Most Asmodeans would have told her to pick a different example.

"Because they could be lying, and, let's be frank here, they are."

"That's not the dath ilani answer, I'm sure of it, it's not what Keltham would say - what if they swear to everything in Asmodeus's name, what if they're under truthspell and you're powerful enough to make it stick, if this is math that holds across all the imaginable realities then whatever #7 means will still be true even then."

"If they're under truthspell and can't evade it, they'll still tell you only the things that help their case, and hide everything that doesn't, and if you just took that at face value you'd always end up convinced every time by whatever Church you talked to, and I bet dath ilani don't work like that."

"Good work Ione now shut up again."

She almost has it.

She can feel it, she's almost there.

The key to the game between dath ilani.

If the Conspiracy is choosing what to show you, if you know that, if you expect that, it changes - something, somehow - it has to still obey the Law that you can't expect to end up convinced of what the Conspiracy shows you - they can only win if they take you unawares, but if you correctly guess what the Conspiracy is doing, how they're thinking, you win because then the world you see is what you expect if there's a Conspiracy, no matter how much they try to show you things from an Ordinary world - you could keep on seeing evidence that favored Ordinary and go on shifting towards Ordinary and then look back at all the shifts, too many shifts, and realize something was wrong -

No, that's not right, that doesn't feel like the way the math has to work, 'look back on the math and realize something's wrong' isn't something she can prove with numbers and everything else on Keltham's list is -

There are three minutes left on her allocated hour when Asmodia looks up from the example she was building for herself, about somebody who wants to convince you who murdered somebody else, and the clues are all ways that a coin-spin can land, and they're only telling you about the coin-spins that landed Queen and none of the ones that landed Text.

She feels exultant and strangely calm at the same time.

She was right.  #7 is the key.  Not just a key, the key.  Maybe there are much more complicated things that true dath ilani know about this game, but Asmodia has the key to the basic rules.

It's very simple, in the end:  The probability of the coin landing Queen on the third coin-spin isn't the same as the probability of somebody telling you about how the third coin-spin landed Queen.

Maybe in the end it's just common sense about how lying works if you're not being blatant about it, except that now Asmodia knows how to mate that common sense with the dath ilani numbers that they use to track the subtle shifts of probability.

Keltham isn't just thinking about what the Conspiracy is showing him, telling him.  He's thinking about the probability that the world he's inside decides to show him and tell him those things.

If Keltham can figure out which facts the Conspiracy would choose to reveal to him, and he predicts that accurately, he'll learn he's inside the Conspiracy world.  You can't expect to be convinced of things by a Conspiracy that you know is a Conspiracy.  Not unless they pass some test that the true Conspiracy shouldn't be able to pass, like, you can believe someone about who the murderer is, if they show you all the coinspins, or even if they show you enough coinspins that the hidden ones couldn't matter even if they were all Text.

If the dath ilani correctly imagines the Conspiracy, if they figure out the rules the Conspiracy is actually following, they win; unless the Conspiracy following those rules is truly indistinguishable to them from the Ordinary world, and then it's a tie.  And that's a contest Cheliax has already lost, because they've already screwed up alter-Cheliax a few times and Keltham may remember those.

If Asmodia can figure out what Keltham is thinking and - not show him a Conspiracy that picks which coinflips it shows in a way that Keltham can figure out - if the true Conspiracy is still using rules Keltham hasn't figured out - then she can convince Keltham of the Ordinary world, make him shift his probabilities in that direction.  Which she has now proven, can only happen if Keltham wouldn't predict that, even thinking himself to be in the Conspiracy world the way that he currently suspects the Conspiracy to work.

...it's inherently a losing game.  The more she shows Keltham, day after day, the more Keltham knows how the Conspiracy must be thinking, if there is in fact a Conspiracy.  Everything she commands will carry the signature of the way Asmodia thinks, because she can't actually contain the whole alter-Cheliax within herself and truthfully.  And if Keltham ever imagines Asmodia fully, if he sees enough the true shape of the shadowy hypothetical being playing against him, he wins.

But she can try to lose very slowly.  Maybe, even, slowly enough.

That is the game between dath ilani; and if Asmodia isn't one herself, well, she is no longer entirely not one, either.

"I'm done," Asmodia says to Ione.  "You can go now, unless you want to hang around for forty-five minutes in case I want somebody to bounce ideas off for the game against Keltham."

There's a strange feeling of emptiness to go with the exultation.  Everything else she can do in the next forty-five minutes, working out more details of the game to play against Keltham, none of that is going to be as exciting as this.

Maybe the Grand High Priestess's puzzle will be more exciting.

The thought brings with it a chill of fear... no, she was told she wouldn't be hurt as long as she wasn't incredibly stupid.  Being lent the Crown of the Most High isn't something that happens to you when your life is ending.

Will the Most High understand how much she's achieved?  No, she was told that Sevar would judge it.  And Sevar, Asmodia thinks, Sevar will understand.

"I wouldn't mind sticking around for forty-five minutes.  Just to see, in my capacity as touched of Nethys, whether you explode."

It's hard to shift gears, from the math where things get solved and stay solved, to the real world where she has to play a slowly losing game against Keltham, full of particulars.

"So what's the most important thing we've got to make Keltham think next, according to Ione?  Feel free to deliver a prophecy about it, if that helps."

