"Clarification - I'm to tell Keltham that I asked him 'why is everybody asking me that' and then realized I was actually supposed to have asked Security about the classification status of the Crown inquiry first and that's why I didn't follow up earlier...?"

"I also don't understand our mission goal in general.  Do we believe his tropes theory, and are we trying to extract information about tropes theory from Keltham, while concealing anything from him that he could use to realize the tropes theory is actually true?"

"Yes, if that's the kind of reason alter-Asmodia might've had; if you'd rather she have some other reason give it and I will probably authorize it. 

Our mission goal is to, if there are tropes, know about the tropes so we can refer them to the Grand High Priestess and never think about them again, and for Keltham to think tropes are unlikely." Because when he thinks they're likely he has a nightmarish freakout about how everything is fake and it's very stressful for me, personally.

"Can tropes - I don't know how to ask this.  Do we believe that they are things that negotiate with gods, did they bargain with Cayden Cailean, and if not, how are they getting Cayden Cailean let alone Lord Asmodeus to go along with constructing the romance novel?"

"If tropes are real, then what they did, is look over all the possible starting conditions that would produce the romance novel they wanted, and put Keltham into those starting conditions, such that gods would decide of their own free will to sponsor girls in Keltham's harem. ...I think. Keltham says we don't know enough prerequisites to truly understand tropes."

"I request orders.  My belief about what alter-Asmodia did at breakfast stands, but this whole situation is beyond what I know how to determine a best action for.  I am not confident in my ability to extract useful information about tropes from Keltham, but can try if so ordered."

It's sounding like Keltham isn't her sponsor, not that it would've made any sense.  And if someone somewhere cared about her, it's because that was something true in the universe before Keltham got there, somehow, and she doesn't have any obvious avenues for figuring who that is.

"At this time my going assumption is that no one can, maybe unless or until we master dath ilanism. Your only orders are to not tell any new and innovative lies and not to suggest to him that you've got superpowers, or arguable superpowers, or things that Hell alone can say might or might not be superpowers; if you want to get close to him and ask questions, you may, and if you want to have no relationship with him outside class, you may do that too."

"If I am to be left to my own initiative in making those decisions, what are my goals?  How may Hell's interests best be served?  I am sorry if I am proving difficult to command.  I am confused."

"Your goal is to learn dath ilanism without making Keltham suspicious. Hell's goal, as far as we know it, is to keep Keltham here, corrupt him, and learn from him. You're not assigned to the corrupting him or keeping him; just learn from him."

"Learn dath ilanism, don't make Keltham suspicious, it seems to me that these goals are served by asking Keltham questions about superpowers as alter-Asmodia would do, maybe with - alter-Asmodia focusing more on asking on how all this strangeness interacts with dath ilani reasoning and Law?  I will do that at some appropriate point, unless countermanded."

"Go ahead.

Did you think on my question to you, before you died, about what bribes would motivate you to bring your full intelligence to our work?"

She's got it already, but that's not an acceptable answer.  What is alter-Asmodia's answer... why hasn't she said it already...

"Keltham's ways of thought would not be balked by my - problem.  He would see many solutions, some of them not disloyal ones, maybe even ones less severe than my ceasing to be.  So it is to my benefit to either understand those ways of thought myself, or that you do, or that Keltham be successfully corrupted to where I may plainly ask that riddle of him in return for my loyalty to him under Cheliax.  Though, I did clearly hear that I am not myself assigned to that corruption."

It is in fact kind of notable to Carissa that Asmodia did not say it already, doesn't seem very motivated by it anymore.

Maybe it's because Hell wasn't as bad as she thought and she feels silly for having wanted to die rather than go there. 

Maybe.

"That's all, dismissed, we're considering whether and how to brief the girls more."

Dismissed, she goes.

She got through the whole thing without having to take the Gorthoklek authorization out of the pocket where she is terribly aware of it resting.  That's probably as close as she can come to victory here.

Well, and she has explicit permission to talk to Keltham.

She was testing something of a theory, there, in fact, which was that she could just behave like a very good Asmodean and somehow end up being assigned to talk to Keltham anyways, or given permission for that, even if she wasn't trying to steer there.

She's a Project Lawful girl with a mysterious background, after all.

She's got to end up involved with Keltham somehow.

Even if she's incredibly unlikely to be attracted to him, and Keltham can tell that about her, they will, somehow, end up doing something that would happen in a romance novel.

Since the gods are repeatedly intervening around them to suddenly set up a romance novel.

...A dath ilani romance novel.  They might be very different.  Asmodia has not read any Chelish romance novels, in fact, though she's heard their plots discussed.  She is not sure whether this is a disadvantage or an advantage in this situation.

She's maybe going to have to think about this again sometime when she has Owl's Wisdom and Fox's Cunning.  And maybe more lectures on Law.

PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Late Morning

"Greetings, my esteemed co-researchers.  If you're wondering why I didn't lecture you more yesterday, it's because I was being a complete idiot to the point where I don't actually want to talk about it.  Is that dignified of me?  No.  Having established this point, let us now continue with exploring further into Probability."

