"Ah.  K.  That makes sense."  He's having trouble following this while trying to do his Conspiracy reasoning; if she's saying all that while also running the Conspiracy, he's genuinely impressed... no that's affection talking, it's obviously going to be easier for her to generate those thoughts internally than for him to follow along her communication of them.

Time for Keltham to consume food quickly!

Asmodia thinks - probably less than 1 bit - Snack Service has been pretty clear about volunteering help, but not often responding to requests for it -

If she was Keltham she'd ask Snack Service about a Conspiracy straight out and do it by thinking thoughts at it.  Which - possibly plays into the mindreading thing - but Snack Service has too many other abilities, it may not make sense to Keltham if Snack Service can't read his mind about that, she has to review everything Keltham has seen Snack Service do but she's not at her Wall - has Keltham communicated with Snack Service in code before -

AlterAsmodia is not trying to think of any of this!  She is thinking of ways to destroy the Conspiracy!  Keltham could ask her at any moment what she's thinking about!

Keltham hasn't communicated with Snack Service like that before.

And yes, Keltham is planning to request a cookie for dessert using an unspoken code that he came up with the previous night, request it very suddenly, and not think about that at all, if he can help it.  Snack Service will if allowed truthfully give Keltham the coded cookie for 'I can't answer that for complicated decision-theoretical reasons', which is mostly what Keltham expects in Ordinary and in Mindreading Conspiracy and less expects in Nonmindreading Conspiracy.

- the question of whether they're still cooperating with Snack Service at this point Carissa is going to kick to the Most High though if she has to make a snap judgment it'd be 'yes keep cooperating' (and if she has to make a snap judgment on petrifying Keltham it'll be 'not if Maillol thinks it's a blurry border of his orders', but the Most High should make that call too.)

"You have command here, Sevar.  My own estimate is under 10% that Snack Service betrays us now.  You may know better than I, and if you do, Gorthoklek is perhaps the only one who could prevent Cheliax from having a bad day about it.  I will call him, do you so command."

"Oh, right.  Keltham, you should be running Detect Magic pretty frequently this whole day.  Conspiracy obviously has ways of fooling it, I mean, I expect so does Ordinary upper Security secretly, but it might make the Conspiracy's lives harder in all sorts of little ways."

- Carissa feels like Snack Service is not going to betray them by suddenly attacking everybody, that's not at all what the tropes say would happen here. 

...how sure is she that tropes are real. A week ago she was pretty sure they weren't, but now, at the last minute, Keltham has a last doubt - and Abrogail and the Most High are clearly reasoning as if the tropes are obviously real, and have more information than Carissa does -

(Her newfound Intelligence wants to go chasing down all the implications of the Most High and Abrogail disagreeing with her about how likely tropes are to be real, starting with whether someone is pregnant by Keltham and ending with whether she's a secret cleric somehow. Her newfound Wisdom notes that she's already trying to simultaneously run two Carissae and should probably not add having epiphanies of no immediate relevance to the to-do list, and that this is one of the ways intelligence enhancement is not obviously good in slaves, if your starting point is as squishy as a human. Thankfully the Wisdom actually gives her the skill to set those trains of thought aside neatly, flagged for later, not forgotten.)

"You could have some five-year-olds brought in to talk to you, in an antimagic field so no one could feed them lines, not that I think feeding five-year-olds lines even works very well but the Conspiracy might have mind control that'd make it work."

"Conspiracy can probably do that if they get to pick the five-year-old and brief them, it'd have to be via scry into a city somewhere that Keltham could pick one - does scry work through antimagic field?"

"Can't scry into the antimagic field but I can't think why you couldn't position the scry so it can see, in an entirely nonmagical way, the goings-on in the antimagic field? I'm not actually sure that Conspiracy can successfully brief five year olds even if they pick them, five year olds are terrible liars."

"I'd have multiple trained five-year-olds ready to go if I was that sort of person and running the Conspiracy."

She doesn't.  And - doesn't actually regret that.  One of the real Asmodeans needed to think of that if they wanted it thought of.

"Okay.  Both of you.  Slow down.  You're having a lot of fun and that's great and it is helpful evidence, Asmodia was 4/3 as likely to suggest the Detect Magic thing," he's casting it now, "in Ordinary, and I was in fact waiting to see if she would.  But also I am running at a much higher cognitive load than usual for processing everything you're saying, and both of you need to slow down and give me 15 seconds here."

Obviously Cheliax has well-trained children of all ages old enough for speech; they're not trained for this specific incident but they are experienced in adopting new personas quickly.

