"Okay.  Both of you.  Slow down.  You're having a lot of fun and that's great and it is helpful evidence, Asmodia was 4/3 as likely to suggest the Detect Magic thing," he's casting it now, "in Ordinary, and I was in fact waiting to see if she would.  But also I am running at a much higher cognitive load than usual for processing everything you're saying, and both of you need to slow down and give me 15 seconds here."

Obviously Cheliax has well-trained children of all ages old enough for speech; they're not trained for this specific incident but they are experienced in adopting new personas quickly.

Sevar would need to give any related orders; Aspexia commands not, here.

Sevar predicts at something like 70% to 80% that Keltham's not going to go for it, not suspicious enough for the desire for a bit more information to overrule his dath ilani sensibilities about involving children in things, and that he'll update that they can interfere in some way with antimagic fields, which they can't so it doesn't seem like a dangerous direction for him to be looking in. That said, they should go ahead and brief the kids, it's not that costly.

She waits a patient fifteen seconds and then says, "so demand Cheliax bring you a kid with pox scars and misaligned ears, or not those specific things but visibly identifiable things that occur at about that frequency in the population; they can't have trained that many five year olds."

Asmodia considers the question of whether they've got spells to quickly produce pox scars -

AlterAsmodia says, "Blunder, Sevar.  I'm not sure if I'm supposed to point out why."

"Okay, seriously, slower than that."

"You're supposed to point it out, Asmodia.  I already know what I say here, you saying it doesn't change anything.  Carissa, give me a few rounds to analyze what Asmodia says, or nod, or something, before you respond."

"That test is cheap and easy to pass for Ordinary Cheliax.  If you look at it from the perspective of a dath ilani possibly inside the Conspiracy who isn't sure exactly what kind of magic exists, wondering if that test means that they've got to find some quick way of adding pox scars to five-year-olds, it forces Keltham to say... Keltham?"

"I'm not going to use any children in these tests.  It's not particularly likely that whether or not I can do this is going to boil down to my ability to use children in tests.  Even if that was more likely, I'm not so Good that I'd have to do that just because it was the right thing for the larger world."

"It's not really a blunder, Asmodia.  It doesn't disadvantage Keltham's interests to remind him that he has to say that.  I just straight-up hadn't thought of it."

Is Carissa supposed to know that?  Yes, but so is Conspiracy!Carissa.  It doesn't particularly advantage them to have Carissa blunder and Asmodia point it out?  It's not like their goal is to protect kids, on most Conspiracy probability mass.

Every exchange that doesn't leak 2s is a win, since they only have to make it through to tonight.

"Does that also rule out my next idea, which was going to be to send someone to Absalom or Katheer or Corentyn or Quantium and scry them while they go around asking people questions? Because kids'll obviously swarm them begging."

"I'll think about it."

"For what it's worth, I don't think I'd have that many trained kids ready to go, unless the world is a thousand times larger than Keltham has been told.  I don't think dath ilani rules, or, Keltham's version of those, say he's supposed to hide for the rest of his life because if he leaves and goes to a city, where there'd obviously be kids, the Conspiracy might have an incentive to - I mean - I guess if there just wouldn't be any such thing as beggar kids in the first place except for the elaborate lie the Conspiracy is using where beggars exist - but then the Conspiracy wouldn't necessarily expect Keltham to realize they might be producing beggar children for him, because a dath ilani doesn't easily think that way, and in that case, the beggar children were produced already, to be ready for him, so it doesn't make a difference if he goes ahead and visits - or is saying that the beggars were produced already, bad decision theory -"

"I don't think I really appreciated up until now what it must be like to have that much uncertainty about which world you're inside.  I'm trying to figure out what the Conspiracy looks like to Keltham and I'm obviously not allowed to ask him and it's just... a lot of uncertainty, though he's had longer to think and would've maybe narrowed it down more than I have."

"Thinking about complicated meta, pause."

Is Asmodia trying to prompt him into thinking about his current Conspiracy forecasts for mindreading purposes?  Probably not?  The mindreading Conspiracy knows he's wary about that possibility, that the reason why he doesn't know what the Detect Intelligence spell does the same way he knows the effects of Detect Wisdom/Anxieties and Detect Splendour/Desires, is that the third member of the trio is declarative beliefs or something, and they blocked his god from giving that one somehow - something like Spell Immunity that excludes a single spell from clerics?

Of course if Keltham reasons too much about how the mindreading Conspiracy should know better, they know he's reasoning like that, and are more likely to do it, so there's probably a self-referential equilibrium around... call it 1.1x for Conspiracy over Ordinary.

Oh, fuck him!  AlterAsmodia legitimately hasn't thought about Keltham thinking he might be getting mindread, she was told to start thinking about this like a minute ago!  AlterAsmodia actually just said that!

"Very minor blunder Asmodia, I'm worried about the world where they've got mindreading magic being used on me, so please don't say things that sound like they could be prompting me to think about info the Conspiracy wants to know."

