"Mm.  Sounds like you're being careful to emphasize this isn't a Keltham-and-Carissa situation?"

"Actually no, not at this point, it actually is a private conversation."

"When I came back from Hell, I was told there was a Crown order to determine if I had any superpowers.  Later you asked me about that, I asked why people were asking me that, I realized I hadn't actually been briefed on the classification status of the Crown order and shouldn't have said that in public, queried that to Security, eventually got an answer, and now I've found that at least you're allowed to know the Crown order exists."

"Which would make sense if you started the whole thing.  But anyways, I'm now allowed to talk about that with you.  Or rather, I always was allowed to talk about it, but now I know that."

"Is this where, now that we're in private, you say that you did in fact get superpowers and you want to know how I knew?"

"No, it's where I ask if I was supposed to get superpowers.  Should I be going back to Hell and asking somebody for them, for example."

"Sorry 'bout that.  I didn't mean to create false hope."

"This particular hope isn't likely to go away until I know more about why you would have thought I'd get superpowers.  Ideally with math attached, math would be great."

Heh.  Sometimes people here talk not entirely unlike Civilized folk.

"So remember when I asked everybody to rate how much of a surprising hidden backstory they'd probably have?"

"Yes.  I put down that I wasn't special.  At all."

Oof.  "I was checking a hypothesis about - how I got here, where I landed - which predicted a result that I, in fact, got, about how many girls in the class would rate themselves as pretty surprising, and how that would square with how surprising most girls thought the average should be."

"Ione and Pilar, if they were honest.  Well, you asked people to be honest or not respond at all, so I should say, if they responded at all - and if Pilar already knew at that point, I forget what the timeline was on her.  Was there anybody else?"

"Can't answer that, I didn't warn people I might tell others the total results."

"The point is, the results I got matched a pattern.  That pattern also matches Pilar going to Elysium, and Ione delivering prophecies.  If you'd happened to die and then come back with superpowers, that would've matched too..."

"This would make more sense if I'd gotten as far into my Probability lecture as I was hoping for.  It's important, doing these things, to try to say what will happen in advance.  I was trying to do that with you - to guess that you would end up in the same category as Ione and Pilar."

Asmodia knows more than she's supposed to, or thinks she's supposed to know; she should've asked Sevar about that.  She needs to work the conversation around to where she's definitely supposed to know.  "Does this category also include, by any chance, Sevar?"

"Yes, though not, so far as I know and have been assured by the Grand High Priestess, in the sense of any god having touched Carissa."

"I'll be blunt.  Do the girls in the category need to be attracted to you?  I'm not, or at least, I haven't ended up attracted to you yet."

Keltham doesn't suppress the smile that comes from verifying that girls are allowed to say that to him, thereby rendering meaningful other possible signals on that channel.

"I mean, they need to be able to be attracted to me, on the pattern I think I'm seeing.  So if you're pretty confident you'll never be attracted to me, now that you've met me, then yeah, that would exclude you from the category."

"Unless you're the 'asexual'."

"'Asexual'?" Asmodia repeats.

"Maybe a Taldane translation would be - asexual?  Somebody who doesn't experience sexual attraction?"

If Keltham were a Chelish person or able to read Chelish people, Asmodia might possibly have failed a Bluff check.  He isn't, and he can't, so she hasn't.

"Can you possibly back up and explain what this category is," Asmodia says.  "What this whole pattern is.  I was thinking something that just got contradicted, like - the category is interesting girls who you can also have romances with -"  She needs to dance carefully around the Keltham Corruption Project and not ruin it where Security will write down that she did.  "- though, I mean, it's not like you couldn't have sex with an 'asexual', I guess, if that's what you were into."

"If I paid her enough, you mean?"

"Sure.  Is that why an 'asexual' would be in the category and part of the pattern for you?"

"No, actually.  It's not - my pattern, it's something out of dath ilan, that's in my memories, and the exact nature of it is something that wouldn't be easy to explain - but in the pattern, somebody - a man in this particular subpattern, though there are female versions too - comes across three to five very interesting girls with whom it's possible to have romances."

"Sometimes, though not always, there's an additional girl, an 'asexual', who has a special status within the pattern, often that she's the one standing back and watching the whole thing happen and talking with you about it.  You might still date her and have a romance with her, maybe also marry her alongside the other girls.  But you don't have sex with her at all, that's the point."

WELL THAT WASN'T WHAT SHE WAS EXPECTING TO HEAR AT ALL

NOW SEEMS LIKE A GREAT TIME FOR A DISTRACTION

"...I'm trying to think of what the math we learned about probabilities today, could say about a puzzle like this one, and not really coming up with much."

"That would've been easier to explain if we'd had the lecture I'm hoping for this afternoon, first."

"We do have the option of breaking now and resuming at dinner, if it's really a place where things will be much easier to understand after one more lecture."

Which would give Asmodia time to flee, followed by time to think!  Both of those kinds of time sound like good forms of time to have! 

"You know, since it's you, I'll try improvising and see if you just get it."

"The general principle is, we compare the different ways reality could be, the different worlds we could be living in, and see whether our observations are more or less probable in different worlds.  The fact that you didn't immediately say whether or not you were asexual, and asked me more questions about asexuals, doesn't prove you're an asexual.  But you're more likely to do that if you're currently going WAIT WHAT inside yourself about how I mysteriously just nailed your sexuality - possibly one you didn't know was a standard sexuality five minutes ago, if Taldane has no word for 'asexual'.  So my probability on you being asexual went up after that.  Not up to certainty, just up."

"That said, the basic challenge, on a problem like this one where you didn't carefully write down your predictions in advance, is that you overestimate how much your favorite theory predicts things, and underestimate how much your less favorite theories predict things.  I didn't expect, on being invited up here, that you were going to tell me you weren't currently attracted to me.  It's not something the pattern told me to expect in advance.  Afterwards, I thought of a different part of the pattern that could fit it, but the pattern is a very large one and has a lot of potential variations and you can probably twist it around to fit anything, the question is, how far did you have to twist it, and how much does that lower the probability it assigns."

"At least in dath ilan, I don't know about Golarion, 'asexuals' are not really that uncommon, and more common among women than men; the chance of there being an 'asexual' in a group this size is already probably something like 50%, and if anything, I'd guess that fewer than 50% of the instances of the pattern I was talking about have an 'asexual' in them.  You could think about whether Asmodia is a special case of a random research group member, because she went to Hell and came back with no superpowers and now has a reason to talk with me, and whether it would be on-theme for the pattern if the 'asexual' was the one interesting girl who didn't have a weird background but was just very respectable by being better at Law than anyone, but the more you twist things around like that and specify more additional facts to make things fit, the more the probability goes down and down.  It's like asking if a rival merchant ship will come in with a cargo of shoes from Absalom, instead of asking whether a competing supply of shoes appears in the city for any reason at all."