"If we're important conspirators we definitely have Telepathic Bond up, which is why I suggested an antimagic field to you. The earrings are command-word activated like the handcuffs, and then treat the controlling party's orders as magically compelled, as the spell Geas. - I invented it from scratch. I thought it'd be fun to try inventing my own magic items."

This is false!! It's less false than it was an hour ago; she's been making some modifications on the fly. If she gets enough undistracted time, then by evening it will probably be true. It means the earrings succeed at their original concept but are less obviously targeted at that.

She fucking loves this headband.

"That is the most Carissa sex toy ever."

"I'll try it out sometime when I won't have to wonder if the effect is real."

It doesn't even occur to him to activate the supposed effect on Carissa and question her; the Conspiracy wouldn't make earrings like that, if that would work for him.

Tragic. They could have had a sexy interrogation scene. 

"You okay with... rephrase.  This is your brief chance to argue me out of my holding on to those earrings, just in case they're vital Conspiracy-maintenance equipment."

"Go ahead. However, later, once this is over, you have to be very impressed with me about them or I won't invent any ludicrously expensive magic sex toy surprises for you again."

"I doubt I can properly appreciate it until I've got better Spellcraft.  But I'll be duly impressed that you're probably not supposed to be able to make sixth-circle items at fourth-circle, that you got access to what sounds like heavily forbidden mind control magic for purposes of a sex game, and with your general pervertedness levels."

"- if I'm holding the earrings does the effect apply to me."

"No! I'd have warned you! Also, you can simply not say" Message  'equestrian pumpkins', "which isn't really the kind of thing people say much by accident!"

This sequence of events seems predictable.

Maybe too predictable.

There could be rules about how he has to accept the bearer-controlling mind-control magic item voluntarily or knowingly; they could be suspicious that his Spellcraft has advanced enough to recognize what a mind-control item looks like.

"Apologies to Ordinary Carissa.  Remove the earrings from your head, but keep them yourself."

"Yes, Keltham." 

She obeys.

Great, she'll get to keep working on them. That went perfectly.

Asmodia, booped by Keltham, will duly open her eyes and cease her humming.

"Request quiet while I rest my brain for a few minutes, until Maillol's scry people get here.  Possibly afterwards too, if we don't have to talk much to them."

"Some point in the next hour, unpredictably to me, tell me to go to the bathroom?"

"Check."

Awww, too bad, she was hoping he'd ask whether and why Geas is even legal to know about, they spent a while workshopping that earlier this week. 

Obviously the Conspiracy wouldn't bring that up if they didn't have a great excuse prepped for it.  He noticed confusion, but he'll ask later; it may be a mistake to make himself too easy to steer.

Carissa steps back to give her boyfriend some time to think, smiling at him.

- now is a good time to give her any non-urgent updates that haven't previously been passed along, and a good time to make sure of some obvious things: the team editing the books retrieved from a Tien-speaking company should be routed through Korva by default, with anything Korva is unsure of going to Asmodia, with anything Asmodia is unsure of presented to Carissa. Carissa hasn't yet been interrupted with anything which likely suggests people are being too conservative in escalating; they should now try escalating the things they considered escalating and then decided not to.

If anyone at any stage in the process thinks that they are making some kind of serious mistake she wants to hear about it. The primary thing they're editing for is references to Abadar's holy symbol or teachings, Hell or devils and to mindreading (as something that is not secret and tightly controlled); they're secondarily editing for Lawful Evil people behaving like, well, Lawful Evil people, possibly by just changing them all to Neutral Evil and some Lawful Neutral ones to Lawful Evil. Tertiary: Nethysianism inconsistent with Ione's, mentions of the minor god they told Keltham they thought was his, references to suicide being Evil (she hasn't previously issued a directive on that but it's obvious now it's going to leap out at Keltham.) Suicide in alter-Golarion is discouraged by Good churches but is not categorically Evil. 

Keltham's leaving Ione out of his investigation, apparently because he suspects she might be an innocent dragged into all this. That makes her a promising person for the false escape plan, if she's in fact not going to betray them for Nethys. Carissa wants a mindreader on Ione full-time and if she seems reliable they should start making modifications to plan #18 or #33.

Keltham might want to scry Peranza in Hell; someone should tell Hell that if that happens Peranza needs to be peacefully asleep in non-appalling surroundings. Keltham might want to scry Hell, in general - might ask for a list of devils and then ask to scry them, or ask to scry the devil Carissa supposedly sold her soul to. Hell should be asked for a list of devils safe for Keltham to scry. Keltham might want to scry the front lines of the war; Carissa wants a specific location for them to drop in on identified in advance and the surrounding units briefed. Keltham might want to scry the Worldwound, same dea -

- that's an obvious endgame for Good's baffling seizure of a fortress at the Worldwound, actually. A natural direction for Keltham's skepticism to turn, at this point, is whether any of the emergencies that purportedly necessitated his relocation to Cheliax and then to this fortress were real. The Worldwound is real and normally Cheliax would be happy to show it to him. But Good is playing some kind of fucking game there, now, and that means it's dangerous to let Keltham look closely - unless that's just what Good wants them to think. Carissa requires the most up-to-date summary of that situation, immediately. And presumably the other fortresses are now being checked very extensively; if there's one Cheliax is confident in, then the teleporter should, asked to go somewhere, go there. Alternately, Keltham might ask Carissa to name a former colleague to scry, or to name five so he can pick one; she'd like five names, in case he does that, who have been at least minimally briefed. 

