"I have to admit, this is a new way for someone to fail to figure out how to wear me."

...right.

"Sorry.  This is - more of a recognized problem in dath ilan, and the 'gendertropes', the male-female behavior options, do usually have the girl interrupting the boy before he gets to this point.  Or the boy interrupting the girl, but that happens around a quarter as often."

"Well, if you didn't like current ongoing events, clearly, there must be something you'd rather be doing; and it is hardly thinkable that this activity would not involve me in any way.  So what, do tell, is your greater preference?"

No dath ilani out of living memory would have seen the phenomenon that is occurring inside Asmodia now.

No, not even the oldest Rememberers staying alive half from machine assistance and half from willpower.  It has been longer than that since Civilization trialed what happens if you take an adult as generally talented, reflective, and mathematically intelligent as Asmodia is now, and expose them for the first time in their lives to the idea of probability theory.  Only those sleeping in the cold would have witnessed it; perhaps not even they.

1.  Your strength in the Way is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.  If you're equally good at explaining any outcome you can see, that's the same as not knowing anything.

2.  Surprising claims require surprising evidence; unsurprising evidence suffices for unsurprising claims.

3.  No empirical theory can prove itself except by risking its disproof.

4.  To convince me of your theory, make a correct prediction that no other theory makes.

5.  A precise true prediction is much more convincing than an imprecise true one.

6.  It is impossible to coherently expect to convince yourself of anything.

7.  You can't expect anyone else to convince you of something either, even if you think they're controlling everything you see.

Asmodia has decided to wager on the prospect of solving all Keltham's seven problems within an hour, and then turning her attention to games of deception for the remaining forty-five minutes; because his #7 is the key, it has to be.

It might not have been a decision she'd have made before for any Wisdom, but the added Splendour is helping, even that is helping, for some element of that is lending Asmodia a driving will and force that she had only known before in the grips of exultation.  Keltham thinks this problem set is possible to at least one of his students, and maybe he would've been wrong about that; but if Keltham can imagine that being possible, then this Asmodia could should will get it done within a single hour.

She hit his #1 and bounced, it is too poetic she does not know what it means so back off and try #2 that's just too obvious it says that the thing-that-is-a-likelihood-ratio has to be extreme to overcome an extreme thing-that-is-the-prior-odds, is there something she's missing, just assume not for now and continue, she tries #3 it doesn't solve immediately there's no obvious thing it means, so try #4 and see if solving all the fast problems helps and #4 isn't instantly obvious but Asmodia can feel in her mind the hint of a shape where it might be pointing so she starts scribbling down numbers.

Cheliax has fewer proverbs about mathematics than does dath ilan; it lacks in particular a proverb to the effect that quite often in mathematics, and with only rare exceptions, knowing what you need to prove is nine-tenths of the real work.

The lost people out of Civilization's lost beginnings who first invented these ideas took longer to get there, from the bones of probability theory.  But they did not have informal statements of where they should be going; and also they were not quite as smart as Asmodia is now, along some dimensions of thinkoomph if not others.

So it doesn't take Asmodia much scribbling at all to see that if Conspiracy and Ordinary make the same predictions at the same strength then neither world can win out over the other one, to see the abstract point that if P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 1) = P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 2) then their ratio is 1:1 and the posterior odds are the same as the prior odds, while if P(evidence ◁ hypothesis 2) is 0 or just very tiny then as soon as you see the evidence you are convinced of hypothesis 1 no rather you're convinced that hypothesis 2 is false there could be other hypotheses even if Keltham only hinted at that it's clear how to adapt the math and she's doing it, she has enough of this Law to invent the rest, onward Asmodia goes to #5 and though she has no integral calculus with which to think in densities she imagines each of a thousand possible numbers between 0 and 10 down to a hundredth of fineness, and soon she has understood #5, or she thinks she's understood, no she has that's just the obvious thing it means mathematically, when you call it down to a hundredth part your prediction is ten times as strong there as if someone else called it down to a tenth, she is doing it she is inventing completing seeing the Law of Probability parsing the world with Keltham's own Sight, and the feeling that goes through her is glory.

She's... probably not supposed to say anything and interrupt this?  Just stick around and be a sounding-board if necessary?  Most of what Asmodia's scribbling makes no sense, at least not to Ione, but Asmodia sure looks like she's having fun.

Ione wants that headband.  It looks ordinary but she's guessing it's not.

Carissa spends a few minutes meditating on the virtue of Evil. This seems like a straightforward place for it; Good would hesitate to fire the students who are slowing the project down, because it makes people sad and Good is in significant part built off the instinctive human flinch at achieving your goals in ways that make other people sad. Evil can do the thing that accomplishes the goal, not enslaved by guilt. If she were condemning these girls to Hell, she would be doing that because it advanced her goals, and she would have the strength to do things that advance her goals. As it happens she's doing an easier thing. 

She asks to have them brought to her one by one; she'll have more control over the conversation that way. 

Paxti comes in looking, to Chelish eyes, visibly more cheerful than she might've looked on Day 1.  She's on the low-punishment regimen, her soul is worth some unreasonably vast quantity in Dis's markets, somebody in Egorian is building a reputation for her as Project Lawful's deadliest weapon, and she didn't win the last Keltham seduction contest but she's bound to win one eventually.

The Grand High Priestess would lead with 'you're fired' and let Paxti simmer for a bit, but Carissa doesn't actually understand why, understand along what dimension that makes Paxti stronger. 

Well, the only way to learn is to try it and see what happens.

"We told Keltham the girls were initially here on one week contracts, so tonight he decided whose contract he wants to renew as a researcher. He didn't pick you, because you're not really keeping up in math."

