She knows.  She's having his mind read.

The Ascendant Court comes into view. 

They ended up deciding to just have Lady Avaricia do the diffraction-grating-and-baseline art on a cloak, and then swap the Keltham-decorated cloak with that of the person who is really walking the Ascendant Court, so the illusionist doesn't have to fake that, or fake how it looks in the mirror or anything. 

The real Lord Fennelosa is entering a different building where everyone around him is safe to Message. 

The illusionist is pretty sure he can stitch the two together seamlessly. Greater False Vision is supposed to be good for that. 

The temples to Iomedae, Norgorber, and Cayden Cailean overlook the fog-cloaked island where the Starstone sits behind Aroden's protections. 

"Up first if you can find one, temple of Irori."  Iomedae is too predictable, and the Ascendant Court supposedly had temples to practically everything a century ago.

He asks a passerby for directions, gets pointed left, goes left. There it is. The architectural style is distinctly different from that of Absalom or Cheliax. The temple is crowned with a graceful green bulb.

The Chelish agent in the real court walks in, and Fennelosa walks forwards. The air is smoky; someone's burning incense.

Anyone around who looks like the salesperson or manager for Irori-related services?

There's a priest doing a channel healing for a large crowd; there's a ring out on the floor marking where to stand, with the priest at the center. He raises his arms and channels; after that, the crowd disperses.  A man limps over, belatedly. 

"Next one's in an hour," the priest tells him briskly.

"Can't heal or channel through this, right?" (aside to Carissa)

Ugh stop being Good. "No."

Message to the priest:  Hi, I'm a strange person in a strange situation, here via scry on the wizard who just walked in.  Do you have a price for a few priority minutes of your time to answer weirdly basic questions?

He casts Detect Magic, looks for the scrying sensor, tilts his head to address it. "It is worthwhile to seek to understand the world. You may have three simple questions without charge, and after that pay half what you earn in a day for more questions, up to the next hour bell."

"I worry that none of my questions will count as simple.  Your stated price to me works out to 36gp in terms of my direct salary, but most of what I earn is not in the form of salary but ownership of something that will have more value later, and that is not something I'd pay over.  I am not sure how long is until the next hour bell locally, but doubt I'll have cause to converse for as much as twenty minutes unless this becomes really fascinating."

"My first question would be what Irori would say of the afterlives for Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and Lawful Evil, and why one would wish to go to Axis rather than Heaven or Hell."

"Irori would say that people should go on their path, wherever it takes them, Rather than reasoning backwards from the question 'do I want to go to Axis or Heaven or Hell', you should think about who you want to be and what you want to achieve, and then look and see what afterlife can offer you that."

"I want a lot of very complicated things, but most of all, to become - myself, I suppose, realize the parts of myself that haven't developed yet, have the experiences that will show me who I am."

"But what I am trying to get at here is not to make that choice for myself, but - basic orientation to how certain choices work at all.  What do the different afterlives have to offer, who should go to Heaven and Axis and Hell, what happens to them when they do?"

"In Heaven over time you become an angel, a Lawful being with the Good in your nature amplified and strengthened. You can go to Heaven and refuse to become an angel but it is not common, and everyone you know will leave you behind. In Hell when you are ready for the trials you will face you become a devil, a Lawful being with the Evil in your nature amplified and strengthened. It is more common for people to go to Hell but refuse to become devils: those who go to Heaven generally aspire to become angels to do the work of angels in the universe, but people only become devils for themselves. 

Axis is a city of a hundred thousand smaller cities, and too many things go on there to name, and the Lawful outsiders of Axis are designed by a process the Material plane is not permitted to know. It is the afterlife that is most like living."

"Nirvana, Elysium, the Boneyard - what makes them less like living than Axis?"

"The Boneyard is meant to be temporary; Pharasma desires that no one make their permanent home there, and encourages the souls there to develop some sense of an alignment so they can move on there instead. In Nirvana every soul takes a form that relates to Nirvana's read of their deep desires and needs, which is nothing like the form they took in life. Elysium is a place of abundant joy and exploration and many people prefer it to Axis on the grounds that you do not have to pay rent, or purchase concert tickets, but this also is a respect in which it is unlike living."

"I see.  Thank you.  Those were not meant as simple questions, but you have given short answers to them, which is fair enough, I suppose.  Your price for more strikes me as relatively steep; I will pass on to other temples and perhaps return to this one, if it turns out you made the most sense after all or they charge even more."

Keltham is, in fact, remembering to check how the surroundings look in his Prestidigitated diffraction grating.  He has detected no anomalies so far.

Message to Fennelosa:  Next up, Abadar.

Sure. Off they go. 

- Keltham felt intuitively dissatisfied with those answers but he's avoiding focusing on that intuition until later so as to not give away his password, if he doesn't figure out why he's unhappy maybe the Conspiracy won't figure it out either -

(Keltham is also deliberately refocusing his attention on annoyance with a pricing concept that implicitly states that his time is worth at most a quarter, no, locally a tenth, of the other person's time, no matter what Keltham's own time is worth, but this doesn't seem like the priority for Abrogail to rebroadcast)

The temple of Abadar is larger than most of the other ones, and has a busy currency exchange at the entrance, where a group of chattering cat-people are exchanging lumps of jade for Absalom printed money. The woman behind them in line is yelling at them to hurry up. There's a thin teenage boy at the entrance, who greets Fennelosa. "How can I help you?"

"I'm attending by scry, in a complicated situation, and looking to talk to whoever present has the most knowledge of theology and the workings of money, if they have a reasonable fixed price for that."

- intends to use the priest's knowledge about economics as a test against their real identity as a priest of the commerce god, interwoven with theology questions, and telling them to shut up if they get suspicious that his questions have become desynchronized from their answers, to prevent - person-in-the-middle attacks - where we're giving his questions to a real priest of Abadar at the same time - he's not sure he can do it in a way the Conspiracy can't beat, but he intends to try -

" - most knowledge of theology would be the seventh circle priest Temos Sevandivasen," says the real attendant at the real temple of Abadar, which gets passed through with the name slightly changed so that the person isn't targetable by Sending. "An hour of his time is 400gp on short notice, 200gp if you book for later in the week, minimum of a quarter-hour."

Hm.  That's... expensive.  Sanity check, if fifth-circle is 500gp/week, and it goes up by a factor of 4 at each circle, and Temos works 4 hours a day 4 days a week... that would make sense, but Golarion people are supposed to have longer working hours than that.  Maybe Keltham will circle back to the Irorian priest after this, after all.

"Second-most knowledge of theology?"

"Sixth circle priest Allandra Kemi. I'll have to look up her rates for you." He has a book to hand for this. "80gp for an hour, 500gp for same-day."

    "Five hundred? That's more than the seventh-circle priest!" Fennelosa's impersonator objects.

The clerk looks at him strangely. "There's ....not a rule that your appointment prices have to correspond to your circle."