"I think the gods told us, though also the properties of planes are directly study-able, for powerful enough wizards, including things like how space is shaped in them and how light from distant parts of them reaches us, and maybe some of that study is sufficient to know they're infinite, I don't know."

"Anyone got the gods' exact wording, there?  For comparison, my home plane doesn't have a spatial boundary in any direction and doesn't spatially loop, but on the lower level of reality underneath that, there were limits on the size of structures that could exist and any two identical structures of entanglement were the same structure at that underlying level of reality.  It didn't actually contain an infinite amount of stuff; it was repeating at a lower level than space looping around.  If Elysium is infinite, nonrepeating, contains arbitrarily large entangled structures, and everywhere comprises a similar positive density of realityfluid, that literally breaks the Law of Probability I know."

" - oh dear. Uh, I don't know that, but I guess we can have someone look it up. ....why does it break the Law of Probability if there are planes that go on forever?" What a good thing for Keltham to be extremely worried about.

"Well, let's say you have an infinite number of INT 16 wizard students, of whom an infinite number become 5th-circle wizards, what's your chance of becoming a 5th-circle wizard given that you're an INT 16 wizard student?"

"I don't think all infinities are the same size though maybe they are in the relevant sense - wait, yes, okay, they are. Huh."

"Right, so, the whole requirement of being able to say, here I am now, what happens to me next, the required premise of being able to ask if it is more likely that you see the coinspin landing Queen or see the coinspin landing Text, is that there's entangled structures of realityfluid where your possible futures are entangled with your present and the amount of realityfluid making up your futures is such that you can have ratios between the amounts of realityfluid in entangled futures.  Like, you want to say that there's infinities you can draw ratios between, sure, but then you can just talk about the fraction that anything is of everything.  Like, maybe for a really really large infinite universe somewhere that was among the simplest possible ones, that one infinite universe would be 0.00001% of the infinite Everything, but then you could just leave out the talk of infinity and talk about the fractions."

"Anyways, not an urgent issue.  I just note that it implies, in descending order of probability, that you misunderstood your gods, your gods lied, your gods have no idea how the ass some parts of Law work, or Civilization managed to get some parts of the Law truly incredibly wrong."

"It seems unfair to your Civilization if they could be wrong based off a - factual thing about how a different universe than theirs works."

"The crap I'm talking about is part of the border between universal truth and local truth, like, the universal truth about why there are any local truths or people inside those local truths to experience them.  I mean, it's not like math and local reality are two totally distinct realms, there's a border where they meet.  Knowledge about realityfluids always being ratioable sorts of things, since it's knowledge about that border, falls on the universal side of 'is that true everywhere'."

"Like, there's a difference between saying that this table is real - where it's just being real here, and not being real over there or in dath ilan - and saying that since the table is real it's necessarily ultimately made out of some stuff that is how real it is, and this stuff comes in ratioable quantities."

"Oh, and if you're wondering why everything I'm saying sounds like gibberish, it's because we're currently talking about 'anthropics'."

"The thing you warned Ione we mustn't speak of. Who knew it was lurking behind things people say all the time, like that there's no point doing anything about the Abyss because there are infinite demons."

"Yeah, don't worry about that.  The ratio between the amount of nondemon realitystuff and the amount of demon realitystuff is not going to be finity to infinity, aka zero.  Even if surface reality looks that way, the underlying reality will be something else.  You can tell, because we're not demons, which we would be, if there was probability 1 of being a demon rather than a nondemon."

Keltham has now consumed any food!  He looks around to see who's present; is this a good time for general announcements about salary negotiations?

Among the Retained, only Asmodia is absent.  Pela and Paxti aren't here, Yaisa and Jacme are.

He'll wait on Asmodia, then, he supposes.

Okay but what the fuck are anthropics.

Keltham probably will further mention such common aphorisms as "Probability is how much you believe in a possibility, realityfluid is how much Possibility believes in you" and try to explain the general notion that 'anthropics' is what the nice sane straightforward Law of Probability turns into once you're creating copies of people, destroying universes too fast for anyone inside them to notice, obtaining outputs in the mainline universe from computations that only happened with very tiny total amplitude, or otherwise manipulating how much realityfluid ends up within overlying experiences directly instead of via the nice sane normal road where you work inside causality to make stuff happen.

