"Are we ready?"

"For Keltham? Yes. For a war with Cheliax? Readier than we'll be in a month. For whatever's actually going to happen? I doubt it. But - gods, at least he'll have the truth."

Carissa's answer checks out, about rational agents with common priors and common knowledge of each other's probabilities having the same probabilities.  It's actually pretty clever, instead of coming up with the obvious formalism on infinite epistemic states over infinite propositions, Carissa did this whole finitary thing with partitions of possible worlds, each of which included facts about which partition of worlds the agents inside those worlds thought they were inside; and just arbitrarily declared that not all possible subsets of worlds were possible epistemic states to avoid putting a powerset of a set inside itself.  There's some rather questionable claims afterwards about how real people should aspire to behave more like that, but they're very Carissa-characteristic claims, at least.

Asmodia's answer checks out, about the standard central distribution being the maximum-entropy infinite distribution with mean 0 and deviation 1.  She proved it in a complicated way involving constraint multipliers, but she proved it, and went on to correctly note that adding up lots of different independent variables will tend to preserve the sum of their means and the sum of their variances, while throwing away most other information, such that the sum of lots of independent variables will tend towards the maximum-entropy distribution with the sum of their means and the sum of their variances, aka the central distribution.

The rest of Project Lawful... wrote up a lot of different versions of the Conspiracy, almost all of which are planning to milk Keltham for his knowledge and turn him into a captive if he ever tries to leave and obviously never pay him his real profits, but which are planning to do that in different ways.  In most stories Carissa is the chief field agent, senior to Asmodia who is the chief person on-site working to keep everything consistent, both of them ultimately reporting to a widely varying set of Crown officers none of whom Keltham has ever heard about.  In other cases it's just entirely a set of hidden officials running the whole thing.  The Queen is always in on it.  The Church of Asmodeus doesn't have nearly the claimed involvement, isn't actually powerful in Cheliax, and none of the purported priests of Asmodeus actually works for him.  In some cases there's no such god as Asmodeus.  Other details vary widely.  Shilira's version of the Conspiracy is not suitable for insufficiently perverted readers.

Ione first wrote what he asked for, a hypothetical-best-guess mostly similar to that of the others; and then wrote three other versions: the first about how 'Golarion' mostly borders the Worldwound thereby explaining away the coincidence of Keltham's arrival there; the second about how Keltham never really left dath ilan; and the third of which is a single sentence, 'Keltham is still inside the mirror takaral'.  Ione's postscript notes that she's a Nethysian and doesn't want to obey rules all the time.

(Trying a variation of Keltham's question with the Shadow Project coming up with theories about an actually-false Conspiracy inside the Conspiracy world, with everyone instructed to independently do their best job at saying what that would be if it existed, showed that:  Virtually everyone said the Project Lawful girls were trying to escape Cheliax and evade Hell somehow; and that Sevar was the leader of their effort; and that Snack Service was the key to their escape plan.  Other details varied widely and without much structure that Asmodia could see.  Basically, obvious things are obvious and then people make up widely varying details on top of that, so far as Asmodia can tell.)

He rapidly skims a random selection of the purchased books.  It's much easier when Keltham can touch and control the pages himself.

...they're not obviously fake books.

The fiction, including the erotica, is written in a hugely over-verbose style and does not really make a lot of sense at all and Keltham is not sure which aspects are meant to be realistic or unrealistic.

It's taken for granted that a bunch of countries exist, including Absalom and Cheliax.  Magic-in-the-background works largely the way it's been represented to Keltham - which he did mostly think was the case, he's come into contact with wizard spells and cleric spells very directly.  There are beings called 'witches' and 'warlocks' who get powers in much vaguer ways and Keltham is not sure if these are supposed to be standard tropes or real things.  This paladin acts a lot stupider than that actual paladin that Keltham met, but this could be because the author is stupid and can't write a paladin any smarter than that.  This character is a seventh-circle wizard at age fourteen because he's the reincarnation of Nex, that probably doesn't happen but Keltham isn't sure.

