Keltham to priest:  "Sorry, I'm trying to reconcile stories I was told.  How many women is the Pharaoh of Osirion - dating, or however this works?"

"Osirion doesn't do anything they or you would identify as dating. The pharaoh has eight wives, and hundreds of concubines, which historically was a social role that involved bearing him children but is more expansive these days. An Osirian would emphasize that to be a wife or concubine of the pharaoh means that he has obligations to you - to feed and house you and your children for life, to provide for your health and your dignity - and that your corresponding obligations to him are mostly about Osirion's legitimate interest in being assured of the paternity of potential heirs. It's not sexual slavery."

"And what kind of - selection process, constraints, laws, or customs if there aren't any laws - determines who ends up one of those hundreds of concubines?"

"Historically, many of the pharaoh's concubines were women presented to him as gifts by neighboring countries  on his ascension to power, women who came to his attention in some other ways, women captured on campaigns of conquest and so on. But that was the ancient Pharaohate, which Abadar had no part in. Today, recruiters go out and look for eligible candidates, conduct interviews, and present the pharaoh with the most promising, and the majority are selected through that process, though I think some cases are more complicated. Qadira does still send some girls as gifts, and it'd be very rude to turn them down about it."

"What happens if one of the gift girls from Qadira arrives in Osirion and announces that she's sorry but, having met the Pharaoh, she'd rather not be his concubine after all?"

"That really seems like a question you should ask of an Osirian. I know little of the inner workings of the Pharaoh's court. I doubt she would simply depart, but perhaps employment more suited to her could be found for her."

"Carissa, is this matching your understanding."

"If he doesn't actually grab girls he sees who suit him, then that's better than I knew. I sort of expect that if a concubine doesn't like it she gets told to grow up and do her job and not anger the powerful person who rules the foreign country she's been shipped to where she owns nothing, cannot legally work a job, and doesn't even speak the language. But I don't know anything firsthand, here."

It's... not out of the reach of Ordinary possibility, for Golarion, in terms of different sides of different factions having different stories and maybe not understanding each other all that well, Keltham supposes.  His childhood training in the Way would not have emphasized so much the need to make sure you understood the other side's story, as they would tell it themselves and from their own mouths, if that was not otherwise a failure mode of human beings.

"Carissa, back to the math mines, please."

And to the priest of Abadar:  "Okay, and trying again to verify those words were indeed from a seventh-circle priest of Abadar, I don't suppose you can give me any analysis of what we've just been discussing that sees the world the way a high priest of Abadar would see it?"

"I am tempted to analyze the dynamics between rulers and the lovers they take, or between men and women more broadly, through the lens of bargaining power," says Temas, as Carissa, smiling, turns back to her math notes. 

"Go ahead," Keltham says to the priest.

So she'll expound, from a relentlessly business-centric perspective that finds Law from the least dath ilani perspective she can conceive of with the Crown of Infernal Majesty helping, on how in navigating the supply of components or labor it's important which side has the better alternative to a negotiated agreement, and how differently the gains from trade might be distributed depending on that, and how the model can be applied to the hiring process that is romance, though of course Osirians don't really speak of romance so much as of household formation, along with some speculation about how Avistani gender norms are the consequence of a persistent deficit of men due to the way wars were fought in Avistan a few centuries ago differing from how they were fought in Garund, producing a population with more women than men and where the strategy of holding out for marriage was outcompeted. 

...and the combined powers of half of Project Lawful have finished both Asmodia's question and Carissa's; they know now how to solve problems together that they could not solve alone.  They can give Carissa the outline of the solution path, down to the most plausible of the false leads they followed, and she need only write it at whatever speed she thinks Keltham will find plausible.

Asmodia is doing the same, with her own problem, in between looking over the Shadow Project's individually generated notes on a Conspiracy of Project Lawful girls, to see what the statistical structure there should look like, how much commonality and how much difference there is.  She'll be able to correct, soon, any relative anomalies in the main Project Lawful's stories of what they think the Conspiracy would look like; they're all working on their stories now, without waiting, of course.

Asmodia doesn't let herself think that maybe the worst is past, because tropes.

That does seem like the sort of analysis he'd have expected from a 7th-circle priest of the business-god.  It's not even giving him the feeling of - staleness, of not seeing the new information he was really looking for - that he got from the earlier parts of the expedition.  So why is Keltham feeling not so great about the whole thing?  Because it's something that Carissa and Asmodia working together could plausibly have composed?  He tried to run a safeguard against that.  This should be some evidence for Ordinary, at the end of it, even if it's not decisive.  What was Ordinary supposed to do? - he should think of that later after it's too late for them to read his mind and do it.

Carissa turns in her completed problem before Asmodia does, and while the priest is in the middle of a particularly detailed and clever discussion of the different incentives which produced norms of large harems among rulers in Casmaron and not among rulers in Avistan.

...at which point Keltham realizes that he's gotten around as much evidence as he's going to get, here.

He tells the priest they're done.

And tells Fennelosa to go look for whatever accessible library he thinks would have the largest flaming Chelish history section they can find.  And it would be nice if Keltham could buy or borrow books from that library.

Fennelosa has no idea where the libraries in Absalom are, is it okay if he asks people?

He can even pay people.  Fennelosa has free rein on this one; Ordinary Cheliax can put its best foot forwards here.

All right, then, he'll go to the front desk of the Abadar temple and offer to pay for a list of suggestions, with extra money if the top suggestion is the same as the top suggestion of some other people he asks, and then he'll go out and over to the Nethysian temple and ask them too - god of knowledge, after all - and then the temple of Iomedae, who is after all a Chelish ascended human.

Keltham is trying not to think of how he plans to check things.

...is planning to read ahead more than one page this time, do other spot-checks around the book...

Cheliax has some magic text-editing items by now, and Korva Tallandria has been working hard behind the scenes with basically all of the Imperial book-editors in Cheliax, to re-prepare for this.  It's down to her, then.

- nobody tell Tallandria that.  It won't help.

Even the very early stage Project books that just replace the word "Taldor" with "Cheliax" everywhere and change the names of the rulers and cities should be on the shelves for this. They'll pass certain kinds of consistency tests that the other books won't, and Keltham already has low expectations for how much sense books make. 

And are preparations complete for the Ione-escapes-with-Keltham version of the Project collapse plans?

Sigh.  Yes.

It's not going to work despite Ione trying her hardest, because tropes.  Ione wants that very clear before she tries her hardest.  None of this 'You will pay the price of failure in pain nonetheless' bullshit, if they want her wholehearted cooperation on playing this out, and demonstrating that it can't work even so.  Ione is not an Asmodean and if Detect Thoughts and truthspells showed she did her best, that's it, no horrible tortures afterwards, okay?

(Not to mention that Lord Nethys has no doubt arranged for Ione to depart with Keltham when he leaves, so she won't have time to hang around being tortured.  No doubt.)