Sure. Off he goes. He won't ask again about lunch, though he'll cast longing side-glances at vendor carts as they go.

....they're going to need the Greater False Vision for this part. The plan is for someone to genuinely go to all the relevant places, so the illusionist can grab the right visuals from that, but for Fennelosa to go to a different, them-controlled, location, where the people who walk up and speak to him are actors and will respond correctly to having someone Message them.

The illusionist says he's ready. 

He'd better be right. 

Keltham catches that longing side-glance!  He is very sorry!  Yes please have lunch, Keltham said he could.

(No, it's not great that Keltham said their next destination, before that point came up; but if Keltham doesn't like that, it was Keltham's responsibility to remember what he told the other person they would do.)

Then he will grab some kabobs from a vendor, shove some money into her hands, and keep going. It's significantly less than a minute's delay, all told; soldiers are not habitually slow eaters. 

"It's Ione's line, I know, but should we also eat."

1.2x for Ordinary that he didn't try for a longer delay.

"We can have food brought here, sure.  Preferably something I can eat while distracted."

"You and Asmodia have both been quieter than I thought you would be."

- is thinking that he admittedly looked like he was focusing a lot, but he wants to see what you say, but he knows his mind might be getting read -

"I think you're doing pretty well except I'm confused about how you ended up back on the are-masochists-real track and I'm sad you didn't buy the book defaming Abrogail, I bet it would've been funny. Should I be talking more? You often looked about as interruptible as I feel when I'm doing crafting and whenever I say anything Asmodia bites my head off about how you couldn't possibly know if I'm lying, and - I do realize that you're starting from the assumption that the Conspiracy can conceal a lot about how magic works from you, but also it seems to me that at least some of the time you might know a clever physics-based test that can confirm that I'm right, and it'd be worth a lot of twos if you did happen to know one."

...hard to remember, with everything he's trying to keep track of simultaneously, that in the Ordinary world Carissa is not reading his mind.

"Via the shopkeeper's claim that pornography was banned in Absalom, then passing what were obviously storefronts advertising sex work, and those two things not going together, which made me realize that the pornography ban was a Conspiracy plot to prevent me from checking for erotic novels written with submissive masochists as viewpoint characters."

"Oh, I just figured he was a Sarenrite. I guess your version makes sense too."

"The ass does Neutral Good have against erotic literature anyways?  I know the dath ilani reason to gate perverted stuff behind a prior level of achieved perversion, namely so as to not accelerate people's natural descent into sexual corruption over time, but I bet it's not the same here at all."

"They.... think people's natural descent into sexual corruption is bad for them and instead of that they should strive to not descend into sexual corruption? You should probably ask one of them, I bet I'm not doing it justice."

"Maybe some other time.  Now that the topic has come up explicitly, the Conspiracy has time to find a real Sarenrite priest and get an account from them of how they'd defend that position."

"Sure. So should I be talking more?"

"...probably not, in the end, if it looks like I'm currently concentrating."

The thought comes to him, then, that if the Conspiracy is real and Keltham ends up deciding so, this could be some of the last conversation that they'll ever have.

He dismisses the thought, not by assigning it low probability but by assigning it low priority; Keltham does not see how thinking of such a thing will serve him in this task.

"Okay. Do you in fact have any clever ideas for how to check the thing about lead and emanations? I was thinking if you have some technique to Prestidigitate lead, or some chemical correlate that you expect is driving the emanation effect, you could flicker it on and off faster than anyone could dispel and re-cast a spell to mislead you, or maybe there's something to be done with the fact lead is denser than other metals, immersing it in water or something and then if anyone does anything to it the volume changes..."

"Hard to be sure the Conspiracy wasn't messing with my experimental results, is the basic problem here.  If the Conspiracy exists at all, it was able to fool my truthspells on day one in such a way that Greater Detect Magic made it look to me like my own magical signature... maybe I should see if some scroll shop's got an Arcane Sight, now that I can afford one.  Or if Cheliax could get a borrowable item of constant Arcane Sight to me in a hurry, it'd be some pretty significant evidence for Ordinary, I expect that makes the Conspiracy's life a lot harder.  Should've thought of that earlier.  Anybody feel free to remind me to put that in, the next time I send a message to Egorian."

"Meanwhile, there's problems like - I know there's spells that change materials around.  Can the Conspiracy turn the iron in an iron helmet into something that doesn't block divination?  Even if I can verify it working in one experiment, that doesn't mean they can't mess with it after I put it onto my head."

