Then we want to interrupt him before he has, emotionally, already resigned himself to losing me.

She lies down on the grass and looks up at the sky. She's kind of worried about what feelings she's going to have once she stops trying not to have feelings. 

We can put you to sleep for a brief time, Chosen, if you'd rather not think.

Let's run through the fake escape one more time, see if we can poke any more holes in it. Then - 

- it feels like admitting weakness. But perhaps it's better to admit weakness than to pretend you possess strength you don't. 

Keltham sits up.  He didn't sleep, and didn't much succeed at quieting his own thoughts.  There are disciplines for that, but it seemed like - the wrong time, the wrong situation, to use them.

Part of his brain sure does seem sad about how the day went.

Is this, possibly, probability-theoretic nonsense?

Keltham took a fairly hard run at the Conspiracy.  That could've broken a veil, if there'd been a veil there.  No such blatant break occurred.

On some very basic level, that ought to count in favor of Ordinary, not against it, and he should be less emotionally worried about Conspiracy than he was this morning.

Does Keltham's brain buy this?

...nope.

Why is that, Keltham's brain?

...apparently his brain thought he was supposed to get stronger first-order evidence for Ordinary, than he was able to get, and his failure to get that first-order evidence second-order weighs against Ordinary.

...can his brain possibly give an example of what that expected first-order evidence was supposed to look like.

It looks like... the booksellers having a broad selection of Chelish history books.  Right away.  Rather than that having to wait for the library, after the Conspiracy has had a chance to frantically produce a lot of new books, half of which aren't for sale or borrowable.

It looks like there not being totally logical and rational in-universe reasons why a visit to Ostenso has to wait until tomorrow.

Or the first bookseller's book 'critical' of Cheliax sounding a bit more like the book 'critical' of Qadira.

...this does not seem like it quantitatively justifies a major increase in despair, brain.  These are not things that must happen in the Ordinary universe.

It just felt on an intuitive level like what was going on today was Keltham failing to pierce the veil and not finding decisive evidence, not like he was walking freely around in a world where no veil existed.

You know, if there's an actual Conspiracy they're probably going to be pretty annoyed if Keltham ends up walking out on them for reasons like that.

...what, is the Conspiracy supposed to think that we should now resolve this battle fairly, determining in a Lawful way who won the contest, by iterating through all the events of the day, multiplying together the likelihood ratios we assigned at the time, multiplying by whatever prior we previously assigned, and coming to a decision on that basis?

At least Conspiracy Asmodia has to know better than that.  Or Conspiracy Carissa.  It's not like we haven't told them that the rule even for small cases is to make up a prior and a likelihood ratio, multiply them together to get a posterior, and then throw that number out and go with your intuitive feeling once you've forced your brain to actually ask all of the correct questions.

And this is a huge case, involving a huge number of conditional dependencies between all of the things going on.  You can't just take the likelihoods your busy brain was making up without keeping running track of how the most likely Conspiracy and Ordinary universes were shifting with each update, and multiply all of those likelihoods together.  They know that too.

Finally, if there's an actual Conspiracy on the other side of this, we are absolutely not supposed to be having a fair fight with them.  We should just boost Wisdom and possibly also Cunning, try to focus just on this one issue, and then if that starts to go wrong quickly drop out of the Rope Trick and ask for an emergency Dispel.

...well, part of him sure definitely thinks that if he does that it means he never gets to see Carissa again.

Yeah, okay, enough of that, let's just actually walk through the evaluation of the evidence from today and from all other days.

Keltham forgot, in fact, to cast Detect Intelligence where he could verify that it just detected Intelligence scores.  Or get Detect Intentions cast on him by that Security.  Keltham is willing however to expect that this test would go the way that the Conspiracy said it would.  And if Keltham casts Detect Intelligence afterwards and it's hugely anomalous, he can change his conclusions then.

So step one is to review Carissa's and Asmodia's math homework, the other researchers' Conspiracy homework, and skim a random selection of the books that were actually bought or borrowed.  Just do his own homework first.  The longer he delays before doing that, the more time the Conspiracy has to finish the half-written books and transform the ones he has in here, using their eighth-circle wizardry that can in fact go right through a Rope Trick.

Well, it's not trivial even with eighth circle wizardry.  Manohar is, presently, a gaseous housefly clinging to the bottom of Keltham's screen, just inside the Rope Trick, having been Polymorphed by Polymorph Any Object rather than Greater Polymorph as it lasts longer. Every half hour he has to fly out and get the Polymorph suppressed so he can recast Detect Thoughts and have Gaseous Form recast on him; more frequently than that he flies down an inch to deliver a situation report. 

