"I don't need to be present for this part of the conversation.  Keltham is inquiring about my 'romantic route', I need to know how specifically I got scared to the point where I acted like I did.  Maybe my librarian got burned when I was four... would I remember that?  Fuck all this, why couldn't the Church have taken over alterCheliax ten years ago instead?" 

"I told Keltham I was twelve. ...I guess I could shave a couple of years off my age, though I also told him I'm on my second deployment."

"I suppose we'd have to fake all your paperwork and everyone else's paperwork anyways, I doubt our files in realCheliax would pass... no, I'm pretty sure somebody's told Keltham at some point how long ago the Church took over.  Ah.  Maillol told him it was fifteen years.  I think somebody else told him before then, probably you, don't remember when."

"THIS is why I keep wishing people would STOP TELLING KELTHAM THINGS.  Yes I know that's IMPOSSIBLE."

"Oh, and you know what else?  Scries don't work in the palace.  Two-way mirrors don't easily communicate inside the palace proper, or inside major regional bureaucracy headquarters.  Because otherwise Keltham could demand to see paperwork, and then more referenced paperwork, and just keep on looking until he went past what we could fake, and found something whose inconsistency with alterCheliax runs too deep for blocking out particular sentences from his attention."

" - yep, all right, authorizing that lie to the extent it's even a lie. All major bureaucracy centers are like this site unscryable for security reasons. Could Ione have an older sibling who warned her to not tell the Chelish government she was Nethysian and then mysteriously vanished?"

"That would be an excellent story if the goal was to make Keltham believe in tropes."

"You know, if we're going for shallow stories with deeper trope stories behind them, I'd go with, there was a boy who blackmailed me about being Nethysian and forced sex out of me, deeper story, that boy was my brother.  It would explain my searing hatred and desire to watch him slowly suffer and die, if that showed up in Detect Desires at some point.  Also why I'm not discussing any details and am not telling Keltham his name."

" - might work. I at least like it better than the first version, and Keltham won't pry because he becomes absurdly solicitous at the slightest sign of weakness."

"So remember how Keltham reacted to our story about Manohar?  Remember his thoughts in the transcript just - looking it over, thinking, instinctively feeling that it wasn't reality?  Keltham has - something deeper than words, numbers - that he uses to notice stories.  I think he notices the story here.  Because it is a story.  At best he blames it on tropes, at worst he correctly blames it on us."

"That just brings us back to 'it's really best not to lie to Keltham', which, I agree, that's why personally I didn't betray Asmodeus at the first opportunity and tell Keltham not to let them disappear me. Ione did, so.

She could say she doesn't actually remember that conversation and her recollection of the day before the vision is generally blurry - no, that definitely gets Keltham trying to track down the exact details. 

She could say that, embarrassingly, she seems to have come back from her contact with Takaral exclusively attracted to the undead?"

"Oh that's not the least bit suspicious.  Happens all the time outside of stories."

"...total changes of sexual orientation could be common as a result of -"

"Keltham gets suspicious and asks me to have sex with a zombie while checking my arousal levels."

"Well, that'll take some time to arrange during which we can figure out how to fake it."

"Veto.  Not in my compact.  I'd sooner tell him that I picked up Takaral's sexuality and am now attracted exclusively to voluptuous drow women takaral."

"Ione, what did your brother actually do to you?  Anything dramatic, tropey?"

"Just got my life as close as he could to Hell without visibly-to-my-parents decreasing my sale value as wizard livestock."  She's not telling them the bird story, these are not friends.  "He didn't actually rape me, if that's what -"

"Okay, see, that?  That is reality.  Right there.  It sounds real because it is real.  Some unspecified boy you were around growing up scared the shit out of you about what happened to Nethysians and you never realized how much he was actually lying to you until now.  Dark reveal, that boy was actually your brother.  That's it, nothing more improbable than that actually happened to you."

"And we don't have a transcript of that conversation, only of the lectures, and we pray Keltham doesn't remember anything but the sexy bit. Done, that's the best we're going to get."

"I hope you just mean 'done' on the scared-Nethysian backstory because I also need approval on the story of how I got Nethys-touched enough to borrow books from libraries, how I found out about Nethys and became a worshipper in the first place, I am going to have to figure out Nethysian theology from scratch and write down what I would obviously know about it unless you can get the Most High to reconsider the damage she's doing to alterCheliax by not letting me have real Nethysian theology that will fit with everything else, and also if I didn't get sex extracted from me, we have not explained why I offered myself to Keltham that completely when that's not in fact my sexuality and that's going to show up in my arousal levels.  That he can read."

"Did you in fact possess a convenient childhood passion for libraries or learning or something. Run away from home because they wouldn't let you read books, anything interesting like that."

"I read what I could get my hands on.  Thought about running away from home all the time, it never seemed like actually the correct strategic move compared to becoming a powerful wizard and eventually coming back for my revenge."

"And at some point when you were reading everything and thinking about that, you had a religious experience, and then just knew you could get books from the library without going."

"On theology as I know it, I should've been a pretty devout Nethysian before that point... I guess Nethys could've just foreseen I'd be on Project Lawful someday and have been looking for an excuse?  That implies more foresight than I think people have been attributing to Nethys, I don't think Nethys can predict actualities rather than possibilities that finely -"

"Veto, it implies too much else if Nethys can do that.  What if you only got those powers after you became a wizard and were already a Nethysian?  Then you're already in Ostenso academy, Nethys guesses where Project Lawful gets located... still seems like a lot, but Nethys could've been making multiple tries."

"Works for me.  If I'm already a wizard it's more plausible that Nethys is being even slightly nice to me."

"Look, if we're trying stories neighboring to reality, how about if I was terrified that we'd be sent back at any moment and replaced with better researchers and more seductive women, I was absolutely certain that Nethys wanted me to stay with Keltham, and I was trying to offer him the most I possibly could so as to try not to be sent away from him?"

"...maybe? But I think that's just not what an alter Cheliax girl goes for, when she's trying to be as seductive as possible."