"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 -"

"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?"