"The Security who knew wasn't allowed to tell Maillol, or so I now realize, but he was allowed to wake me up and tell me what was happening."

"And you asked that because you were wondering how the - it's so weird, I can tell that my language needs all these words it doesn't have - the way that probability is spread out over when Maillol gets to the dining hall, the way that probability spreads out for my getting there, they'd have to be tangled up, or they wouldn't match -"

"Am I seeing it?  Am I wrong that I'm seeing the way you see, now?"

"You're seeing it.  Yeah."

Why is he sad like this.

"You're sad.  Why are you sad?  I would've thought this was great news.  I'm happier than I've -"

"I'm pretty happy, from hearing you confirm that."

"I don't actually know."

"Asmodia, you go on ahead to the dining hall and tell the others I'll be there in a few minutes."

"Anything you do want me to do here?"

"Is there anything more like this I should be expecting to happen?"

"You'd have had ten messes like this one if I hadn't been running myself ragged for the last week trying to keep everyone else out of your hair."

"Having this happen to us does earn us some amount of informal political credit for being the ones to take the Manohar hit, like, you don't pick on the people who just had that happen to them.  I wouldn't expect another event like this tomorrow.  Another week, who knows."

"The stronger your Project gets, the more results it produces, the more politically able it becomes to defend itself from this sort of thing.  I'm saying that in part for my own benefit, but it's your benefit as well.  Having an identifiable interest in the Project who's not just the government of Cheliax is likely to help on future things too."

Right.  Keltham goes off to take a few more minutes to himself.

"Keltham said he'd be here in a few minutes."

"How are we looking on his thought transcripts, nobody interrupted me so I assumed nothing drastic was going wrong -"

"I think it basically - worked - I haven't gotten the last couple minutes of thought transcripts but he's not hard to read and he parsed none of that as a conspiratorial attempt to turn him off intelligence enhancement, he was too busy being sad for you - bad news for the plan where we get him to ever be even vaguely Evil but good news for the objective." She exhales deeply. "I want an item of Glibness. Is that known to be possible to do - it ought to be, the reason wizards can't cast it is it won't stabilize -"

"Basically worked is charitable," says the eighth-circle wizard called in from the front to read Keltham's thoughts during this dangerous attempt.  "All of you children require additional acting training before you try anything like this again, either that or call in real fucking impersonators to replace you.  Keltham intuitively felt that some of your interactions sounded scripted, especially while you were describing events that hadn't actually happened and things that are not true.  He wasn't confident of his ability to tell that through the dimensional-travel unfamiliarity, but he noticed.  You weren't interrupted on it because my best judgment was that doing so or warning you would've made it worse."

His name is in fact Manohar, just in case; one less lie.

He is not a Nethysian.

He doesn't confine his experiments to consenting adults.

"Glibness will solve the sounding scripted and it's cheaper in our time than acting training, though I guess we might generally all benefit from acting training."

"I know of one item of Glibness that exists, so it's possible.  It's not for sale anywhere I've heard of, so it's not easy.  I don't know if the item would play well with your nice new headbands, either, it's a transmutation-based effect."

"Am I done here, Sevar?"

She holds out her hands for the transcripts. "Yes."

(There ought to be a way to make it slotless if there's a way to do it at all; the conventional wisdom is that slotless is a lot harder in addition to being more expensive, but Carissa thinks that's because everyone is a coward. It's not even harder, it's just more complicated.)

"Wait."

"Target is reevaluating events in hindsight and I don't think he's happy."

All right, set aside the question of why he's feeling sad about Asmodia; it's plausibly-enough some mix of 'you never got to know the old her' and 'this isn't how you imagined yourself starting Civilization' and 'are you less special as other people master more Law' actually that's too uncharitable it doesn't feel like that kind of sadness, 'you wanted it to seem newer and brighter somehow and not just Civilization repeating itself' well it could still be that but Probability is going to be the same everywhere so obviously Asmodia's going to start sounding more dath ilani as she starts to use those ideas, you can't deny them that, Keltham, just because you want them to go on feeling to you like the fresh new world of Golarion -

Set it aside.

How likely was that whole Shenanigan in the Conspiracy world, versus the Tropes world, versus the Ordinary world.

It feels like a wrong question, somehow.  Something was anomalous about that; and it didn't feel like Conspiracy or Tropes.

Why did the interaction between Ione and Maillol feel scripted?  Is it just something about the way that real Cheliax reads to a dath ilani, something that rhymes with fake permanent cheerfulness in class, with Carissa trying to act during sex like everything is all right?  Permanent cheerfulness is not a trope, it has no clear Conspiracy objective, it feels fake and it is fake but it's not meant to be deceptive.

Can he put his finger on anything about why the interaction felt scripted?

It felt rushed.

Counterarguendo:  It was an emergency.  They were rushing.

It felt optimized for making sure Keltham heard everything he needed to hear.

Counterarguendo:  Everyone talking knew that he was going to be surprised and alarmed and were, in fact, optimizing heavily for making sure Keltham didn't freak out about their back-and-forth.

It felt too clean, like, giving that everyone had been doing their parts separately to keep him informed, there should've been more stumbles and messiness in their conversation.

Counterarguendo:  Keltham has had plenty of smooth conversations both here and in Civilization wherein nothing obviously disruptive or messy happens for up to five minutes at a time, and this was less time than that.

