"Meritxell never tries anything clever, so she could be not-intimidated if Sevar doesn't want to spend the night with Keltham."

"I'm smarter than you," says Meritxell, "which is why I'm not doing things that look clever but aren't what I would do in alter -"

Carissa uses a minor illusion to make a thunderclap above their heads. "Testing whether that's as effective as lighting you on fire," she says. "Meritxell is indeed a good person to put in front of Keltham while we're all confused because alter Meritxell seems credibly pretty similar to real Meritxell. However, I want Keltham tonight, because my model of him suffers when I go this long interacting with peoples' Keltham-guesses and not the real Keltham. And furthermore I would actually like him to next pick up someone who can give him credible evidence on the masochism front since that's very entangled, for him, with Conspiracy."

Nobody wants to demonstrate to her that they need to be set on fire to be quieted.

Great! 

If that's settled, then, she'll slip out to Keltham.

(After she's gone.)

"It actually was a compliment, Meritxell.  You say clever things in class, you don't try stupid Nethysian plots.  Just don't ask me to phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like an insult, because I can only lower myself so far given our relative pay levels."

"You take the money, I'll take the lack of brain damage takaral."

"Not sure they're going to take thirty minutes," she tells Keltham when she catches him. "I probably shouldn't report what was said?"

"Yes and oopsie.  I thought in the back of my mind that was obvious enough that everyone would get it, and even if I was right, I still should have said it out loud."

"I guess Security can pass that along to the girls still in there in case it wasn't obvious to any of them."

"Right," Keltham says to the clearly visible Security nearby.  "Can you do that?  Knock, tell them that Keltham apologizes if this part wasn't clear, but he won't ask them about any discussions they're doing while he's out and Carissa won't report earlier ones?"

It'll get done.

Keltham almost asks Carissa if it's an okay time for a hug, before remembering, like, everything else about how their relationship is supposed to work.  He just takes her and pulls her to him instead, leaning into her a bit.

"We need to spend time together today," Keltham says aloud.  "I think my brain starts to slightly forget how our relationship works if we don't regularly... do stuff.  It's still very new to this and learning."

"I was actually just thinking the same thing. I have a bunch of - disorganized thoughts on Asmodia and myself and becoming dath ilani and, uh, staying Carissa, even the parts of me that don't hold up, and - I would like to spend time with you and be confused out loud instead of in my head. 

....also, it kept nagging at me, the thing you said about - how in the Conspiracy world I was pretending, to want this - so I came up with a bunch of clever ways you could verify that I wasn't but I guess I shouldn't tell you them since they could just be the things the Conspiracy could fake. But I did come up with a bunch and you probably could too."

"You know, I was thinking that I should maybe lay off that Conspiracy thing, except maybe with Asmodia and Ione, or something.  Nobody else is commenting on it at all, where a class of dath ilani would have completely run away with it by now.  Because in Civilization they would - well, they'd have trusted in the reality of their Ordinary world, that I'd come to the right answer so long as that was reality, and so wouldn't walk out on them and ruin their careers.  In Golarion, they probably have no idea of all the obvious precautions I'd take about not jumping to that conclusion too quickly, not concluding for sure it was true when I was still in the maybe-faces-in-the-clouds stage..."

"Now that I say that out loud I'm suddenly worried that everyone in the classroom was paralyzed with terror the whole time I was talking.  And wouldn't have dared to say anything about it, because, for all they know, that's what I think the Conspiracy would do."

" - paralyzed in terror is a bit strong but I think they aren't sure they're safe as long as they're in fact not running an elaborate lie, yeah - like, if a person with a Chelish amount of law tried to decide if they were inside an elaborate conspiracy, using the kinds of evidence you use, what they ended up deciding would be almost completely unpredictable. I know you're not - reading entrails - but it's sometimes hard to see what makes it work."

"...I would've sorta expected Ione to have warned me about that."

"Carissa, you need to warn me about that sort of thing."

Oh, is that what Ione meant by her request. That's a genuine error; relayed through Security while Carissa tried to keep her bathroom break bathroom length, she understood Ione to be proposing that she take Keltham aside and say 'you know, if we were in a Conspiracy, that talk would have been very scary', which seemed like a terrible plan, but if in fact Ione was proposing pointing out that girls might wrongly think Keltham could get this wrong then Carissa owes her an apology. And maybe to be slightly less quick to shoot down the Excessively Clever Plans from team Excessively Clever Plans just because they're heretics and in love with their own self-concepts as geniuses.

" - yeah, that's fair. I'm sorry. I don't think the girls are very scared, they joke about it some when you're not around, but - but probably if you asked them probabilities they'd say they think there's at least a ten or twenty percent chance you'll decide Conspiracy even assuming there isn't one. 

- and then the other part of this is that in Golarion if there were a conspiracy you'd demand the heads of everyone in it, right, but I don't think anyone thinks you'd do that, it just hovers as an association with 'conspiracy'."

"The thought that I could possibly be interpreted as meaning that the women in my class had formed a dark conspiracy against me, without the consent of the Chelish government backing them, had literally never crossed my mind at all.  The thought that you were all being held there against your will and figuring out an elaborate plot to get me out along with yourselves?  Yes, though only because tropes.  That other one?  No."

" - no, I mean, if there's a Conspiracy it's got to have at least one of the Queen or the Church. But - that doesn't mean they'd double down, if they were doing a conspiracy and got caught at it, rather than saying 'sorry, we'll kill everyone in the chain of command that authorized this, friends now?' - I mean. They wouldn't. Because hypothetically they've got to understand you reasonably well to have pulled off all of this, and so well enough to notice you wouldn't be impressed. But that's how a Conspiracy among Golarion people playing Golarion sorts of power games might shake out. Though again no one who has met you is plausibly worried about this, it's just kind of hovering as a - literary association."

"I'll tell them I'm sorry when I get a chance.  Remind me if I don't.  It's not - easy for me to guess, still, what terrible associations people here might have."

"I'll remind you. They might have less of them than me, honestly, they were younger when the Church took charge."

"I am, for the first time in my life, having something like 'impostor-syndrome', I think... that's where you get a sense that you're trying to do something beyond your own competence and furthermore pretending to be better at it than you are instead of being honest about that, but not, like, consciously, just the sense that what you're doing is leading other people on...  Sorry, that was a topic change, it's not about Conspiracy stuff, it's about my presuming to lay out equity distributions for a big important startup.  That's not, like, going up against Zon-Kuthon the way that protagonists do in books, that's something people do in real life and Civilization would not have picked me to do that in real life."

"Well, the equity distribution seemed pretty reasonable to me and Civilization's not here to have opinions or make horrified faces."

"Yeah, I'll just go on being the incredibly impressive person that I am in virtue of nobody here having ever seen better.  Sounds like a plan."

"If we ever figure out how to materialize the other Lost Dead into Golarion, please don't hate me for - pretending to be more than I was - because, I did warn you, right now and here, of how it would be, if it went like that."