"Did Chaotic Good help seal Rovagug?" asks Meritxell. " - I mean, I know what the textbook says, but -"

"Yes.  Desna, and Dou-Bral who later was inverted to Zon-Kuthon, both participated in that battle."

"Most High, I request such knowledge of those truths as may have been compiled for those trusted.  It is impossible for me to guess what truth of our gods may be something Keltham sees as entangled with other truths.  That he is as yet too confused to ask much about gods is no guarantee he will remain confused tomorrow."

"We do not get a pass on having failed if Keltham catches us in a lie that we did not know was a lie, from a Conspiracy above our own Conspiracy."

"I shall consider it."

"I also ask how much of this conversation took place in alterCheliax - not at this time, obviously, but sometime.  I ask whether alterCheliax is talking to Keltham about these matters, what knowledge he may hold that is more dangerous in this place, whether his world hid knowledge of magic and gods.  He may think of it; he may predict we will think of it; and alterCheliax is not in the reflexive habit of never talking to Keltham."

"The Grand High Priestess and Queen are paying this less attention in alter Cheliax, I think; that isn't obvious from other things we've established about alter Cheliax, but it's safer for the project to be apparently not run all that competently, and there's the obvious excuse that running a war with Nidal consumes all their time. In alter Cheliax the war is a much closer thing. Perhaps without them Maillol has this on his list of worries, and perhaps we come up with it independently over dinner; and perhaps one of them spares an hour to read transcripts at some point and gets worried about it and sends a pointed letter. All of those look different....

I think alter Carissa, who has been asked to try not to become a Keeper at top speed, and who is worried for Keltham's emotional wellbeing, when she thinks of things like this adds them to a list titled something like 'things that are worrying/things that will make Keltham sad', for things without immediate implications that might turn out to be important, and tell him he can read it if he wants to. I bet he won't."

"Are you - in fact considering yourself ordered by Keltham not to become a Keeper at top speed -" says Meritxell. 

"Yes. I'm not that good an actress - yet! I'm going to try for Glibness swords today! - and I'm not sure I could stop seeing the world as Asmodia does once I start. And - it feels like there's a fragment of Law here, though I've barely started identifying it, where we want to at least be cooperating with the version of Keltham who does end up being possible to win over, who even after embracing Evil is going to be annoyed if I wasn't actually his - or maybe it's not a fragment of Law and it's just that I want that Keltham, my greatest triumph, to consider the punishment warranted to be one I can withstand."

"Glibness swords?" says Tonia. 

"Not trained in Wondrous Items, don't have time to learn. There's no reason swords can't hold Glibness. They'll be tiny swords, obviously, they'll fit in your notebooks."

Carissa is adorable and absurd.

"Pilar will attempt to become a Keeper at full speed.  It is all too plausible that Golarion will in fact prove to need one.  It has been established well enough that alterPilar might do the same."

"Acknowledged."

"Sevar," it's safer to request this of her and not seem to be going over anyone's head, "so long as I'm requesting resources, can we have some fresh intelligent wizard students our age kidnapped from Taldor, not broken slaves, not terrorized, ideally with no idea that they've been taken by Cheliax particularly, kept in surprisingly good living conditions, who I can try to teach Law to see how they react to that?  It's probably far too late for us to act anything like they would, but it would be helpful to have any idea what not-too-scared wizard students are like outside Cheliax.  I want to know what we've already given away before Keltham sees it."

"I've thought about that. You can convince me it's worth it but the ways they'll fail to correspond are going to include 'they won't be girls' - noble girls learn wizardry sometimes, but we can't realistically get away with kidnapping a decent sample of Taldane noble girls - 'they won't have learned in a school, but as an apprentice of a specific senior wizard', they'll be older than you lot or considerably weaker as wizards, and they're often going to be their family's one investment meant to support all the rest of them for life, selected as the child likeliest to - abide by that contract, if you want to give them credit for Law, or be socially pressurable into paying for all the deadweights, if you want to think of it that way. 

If given all that you still want them, sure, let's do it, but if we want the closest analogy to Cheliax we want a wizarding academy and I think we'll get noticed if we kidnap a sample from those."

"You could give me two such girls, so that they'd have any interactions with each other to observe, and no more."

"We could look further afield than Taldor, my sense is that this is not just about alterCheliax but about what holds in Evil countries generally that we are giving away."

"Adding a safe holding area for unfriendly wizards, even just two second-circle unfriendlies, otherwise isolated from Keltham, unable to make any trouble Keltham could notice, is not a trivial request."

"Not trivial is project manager language for don't wanna.  Don't tell us not trivial, tell us what it actually costs."

"Ten thousand gold over four months, perhaps, not including kidnapping costs, and some lingering chance they do cause trouble that Keltham notices if they're being held in or near his location."

"Once my Ring of Sustenance kicks in, maybe I could go to Egorian on an evening Teleport and visit them there...?"

"Can we hire them? - noting the trend where I keep making the Abadaran suggestion, and maybe it only seems good to me because I've tilted myself too much towards making sense of Keltham. But we could have someone go to the wizard schools in Absalom I'd hesitate to kidnap a student from, and offer a lot of money for a couple years' indenture working on some wizard's secret project, he reserves the right to stop you from leaking his secrets. .....she, actually, if we don't want the wrong kind of filter on what girls we get."

"Potentially adds a number of complexities on top of keeping simple prisoners.  Still, I expect that wizard girls in Absalom will sign up for some arduous restrictions if you offer ten times more money than they could otherwise earn in a year.  I'll have somebody look into it."

"I observe that I don't actually want to teach them Law over the next months or years, I want to quickly observe how they behave in the first week.  If I think I've learned all I can after a week, what do we do with them after?  With simple prisoners we can statue them when I'm done with them, since we don't want to send them to their afterlife where they might talk.  If their school is expecting them back, or responsive to Sendings..."

"Yeah, you'd have to get them to agree not to be expected back at school. I'm fine with some exploratory looks at kidnapping as well, but" this is sure an awkward conversation to have in front of Abrogail "my impression from what wizards not from Cheliax say at the Worldwound, is that the big wizard academies are the Academae in Korvosa, which is more or less also the reason we don't own Korvosa, and Felandriel Morgethai's university in Almas, which is definitely the reason we don't own Andoran, and the Magesterium in Absalom which is the reason no one's conquered it in five thousand years. And if any of that is half accurate then kidnapping the kids who are the best close equivalent might get the attention of one of the few powerful people in the Inner Sea who aren't yet meddling."

"We could hire them under a contract where they are to go entirely out of contact and unscryable for 2 years, I suppose, if anyone would agree to that.  If they go home and only two weeks have passed, oops, guess there was a time accident."

"Though - I'd worry that even after 2 years, maybe I would've taught some piece of the Law we don't want them taking back, if we can really win Keltham over or keep him that long - if they're Lawful, they could swear a secrecy oath, I guess, but -"

"Are there girls our age in other countries who are known to be good at math, with Intelligence 17, without their being wizard-tracked, or being quite so missed if they are kidnapped?"