"...knock me out until somebody can get me a Wisdom headband, I guess."

"Keltham, was your previous bad reaction like - your mind being put into a new shape that it needed Wisdom to sustain?  Or you just thought things on Wisdom that you'd rather have not thought?"

"Mostly the second one.  It wasn't at all like brain damage.  If there were things in me that wanted more Wisdom to sustain themselves, they were just regular new thoughts."

"Okay.  I vehemently argue, in my own interests, that most people are incredibly fine after doing something like this.  The sole reason we have to believe that Keltham is vulnerable to what happened to me, is on the theory that my understanding of Law was responsible.  If that's true, which I am not discounting to be clear, 40% maybe, then it should require thinking about Law and doing that for longer than six seconds in order to do the damage."

"Six seconds of +6 Wisdom blowing him up is not going to be the kind of bad thing that actually happens in real life, like Keltham was saying before we needed to learn how to distinguish.  It's not even something that happens to one person you know."

"I... basically buy that.  All right, let's proceed, after twelve seconds for more objections if any."  Under other circumstances he might not, but it's occurring to him that maybe something is being hidden here and then maybe that thing is important.  At the very least, he wants to see if he somehow gets stopped before he can actually put the headband on, after Asmodia apparently argued so hard for that.

"I was not going to say this unless it looked like you were really going to do it anyways, because it is still not safe but -"

"Um.  I mean, Keltham, you might have the tool to partially solve some of your problem here, but I don't know for sure whether you do -"

"Actually, I'm not sure if this is a thing where dath ilani Security means I'm not supposed to suggest it."

"This sure is turning into a day."

"Ione, in the interests of sheer sanity even at the expense of Security, I'll ask for a hint, is the reason you're not sure, that you're not sure if I have a particular spell prepped?"

"Yeah."

Keltham mentally reviews all of his spells.

1st-circle.  Truthspells, Fairness, Sanctuary, Comprehend Languages in case Share Language fails on him.

2nd-circle.  Keltham didn't go all Owl's Wisdom on his 2nd-circles, today, because some people being fired did free up some space there.  And the obvious contingency 2nd for emergencies, to put in the freed-up space -

"You think I should do an Augury first."

"YES I REALLY THINK YOU SHOULD."

...because she decided, some days ago, not to tell him about the 4th-circle False Future spell that can spoof Auguries, when she was listing 4th-circle cleric spells she could 'remember'.

They could've just warned him to try that before getting Fox's Cunning cast on him, given his previous bad reaction to Owl's Wisdom.

They did not, really, need the rest of this.

And now she has a decision to make. 

Should Augury tell Keltham to try on the headband, or not.

There is some chance that when he tries on the headband he'll realize everything. His not trying on the headband is safer, that way. 

But if she were Keltham, at some point she'd take a step back from all of the details and check - did he get to test whether Asmodia's headband was +6, or did he not. And if the answer is that he did not, that's strong evidence that someone didn't want him to. It moves probability towards all of the worlds where someone had a reason to let him not. And it drags along - Carissa's credibility, Ione's, truth spells', now possibly Augury. 

No.

It reduces the odds of losing right now but it's a losing move.

Give him 'neither weal nor woe', she thinks. 

...nobody on Security has False Future prepped and there's no scroll of it on the premises.

Well, at least they didn't notice that problem the hard way.

"Do Auguries still work inside of whatever anti-hostile-gods setup we've got here?" Peranza recites a Security-passed message.

"We'll revisit that question if I get a null result.  I will state out loud that I'll consider that suspicious and then probably proceed anyways."

Keltham takes a moment to consider various probabilities in advance.  Augury, in one sense, seems definitely very easy to spoof; they could precommit to doing something bad to him if and only if he tries on the headband, whereupon the Augury returns a doomy result and Keltham therefore doesn't try on the headband and they don't have to follow through on the precommitment... well, except for the part where Augury is noisy and they might have to follow through, but if they cared enough, they could do it and take the expected loss.

Probability of the Augury just failing inside the Ordinary anti-hostile-gods zone:  30% maybe?  Actually, should be higher because sometimes Auguries do that anyways.  No, lower, because, as he's just realized, Pilar's cake thing still works and he'd expect that to run off a similar mechanism.

More importantly, Ordinary probability of the Augury returning 'doom'?

Tiny.  He wouldn't have been set to do it otherwise.  A negative Augury here will be a very large update.

...actually no, they're noisy, but still.

Keltham casts his Augury, effects if he tries on Asmodia's headband very briefly.

He can feel the Augury go through, this time, and it comes back pretty neutral.  Not failed, just neutral.

"I got a basically neutral answer.  Asmodia, ready?"

"Yes please."

Keltham quickly takes the headband off her, puts it on his own head, leaves it on there long enough to verify that yep this sure is like the Owl's Wisdom he remembers but maybe 50% stronger than that, and puts the headband back on Asmodia.

"Okay, check passed, that was Owl's Wisdom but half again as strong."

The girls, who could all see this very plainly using their permanent Arcane Sight, look exasperatedly back at him. 

(Carissa lets out an enormous entirely internal sigh.)

"Don't worry, everyone, it's not that he's inherently like this all the time.  He'll need to do this sort of thing less and less often as he narrows down which world he's inside."

And nobody here had better fucking forget it.  This was not a good day for Project Lawful, even if Keltham seems to have mostly pointed in some new wrong directions.  She's starting to appreciate on a deep level, these things cumulate and not just in ways that Keltham thinks about in numbers.

"...yeah.  What she said."

He's worked out why he's sad now.  It's like having a toddler you were intending to raise, and then somebody puts an artifact-grade headband on it, and the next day it's talking in full sentences without you ever having had the chance to teach it more than a few words.

"So at some point soon, perhaps even, dare I say, now, while the memories are piping fresh and hot, we should segue into the question of how much I'm getting paid to put up with this sort of thing.  I may have shifted some of my previously expressed opinions on that topic."

"I admire your attempted timing on compensation negotiations, but that doesn't work on people who are reasoning Lawfully."

"Be that as it may, 15 gold a week is not going to cut it.  To be clear, I'm not talking about the consequences of my personal decisions, I'm talking about all this Project Lawful weirdness in the first place, my not blinking at the sudden truthspell just now, the fact that I'm going to deliver this morning's Probability lecture in your place and literally nobody else on Golarion could, and that I come with a +6 Wisdom headband as personal equipment.  Anything less than 50 gold a week for me is downright disrespectful."

One of the problems with Project Lawful is that - it feels like Ione sometimes, and Asmodia now, are just aliens. Not even the same way as Keltham, who knows that he's an alien and tries to compensate for it, some other and mostly unpleasant kind of alien. Predicting Keltham is hard, but not impossible: he's Abadaran, he wants to know that everyone who happens to pass in front of his nose is okay, he's paranoid. Asmodia and Ione are different unpredictably alien kinds of aliens, and what they care about is entirely incomprehensible, and they think that they're not aliens they're just smarter than you.

All of this to say that Meritxell hopes Keltham tells Asmodia she's fired, though obviously he's not going to. Asmodia is really annoying, see. Meritxell's pretty sure this is objectively the case and not just jealousy.

(Carissa didn't pass along all the details of Keltham's salary plans; one less things for the girls to fake, and Keltham's Sense Motive is getting better.... still bad, but getting better.)