A quite good outcome is if Keltham ends up focusing most of his testing today on his theory that the Kuthite war and the godwar and maybe the Worldwound are shams set up to scare him into staying in the fortress. Carissa is hoping he'll think to ask for detailed records of troop deployments, logistics and casualties for the Kuthite war - they have those, and they'll add up in all the right ways, though Keltham might not know enough about war to recognize that. He's not likely to ask for Kuthites to talk to, because the Conspiracy that made up Nidal entirely will presumably horribly scarify some people to show him. 

It seems to Carissa, and she'd like this disseminated to everyone on staff, that this is winnable; not easy to win, not necessarily in their favor, but far from hopeless. There are many possible Conspiracies, Keltham doesn't know where to look, and he gave them a lot of time to prepare. Cheliax is smarter than Keltham imagined, more ruthless, more determined, and Cheliax's obedience to Asmodeus is not something he is even prepared to look for, it is so far outside what he can understand. 

Those project staff with no role in the current activities but whose assistance might be needed later should rest, reread their notes, and try to avoid spending all their adrenaline before they enter the field of battle. Those project staff who are not necessary to today's activities should pray that Asmodeus's will be done here.

"She's not lying enough," Abrogail says out loud to Aspexia.  No Security will hear them, neither of them trusts Security around a weakened Queen.  "She's volunteering too much truth.  She should not have told him that an inch of iron blocks divination.  It would be ruinous if he believed that truth and made a helmet for himself.  Her lies don't need to stand up forever, just for one day."

"Correct me if I err in my understanding of tropes, but if you tell Sevar that - even by proxy, such that it doesn't seem like her Queen's command - then the next lie she tells will be the one that Keltham catches."

"Yes.  I know."

Keltham is not able to truly rest.  He has too much to not think about, if the Conspiracy is reading his mind, including ideas by which right Broom should kill him immediately followed by everybody else in this installation who might've been in the telepathic loop.  He needs to run through all this faster than he'd planned, he will exhaust himself too quickly at this rate.  He really wishes he hadn't gotten those early indicators of mindreading!Conspiracy.

Keltham remembers to himself some videos he's seen over and over.  It's the closest he can come to clearing his mind, and it isn't all that restful.

"If it's all right with you, I'm going to write down some ideas I came up with, then rejected, which it'd be better for you to think of yourself -"

"Go ahead -"

Great, now he's thought it, the mindreading!Conspiracy knows it, and he might as well say it out loud to her.

"- but, sorry, I'm mostly tuning out things about the laws of magic, today.  If I pierce a Conspiracy, it won't be be because I got into the technical weeds of Spellcraft and outthought them there, it'll be because I managed to move the fight to my own home ground, which I am presently trying not to think any details about so don't ask how."

"Makes sense. They weren't spellcraft ideas, I do realize you'd be an idiot to trust me about that."

And she takes out a piece of paper and begins scribbling furiously. 

One place Keltham might be safe outside the interdiction is the Worldwound, if he'd taken the oath, and he could talk to all of the allied churches there. Rejected b/c if anyone did want Keltham badly enough to break the Worldwound oath about it they might do it and it's not worth the risk (is this bad decision theory? she's not sure)

Keltham could ask someone to bring him all of the deployment, logistics, casualties, honors awarded, disciplinary actions, etc., records for the Worldwound and for the Kuthite war. Maillol will hate this plan because they're classified, but it seems pretty impossible for a Conspiracy to manufacture on short notice. Rejected because: only works if Keltham thinks of it. 

Keltham could HANG OUT IN AN ANTIMAGIC FIELD so he stopped having to worry about mindreading. Rejected because: she has already pushed pretty hard for antimagic fields and he's ignoring her and if she suggests it again he will probably conclude that the Conspiracy has a way around antimagic fields. 

Keltham could ask for the Grand High Priestess to raise a gate to let him directly visit Hell, where Asmodeus can probably protect him from the interference of other gods. Rejected because: the Conspiracy could take him to some other place under their control instead; she can't think how he'd verify he was really in Hell. 

And three uniformed people visibly straight off the front lines in Nidal (you'd get in a lot of trouble for wearing a uniform that crumpled if you hadn't been summoned straight out of a war zone) walk in, holding an enormous top-tier scrying mirror and a very magic silk bag. 

This subtlety, like so many other subtleties, will be wholly lost on the young man out of dath ilan, who considers a bathrobe to be appropriate attire for the Chief Executive of Civilization.

"Hi.  Thanks for coming.  I probably shouldn't explain anything that hasn't been explained already."

"There should be a person who can do a lesser Teleport out to a destination I'll specify and Teleport back, a Greater Scry scroll and someone who can cast from it, and a Comprehend Languages scroll hopefully the divine version."