"What happens to me now?" Paxti says.  She's not already dead, so it's not that, unless for some reason you're supposed to talk with the project leader before she kills you.  She's mostly trying to hold back all her emotions, she might need her wits for something.

"Keltham of course wants all the girls who have worked with him to be better off for it. He proposes that you be given a bunch of options including reassignment to some other project, hanging out in Hell for a couple years until you don't know anything secret, or staying here in a different wing of the fortress and getting lessons in some kind of advanced magic you wouldn't have had access to at your age otherwise - I was thinking maybe ring forging because then I can drop in in my abundant free time and pick it up myself. Keltham plans to tell you tomorrow about his decision and your options, and I recommend that after thinking it over you pick the option where you stay here, though of course you may go to Hell if you'd rather. Ask Asmodia what it was like; for Project Lawful girls it's quite different, I think."

"I'll stay here and learn ring forging," Paxti says almost immediately.  She's not stupid enough to pick a choice other than the recommended one.  She doesn't dare ask explicitly if she still gets to stay on a low-punishment regimen, but she's certain that's not on offer for projects elsewhere, or for that matter, in Hell.

"Good. I want you to think very hard about alter Paxti, and what she'd believe about Hell and about her options, and how she'd react to getting this surprising news from Keltham tomorrow, and if you do a good job, you're already cleared to know about Project Lawful and there may be opportunities in it for you in the future."

"I will obey."

She wants so much to ask if she's still on the low-punishment regimen, but she has zero negotiating leverage for that and if she asks under that condition there's absolutely no reason Sevar wouldn't just say no.

Well, that went fine. Not fun, exactly, but fine. 

"Dismissed."

Paxti goes off to her room to think about what alter-Paxti would think.  It's too hard, and she asks if Asmodia is available to tell her, but Asmodia isn't available and won't be for a while.  She taps herself with a Fox's Cunning and the main thought that comes to her on Cunning is that Owl's Wisdom might let her get this right and not die, but when she leaves her room to ask, Security either doesn't have a Wisdom available, or doesn't think she's a priority anymore.

She goes back into her room and wonders if alter-Paxti would cry right there when Keltham tells her, if people in alter-Cheliax are more pathetic than those in true-Cheliax.  Someone else will have to instruct her about that.  It's not a decision she'd be authorized to make even if she was still a full member of Project Lawful.

She files a request with Security for an Asmodia alter-Cheliax consult as soon as Asmodia is available.

She files a request with Security to still be part of the Nap Stack so she has longer to think tonight.

She goes to look at Keltham's seven problems, which, if she was smarter, she should've done before the Cunning wore off.  If she could solve them all, if she could solve any of them, maybe Keltham would want her to stay on.

After a while she thinks she understands #2.  That's enough, right?

...she's pretty sure it's not.  It's the simple one that Keltham included so even the dumber students wouldn't feel disappointed about getting zero right, because that's how Keltham thinks.

Paxti wonders if Keltham would have kept her if she'd been more proactive about having sex with him.  Probably yes.  It's not that he's firing her for reluctance, it's that, if she had slept with him faster, he'd feel too guilty now to do this to her.  Her own stupidity for thinking she was safe to take her time.  Sevar was smart.  Asmodia was smart.  Meritxell was smart.  Ione was smart.  Paxti should have paid more attention to what the smarter people around her were doing.

        "I'm keeping up," Pela says. "I'm just quiet."

"You're mostly keeping up. You wouldn't fail a class, if this were a class. But you'd be the slowest one remaining, if you stayed, and Keltham doesn't think that's worth it. Though you may argue with him tomorrow if and only if you are quite confident that alter Pela would argue with him; run your reasoning by me."

       "He's going to get tired of you too, you know."

Carissa's Unseen Servant slaps her. "That was stupid and petty and unprofessional and you know it; you can still try to make your case to Keltham in the morning if I am persuaded you'd make it in alter Cheliax. My fate is no one's concern but mine, and yours no one's concern but you."

      "Oh," Yaisa says. 

"You thought he liked you."

       She doesn't answer. 

"He does, and you have permission to keep trying to seduce him. You might have a better angle on it, actually, since he doesn't have to work with you afterwards."

      "What do you mean," Jacme says slowly, "that we might prefer Hell."

It means that Carissa really wants to eavesdrop on Asmodia advising other Project girls about Hell; it's information she desperately needs for her plan to make them resilient to mental breakdowns about it. She's convinced at this point that Hell did something. She's not allowed to know what. But maybe she's allowed to know the implications of whatever Hell did for whether Project Lawful girls ought to fear it. "Well," she says blandly, "we all desire Hell so that Asmodeus may have freer reign to improve and reform us. Asmodia seems improved, doesn't she?"

       "....uh huh."

Pilar already used her once-per-week Nap Stack opportunity, so she requested to be hit by a Sleep spell now, so that she could still accumulate enough sleep to hang spells tomorrow, even if she needs to be awake for the mid-night general briefing.

Paxti needs cake.  So do three other people, but Paxti is the one that Pilar cares about.

And her curse woke her up from sleep to go deliver some?

No.  It's not something her curse is demanding.  Pilar's curse isn't that hungry.

It's just something that Pilar can do if she wants.

She notices the feeling of wanting to help Paxti and Pilar is not stupid, she knows how she's disappointing Asmodeus and Sevar said it's not okay even if she punishes herself afterwards.

Will it help Lord Asmodeus, if Pilar goes to deliver cake?

No.  It will only help Pilar.  Chaotic Good would usually try to help someone like Pilar who was being used by them -

Then her curse can fuck off and not bother her unless there's something that helps Lord Asmodeus.

Pilar's curse will keep that predictable instruction in mind, in the past as in the future.

What's that supposed to mean.

Pilar can fall back asleep now.