AlterAsmodia would be tired, after all this, and would be found in her bedroom trying to take a short break herself, not sitting beside Sevar.  So Asmodia staggers off to her bedroom, in case Keltham runs right out of his Rope Trick to check on her, and lies down in her own bed.

She... really is a little tired, after that.

Asmodia wishes that she could blank her mind.  There's probably a dath ilani discipline for it, and it's probably considered dangerous to teach to children because they'll hurt themselves.

They should have been so much more prepared, before this, she should've just told the Chelish Imperium up front that she was taking all of their writers and permanently exposing them to the truths of history only Korva was cleared for and they'd just have to train new writers, and put them on nothing except producing and altering enough books to have a chance of fooling Keltham.

Is that - hindsight bias?  Was there something else Keltham could've tried, just as likely in foresight?  Maybe Asmodia wouldn't have seen through to Keltham's ideas about forcing Cheliax to create too much information too quickly, maybe she would've focused on the possibility of an Ostenso visit... an Ostenso visit probably would've helped win some 2s.  Maybe she was supposed to have closed the Ostenso ports, redirected most of the traffic elsewhere.  Or she was supposed to have fake ships ready for the Ostenso ports, and have rehearsed everyone in Ostenso already.  Or just, have already built a fake Ostenso.

One of her superiors should've told her, if Asmodia was allowed to play with nation-level resources to do her job.

One of her superiors should've told her, if those points were so obvious in advance to everyone, and not just in hindsight.

That's what she'll say if she's - questioned about it?  She'll - try to explain, about the Law, governing that, how only ilani are trained to counteract hindsight bias, how only their Keepers can do it indistinguishably; how, without training, children often can't counteract it at all.  Maybe she'll leave out the part about dath ilani children.

If something this stressful had happened to her, that also happened to alterAsmodia, she'd ask Keltham to just hold her, that night, and be a warm thing for her.

Asmodia wishes she could just, rest her head on somebody's shoulder, at least.  Somebody who was safe to be around, and wouldn't hurt her, or hold her in contempt for being that pathetic.

If Keltham leaves, she won't have that from him, anymore.

((It's only then that she remembers that she was supposed to be secretly hoping that Keltham would win.))

Carissa is not letting herself do a failure analysis, not yet. It seems like a very dangerous thing to do with this Crown on. She's - also not letting herself estimate the odds that they've won or lost, apparently. She keeps flinching away when she tries.

Asmodia's thoughts have wandered to how she could breach to Korva the subject of her being Asmodia's replacement snuggling partner.  They're both probable-asexuals so it should be safe, right?  Asmodia is Korva's superior, but she doesn't actually want an unwilling snuggling partner.  Asmodia does have Detect Thoughts and some proficiency with it, it was a very useful spell at Ostenso academy.  Asmodia could just order Korva to fail her Will save, to determine how Korva really feels about a proposal like that... no, that's a bit overt and aggressive, Korva might not like that.

Asmodia will just order Security to read Korva's mind about it, when the subject comes up, and report to Asmodia.  That seems less likely to offend Korva, if Security can do it without Korva noticing.

...it feels like Korva couldn't replace Keltham, any more than Keltham could replace Korva.

Hey, Asmodia says into her Telepathic Bond.  I notice that I've seemed to start actually caring about Keltham, in the sense that the thought of not being able to snuggle Keltham any more feels bad and it doesn't feel like anyone else could actually replace him about that.  I register that this matches a correct, purely-trope-based prediction that I made earlier about what would happen to me by the time we needed to run a fake escape plan.  I predict that any fake escape plan is going to fail unless it has at least me and Ione, possibly Yaisa I'm not sure somebody needs to read her mind about it.  Everyone who's started actually caring about Keltham.  The tropes won't let it work otherwise.

Thaaaaaaaat sure does sound wildly self-serving, Carissa notices distantly. 

Also if we're going to use that style of reasoning, which we PROBABLY SHOULDN'T, then any escape plan obviously needs Carissa. She's the one Keltham's scared of losing. 

The problem is that it's much easier to sell Keltham on Ione and Tonia being innocents than on Asmodia and Carissa. 

The other problem is that the escape plan is very obviously doomed. She's going to try it anyway, not much to lose, but while she's refusing to generate a probability estimate about whether they've lost already her brain is happy to generate one for whether the fake-escape will work, and the answer it produces is 'no chance in Hell.'