"I mean, I would have answered that differently before, but right now, after watching you, I'd say the most important thing we want to convince Keltham about is that - for some reason - and I don't envy you your new job making this sound convincing and just as probable in Ordinary as in Conspiracy - in alter-Cheliax it's an incredibly bad idea for Keltham to ask us for a Fox's Cunning, even though everybody around him is getting them all the time and they look really helpful and fun."

All the exultation is quenched in an instant by icy water in her veins.

She doesn't get to keep the Crown of the Most High.

And even if she did, if Fox's Cunning plus Owl's Wisdom does to Keltham, anything like what it does to her -

They could lose at any time.  Any instant.  They can't have a plausible story ready to give Keltham when he asks for a Fox's Cunning, because Keltham is always walking around carrying the Conspiracy inside his head, and a plausible story is going to sound exactly like what the Conspiracy wants him to believe.  They need to show him something that convinces him he doesn't want a Fox's Cunning, beforehand, and he will know that it's something that the Conspiracy would want him to believe.

But they have one advantage.  They have an advantage, if Keltham is giving them an accurate picture of how he's thought so far, Keltham might credit, maybe, that in the Conspiracy world, Cheliax would never be crazy enough to tell him that Fox's Cunning or Intelligence headbands even existed.  Which, to be clear, they absolutely should not have.

Though - if they lean on that, here - Keltham then learns a further true fact about the Conspiracy, in the world where the Conspiracy is real.  He learns that they are learning as they go, that they were stupid enough at the start to tell him about Fox's Cunning but then changed their minds later; in the world where the Conspiracy existed, that will obviously be what happened inside the Conspiracy, even if it seems improbable and shifts belief in the Conspiracy downward for that moment.  He'll think the Conspiracy is less probable, for the moment; but inside that hypothesis, knowing that takes him closer to the real Cheliax, closer to the truth about Asmodia playing the game against him.

It's still a forced move in the game.  If Keltham gets a simultaneous Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom, Cheliax loses.  It's probably that simple.  Why hasn't he asked for that already?

"Yeah," Asmodia says out loud.  "Stick around, Ione.  Security, I need Sevar in this room, or if she can't be here then I need messages passed fast enough for two-way conversation."

"After Carissa showed me the contract," Meritxell says, "I asked her what to expect, and she said 'that would be spoilers'. She would not have said that a week ago. You are a sadism influence."

"Would you have wanted Carissa to tell you in advance about my amazing shirt?  Clearly not.  Then obviously she shouldn't have told you anything else either.  Even a dath ilani child could prove that conclusion from that premise."

"I didn't say you were a bad influence. Just a sadistic one. And an Evil one. Who would imagine we of the Evillest country in the world would have so much Evil to learn from dath ilan."

Keltham has been, among other things, repeatedly comparing Meritxell to his shirt, claiming that his shirt is much better than her, noting that it has zippers, asking if she has zippers, and examining her (unclothed) form and trying to further unzip her in various ways, most of which have not been working.

"Well, since you said you weren't much into physical pain, I thought I'd try inflicting nonphysical pain and see how that worked for both of us."

Meritxell is incredibly confused? There's no correspondence whatsoever between enjoying whipping people and enjoying banter? They're just completely different categories? She has absolutely no idea if she'd be this confused in alter Cheliax, or if she'd be able to hide in alter Cheliax. Stupid alter Cheliax is really ruining her sex life at this point. 

"Well, I liked it," some version of Meritxell generated by some process or other inside the real Meritxell says aloud, and giggles. 

"Well, I expect, though not with certainty, that this never allows me to fall in love with you.  But I suppose it permits you to be an acceptable shirt to wear sometimes."

"I don't actually get why you won't hurt me, if you want to, and I want you to, if that's how you fall in love with people."

"It's the response to the pain that matters to my 'gendertrope', I think, not just inflicting the pain itself.  Limiting case, imagine trying to do that to the body of somebody who's currently in Hell and before they get Raised.  This tells you that any internal response is necessary, not just going through the outward motions.  Turns out the particular response also matters."

"Unfortunate," she says, and doesn't just mean for her. 

"I actually think the thing to do is to agree to cast Cunning on him if he asks but actually cast something else, if we can possibly get away with that. An excuse will seem too implausible. Is there some spell that'd have some mental effect but not the precise one - oh, I will have to ask Maillol if that's even allowed -"

"Why doesn't the spell do for him what it does for everyone else?  Do we think Keltham doesn't think, never thinks until the game has already ended, of the possibility that the unknown masters of the Conspiracy sat around and figured out a different spell to cast on him instead?  And Security, I request a response from Maillol now, we don't have much time."

It's - hard to say - it depends on what the spell does exactly, Maillol thinks - it may be permitted to fool Keltham, but not change him, maybe - he doesn't know why casting regular Fox's Cunning isn't already forbidden - maybe because it's transmutation, not enchantment, it works by a pathway where it doesn't decide what Keltham is thinking - there are things they're allowed to do more if the spell isn't targeting Keltham directly, that's why he was able to approve the spell that targets text and makes it uninteresting, because the spell is about the text and not about Keltham, because it obscures something from his perception rather than forcing his thoughts about it, it's like Invisibility in a way -

"If we just figured out one that does 1 point of int instead of 4, then it does the expected thing but doesn't help him all that much and he doesn't really know how much it's helping us."

"So how many hours does that take to research?"

"Also, what if he asks to try on your headband."

Pointing out to other people how they're still doomed to explode wouldn't feel like so much fun if it was heretical, right?  Surely she should have better instincts than that, if she's meant to belong to Nethys... she really needs the allowed belief list for her new people.