"Oh.  Sorry."

"It wouldn't surprise me if magic like that existed in Ordinary somewhere, it'd just be above my access level probably by a lot, so, very good point."

"Lead hat - oh, if not for the brain damage. But remember that emanation divination spells, which mindreading would be if it exists, are blocked by a thin sheet of lead or an inch of iron. Wearing a helmet an inch thick sounds miserable...I think if I was worried about mindreading I'd put Lady Avaricia in charge of checking if other metals on our elements table have the divination-blocking effects of lead."

"Okay, I'm going to put on hold figuring out how weird it is that the alleged simple solution risks brain damage, what with my having only the Conspiracy's word inside the Conspiracy worlds that it's even a solution, though I guess that blocking emanations was previously listed among problematic uses of Element-82 -"

"Everybody just pause.  I am going to finish eating, then go to Maillol's office with you to ask about a thing, we can have the freeform suggestion session later.  Right now, doing the things that I thought of before the Conspiracy can react to them, is the priority, anything you suggest is something the Conspiracy has had unlimited time to prepare for."

Keltham's thoughts show that he's been reminded to ask for a scroll of whatever Carissa used to determine his Intelligence right after he arrived in Golarion.

They have a lie prepared for that! The spell Carissa used is second-circle, here it is, it just detects Intelligence. he's welcome to try it. 

(None of Carissa, Maillol, Asmodia, or Security are at any real risk of failing their will saves against a scroll-cast Detect Thoughts.)

Maillol will, at need, send Carissa and Asmodia out and then tell Keltham flatly that yes, there's a third-circle spell that corresponds to Detect Anxieties and Detect Desires which does Detect Intentions, it's illegal, the second-circle spell he just used was invented by wizards as a way to get the useful Intelligence-detecting ability without the illegal components.

Keltham will eat, trying to maintain his continuing momentum and enthusiasm about what is, in fact, an attempt to destroy his new reality.  His mind will show a lot of repetitions of 'If the Conspiracy is real, I want to know the Conspiracy is real, if the Conspiracy is not real, I desire to know it is not real' and 'In worlds where this is actually a Conspiracy and Carissa never loved me it is better to know earlier rather than later' and the like.

He's trying not to think much about his plans for the Ostenso trip in the unlikely event that's allowed.  His mind briefly thinks something about Ostenso Academy and then deliberately thinks about how he's trying to throw out some false thoughts to confuse the Conspiracy and sometimes thinks this thought after both the accidental thoughts and the deliberate ones, and then he successfully refocuses his attention on the food and how much he doesn't want to lose Carissa.

His thoughts will also briefly cover how he's not even thinking, honestly hasn't thought about it, about whether making a hard try that ends up finding no Conspiracy would be enough info for him to think about kids.  He is not that absolutely confident that tropes don't exist.

Probably the Ostenso trip is a bad idea but in addition to the three bits it also buys them several hours. Carissa is torn.

- Korva's manning the Wall, can she work up a list of divergences between Ostenso and a similar city in Taldor and her best projection of alter-Ostenso.

When Keltham tests Detect Intelligence Carissa's needs to reflect her expected +4 and not her current +6. She could have herself dealt two points of Intelligence damage (temporarily) or swap the headbands out (this is painful to think about).

Aspexia is utterly confident of her ability to bestow a curse that precise, if none of the other clerics here have the spell prepped and are confident of their own skill.

Asmodia can feel a tiny note of terror in herself about the Ostenso trip.  Why.

It's huge, chaotic, hard to plan.  That, obviously, from Keltham's perspective, is the point - but it doesn't account for why he'd think Conspiracy was eight times less likely to -

If Ordinary probably won't go for it, maybe Keltham assigns 40% to that, so then he'd have to assign 5% to Conspiracy -

Asmodia is an idiot.  Either Keltham planted that thought for them to find, or he actually is that confident that this is an incredibly terrible idea for the Conspiracy for reasons the real Conspiracy hasn't seen.

.... Ostenso trip tomorrow. That's the solution. Keltham doesn't have any reason to think tomorrow's lots better for the Conspiracy than today, and there are obvious reasons even Ordinary would want to wait a day, so Security can have their spells prepared and additional Security made available. And that gives them an entire year to figure out why the trip is so dangerous and if necessary to completely rebuild Ostenso. 

Can alterCheliax really not secure a spontaneous version of that trip right away, if Keltham is calling in nation-level favors on it, if it's possible to do it 'tomorrow'?

There might literally not be any high level wizards or clerics with the requisite spells to make it safe, since they prepare their spells in the morning and already did so; it's not like Greater Teleport which you have other reasons to prepare. You'd probably want Teleport Trap to stop people teleporting in, which is seventh circle wizard and not prepared routinely, and plausibly Shield of Law or something which is cleric 8th. 

- actually, Carissa is delegating, to the Most High and whoever is the most senior wizard now on site, thinking of the spells that their alter-selves would use to make an Ostenso expedition safe.