ones."

Asmodia writes down the equation that a far distant place might call Conservation of Expected Evidence, and then, which takes longer, a brief sketch of the idea of filtered evidence and that P(they tell you about the 4th coinspin ◁ the 4th coinspin came up Queen) being a necessary item of evidence to take into account and not just P(the 4th coinspin came up Queen) in order to not violate Keltham's #6.

"There are important implications and I still think you should hear about those before composing a final version of your report to the Most High.  But not having a headband for another day won't kill me, so long as I don't start thinking I can kill the pharaoh of Osirion to steal his crown, again."

She should NOT kidnap Keltham to trade him for the crown, even if she could.  That is not what her Sponsor probably wants.

"If you pull this off, we'll all be rich beyond our wildest imagining and I'll see you given a headband fancier than any yet conceived on Golarion. We have to win first, though. Go take a rest."

Asmodia goes.

She hopes it is possible for her now to function without a headband, as opposed to her previous wearing of an overpowered headband having left ideas embedded in her mind that only a more powerful mind is competent enough to contain without going mad - is that why there are Keepers -

She needs to not think about that.  Thirty minutes, boring history of Taldor.

Maybe it was just being happy that did it.  She's... well, in retrospect, she's never actually been happy before, not really.  Maybe her mind just didn't know how to handle that inside.

...Asmodia hopes one of these days she can be really happy, somewhere that isn't Cheliax, and just fly away like that, safely, and return to the ground when she tires herself out, to sleep.