"I apologize for my genuinely unintentional stupid phrasing.  I'm the same person as the first person who introduced herself to you as Asmodia in the villa library."

"Did whatever actually happened to you to make you sound different, reflect coercion of you, by the Chelish government or forces with which the Chelish government is cooperating, into doing something you'd rather have not done?"

"No," Asmodia states, feeling weirded-out by how much that was very nearly the only such question that could have been asked about her entire life where the answer is no.

"Was it by your own choice that it began, whether or not the outcome was exactly what you had envisioned?"

"Yes."  She asked for a powerful headband and got one.

"Did whatever happened to you alter your goals or - which god you're with?"

"Nothing external came in and did that, apart from - mastering the Law of Probability, rethinking things, seeing new opportunities.  Nothing like a Suggestion spell.  I want Project Lawful to be able to keep doing what it's doing.  That was true both before and after the event that you keep asking about and for the same reasons."

"Are you basically with Asmodeus?"

"Decline to answer.  I request that, if you want to truthspell me on things like that, don't do it in public.  I'm not, to my current knowledge, opposing Asmodeus's interests in Project Lawful."

"Sorry."

"Somebody can go ahead and dispel the truthspell now, after which there's one more test I want to perform."

Security does so.

"Keltham, you're scaring me slightly so please just -"

"Sorry.  I want to tap you with a spell-based Owl's Wisdom and then try on your headband myself, very briefly, to see if that headband actually feels like +6 Wisdom."  It's occurred to Keltham that, given the supposed rarity of +6 headbands, if something happened to Asmodia that augmented her directly, giving her a fake headband to cover up her augmentation might have been something they tried to do.  "You can decline, but then we'll have a conversation about how if there's something you think I need to not know for good reasons, you need to just tell me that, seriously."

"...your 'prior' is kind of all over the place, isn't it?  For very understandable reasons."

"My 'prior' was great, actually, flaming awesome, as ordered as the positive integers.  The problem was what it updated to after I got to Golarion."

"Anyway, about my important question -"

"It's fine, Keltham.  It actually is a headband of +6 Wisdom.  You don't even need to waste the Owl's Wisdom on me, I'll be totally fine if it's just six seconds."

Carissa is slightly worried about the consequences of Keltham wearing Asmodia's headband even for 6 seconds, but she's more worried, at this point, about the consequences of appearing to discourage him from doing that. 

And Ione, extrapolating a possible tactic forwards, finally gets Cayden's riddle which really might have saved them all an awful lot of trouble if she'd gotten it earlier but - no time to ask permission she'll just have to -

"Nethysian advisory, Keltham, are you sure that's a good idea?  You've got a lot more Law in you than she does, and it might not take an artifact-grade headband to -"

"I already tried Owl's Wisdom once when I was learning to catch cantrips, remember?  And, yeah, had something of a not-great reaction afterwards which is why I'm not mainlining it all the time, but if +4 for eight minutes didn't get me then +6 for a few seconds should be fine."

"Maybe it's different for dath ilani rather than Nethysians, but there's an awful lot of Nethysians whose last words in Golarion were 'should be fine'."

Security to Asmodia:  Ione wants you to argue against her and says there's no time to explain her reasoning.

"I express that, in my own interests, I would actively like to see Keltham try on my headband for six seconds in order to reduce distrust here.  Given what happened to me, I think the odds of six seconds of just +6 Wisdom with no other Cunning or Splendour or thinking about anything interesting, doing any permanent damage, are extremely low -"

"Keltham, Detect Anxieties, that your god gave you, gives a read on everyone in the room's Wisdom, and does that even if they're resisting the invasive part. You could check Asmodia with the headband on and with the headband off, to confirm she has a normal human wisdom with it off and 6 higher with it on, and she can block you on reading her anxieties. Also if you look at the headband with Detect Magic it's obviously the thing Maillol is wearing but more powerful but I've had spellcraft since I was ten and don't actually remember how obvious it'd be when I was new at it."

"That... is a very sensible suggestion on the face of things, and the problem is, the fact that you suggested it means that, in worlds where more people were in on it along with Maillol, Ione, and Asmodia, you'd be suggesting that to me out of a dozen other equally plausible possibilities a Golarion native would think of, because those are the two possibilities that Chelish governance can easily defeat, where they couldn't defeat me trying on the headband."

"Sorry, this genuinely isn't meant to indicate - anything personal - it's just how Security reasoning in Civilization works.  If this comes up again, try telling me that you think I already have the tools to solve my problem and I need to try to think of it myself."

"Also I didn't prep Detect Anxieties today.  And if I wait until tomorrow, then on the it's-all-fake hypothesis Asmodia will have a +6 headband then."

" - okay, but I think we should have a plan for if you somehow do manage to think the wrong thing in the space of six seconds and lose the ability to function without it."