"So far we've talked about two of Probability's - let's call them Law-fragments, the 'Baseline' term won't translate easily if at all."

"The first Law-fragment was that, if you're rating how likely things are to happen or be true, even if it's just on a scale from 1 to 12 where nothing on the scale is labeled, it still seems pretty reasonable that you can't say it's more likely that strictly more" propositions "things are true.  Even if the scale isn't labeled enough that we know where to put a chance that's half some other chance, it can't be less likely that we have beef for lunch, than that we have beef for lunch and a spun coin lands Queen."  (Keltham has of course returned Carissa's gold coin to her by this point; you can tell, because he still has cleric powers.  He has now exchanged some of his platinum for gold, silver, and copper, and has his own coins about him.)

"Even if you're Ione and can predict the coinflips, beef and Queen cannot be more likely than beef whether or not Queen.  And you might think this Law-fragment so obvious and trivial as to be useless; but in fact, most of you collectively - perhaps not all individually, who can say - must have been thinking in a way that violated the principle."

"The second Law-fragment I taught you was incomplete, because I'm running through all of these things way too fast, to get to proof-of-concept profits as early as possible.  We could say that this fragment is about comparing estimates of how likely things are, to what actually happens.  It generalizes the way that, for example... actually I should just quickly run through this earlier part, because you wouldn't have heard it explicitly even if you understood implicitly, because Golarion."

Keltham first writes on the wall-whiteboard, "Keltham is now holding a silver coin in his left hand."

He then obtains a silver coin to go alongside the copper one, showing both to the class; mixes them behind his back, selects one in his left hand, and holds that out as a fist.

"What is truth?" Keltham then asks the class.  "And in particular, what is the... truth-value... of the sentence I just wrote?  I'm not asking whether it's true or false, you don't know that right now, I'm asking what it means to say that the sentence is true or false."

That seems like such an unfair question. 

When someone says, 'this is true', they mean, 'I want you to believe it'. 

It seems like not a dath ilani answer.

"Blank looks, check.  It's okay, you're probably using this fragment of Law correctly, you just don't know it to yourself.  I should probably be playing some sort of game to make this point, but all the ones I know are literally aimed at five-year-olds and would be excruciatingly slow soooo."

"You're maintaining, in your own mind - something like the scaffolding Carissa used to reach out to her spellsilver, between my hand, and the writing on this wall.  Only much less complicated than Carissa's scaffold, and also the correspondence is something represented inside you, rather than out in the air where you can see it with Detect Magic.  If there's a silver in my hand, right now, you'd say the writing on the wall is true.  If there's a copper in my hand, or for that matter, nothing, you'd say the writing on the wall is false.  Or if you wanted to be more precise about it yet, you'd say that the meaning of the writing or the claim the writing talks about in Taldane is false."

"When your mind maintains a correspondence of this type, it does a ton of intricate work in the background.  For example..."

Keltham opens his hand, showing that in there is a copper coin, and then replaces it with a silver one.

"First you learned that the writing on the wall was false, and then, the writing suddenly turned true.  How can this be?  Is truth unstable?  No, it's that the word 'now' in the phrase 'Keltham is now holding' is a powerful word in terms of the scaffolding your mind builds.  Carissa decided while she was building her scaffold to move the spellsilver a little further away, and then stretched her scaffold to reach out to it.  The scaffold of meaning between my hand and the wall-writing, as your mind maintains it, instructed by that word 'now', is something that constantly slides through time.  In every moment of time, the wall-writing has a different meaning, there is a different fact-in-the-world that makes it be true or false, because it is talking about the contents of my hand in that moment of time - according to the scaffolding your mind is maintaining inside itself; it's not that the writing on the wall is so complicated and powerful, but that you are."

"To extent that meaning is fixed, it always has fixed truth or falsity; to the extent it seems like truth or falsity is unstable, we can always deduce that it's the meaning that's really unstable, that something is wrong in the scaffold we build in our minds, not that reality itself has anything being simultaneously so and not-so."

Blink blink blink blink blink. 

This is going to be one of those lessons where everyone's scared to talk because heresy, aren't they. 

"Is there something you're saying that isn't captured by - statements are true if they describe how the world actually is, and not otherwise?"

"If it sounds like I'm saying something stupidly simple, you probably understood it right, yeah.  The point is to be explicitly aware of the scaffolding your mind builds, which is something that other understandings build upon."

"For example..."

Keltham reaches behind his back, mixes coins, puts one into his left hand.

"If I now say there's a 50/100 probability that there's a silver coin in my left hand, is that true?  Is it false?"

" - I mean, to us there might be that, but Nethys knows," says Gregoria, "and it's one way or the other."

"Hm, yes, and actually, let me close my eyes for a moment -"

Keltham closes his eyes, opens his hand to show the contents, closes his hand, opens his eyes again.

"If any of you now say that there's a 1/2 probability the coin in my hand is silver, you'd be wrong, actually in this case lying.  But if I say the coin has 1/2 probability of being silver, I'm being honest.  How can this be?  It's the same hand in both cases.  How can the same words be dishonest when spoken by one person, and honest when spoken by another?"