"Here.  I'm not actually comfortable with not knowing what Snack Service is doing using my body, so if possible and if it doesn't cost Ordinary anything, I request that sometime after this is over I get told what went down just now."

Keltham is already quickly biting the cookie, verifying the taste.  Apple-flavored, great.

"Snack Service says that the decision theory of this is too complicated for it to be telling me much, which is mostly what I expected."

So, on the one hand, that's better than Snack Service not being able to do that, which would've favored Conspiracy a lot - Snack Service is pretty high on the list of apparent-things they'd be faking.  But it again means that, in the Conspiracy worlds, it's narrowing down even more strongly on the mindreading Conspiracy and on them being relatively better at mindreading.  What with 'Snack Service' having apparently just read a thought, and one he was trying to hide.

Off to Maillol's office.

"Sudden trip to Ostenso.  I'm not going to ask whether it's possible, because it's obviously possible in principle, I'm asking you what ends up being the minimum cost and minimum risk."

"I'm not going to hide it, Keltham, I was wondering if you were going to ask that and I have literally had nightmares about you asking that.  Cheliax is still fighting the war that started when you went on one quick, tiny, almost certainly completely safe excursion three steps outside of our Forbiddance.  Don't get me wrong, it's a good war, a great war, the best, really, glad it started, but we are still in the middle of that one and I was sort of hoping to finish it up before you started the next one."

He's not lying.

"Ferrer."

"The main risk here is that this Project is cursed by Pharasma with respect to what happens whenever anything like this goes down.  I don't know how I protect you from that.  Intuitively, the way things go around you, it feels like literally nothing we can do is going to make there be a, in ilani-style numbers, less than ten percent probability, of Rovagug cultists or a Kuthite cell planted in Ostenso to get you or something completely unexpected going wrong."

He's still not lying.  AlterMaillol says it too.

"Is this a tropes-based prediction?  Because I'd mostly lost probability on those."

"It's a PROJECT MANAGER prediction."

"That is in fact about what I figured Ordinary was thinking, with respect to how I ended up tightly contained to a small location."

"Now talk to me about actual costs and how you'd do it if you had no other choice."  Again that flash of power, of pride, that his dath ilani instincts automatically try to crush down.

"Even if we trust the interdiction to keep out most of the gods, it's not impossible that multiple countries have localized something-interesting down to the Ostenso region.  The fact that Nidal invaded a site somewhere around here, to kick off the war and the god-war, that's something news has spread on even if not about Project Lawful specifically."

"There's dangerous things in the world that aren't gods, Keltham, that Broom's god isn't keeping out.  Subirachs isn't here to fight them off, she's here to die after hopefully longer than half a minute so reinforcements have time to get here.  If there's any shapechanged ancient dragons who decided to pass one of their endless years in Ostenso, just waiting to see if the cause of the god-war happened to pass by their tea-shop - I mean, there are ancient dragons with whom that'd be fine, but a lot with whom it wouldn't be."

"Just trying to protect you against a kidnapping cell planted by a Taldor duchy but one that has the ability to call in reinforcements to grab you - takes 8th-circle Shield of Law on you, ideally 8th-circle Mind Blank on you, if you can give us a wide area that's something like 160-foot by 160-foot ten minutes in advance we can put a Teleport Trap on the region and if we can't then I'd like to know how we're supposed to defend against somebody calling in a nation-level strike force that shows up standing next to you - I can run this past more experienced officers in Egorian but I mostly expect that our 8th-circle casters literally do not have those spells prepared today and yes I realize that doing it tomorrow gives everybody in Ostenso time to rehearse a story."

"What's the Queen do when she wants to travel?"

"First of all, Abrogail Thrune is an 8th-circle sorcerer herself and literally one of the five most powerful casters in Cheliax, second, she mostly stays in her well-protected palace, third, when she leaves her palace she teleports directly to somewhere else that's very protected, fourth, if she was violating those rules, she wouldn't do it on less than a day's notice."

"Conspiracy Asmodia already has everybody in Ostenso prepped with a story.  She's insulted that you think giving her an extra day of prep time is going to make a difference to her."

"I actually don't think she does? Ostenso is a port city, there are ships arriving from all over the world, there's no way Conspiracy is stopping them all at the docks to brief them. Unless Conspiracy rules the whole world, I guess, or at least the whole Inner Sea."

"You underestimate Conspiracy Asmodia... okay maybe not really, maybe not for that one."

"I don't know, I'd need a minute to think about how I'd handle that and Conspiracy Asmodia has literally had weeks."

"Is she any better at the ships thing if Keltham visits Ostenso tomorrow instead of in one hour?"