In the erotica section, Keltham has no idea if any masochist or submissive has ever, ever thought this way in reality; but either masochists exist or they're enough of a standard fictional trope for a poverty-stricken world to have this many different pieces of fiction featuring them.

...can Keltham find any hints of masochism in the non-erotic fiction.

Wow.  Okay.  Keltham is in fact glad that Carissa Sevar is not like this.  But this character sure is in passing a masochist, yep, in a novel that is apparently somehow not pornography by the standards of that bookseller.

Different parts of the books, different aspects of them, feel real versus unreal.  The fiction is incredibly badly written, but not in a way that feels like it would be lower-effort for the Conspiracy to write.  Keltham would bet that Carissa Sevar would find it easier to write good fiction than for her to write fiction that is bad in exactly this way.  The characters are deeply unreflective; they hardly seem to think about their own thoughts at all, let alone correct them.  It's terrifying to consider that maybe this isn't so much bad writing, as what the average Golarion person is actually like; Keltham doesn't know which possibility is true, how could he.

Various magical facts appear in places where they're important to the plot and the Conspiracy couldn't have just edited that in afterwards.

Nothing in it... really gives the Conspiracy away.

(The Conspiracy had time to do some emergency editing, using some specialized magic items, while Keltham was continuing his scry-trip.  There's now several sections of the fiction books that will seem to weirdly make no sense on a careful, actual reading.  Asmodia is hoping Keltham does not pick one of those books and carefully read it all the way through over the next several hours.  There is not much else she can do but hope that.)

Okay, and now comes the labor-intensive part, which Keltham is frankly not looking forwards to.  Personally?  He does not actually like tackling epistemological problems rigorously.  It's work!  Not all of it is fun work either, when you've got to do this much of it!  It wouldn't be fun even if what he was trying to destroy with truth was not the seeming of things precious to him!

In a case like this, how that looks, is not that you pick a prior, and then go through everything you've seen and assign Ordinary vs. Conspiracy likelihood ratios.

What it looks like... is a large research problem.

According to Keltham's teachers on the subject of how to tackle Very Serious Problems, he should first try to collate all the points or observations that are potentially important:

- Observations or apparent facts that seem confusing even now;
- Things that stuck out at the time;
- Everything that caused him to update a lot, because any of that could be an adversarial Conspiracy move;
- Anything interesting that was said early on, before the Conspiracy had time to plan a lot, or they knew what kind of target Keltham represented, or knew what was important to optimize-over about him.

Then Keltham should organize that first disorganized list into rough categories, using computer-based outlining software that he does not, in fact, currently possess.

Then Keltham needs to stare at that list, look for intersections and correlations, and write down a lot of possible questions or confusions.

Then Keltham is supposed to organize that rough list of confusions and questions, and look for interactions between those.

Then Keltham is supposed to try to figure out plausible Conspiracies such that a lot of those questions would be resolved, and make note of the ones that are still unresolved for each Conspiracy theory.  He's also supposed to figure out plausible Ordinaries that would resolve those questions, if there's more than one notion of what the Ordinary world would have to look like; though, in the Ordinary world, he can just ask.

Then he's supposed to pre-update each of those theories into 'latently detailed' background stories that would, ideally, make all the particular observations have likelihoods with no further dependencies between each other - rather than observations needing to update the particular details of vague Conspiracy or Ordinary pre-theories, such that later observations would have likelihoods entangled with earlier observations.  Of course, this pre-detailing step must further penalize the priors for each added detail.

Then he's supposed to sweep through all of his observations for the latently-detailed versions of all of his remaining plausible theories.

This sweep through all the evidence needs to include an estimate of the cumulative gradual evidence from all the minor occasions where something Conspiracy-ish could have happened but didn't, all the things that aren't confusing but could have been.  Because if you only look at the confusions given Ordinary, as will all tend to weigh against Ordinary, that's a methodology that will always conclude in favor of Conspiracy.

And then Keltham is supposed to throw out the final numbers and go with his brain's intuitive sense, once he's actually forced his brain to weigh all the pieces of evidence.

Yeah, let's be frank here.