I'll also register for what it's worth that an escape plan probably involves an apparently unconscious and stunned Sevar being carted along with him in magic-neutralizing handcuffs or... something.

She's the only one Keltham is truly afraid of losing.  His thoughts said that, over and over.

And any fake escape plan - has probability practically zero of fooling Keltham unless he wants to be fooled.  Desperately wants it, needs it, to the point where he doesn't want to use dath ilani disciplines to know better.  If he's already lost his Carissa - we might as well not bother, is my sense.

Then we want to interrupt him before he has, emotionally, already resigned himself to losing me.

She lies down on the grass and looks up at the sky. She's kind of worried about what feelings she's going to have once she stops trying not to have feelings. 

We can put you to sleep for a brief time, Chosen, if you'd rather not think.

Let's run through the fake escape one more time, see if we can poke any more holes in it. Then - 

- it feels like admitting weakness. But perhaps it's better to admit weakness than to pretend you possess strength you don't. 

Keltham sits up.  He didn't sleep, and didn't much succeed at quieting his own thoughts.  There are disciplines for that, but it seemed like - the wrong time, the wrong situation, to use them.

Part of his brain sure does seem sad about how the day went.

Is this, possibly, probability-theoretic nonsense?

Keltham took a fairly hard run at the Conspiracy.  That could've broken a veil, if there'd been a veil there.  No such blatant break occurred.

On some very basic level, that ought to count in favor of Ordinary, not against it, and he should be less emotionally worried about Conspiracy than he was this morning.

Does Keltham's brain buy this?

...nope.

Why is that, Keltham's brain?

...apparently his brain thought he was supposed to get stronger first-order evidence for Ordinary, than he was able to get, and his failure to get that first-order evidence second-order weighs against Ordinary.

...can his brain possibly give an example of what that expected first-order evidence was supposed to look like.

It looks like... the booksellers having a broad selection of Chelish history books.  Right away.  Rather than that having to wait for the library, after the Conspiracy has had a chance to frantically produce a lot of new books, half of which aren't for sale or borrowable.

It looks like there not being totally logical and rational in-universe reasons why a visit to Ostenso has to wait until tomorrow.

Or the first bookseller's book 'critical' of Cheliax sounding a bit more like the book 'critical' of Qadira.

...this does not seem like it quantitatively justifies a major increase in despair, brain.  These are not things that must happen in the Ordinary universe.

It just felt on an intuitive level like what was going on today was Keltham failing to pierce the veil and not finding decisive evidence, not like he was walking freely around in a world where no veil existed.

You know, if there's an actual Conspiracy they're probably going to be pretty annoyed if Keltham ends up walking out on them for reasons like that.

...what, is the Conspiracy supposed to think that we should now resolve this battle fairly, determining in a Lawful way who won the contest, by iterating through all the events of the day, multiplying together the likelihood ratios we assigned at the time, multiplying by whatever prior we previously assigned, and coming to a decision on that basis?

At least Conspiracy Asmodia has to know better than that.  Or Conspiracy Carissa.  It's not like we haven't told them that the rule even for small cases is to make up a prior and a likelihood ratio, multiply them together to get a posterior, and then throw that number out and go with your intuitive feeling once you've forced your brain to actually ask all of the correct questions.

And this is a huge case, involving a huge number of conditional dependencies between all of the things going on.  You can't just take the likelihoods your busy brain was making up without keeping running track of how the most likely Conspiracy and Ordinary universes were shifting with each update, and multiply all of those likelihoods together.  They know that too.

Finally, if there's an actual Conspiracy on the other side of this, we are absolutely not supposed to be having a fair fight with them.  We should just boost Wisdom and possibly also Cunning, try to focus just on this one issue, and then if that starts to go wrong quickly drop out of the Rope Trick and ask for an emergency Dispel.

...well, part of him sure definitely thinks that if he does that it means he never gets to see Carissa again.

Yeah, okay, enough of that, let's just actually walk through the evaluation of the evidence from today and from all other days.

Keltham forgot, in fact, to cast Detect Intelligence where he could verify that it just detected Intelligence scores.  Or get Detect Intentions cast on him by that Security.  Keltham is willing however to expect that this test would go the way that the Conspiracy said it would.  And if Keltham casts Detect Intelligence afterwards and it's hugely anomalous, he can change his conclusions then.