It felt coordinated, like everyone had worked together in advance on making sure that all the information they wanted Keltham to see was present in that interaction, and finished its delivery exactly when Asmodia showed up.

Counterarguendo:  Hindsight, Keltham; would you also have said that if Asmodia had walked in the room right before Peranza said anything, or would you have said that if you'd also gotten a chance to hear whatever the next speaker had to say?

WELL IT INTUITIVELY FELT SCRIPTED, SO THERE.

Counterarguendo:  WELL META-INTUITIVELY YOU'RE ON SOME COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PLANET AND YOUR INTUITIONS MIGHT HAVE SOME PROBLEMS SO THERE

He could make up numbers, probabilities, but that itself feels like the wrong move.  This doesn't feel like Conspiracy vs Tropes vs Ordinary, it feels like the real hypothesis is not in his starting set.

If Keltham just goes purely on intuition...

It feels like Asmodia had an Event last night that changed her outwardly apparent personality and gave her mastery of Probability, an Event they weren't expecting and one that they were flatly prohibited from explaining to Keltham, and then they had to frantically scramble to make up a cover story for that and weren't very good at it.

Keltham doesn't remember exact wordings but, if they were expecting to need to pass a truthspell test later, among the things they could do, if they were truly desperate, was call in an eighth-circle wizard named Manohar from the front with the reputation Maillol described - a reputation Keltham possibly finds slightly more sympathetic than the Chelish seem to, that guy is living his best life - and have him act out the events they described with Asmodia, so that she'd be able to tell Keltham under truthspell that it had all happened.  Either Maillol, Ione, and Asmodia are in on it and the others not, or also Pilar and Peranza, and, it sort of hurts to think but, probably Carissa too at that rate, because they'd know Keltham might turn to her for advice.

Does he actually believe that scenario?

The prior here is kinda low.

It's low in Conspiracy and it's low in Ordinary.  It's higher in the Tropes world where Asmodia may still be due to acquire a Special Background.  Her whole deal would never go in a Civilization-original eroLARP, fine, but neither would a lot of other things in Golarion.  Maybe call them pseudo-tropes, fork off a theory where they look enough like dath ilan tropes to be initially recognizable but they're not the same tropes... that hugely widens a prior space that was already way too populated with potential patterns.  But maybe the theory will start to make sense over time.

Something else happened to Asmodia, and they had to frantically scramble to cover it up.

Can he figure out what else would probably be true in that world, and how to test it?

Aaaaargh why is he like this. They should have left him petrified until they had the Glibness, never mind that those aren't available for sale anywhere, Carissa can do them herself. WIthout retraining into Wondrous Items, she doesn't have time for that. She can do them as swords. - too late now.

She needs to be ahead of Keltham instead of behind him for once. What else would probably be true in that world. That isn't about a Conspiracy. .....well, if they're deceiving him and bad at it they probably feel avoidant and guilty, that's a potential direction to take, figure out what Actually Happened and then have them get caught in a lie, demonstrating they have no capacity to fool truth spells...

Keltham's heading right on back.  You know, never mind concealing that he noticed, to see if they give themselves away more, that's too bad for trust if he's wrong.  He's just going to try asking some questions under truthspell, ones that try to rule out anything sufficiently awful or emergencyish having happened, but if there's actually some incredibly good reason for him not to know about the thing immediately, then fine.

He considers opening with "You know, if there's some actually good reason for me not to know what really happened to Asmodia, you can just say so and it'll be a lot simpler than this," but that's destructive of trust if he's wrong about all of this, which he's definitely still at over 50% on.

"Don't say things under truth spell that'd be a lie in the world he's just conjured, where something else happened and we arranged to be able to truthfully tell him this. Makes it look more likely we can defeat truth spells."

"Acknowledged."  She feels sick to her stomach but can at least manage her outward expressions - better than before, with the added Wisdom, even if it's not Splendour, and definitely well enough to fool Keltham as he is.

There is something she didn't get previously about 'being more confused by fiction than by reality' and she thinks it's meant to have a very literal sense, one that she maybe missed for thinking of all the wonderful equations, one of just stepping back from everything and asking whether it has a feel-of-reality or a feel-of-fiction, only, only it feels like that wouldn't work for her, yet, if she tried it, she wouldn't be able to see what Keltham saw -

She wasn't ready.  Whatever she is now, it's barely emerged from its eggshell.  She shouldn't have tried something like this against a mature dath ilani.

"I'm back."

"Everyone, I'm sorry for this, but I think it's better to clear the air than for me to quietly swallow concerns."

"Asmodia, are you okay with answering some questions under truthspell?  Your employment with me does not depend on it; I cannot, unfortunately, make an honest promise that I'd manage to ignore the update implied by your refusal of it."

"I'm willing to take a non-compulsory truthspell, reserve the option to decline questions, and ask that you probe narrowly about whatever it is you're worried about."

"Understood."

Tap.  Symbol.

"Are you the same person I first met who looked like you and introduced herself to me as Asmodia, in the sense of having not been replaced in body or mind by some other person who existed separately from the previous Asmodia when she first introduced herself?"  That should get most of the doomy cases he's actually worried about, while permitting the one where her mind or body went backwards in time by however long, in which case yeah they could have legit temporal shenanigan reasons to desperately cover that from him, but should also probably be implicitly notified that he did think of the possibility.

"Yes.  I'm somewhat changed by things that happened to me, I haven't been replaced."

"Obviously you have not been replaced by any person other than you -"