"Also also I expect that introducing density changes will usually come with potential energy changes... maybe there's a way to sidestep that, but if you think of the forces you'd need to apply to a metal to pull it apart or compress it, it'd probably be pretty forceful.  That means the new potential energy in the current position isn't like the old potential energy in the current position..."  Where it's been established via experimentation that everyone on Project Lawful is of course thoroughly familiar with, at this point, that Prestidigitation doesn't let you change materials in a way that greatly changes their potential energy.

" - hmm, okay. I think the next thing I'd try would be sitting in an iron box with my own Detect Intelligence up, having requested a bunch of people stand around right outside it so that it's instantly obvious if my Detect Intelligence is leaking through the box, and then I'd ask for some kind of powerful metal-transmutation spell and transmute the iron myself intermittently until satisfied that I was getting a read whenever I poked a hole and not otherwise."

"Carissa, that works a lot better if you start out knowing for sure that the invisible seventh-circle wizards who can easily beat my Invisibility Purge are forbidden by the Law of alternatephysics to flicker their interception of my Detect Intelligence spell faster than I can transmute the metal in the box."

"Yes, it's very silly in Ordinary.  If you know that's where you are.  Conspiracy Carissa is only suggesting this because she knows she can defeat it."

"Which is why it'd be so valuable to figure out an actual test you were convinced of! But if that's not one I'll keep thinking. - and if Egorian doesn't have an item of permanent Arcane Sight for you I can probably make one, it'd be something like twelve thousand in materials costs which is soon to be a lot less than that."

"Yeah..."

...part of his brain sure is increasingly convinced that things which happen on those kinds of timescales, will not happen; that the happy bright future she's talking about no longer exists.

Keltham really hopes that's his brain discharging a burden of gloominess brought on by things apparently going so well and a lingering belief in tropes, and not because his brain is picking up on a pattern that Keltham hasn't seen, or is refusing to see.

"So, Asmodia, have you figured out yet what Conspiracy Asmodia thinks of me?"

"I mean, mostly I've been staring at what you're doing, trying to figure out whether it reflects any Laws you haven't explained yet.  I think I've deduced the basic concept of why you keep asking for books, it's because it's expensive to fake a lot of those, and you can look at just a page of them in the shop and then use that to verify the entire book already existed when they buy the book and bring it back.  I bet there's some much more extensively worked Law for seeing that sort of viewpoint in dath ilan, the work that goes into things and how to force somebody else to do a lot of work."

"And, yeah, Conspiracy Asmodia doesn't have to be like the Asmodia you know, but she's a person such that I was an easy person for her to pretend to be which is an endlessly fascinating question.  There are probably not meaningless divergences between us because all of those are extra work for her with no reason.  Our favorite foods are the same, she eats the same things at breakfast.  She's - probably got ambitions that lean more towards world domination than getting a big share of the Project, was my first thought about differences?  Except she was probably more of an ordinary Ostenso student, before the incident that wasn't really Manohar.  She wanted to be running something important, well, obviously so do I, so is that even really a difference..."

"I think she's getting something out of snuggling clothed with you, because there's other Project researchers who would quickly jump for that item-slot if Conspiracy Asmodia didn't have some reason to hold it for herself.  Despite her incredibly busy existence leading her entire life as well as mine... which is a lot of busyness, even taking into account that a lot of the work she pretends to do for the Project is really being done by somebody else," since she doesn't have a Ring of Sustenance.  "Given that her overall personality is probably mostly similar to mine, and that I don't have unusually Conspiracy-useful effects on you that I can figure out, I buy that she finds it nice to have a warm boy to snuggle."

"She thinks of you - as an opponent in her game, probably?  I can't say how much she respects you as an opponent, because I don't know how close she thinks you are to breaking out, or how much of that was because of you being smart and how much of that was just her screwing up.  But I don't think she'd find it, warm to snuggle you, if she didn't respect you at all."

"That's not by any chance a message from the true Conspiracy Asmodia to me, is it?"

"Ordinary Asmodia is insulted that you think anybody who could pretend to be Ordinary Asmodia would ever do that.  I'm just reporting Ordinary's model of Conspiracy's thoughts to you, Conspiracy would never tell you her real thoughts like that, she'd figure out exactly what I'd say and then she'd say exactly that.  Which is not the same thing because I don't know what she's actually thinking."

"I know.  Just teasing."