Keltham is not going to do all that.

Or rather, he's definitely not going to do it correctly.  Not on his first pass.  Not when he doesn't even have a computer that lets him rapidly type out all those thoughts, and easily reorganize hierarchical outlines.

He's going to half-ass it and hope that gives him a more definite answer without doing all that work.

Just like Keltham eighth-assed it last night, in his own head, in order to try to figure out which tests to do today.  Hoping that the experimental or observational results would change his intuitive sense of being stuck inside a fake world, or give him some important further insight, before he tried to half-ass this assessment today.

If half-assing it does not work, Keltham is frankly not sure he has it in him to whole-ass it.

('Just half-ass it, or if that's still too much effort, quarter-ass it', was in fact given as an approved out, by his teacher, to the supermajority of the kids who were by then staring at the teacher in horror about all that work.  That's how it always goes.  It's just that only the remaining kids have any chance at solving important problems when they grow up.)

Well, step one, try to write down all the weird-observations he can think of.  (In Baseline, but in a trivial cipher that Keltham can sight-read and sight-write.  It probably doesn't help much against scrying, with the Conspiracy also reading his mind, but maybe every little bit helps.)

He made a first pass last night, in his head; he didn't write it out, then, in case magic could read codes and Security was peeking at his notes.  Mindreading hadn't been as prominent in his hypotheses then.

Turns out, it gets a lot more detailed when he writes it all down.

Maybe he should've done that before his trip-by-scry, even if that would've given the Conspiracy much more time to prepare... no, Keltham is sticking with that first decision; if the Conspiracy was learning and preparing as fast as it looks, a quick early trip was the correct decision.  He can, if necessary, ask for another trip later.

Actually, doesn't that further imply that the Conspiracy wasn't reading his mind last night, if they weren't alarmed and alerted then?  Did he do something that tipped him off this morning, before he even got to Ione, that didn't tip them off last evening?  Add it to the list... actually, the part where he prayed for spells, if they can cheaply read the response from Keltham's god coming back, but mindreading him is more expensive, would be one obvious theory...  Say that mindreading requires Lrilatha around here somewhere, hidden, but Maillol, no, Subirachs because she was posted here later and could have special relevant talents, can read it off when Keltham's god grants him alarming-looking spells.

...his teacher did say to not let yourself be distracted during the observation-collation step.

Right.  Back to that long list of observations.

First, items he remembers thinking about last night, but written down this time:

- Somehow Keltham ended up confined to a very small location and without a lot of outside information.  Okay, admittedly Keltham didn't push on this.  By the time he had any money he could have spent on a shopping trip including the cost of Teleports and a scry, he was busy storming for spellsilver.  But still.
-- This had loomed very large in Keltham's notice the last night - the sense of being confined to a tiny world, deprived of observation, it felt like that was the circumstance that made Conspiracy continue to feel so possible.  Was there some truth of the larger world that they were trying very hard to hide from him, by keeping him inside one fortress?  Possibly even along the lines of there existing no such country as Cheliax after all?

- Similarly, Keltham has somehow mysteriously ended up inside an 'interdiction zone' maintained by Broom's god, Otolmens, which explains why Keltham's own god is no longer able to contact him or pick out helpful spells for him.  It would be terribly dangerous for Keltham to leave this relatively narrow zone around Ostenso.  Possible in Ordinary, but.

- The critiques of Cheliax that he got from the lantern archon and the paladin felt sort of weaksauce for Golarion.  This is something that it took a long time for Keltham to notice because those would be totally reasonable interfactional critiques in dath ilan.  'Lawful' Good, 'Lawful' Neutral, and 'Lawful' Evil in Golarion are not actually that Lawful and should be in much sharper states of disagreement than that.

- Carissa talking about pitting rats against rats and them fighting to the death in a cannibalistic frenzy, to which she'd sell tickets.  That stood out under Owl's Wisdom, and even in retrospect, knowing that Golarion has afterlives, there's something darker about it than just - a relaxed attitude towards violence.  It implies - not so much being a spectator but more like - hating the rats - Keltham doesn't know.  He couldn't figure out how to investigate this.