Sevar would need to give any related orders; Aspexia commands not, here.

Sevar predicts at something like 70% to 80% that Keltham's not going to go for it, not suspicious enough for the desire for a bit more information to overrule his dath ilani sensibilities about involving children in things, and that he'll update that they can interfere in some way with antimagic fields, which they can't so it doesn't seem like a dangerous direction for him to be looking in. That said, they should go ahead and brief the kids, it's not that costly.

She waits a patient fifteen seconds and then says, "so demand Cheliax bring you a kid with pox scars and misaligned ears, or not those specific things but visibly identifiable things that occur at about that frequency in the population; they can't have trained that many five year olds."

Asmodia considers the question of whether they've got spells to quickly produce pox scars -

AlterAsmodia says, "Blunder, Sevar.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to point out why."

"Okay, seriously, slower than that."

"You're supposed to point it out, Asmodia.  I already know what I say here, you saying it doesn't change anything.  Carissa, give me a few rounds to analyze what Asmodia says, or nod, or something, before you respond."

"That test is cheap and easy to pass for Ordinary Cheliax.  If you look at it from the perspective of a dath ilani possibly inside the Conspiracy who isn't sure exactly what kind of magic exists, wondering if that test means that they've got to find some quick way of adding pox scars to five-year-olds, it forces Keltham to say... Keltham?"

"I'm not going to use any children in these tests.  It's not particularly likely that whether or not I can do this is going to boil down to my ability to use children in tests.  Even if that was more likely, I'm not so Good that I'd have to do that just because it was the right thing for the larger world."

"It's not really a blunder, Asmodia.  It doesn't disadvantage Keltham's interests to remind him that he has to say that.  I just straight-up hadn't thought of it."

Is Carissa supposed to know that?  Yes, but so is Conspiracy!Carissa.  It doesn't particularly advantage them to have Carissa blunder and Asmodia point it out?  It's not like their goal is to protect kids, on most Conspiracy probability mass.

Every exchange that doesn't leak 2s is a win, since they only have to make it through to tonight.

"Does that also rule out my next idea, which was going to be to send someone to Absalom or Katheer or Corentyn or Quantium and scry them while they go around asking people questions? Because kids'll obviously swarm them begging."

"I'll think about it."

"For what it's worth, I don't think I'd have that many trained kids ready to go, unless the world is a thousand times larger than Keltham has been told.  I don't think dath ilani rules, or, Keltham's version of those, say he's supposed to hide for the rest of his life because if he leaves and goes to a city, where there'd obviously be kids, the Conspiracy might have an incentive to - I mean - I guess if there just wouldn't be any such thing as beggar kids in the first place except for the elaborate lie the Conspiracy is using where beggars exist - but then the Conspiracy wouldn't necessarily expect Keltham to realize they might be producing beggar children for him, because a dath ilani doesn't easily think that way, and in that case, the beggar children were produced already, to be ready for him, so it doesn't make a difference if he goes ahead and visits - or is saying that the beggars were produced already, bad decision theory -"

"I don't think I really appreciated up until now what it must be like to have that much uncertainty about which world you're inside.  I'm trying to figure out what the Conspiracy looks like to Keltham and I'm obviously not allowed to ask him and it's just... a lot of uncertainty, though he's had longer to think and would've maybe narrowed it down more than I have."

"Thinking about complicated meta, pause."

Is Asmodia trying to prompt him into thinking about his current Conspiracy forecasts for mindreading purposes?  Probably not?  The mindreading Conspiracy knows he's wary about that possibility, that the reason why he doesn't know what the Detect Intelligence spell does the same way he knows the effects of Detect Wisdom/Anxieties and Detect Splendour/Desires, is that the third member of the trio is declarative beliefs or something, and they blocked his god from giving that one somehow - something like Spell Immunity that excludes a single spell from clerics?

Of course if Keltham reasons too much about how the mindreading Conspiracy should know better, they know he's reasoning like that, and are more likely to do it, so there's probably a self-referential equilibrium around... call it 1.1x for Conspiracy over Ordinary.

Oh, fuck him!  AlterAsmodia legitimately hasn't thought about Keltham thinking he might be getting mindread, she was told to start thinking about this like a minute ago!  AlterAsmodia actually just said that!

"Very minor blunder Asmodia, I'm worried about the world where they've got mindreading magic being used on me, so please don't say things that sound like they could be prompting me to think about info the Conspiracy wants to know."

"Oh.  Sorry."

"It wouldn't surprise me if magic like that existed in Ordinary somewhere, it'd just be above my access level probably by a lot, so, very good point."