"Good idea.  Manohar shouldn't be able to get here too quickly, we're in the middle of a war and he shouldn't actually be deserting the front lines."

"Are you close to being ready to roll on that, Keltham?  Or can you get a version done in the next hour?  I'm seriously considering just suggesting that everybody should stick together in a group, if so.  Not if it's more of a one-day thing."

It's at this point that Keltham notices that, like, you're not supposed to rush setting up your legal forms, or hurrying to sign a contract with a not-super-trusted partner, and that this situation could potentially be rushing him to do that.

And this does seem - well, everything here is so simultaneously alien and trope-laden that it all looks like a script on some level, about a world with economicmagic, but still, that Maillol-Ione interaction could be a script?  Or does it just feel that way because nobody else is speaking up?  Chelish people stay silent in class too, unfortunately.  Ione is the one who ever speaks up anyways, and she's already talking.

"There were a lot of issues to be hammered out even in an interim contract meant to be replaced," Keltham says out loud.  "What's the minimum content of a contract like that which would keep Manohar out?" 

"Depending on whether Manohar wanted to get sticky about it, which I can easily imagine him doing - it can't look too minimal, sorry.  Something that does set up the ability for Project Lawful to make any kind of contribution that entitles it to any revenue from the government of Cheliax which is then recognized as being owned by you."

"All right, let me think."

Message:  Carissa, does this look on the up-and-up to you?

Message: I think the girls to worry about are the ones you just fired. ....uh, the stuff about Manohar being a Nethysian with license to be difficult is true.

Message:  Okay, we'll call that the sane-world prediction.  Tropes say it ought to be Meritxell.

"Anyone else got any knowledge about this guy?" Keltham asks the room.  "Also, I assume Security has already been dispatched to get Asmodia, Pela, and Paxti?"

"Shit.  Paxti."

"No, I was focusing on you as the target to protect, didn't headcount, yes that was stupid of me.  Security, I need an immediate report on those three, then get them here."

"Pilar, you think Paxti would say yes to him?"

"...maybe not actually in real life.  I don't know.  Paxti isn't stupid."

"Up until five minutes ago I had maybe heard twice in the course of my life that one of our eighth-circle wizards sets a bad example of mature adult behavior and a great example of how much you can earn special treatment by being a good-enough wizard.  I couldn't have told you that his name was Manohar, and if he identified himself to me like that, I probably wouldn't have recognized it enough to be cautious.  I'd have assumed that if Security had let him in he was probably allowed to be there."

"Yeah, that's pretty much what happened to me, only with somewhat less ignorance and more stupidity."

"Plus side, I'm basically okay, I get to keep this +6 Wisdom headband I'm wearing, and he's used up his being-fired token for the next year."

"Son of a bitch.  Asmodia, report."

"Strange man knocked on my door and woke me up in the middle of the night, next to a Security that I did recognize, including by Arcane Mark.  He said that one of, uh, Keltham's terms, the very smart people in Governance, presumably him in retrospect, wanted to look into what happened if you put an artifact-grade headband on somebody studying Keltham's Law.  So he'd Teleported here from the front lines to get his nightly two hours of sleep - note for Keltham, sufficiently powerful wizards can compress their sleep down to two hours a day.  He said the plan was for me to try on his headband, while Security sleepspelled him for those two hours so he wouldn't have to experience not wearing his headband."

"As far as I can tell, that actually was his entire plan, unless it had some second stage I didn't get to see."

"His second stage would've been that you did incredibly well, and then he'd let you lure Keltham into demanding to try that too, by your being such an interesting shining demonstration.  Context, Manohar wouldn't be planning to usurp the rule of Cheliax at the end of this, he'd just literally be doing it to see what happened."

"This being why everybody assumes he worships Nethys despite him having never once said anything about that."

"That's not bad enough to use up his bad-behavior token for the year, though.  What happened?"

"I solved all seven of Keltham's problems where I'd previously only gotten up to #5.  No, that's understating things way too much.  I suspect I've basically completed the Law of Probability inside my mind.  I want to try replacing Keltham for the next lecture, which I assume was going to be on the meaning of those seven problems, and seeing how Keltham says I do at that."

Okay, assuming either tropes, or the Conspiracy, Keltham has no idea whatsoever what's going on at this point.  This is neither a recognizable trope, nor does it have any recognizable Conspiracy objective.  This, of course, could be the sign of a competent Conspiracy, but then the interactions leading here would've had a better script to the point of not giving him that scripted feeling.

The problem with Golarion is that the Ordinary possible-world is so much more insane than the Conspiracy one.

Still, testable things can be tested.  "Meaning of problem seven?"

"Uh, the evidence of somebody telling you about a fact has to be weighed separately from the evidence of the fact itself, which is how the rule of #6, about not being able to predict what the evidence you see will make you believe, manifests when you think somebody else is filtering what evidence you get."

"Shit," Keltham says with feeling.  "Yeah, correct."

Well for that to be a clever plot, the Conspiracy would need to already know the Law of Probability, which is mostly not what Keltham had thought was going on inside the Conspiracy world.

"I'm still not hearing the explanation for why Manohar isn't coming back for Keltham."

"I reacted badly when Security took the headband off per prior agreement and put it back on Manohar to wake him up."

"I request to make the rest of my report in private.  But it looks like I'm basically okay so long as I go on wearing the +6 Wisdom headband that Manohar got for me afterwards, and I observe that I expect this final outcome to be greatly advantageous for my study of Law and for Project Lawful generally."

"Asmodia, considering the sheer degree of what-the-fuck I'm expecting our honored guest is experiencing right now, I'm going to insist that Keltham be allowed to hear that report too, while you are initially giving it to me."

"Is there some very good reason that you did not tell Security to report to me before now?"

"...I guess I thought in the back of my mind that they were allowed to report to you after he was gone.  I acknowledge fault in that."

"You acknowledge fault in THAT?"