- The Zon-Kuthon god-war.  This is supposedly an incredibly rare event in Ordinary, the last god-war having happened a hundred years earlier.  Even if you say it happened because Keltham showed up, Keltham showing up is itself then necessarily a much rarer sort of event in Ordinary, versus Conspiracy where it could potentially happen every five years or whatever and they haven't told him.
-- The way that Nidal ending up attacking at a moment where Keltham could see it happen, instead of being hidden inside while it happened, supposedly was triggered by Ione's prophecy; but it's never actually been explained how Nidal had eyes on Ione.
-- Ione giving prophecies in a world of 'shattered prophecy' is a further improbability in Ordinary.

- When he first arrived at the villa, he'd already formed a hypothesis that Carissa might be hiding facts about gods from him, and then lo and behold there weren't any books detailed in theology in the villa library.  This is maybe excused by it being a really awful library with respect to having any broad reference coverage of basics, his future researchers had better books about wizardry in their bags, but it stands out as a successful advance prediction of a very early Conspiracy theory.

- Supposedly Ostenso academy's only book with a list of cleric spells was out, borrowed, and not returned for a few days.  At the time Keltham assigned that 0.75/0.30 likelihood for Conspiracy over Ordinary, but in later reflection it seems even less plausible.  Cleric spells can be used in synergy with wizard spells, cleric spells can be built into magic items by wizards working with those clerics, arcane magics are constructed in imitation of divine magics, Ostenso academy should have had more than one book with a list of cleric spells.

- Ione's confession to him.  It feels weird, anomalous, even in hindsight, and even with Ione having tried to carefully explain away why she'd done that.  It renders it explicable in Ordinary, yes, but it also feels like - a latent explanation carefully constructed after the fact.

- Manohar and Asmodia.  Same feeling.  There's a story where that happened in Ordinary; it's a possible story; it nonetheless has the feeling of a story constructed after the fact.

- Carissa trying to mimic outward sexual responses she wasn't really feeling.  There's a story after the fact for why it happened, that story holds together, it rhymes with Chelish 'dignity', but he was still surprised at the time and it still has that feeling of something that potentially has a different explanation.

- Pilar going to Elysium... okay actually nothing about Pilar has that made-up-afterwards feeling.  It doesn't make any sense, but it doesn't give off the feeling that any other explanation would make more sense.  Still, it's weird and surprising.

- The Queen of Cheliax like totally decided to go on a Sadistic Date with his girlfriend.  Abrogail supposedly insisted on this against the counsel of her advisors.  This is not impossible in Ordinary, but it is clearly not what was going on in Conspiracy.  If there are tropes producing this kind of impossibility, if that's the real explanation, then it shouldn't have been possible to defuse the whole thing without any conflict; if there are no tropes then why was the Queen trying to date Carissa.
-- Today there was a whole book specifically about Abrogail Thrune for sale, like somebody was trying really hard to convince him that a person like that existed.

...and Keltham goes on trying to complete that list, potentially including items from today's trip too.  Not really trying to organize them as yet.

- His personal shopper kicked a child.

- Ione not being present in the library.  Keltham is still wobbling between how much he wants to call that a total coincidence versus evidence of Conspiracy mindreading.  People do spend some minutes in the bathroom after waking up, right?  It just feels like - the Conspiracy read his mind, panicked, told Ione to be in the bathroom.

- More generally, there was a feel of the Conspiracy being bad at things early on and then getting better at them later.  The Ordinary version of the story is that the first bookseller was bad, the second bookseller was better, and then Keltham allowed his representative to go looking for a real library instead of steering him into random bookstores.

- He still basically feels like he is surrounded by a veil that he hasn't been able to pierce.  He doesn't feel like he understands Cheliax, or like he understands what the rest of Golarion is like.

- If you can use a lead helmet or a 1-inch iron helmet to guard against mindreading, or emanation spells in general, is it really the case that nobody mentioned this to Keltham until now?  Security isn't wearing helmets?