So step one is to review Carissa's and Asmodia's math homework, the other researchers' Conspiracy homework, and skim a random selection of the books that were actually bought or borrowed.  Just do his own homework first.  The longer he delays before doing that, the more time the Conspiracy has to finish the half-written books and transform the ones he has in here, using their eighth-circle wizardry that can in fact go right through a Rope Trick.

Well, it's not trivial even with eighth circle wizardry.  Manohar is, presently, a gaseous housefly clinging to the bottom of Keltham's screen, just inside the Rope Trick, having been Polymorphed by Polymorph Any Object rather than Greater Polymorph as it lasts longer. Every half hour he has to fly out and get the Polymorph suppressed so he can recast Detect Thoughts and have Gaseous Form recast on him; more frequently than that he flies down an inch to deliver a situation report. 

Unfortunately for anybody who didn't want to think about probabilities, Asmodia has now realized something else they like totally forgot to do today!  They should have been running a prediction market and a conditional prediction market this whole time!

So now Asmodia is setting up a quick prediction market about the chance that the primary deception around Keltham shatters, and a secondary conditional prediction market about the chances that different versions of the backup escape plan work, further-conditional on those becoming necessary.

Asmodia's opening bid is 80% that the primary deception shatters before tonight / before they can turn Keltham into a statue for a year, with the second condition winning if there's a difference between them.

Keltham just has too much information, is Asmodia's guess, his thoughts about the Conspiracy were starting to track too closely to what was actually going on around him.  He's not limited to the information from today, he also has evidence from when the Conspiracy was younger and less practiced.  They don't just have to quell his doubts; they have to quell his doubts far enough that Keltham decides not to try an Owl's Wisdom, and then, Asmodia is thinking, taps himself with Fox's Cunning once the Owl's Wisdom makes him realize that's the wise thing to do.

(Keltham has by now had a chance to demonstrate to Asmodia that some of her probabilities were a tad overconfident; Asmodia's intuitive guess was 90%, and would have been 95% without that demonstration and some amount of correction-of-intuition.  80% is her weaker second-order probability after trying to compensate for her remaining intuitive overconfidence.)

So 80%.  Any bidders?

And Asmodia is basically not betting that the main unfixed version of the backup escape plan works, she'll sell anything over 10% on that, if there's any bidders; but she would maybe bid like 5% or 10% on a plan working if it involves at least Ione and Asmodia and Carissa in anti-magic handcuffs.

...okay, actually Asmodia needs the Queen or the Most High to sign off on telling bettors that, in the event the primary deception fails and the backup fake-escape plan doesn't work, they aren't all going to be executed and will remain in a state to have some use for money afterwards.  Because otherwise people are placing bids at probabilities that do not make any sense.

Here is Asmodia's mind being totally sincere about how much she did not cleverly plan that and just legitimately tried to do this obvious thing, that they obviously ought to do, and then ran into herself not being able to do that correctly because people were scared.  She is not trying to extort any promises out of anybody, it just looks to her like Cheliax would obviously continue to have use for Project Lawful either way and is not going to kill off a tenth of all the Security officers in Cheliax, and if Asmodia is right about that, it would be useful to the betting market to say so.

Diminished-Abrogail wishes she could sleep away the moments before she gets her Crown returned.  +4/+4/+4 is not two-thirds of her Crown.  But she would be less defended, then, even with the Most High standing guard over herself.  To remain awake and also guard herself is the wiser course, to preserve herself and her throne.  So Abrogail endures.  It is good for a soul now and then to suffer and endure; Abrogail probably receives too little of that to keep herself strong.

There are emotions in her, harder to keep in rein and check than they would be with her Crown worn.  This creature of Aspexia's will need some correction, at some point, in Abrogail's own opinion.

But also, the little creature is sincere on her surfaces, and she is correct that people are being stupid.

"I was not, in fact, planning to execute a huge number of the most valuable people in Cheliax, who only failed me and did not betray me, who will be needed whatever comes of this.  You will not receive any promises from me on the subject, fools, but I was not planning to be stupid.  I currently expect you will have some use for money in the future either way.  That is all."

Carissa is at this point half-occupied in her own mind tying up knots trying not to think about things that it's probably not wise to think about, and is not going to let her mind go anywhere near the question of what's going to happen to her after she fails, if she fails, but it seems kind of obvious to her that you should bet with the actual odds you think are correct, so they are slightly more likely to succeed at this, whether you think you're going to be executed or not.