- do we have anything planned if Keltham wants to spot five expensive shops, and randomize between them only after he numbers them.

Greater False Vision. Just waiting on giving the illusionist who's going to cast it a bit more practice with Keltham's weird visual, which she strongly expects has to be exactly right or he'll notice, and with mirror-reflections inside a scry. Somehow, this isn't something even senior illusionists have prior practice with.

Somehow Asmodia was thinking in the back of her mind that if they just resorted to Greater False Vision, the tropes would make them lose, somehow, because that was too much like cheating.  But if the real nature of the game is that Keltham has a timer he doesn't know about, until the Conspiracy can start faking everything, that might be a fairer game from the perspective of the tropes.

((It'd be relieving, except for the part where she does not in fact want Cheliax to win.))

That possibility had also crossed Carissa's mind though she's mostly not trying to reason with it, she's not sure it works to reason about how to be in the story you're in even if she is reluctantly angrily going to concede that there seem to be story-like forces around doing things. (Is she somehow a secret cleric of Irori? Consider question later.)

Anyway, Greater False Vision doesn't make things easy. They'll need to have the original guy going around doing things in Absalom for the illusionist to tweak on the fly.
 

Okay everyone!  We're coming up on a part of this flag event that's particularly dangerous for Asmodeus's interests!

Pretty soon it's going to occur to Keltham that the real reason why bookstores don't carry pornography isn't that the churches dislike it, it's that the Conspiracy wants to prevent him from checking whether masochists are real!

Yep. Luckily for the Conspiracy, masochists are real, and some churches really do frown on hardcore erotic works, which nonetheless exist and Keltham can be presented with them. Furthermore Absalom has an entire underground network of brothels specifically for beating up wealthy men who are into that. Carissa checked. She's pretty sure that if Keltham turns his mind full-bore on the question of whether masochists exist, that's a good development.

You'd be right if Keltham had unlimited time to look at things and think about them!  Unfortunately, even when arguing with Keltham, being right doesn't mean you win the argument, if Keltham has limited time to think.

Keltham has to worry about the Conspiracy's illusions.  He has to worry about the Conspiracy's operatives running ahead of him and telling brothels to claim they offer that service.  He has to worry about whether the Conspiracy commissioned the existence of around the same number of fiction books, like that, as they commissioned for Chelish history books and books about Asmodeus.  Keltham has to ask himself how likely it is that churches frown on hardcore erotic works and that's why the small disreputable bookstore you find has only a small handful of hardcore erotic works written from the viewpoints of masochists enjoying themselves.

Keltham has to ask whether the Conspiracy is stalling him, so he doesn't get done the rest of what he wants to do, or so he'll slip up and think of what he's planning to do next.

Keltham will probably decide to give up on going through the whole tour you're planning now, of the real evidence that masochism exists, and go ahead with the rest of his scheduled plan for checking on things, while fighting an increasing sense of internal horror and his mind trying to take refuge in the thought that maybe none of this is real.

......that doesn't really seem like the dath ilani thing to do. Looking into a question shouldn't predictably update you in the wrong direction. 

It's not predictable to him!  Most of Keltham's update will happen at the point where he thinks of how convenient it is for the Conspiracy that the bookshop doesn't already carry erotic fiction.  Then Keltham tries to think of ways to check on things quickly, and later tries to find an erotic bookshop that's large enough to have more submissive-viewpoint erotic novels than he thinks the Conspiracy would have prepared.  Keltham isn't expecting to be able to find a bookshop like that quickly, and Lord Fennelosa won't be able to.  Since Keltham was expecting that result even in the Ordinary world, he doesn't update much on it.  That leaves Keltham with mostly the same probability he got after he realized the Conspiracy's reason for saying that bookshops don't carry pornography.

Keltham won't think of looking for brothels that cater to male masochists without you suggesting that, and if you do suggest that, he'll think it's something the Conspiracy could illusion or send somebody ahead to mind-control people about.  Or bribe them, now that Keltham has seen that Golarion employees will take bribes.

Absalom has trashy tabloids that report on the sexual exploits of prominent people. They have a published guide to all the best ladies in all the brothels in the city. A couple years ago, a particularly lurid book prompted debates -- which were reported on in the newspapers -- about whether there should be more of a crackdown on the brothels where you have pretty women beat you up. And those are just the things Carissa learned on a cursory look; Keltham, turning his full creativity on the question of whether there are masochists, in a city that in fact has hundreds of thousands of them, is not going to just ask if there's a single well-stocked well-known bookstore with hundreds of books and then give up entirely. 

