"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
-- P. C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask.
"You should have a hard time damaging the cloak with a cantrip but dirt, as you might've noticed, sticks fine."
In lieu of asking more questions, Keltham will just try to Prestidigitate part of the robes to subtly patterned iridiscence a la intricate diffraction grating, which is the sort of thing that people on the Project have been doing an awful lot of recently. Does that, in fact, go, with these magical robes?
"Sorry about this, but I need you to wear... different robes over these robes, or a shirt, or something else I can Prestidigitate."
The amount of focus that it takes Keltham to converse about this is sufficient that his thoughts slip; he's planning to Prestidigitate his god's mysterious symbol and a Taldane question mark.
"Sure," Fennelosa says impatiently. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a nonmagical thick fur cloak, and pulls it on over the magical one.
The team following Fennelosa will just have to be prepared to Dominate anyone who walks up to him to comment on the holy symbol, though she thinks people will mostly not do that.
Keltham will Prestidigitate his god's symbol and a question mark, in diffraction-grating iridescence that somebody who wasn't deeply involved in the Project might not understand the optics of well enough to cast an illusion faking it, and also he's going to weave in some small Baseline fancy script that's going to look like a lot of indistinguishable Elvish curlicues to anybody who doesn't read Baseline, but which Keltham himself can immediately check for coherence. That hopefully makes it complicated to change on their end and fake in an illusion on his end.
"How are we staying in contact once you've Teleported? Telepathic Bond, or does Message work across Greater Scry?"
Keltham is trying to avoid thinking about how much it costs Conspiracy to claim that he needs to give all his instructions in advance (20 bits).
She anticipated that, which is why they said that cantrips worked across a Greater Scry.
Though also that number seems high and she suspects Keltham's trying to think false things on purpose.
"All right then, I'm about to give you your destination. Ready to go?"
Keltham is trying very hard not to think of his next action.
Keltham casts Invisibility Purge! Were there any invisible people waiting to go along on that Teleport trip?
The team accompanying Fennelosa will Teleport in separately from a different location, because there's no reason to have them anywhere near the Project site at any point.
"Absalom, the Grand Bazaar if it still exists, otherwise whichever location you most expect to have multiple bookstores."
It is definitely one of the more inconvenient requests he could have made, but not outside the range of things he might predictably have wanted.
Do it, she thinks. They have lots of books they've been faking for Keltham. She wants a team prepared to swap the covers and alter the first pages to match ones he might request from Absalom.
Fennelosa Teleports.
Arayo casts Greater Scry, and there Fennelosa is, in the middle of a chaotic, bustling marketplace, the iridescent symbol glinting on his back.
Message: Move the mirror close to the scry viewpoint and turn it around slowly.
It's his first glimpse of Golarion for real, and Keltham will be examining it carefully and not without a sense of wonder, for he may be in Ordinary Golarion after all.
Fennelosa irritably holds the hand mirror up to the scry sensor and rotates it, very slowly, so Absalom's landmarks can be seen in its edges. He has nothing to hide, yet.
A skinny child tries to pickpocket him while he's staring up in the air doing something weird with a mirror. He kicks them.
...okay, if he asks he'll be told that this happens a million times per day, if the Conspiracy did it on purpose then they're - trying to distract him - it rhymes with other things, other worrisome signs, like he noticed under Owl's Wisdom months ago -
He'll do what the Conspiracy predicted, he supposes, in the version where they predicted that Keltham would think that being distracted and asking questions because a child got hurt was supplying the Conspiracy with the wrong retrospective incentives.
Message: If possible, please carry out the rest of this operation while hurting as few children as possible, as little as possible.
"Acknowledged," Fennelosa says. The mirror is showing an absurdly tall lighthouse, the spires of some cathedral, a clock tower with incredible stone detailing, a flying person passing overhead, a pseudodragon perching to stare at them.
Another pickpocket brushes up against him and he levitates them fifteen feet in the air rather than kicking them.
Okay, nothing obviously out of line with the century-old 14-volume history of Absalom that was left in his bedroom in the 'Imperial Palace' where the Conspiracy brought him immediately after faking the 'Zon-Kuthon godwar', the point at which the Conspiracy started to take its game against him seriously. That probably wasn't enough time for them to fake entire books, which is why they gave him a century-old set of 14 books, which is the sort of thing that Conspiracy Asmodia would not have permitted if she'd then been in charge, she would have had his room devoid of books rather than do that. There's a lot of reasons they might be trying to hide something that happened in the last century, but whatever it is, it's even more likely to be in Absalom than elsewhere, and Keltham has any idea of what Absalom was like a century ago.
He can't exactly sight-read the city skyline - for all he knows, anything really tall could be the Starstone Cathedral - but the wide variety of weird tall buildings at least looks like 'Absalom' should look.
Does Keltham see anything that looks like a bookshop?
Not in the Grand Bazaar. It's mostly food carts, selling fresh fish and things just-arrived on merchant ships: grains, livestock, textiles.
Fennelosa asks, privately, if he should stay away from the slave markets.