Unfortunately for anybody who didn't want to think about probabilities, Asmodia has now realized something else they like totally forgot to do today!  They should have been running a prediction market and a conditional prediction market this whole time!

So now Asmodia is setting up a quick prediction market about the chance that the primary deception around Keltham shatters, and a secondary conditional prediction market about the chances that different versions of the backup escape plan work, further-conditional on those becoming necessary.

Asmodia's opening bid is 80% that the primary deception shatters before tonight / before they can turn Keltham into a statue for a year, with the second condition winning if there's a difference between them.

Keltham just has too much information, is Asmodia's guess, his thoughts about the Conspiracy were starting to track too closely to what was actually going on around him.  He's not limited to the information from today, he also has evidence from when the Conspiracy was younger and less practiced.  They don't just have to quell his doubts; they have to quell his doubts far enough that Keltham decides not to try an Owl's Wisdom, and then, Asmodia is thinking, taps himself with Fox's Cunning once the Owl's Wisdom makes him realize that's the wise thing to do.

(Keltham has by now had a chance to demonstrate to Asmodia that some of her probabilities were a tad overconfident; Asmodia's intuitive guess was 90%, and would have been 95% without that demonstration and some amount of correction-of-intuition.  80% is her weaker second-order probability after trying to compensate for her remaining intuitive overconfidence.)

So 80%.  Any bidders?

And Asmodia is basically not betting that the main unfixed version of the backup escape plan works, she'll sell anything over 10% on that, if there's any bidders; but she would maybe bid like 5% or 10% on a plan working if it involves at least Ione and Asmodia and Carissa in anti-magic handcuffs.

...okay, actually Asmodia needs the Queen or the Most High to sign off on telling bettors that, in the event the primary deception fails and the backup fake-escape plan doesn't work, they aren't all going to be executed and will remain in a state to have some use for money afterwards.  Because otherwise people are placing bids at probabilities that do not make any sense.

Here is Asmodia's mind being totally sincere about how much she did not cleverly plan that and just legitimately tried to do this obvious thing, that they obviously ought to do, and then ran into herself not being able to do that correctly because people were scared.  She is not trying to extort any promises out of anybody, it just looks to her like Cheliax would obviously continue to have use for Project Lawful either way and is not going to kill off a tenth of all the Security officers in Cheliax, and if Asmodia is right about that, it would be useful to the betting market to say so.

Diminished-Abrogail wishes she could sleep away the moments before she gets her Crown returned.  +4/+4/+4 is not two-thirds of her Crown.  But she would be less defended, then, even with the Most High standing guard over herself.  To remain awake and also guard herself is the wiser course, to preserve herself and her throne.  So Abrogail endures.  It is good for a soul now and then to suffer and endure; Abrogail probably receives too little of that to keep herself strong.

There are emotions in her, harder to keep in rein and check than they would be with her Crown worn.  This creature of Aspexia's will need some correction, at some point, in Abrogail's own opinion.

But also, the little creature is sincere on her surfaces, and she is correct that people are being stupid.

"I was not, in fact, planning to execute a huge number of the most valuable people in Cheliax, who only failed me and did not betray me, who will be needed whatever comes of this.  You will not receive any promises from me on the subject, fools, but I was not planning to be stupid.  I currently expect you will have some use for money in the future either way.  That is all."

Carissa is at this point half-occupied in her own mind tying up knots trying not to think about things that it's probably not wise to think about, and is not going to let her mind go anywhere near the question of what's going to happen to her after she fails, if she fails, but it seems kind of obvious to her that you should bet with the actual odds you think are correct, so they are slightly more likely to succeed at this, whether you think you're going to be executed or not. 

(Unfortunately several Chelish Security have now realized that money is more valuable to them if the deception around Keltham fails because they will get less rich if the Project is not a total success.

Nobody is reading their minds about this, and it's going to look to Asmodia just like Security is overconfident in their pessimism because they didn't get anti-overconfidence lessons.)

"Well, I have good news for you."

"Guards? Throw this imposter out. Merenre never has good news for me."

"Keltham's about to see through them. Well. Ninety percent that Keltham's about to see through them, if Chelish people understand how making predictions works. Though, if they did, hard to fathom they'd go on being Chelish people."