Keltham doesn't know the rules of magic or the rules of illusions except for what the Conspiracy has told him.  From his perspective, anything he sees can be fake, anything he hears can be fake, all of his Messages can be intercepted.

The only thing that Keltham can trust even a little is information that would be expensive for the Conspiracy to create or edit.  A single published guide on prostitutes isn't that, because it's easy for the Conspiracy to edit a guide like that to say that some prostitutes offer the service of beating masochistic men, without them having to edit the rest of the book.  Keltham is thinking about informational things that are tangled up, where changing one aspect of the thing would require lots of other changes throughout the structure of information.  Keltham is thinking about being able to ask lots of questions with an unpredictable structure, that the Conspiracy couldn't have traced out in advance.

Snack Service can guide him to something like that, about masochism, since it actually exists for that.  If Carissa Sevar can think of where Keltham should look to find it quickly.

Snack Service can't actually tell Keltham exactly where to look inside a library's archive of all the newspapers to find all the debates, though, that's not really in Cayden Cailean's domain.

Well, someone in Absalom almost definitely has a very large private collection of erotica, they'll just have to figure out who and then - steal it and put it in a bookstore? She doesn't like that plan at all, maybe Keltham'd be too relieved to find the evidence he was hoping for to think about the coherence of the world, but it's not actually coherent, for it to be in a bookstore, the way it's coherent for it to be in a private collection -

Orrrrr Snack Service could just tell Keltham where to find a person who has a private collection of erotica like that, and tell Lord Fennelosa to say he's calling in a favor owed to Lady Sali.  Lady Sali is a worshipper of Cayden Cailean and she'll forgive Him about it eventually.

Okay Carissa does not trust that at all. 

How is Snack Service purporting to have Lord Fennelosa know this?

Snack Service is suggesting that Pilar literally just hand Keltham a cookie and tell him.

Carissa needs a minute to think.

It does not actually seem to her like an impossible task, even with a conspiracy messing with you, to figure out in a large city with a major underground flogging scene that masochists exist. Keltham is very smart. Generally he thinks of the things she thinks of and then some. If he tries to think of every possible way to test whether masochists are a thing, he should determine that they are. It is nothing like what Keltham tried to teach them about how to think, to pose only tests you expect Reality to be unable to pass and then stop testing and apply no further creativity to the problem.

But Keltham is - clearly not at his best, and his efforts to not think about his own plans are plainly hampering his creativity enormously. And he has some kind of irrational utter horror of specifically the masochists-don't-exist scenario -

- no. He knows how to correct for that. He's not going to steer with that. He's not going to decide Conspiracy on the basis of a fact about the world that's actually true because Absalom, a city that has mostly small bookstores with a handful of books on history, entirely predictably doesn't have enormous bookstores of obscene literature. Even under pressure her Keltham doesn't make errors that silly.

.......is what using her own reasoning skills to think about the question produces as an answer. 

But Snack Service hasn't been wrong before. And what is Asmodeanism about, really, if not ignoring all reason and obeying?

We'll take the cookie. If - substantial if - Keltham doesn't in fact think of any creative ways to check, once this occurs to him. 

Fennelosa heads out of the bookshop with his purchased books. "Requesting permission to get lunch from a street vendor," he says as he does. "Should only take a minute." And they've planted a vendor just in case Keltham wants to ask the vendor questions.

- does the Conspiracy need one additional minute to complete a task, Keltham could have slipped up on avoiding mindreading -

- chance that somebody in Ordinary would arrive for this mission while having still not eaten -

- no, Ordinary was trying to move very quickly per Keltham's request -

"Sorry about this, but you okay if we complete the next task in the sequence, which I'll try to keep quick, and then lunch?"

"No problem."

"All right.  Next up, spend a minute striding around and giving me a mirror-look at the shops around here."

Keltham would be doing a very good job of not thinking about why he's looking for more upscale shops, if anybody not on the level of Abrogail Thrune were trying to read his mind -

Keltham is thinking about shops that sell scrolls more than shops that sell magic items.