"Go ahead," Keltham says to the priest.

So she'll expound, from a relentlessly business-centric perspective that finds Law from the least dath ilani perspective she can conceive of with the Crown of Infernal Majesty helping, on how in navigating the supply of components or labor it's important which side has the better alternative to a negotiated agreement, and how differently the gains from trade might be distributed depending on that, and how the model can be applied to the hiring process that is romance, though of course Osirians don't really speak of romance so much as of household formation, along with some speculation about how Avistani gender norms are the consequence of a persistent deficit of men due to the way wars were fought in Avistan a few centuries ago differing from how they were fought in Garund, producing a population with more women than men and where the strategy of holding out for marriage was outcompeted. 

...and the combined powers of half of Project Lawful have finished both Asmodia's question and Carissa's; they know now how to solve problems together that they could not solve alone.  They can give Carissa the outline of the solution path, down to the most plausible of the false leads they followed, and she need only write it at whatever speed she thinks Keltham will find plausible.

Asmodia is doing the same, with her own problem, in between looking over the Shadow Project's individually generated notes on a Conspiracy of Project Lawful girls, to see what the statistical structure there should look like, how much commonality and how much difference there is.  She'll be able to correct, soon, any relative anomalies in the main Project Lawful's stories of what they think the Conspiracy would look like; they're all working on their stories now, without waiting, of course.

Asmodia doesn't let herself think that maybe the worst is past, because tropes.

That does seem like the sort of analysis he'd have expected from a 7th-circle priest of the business-god.  It's not even giving him the feeling of - staleness, of not seeing the new information he was really looking for - that he got from the earlier parts of the expedition.  So why is Keltham feeling not so great about the whole thing?  Because it's something that Carissa and Asmodia working together could plausibly have composed?  He tried to run a safeguard against that.  This should be some evidence for Ordinary, at the end of it, even if it's not decisive.  What was Ordinary supposed to do? - he should think of that later after it's too late for them to read his mind and do it.

Carissa turns in her completed problem before Asmodia does, and while the priest is in the middle of a particularly detailed and clever discussion of the different incentives which produced norms of large harems among rulers in Casmaron and not among rulers in Avistan.

...at which point Keltham realizes that he's gotten around as much evidence as he's going to get, here.

He tells the priest they're done.

And tells Fennelosa to go look for whatever accessible library he thinks would have the largest flaming Chelish history section they can find.  And it would be nice if Keltham could buy or borrow books from that library.

Fennelosa has no idea where the libraries in Absalom are, is it okay if he asks people?

He can even pay people.  Fennelosa has free rein on this one; Ordinary Cheliax can put its best foot forwards here.

All right, then, he'll go to the front desk of the Abadar temple and offer to pay for a list of suggestions, with extra money if the top suggestion is the same as the top suggestion of some other people he asks, and then he'll go out and over to the Nethysian temple and ask them too - god of knowledge, after all - and then the temple of Iomedae, who is after all a Chelish ascended human.

Keltham is trying not to think of how he plans to check things.

...is planning to read ahead more than one page this time, do other spot-checks around the book...

Cheliax has some magic text-editing items by now, and Korva Tallandria has been working hard behind the scenes with basically all of the Imperial book-editors in Cheliax, to re-prepare for this.  It's down to her, then.

- nobody tell Tallandria that.  It won't help.

Even the very early stage Project books that just replace the word "Taldor" with "Cheliax" everywhere and change the names of the rulers and cities should be on the shelves for this. They'll pass certain kinds of consistency tests that the other books won't, and Keltham already has low expectations for how much sense books make. 

And are preparations complete for the Ione-escapes-with-Keltham version of the Project collapse plans?

Sigh.  Yes.

It's not going to work despite Ione trying her hardest, because tropes.  Ione wants that very clear before she tries her hardest.  None of this 'You will pay the price of failure in pain nonetheless' bullshit, if they want her wholehearted cooperation on playing this out, and demonstrating that it can't work even so.  Ione is not an Asmodean and if Detect Thoughts and truthspells showed she did her best, that's it, no horrible tortures afterwards, okay?

(Not to mention that Lord Nethys has no doubt arranged for Ione to depart with Keltham when he leaves, so she won't have time to hang around being tortured.  No doubt.)

Carissa is not planning to have Ione tortured if she tries her best and fails because of the tropes, or because something outside Ione's control did not work out. 

However (she does not say) they both presumably know perfectly well that if this fails Carissa, who is an Asmodean, is going to be being tortured, and is not going to be making decisions about the disposition of her subordinates. Unless she, too, escapes with Keltham.

She is assuming she'll receive orders from the Most High or from the Queen about that; it seems awfully dangerous to think about herself, with this headband on and Security probably extremely twitchy about Dominating her on the spot if she thinks something like that she might, hypothetically, if she fled to Osirion with Keltham, at some future point defect. And the person deciding whether Carissa should flee with Keltham or not should not be unable to think about that.

Rugatonn... will consider whose call that should be.

(Aspexia knows she does not have a talent for dealing with tropes as story-patterns, rather than as a kind of divinity with unshattered prophecy.)

Fennelosa's faked adventures have gotten him a recommendation for a military academy not too far away (they decided the extra minutes weren't worth the extra bits leaked) which he has been firmly assured by the fake Nethysians carries lots and lots of non-military history too, because politics and economics and social policy considerations are highly relevant to the military, and because it's a Nethysian-affiliated academy and aims to by its enormous library attract lots of wizards who mostly want to learn but are persuadable to defend Absalom and/or the world when relevant. 

This lets them throw in a ton of bona fide writing on the Chelish armed forces, which adds some bulk at minimal risk. 

(While this was going on, Asmodia finished her own math problem, and Keltham collected the Project Lawful Conspiracy Theories, even though the thirty minutes' weren't up; and Keltham glance-skimmed everything to try to fix the information content, though he didn't have anything like time to read it all.)

Keltham does not really get the 'military academy has the best library' concept, but it is not outside his general range of Golarion Weirdness and there's no obvious reason the Conspiracy would do that.  If Fennelosa thinks this is Ordinary's best foot forwards, let's try it.

Fennelosa will head on over, or at least appear to. 

It's a very big library, much larger than the one in the archduke's villa, much larger than the one in the palace. The illusionist is drawing somewhat on the library in the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, which is even bigger, but this one is credibly big. Some levitating wizards are in midair, paging through books too high to reach without the ability to fly. 

He asks some people where to find Chelish history specifically. He's told it's a whole section, over there in the back behind Taldor and to the left of the River Kingdoms. 

"All right," he says tiredly to Keltham, on reaching it, "do I start pulling out books at prime intervals and ripping out the eighteenth page of each, or what?"

"...is that allowed or does it cause you to get arrested?  I would sort of expect the arrested thing."

"That will definitely get me fined an enormous sum of money. I wouldn't expect to be arrested so long as I pay it."

"Ripping out pages is entirely pointless."  Once Keltham has seen that page, Fennelosa taking it home with him doesn't add to the amount of information the Conspiracy has to create.  "Can we borrow, or buy, books?"

"We can commission a copy of any book for delivery later this week, which I assume is unsatisfactory to you, and buy or borrow them on the spot if the library already has two copies, which I was told was the case for most of the more popular books and a majority of the recent ones. I assume you didn't want to look at old books anyway."