Oh, well, as long as it's just that, then. 

She's memorizing everything he says to talk over with Asmodia later but she doesn't want to suggest now that that carries anything more than academic interest, since the only reason it does is that Tropes Are Real and in alter Cheliax Carissa doesn't believe that. It feels like a minor thing, but there are no minor things, no bits of evidence they can afford to give away.

Maillol strides into the breakfast area, looking so openly pissed that even Keltham is able to tell this purely by reading his facial expressions.

"We have an organizational issue above us," he announces.  "Not fatal, but urgent.  Keltham, has anyone explained to you that in a majority of countries that aren't Cheliax, seventh-circle wizards and above often start acting like they're above the law?"

Now what.  And what sort of tropes is it going to initially look like and then turn out not to be... where the heck is he now, inside Reality, anyways...

"It's been touched on," Keltham says.  "I wouldn't say I really understand, but I get the general concept of high-circle wizards being powerful to the point where a not-very-Lawful government gives up on restraining them."

It's possible that he just knows too many tropes, can fit them to anything, and is somewhere else weird that he should be trying to decode from scratch.

"Quick briefing.  A significant part of Cheliax's entire military potential is one eighth-circle wizard, name of Manohar, born to Chelish parents outside Cheliax and rumored not to actually worship Asmodeus - relevant Security would know for certain, that doesn't mean we know - who serves the Chelish government under a compact where his foibles and eccentricities are treated with more laxity than literally anyone else gets.  Be it clear, he's not the kind of wizard who carries out dubious experiments on children, Cheliax wouldn't hire someone like that even at eighth-circle.  He's the kind of wizard who carries out dubious experiments on adults.  Not deliberately cruel ones, but not exactly safe ones either.  He has to get permission from the subjects for any crazy experiments involving other people, but is very good at talking people into it."

"He gets, by compact, special treatment from Security allowing him to peek in on projects he decides are interesting - though he does keep those secrets, from everything I've heard.  No mysterious leaks that nobody can prove were him.  Cheliax isn't stupid, and neither is he; he never does anything bad enough that it starts to look commensurately bad with him not being able to singlehandedly guard sections of border."

"His compact says that any time he misbehaves badly enough that anyone else would be fired, he can't do anything like that again for at least a year, or he actually does get fired.  Well, it's been a year and two months since the last time he blew up that interestingly, and I've received word that Manohar has found out that Project Lawful exists and has exercised his special viewing rights to look at our transcripts."

"Well, he's not arriving here in the next thirty seconds, at least, because if Nethys warned us about just a Nidal invasion, He'd definitely warn us about that."

"You serious?"

"Unfortunately no, sir."

"Then keep the smart remarks down."

"You understand that you'd plausibly be his first target for persuasion once he's here?"

"I know.  Keltham, context, Manohar is very likely a worshipper of Nethys and, regardless of whether he really is, the fact that everyone believes that is something like 70% of why I didn't tell anyone about my book-summoning abilities until I met you.  Manohar is what most people think Nethys worshippers are like, especially people outside of wizard academies."

"I'm not allowed to literally give you this as an order, so consider it an extremely strong suggestion:  Nobody is to agree to doing anything with Manohar if he shows up here, and, if he does, tell Security to call me immediately.  Security isn't allowed to come get me as soon as they see him, but they can if he talks to you and you tell them to go do that."

This would be the downside of running your government in a way where, for the greater Good, you would think it was ever okay for somebody like Keltham to demand that Carissa to be given to him even if she didn't want that, because Keltham is so important.  Well, it at least sounds like they didn't literally give 'Manohar' any women.

All right, trope-based prediction, Manohar can't possibly not come here.  He'll target one of the four existing Special Girls, who needs to be protected from him by something that Keltham has to do in some way; or successfully persuade a new girl who turns Special after Manohar does experiments to her and one of those backfires, in which case the event cannot possibly be stopped.

Nontrope prediction, all other possible outcomes; favored within that, Manohar comes in and pokes around and annoys people but everybody sensibly tells him to go away and he does.

"Among my reactions to this is to want to jump forwards immediately on organizing Project Lawful more formally and signing our own contract with the Chelish government that recognizes Project Lawful as in part our own property, and thereby not subject in a simple way to compacts solely between Manohar and Cheliax."