"Hmmm. I guess she knows which ships are coming in and can try to spend the next day briefing or mind-controlling them all? It'd have to be mind-control, actually, unless the Conspiracy controls the whole Inner Sea. But that's still thousands of people, and Taldane and Qadiran merchant ships have their own ship wizards and it'd be an enormous provocation to use illegal mind-control spells on their nationals, they might declare war about it....I think it narrows you down to 'Conspiracy controls the Inner Sea' or 'Conspiracy immersively controls your sensory inputs' or 'Ordinary'. ....maybe with a day you could kick everyone out, close the port to foreign nationals on some plausible excuse and get some fake foreign nationals in their place.

I would need to see the port to guess if that'd work which means Keltham has to assume it would.  You couldn't fool anyone who knows any things about ships but Keltham doesn't."

"Assuming I'm reading this interplay correctly, am I allowed to ask why Keltham thinks that Asmodia is running the Conspiracy?"

"No."

"Why does Conspiracy Asmodia think Keltham thinks Asmodia is running the Conspiracy?  Answer that one relatively quickly."

If that's actually Conspiracy Asmodia, asking this question will force Conspiracy Asmodia to think what Ordinary Asmodia thinks Conspiracy Asmodia thinks Keltham thinks about Asmodia, which should exceed the three-level limit on her brainware-supported recursion ability and force her to either answer very slowly or give Conspiracy Asmodia's real answer.

"The Manohar thing was fake and somehow I got enhanced with the ability to master Law on the level where I'd need that to oppose a dath ilani as a Conspirator."

...sort of hard to evaluate.  It feels like the sort of very obvious answer somebody might give under heavy cognitive load... call it 1.3x for Conspiracy over Ordinary, even given into account that he asked Asmodia to answer quickly and she did.

She's always feared losing her game like this, to dozens of little cuts where she can't realistically do better, if Keltham ever started really opposing them and using all his Law to distinguish them.  Fuck her life, if only Keltham had asked Sevar to pass that test, but there was no time to pass the question to Sevar even if Sevar could've answered it better.

"Okay, wrongthought, that's why Ordinary Asmodia namely me instantaneously thinks Keltham thinks Asmodia would be running the Conspiracy if it existed.  I don't think I have a good model in my head of what Conspiracy Asmodia knows about Keltham that I don't, what with my, you know, not knowing those things?"

They're not very distinct for Ordinary Asmodia, no, but Conspiracy Asmodia has to keep track of the difference and that reduces the quality of her fast answer.

"It'd be nice to send somebody to Ostenso to scry on the place, if I accept that a visit today just isn't safe, but I'm just not seeing how to get around the level of illusion spells that could be applied both there and here.  Conspiracy obviously has illusion spells I can't detect with Detect Magic given their ability to evade truthspells... is there any solution there that only uses Law of magic that I already know and ideally can directly verify?"

Scries would be almost as good as in-person presence for purposes of forcing the Conspiracy to rapidly burn a limited spell supply, which is one of their constraints that's most likely to be real, on controlling a giant freely-navigable high-entropy gameboard.  That the Conspiracy faked a god-war and mortal-war to have an excuse to keep him in an isolated place, and never sent Keltham on any guided tours that would increase his trust level and reduce his suspicion about being isolated, implies that they are very unconfident of their ability to present him with a faked Ostenso.

" - 'do it all day' is the obvious thing? Sustained concentration is very costly, and Conspiracy didn't plan spells this morning with you trying this in mind. And make people show you things that would be hard to illusion well, like all the dock laborers in Ostenso, or the central market, or the temples, where there's a lot of stuff going on and you'd need a very good visual in order to fake it at all. I have all kinds of clever ideas around using necromancy to possess a person who's going to Ostenso, or binding a familiar and using spells to look through their eyes, but none of that's magic you're already familiar with -

High Priest, could we convince Her Majesty to visit Ostenso, with Keltham under a bunch of heavy duty antiscrying and nondetection among her entourage? That happens sometimes, so it's not by itself likely to trigger attacks by any dragons or fae or hibernating liches or whatever, and you don't have to double up the security between Her Majesty visiting and Keltham visiting, and even if people are hanging around in Ostenso desperately trying to learn about Project Lawful, which I'm sure they are, they won't learn much from a royal visit since again those happen sometimes. It'd mean Keltham couldn't go around confronting random people, which is too bad because that'd be very good at differentiating Conspiracy and not, but he could at least - see that Ostenso exists and is at the right tech level and wealth level and has thousands of people around who look like the Ostenso wizarding students do -"