"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 -"

"Sure we could.  Tomorrow.  If we ask for it today without anybody getting a chance to prep appropriate spells, the Queen will justifiably worry about whether we are trying to assassinate her."

"No, wrongthought, as people are saying around here.  The Queen will worry it's an assassination plan but could just truthspell the daylight out of everyone, particularly Keltham, about where that request came from... if she's sufficiently sure nobody managed to tag him with subtler mind-control about that..."

"It still strikes me as a bad idea!  Now you're talking about exposing the Queen to whatever disaster happens around Keltham, and nobody having a chance to prep spells to defend her!  This is the sort of terrible idea that gets into history books!"

"I'm fine with tomorrow! I think we ought to let Keltham see Ostenso but I don't actually think it's that much less evidence tomorrow compared to today. - though we could at least ask Egorian in case she happens to have her staff have the spells prepared for a safe excursion all the time anyway during wartime or something."

"Is there such a thing as an all-day scry?  I think I remember seeing 2 minutes per caster circle?"

"Greater Scrying, two hours per caster circle, seventh circle but I bet Cheliax does have someone who prepared it today because it's a pretty essential military operations spell."

"Those spells will in fact be needed for essential military operations but there will certainly be a Greater Scrying scroll or item available for military emergencies.  It'll run about 2000gp."

Keltham winces and then ruthlessly crushes the qualm.  "Well, don't rush off to replace it because spellsilvered ink is going to get a lot cheaper over the next month."

"Talk to me about how Greater Scry works, is there any obvious way for me to talk through it, can it follow around a viewpoint character even if they do a Teleport, how does that all work?"

"Scrying follows a person up to a fairly fast speed of travel but can't Teleport with them; if you wanted to have someone go look at Ostenso I'd suggest they just ride there from here on a horse while you watch on a scry. Detect Magic and Message work through a Greater Scry so you could talk to them and also see if they were casting any spells or if any magic was operating around them, though I assume the Conspiracy can fake that."

"We can't have somebody teleport to Ostenso and then scry them?"  He obviously wouldn't pick Ostenso, there's no reason to stay inside the Otolmens-protected zone if he's not traveling there... well, now the mindreading!Conspiracy knows that too.  Internal sigh.  Okay he's not going to think explicitly about likelihoods on Ordinary and Conspiracy claiming that scry doesn't work on targets who Teleported somewhere far away.  You're supposed to do it in advance, sure, but you're also not supposed to let them read your mind about it by doing it in advance.

"Sure, you could do that, though then you don't know where they really are."

"He has only our word that a Greater Scry can't follow through a Teleport and covering up that with an illusion of somebody horseback riding does not sound hard."

" - it obviously can't follow through a teleport because the tricky part of the scaffold is the scrying sensor you're projecting which behaves as a physical object at some distance from the target on the other end, if you wanted it to follow through a teleport you'd need the sensor to be physically continuous with the subject. - sorry Keltham, I don't expect you to believe that, I'm just going to find the day very unpleasant if I have to treat all magic as an ineffable black box we can only learn about by asking questions of hostile entities."

"That's one of the actual reasons why Asmodia was augmented to run the Conspiracy once they found out about Law of Probability.  Asmodia is good specifically at perspective-taking-on-ignorance and model-checking."

"Sustaining a Major Image for an extended period - I mean, it was mentally taxing, but that spell has a long range, so I don't see how I prevent somebody from staying out of range of any detection means I have, and just modifying what the scry shows.  I'd be trying to find an inconsistency in whatever they were showing me, and while I do know some things they wouldn't, I'm still very ignorant of Golarion..."

And he can't think in advance of what those inconsistencies might be, because he's up against mindreaders.

Still, the more time they have to prepare, the worse.

He can't visit Ostenso today:  3:1 for Conspiracy... no, they claimed he'd be able to visit it tomorrow.  That's more like 2:1, or even 1.5:1, depending on how vast and complicated the place actually looks tomorrow...

Of course that's assuming the real plan isn't for them to prep spells tomorrow for bringing out the high-amperage batteries on mind control, which is expensive enough that they didn't want to do it before now when they could always do it later and only if required.

He should keep an eye out for other signs that they want to delay him only until tomorrow morning.

"Is it possible for me to decide a target at the last minute, and then somebody Teleports there and the Greater Scry spell finishes focusing on them once they're there?"

(Asmodia wants to say something about how Conspiracy Asmodia should be sent there, where she can't secretly run her game against Keltham too; it would give alterAsmodia a chance to also say she might really be rationalizing the whole thing and really wanted to go look at exotic places.  But Asmodia is not sure alterAsmodia truly has the same thought, and by now alterAsmodia is probably taking this pretty seriously.)