- Now that Keltham has seen a Bag of Holding in use, used to store books in particular, it's much more salient that Ordinary could've offered to, like, Teleport in a roomful of books from a major library in Cheliax on subjects of Keltham's choice, and let Keltham have the run of those books for a week.  Fine, Keltham didn't ask, and it would have distracted him for a week during which spellsilver work would've slowed down.  And yet.

- His knowledge about afterlives still isn't at a point where Keltham would feel remotely comfortable entrusting his mind-state and Future to one.  Even though Early Judgment apparently gave him a full video view of his own, even though there are outsiders walking around in Golarion, and even though Keltham kept trying to ask.  He got an assurance that enhancements were voluntary, and for sale, and that seems almost tailored to Keltham, albeit it was the Abadaran and not the Irorian priest who said it.  Maybe people here just don't know how to be specific?  And yet.
-- "Churches don't like it when you speculate about afterlives" has that made-up-after-the-fact feeling about it.
--- Interesting to contrast that to the business with Sarenrae's Church disliking pornography for no disclosed reason, which also makes no sense, but in a way that feels more like Golarion Craziness than like this was Made Up Afterwards.  Maybe it's because it's hard to visualize Maillol or Subirachs getting angry about somebody making up wrong facts about Hell, instead of carefully explaining things to them.

Okay, that feels disorganized, like he should maybe defer it to a full consideration of today / today's trip, in a more ordered way that involves reviewing the transcript.

Maybe instead he should go back to...

...trying to complete his list of the big items, that frame the hypotheses that today's fresh-in-memory observations could update against:

- Keltham arriving in Golarion, instead of being dead, was a pretty large surprise to him at the time.  His explanation for this surprise is not necessarily correct; for him to postulate that the Keepers have figured it out as an a priori necessity is not the same as Keltham having really understood that a priori necessity for himself, even if he has a plausible theory about how that could be the case.  This is mostly not the sort of thing that Keltham is expecting to explain today, but it's still a big deal that should always be somewhere on any list of major confusions.

- Similarly, his landing at the Worldwound, on Carissa, who seems very romantically compatible with him, is thought in Ordinary to form part of that same weirdness and improbability; that apparent observation could still be better explained by some Conspiracy theory.

- Everything to do with Snack Service.  Supposedly if Keltham thinks about this too much, Snack Service is retroactively allowed to help him less.  Keltham is skeptical, but he will try computing everything without Snack Service in it; and if it looks afterwards like Snack Service is a huge missing piece or an obvious Conspiracy tactic, then sorry, but Keltham is going to add in the Snack Service part.

- Masochists.  Damage-resistant masochists.  Okay they demonstrated that Keltham himself has now acquired the same damage resistance, and there sure does seem to be a reasonable corpus of erotic novels to read on the subject, but it remains incredibly not expected in advance and goes on the list.

- The whole eroLARP thing, with Keltham having an unreasonable number of interesting girlfriends who were all supposedly quickly collected out of Ostenso wizard academy.  Okay, fine, Pilar was supposedly oracle-cursed afterwards and Meritxell (or as Keltham refers to her in private, 'All Other Girlfriends') maybe isn't that interesting in an objective sense.  But Ione is supposedly Nethys-touched and Asmodia is... Asmodia.  That's still a lot of interesting girlfriendness to have been randomly collected out of a wizard academy's top female students.

- Yaisa seems totally unproblematic in any way; except for being way too perfect at what she is and does, while not having any problems.  If this whole investigation ends up resurrecting the tropes hypothesis, then there is some kind of huge deal about Yaisa that is being hidden.  There have been no hints of this, unless Keltham is really missing something, and it should arguably go down as a point against some more paranoid hypotheses.

- Golarion continues to seem to be overall worse off than the number of Golarion Doomfacts that Keltham knows about can account for.
-- Keltham did tell Carissa it was okay not to dump all of the doomfacts on him at once.  He should at the very least be trying to keep around a Possible-Ordinary hypothesis where some things are being lightly obscured from him in a friendly way, so that Keltham doesn't, like, get suddenly hit with something 100x worse than a slave market.
-- No he should not just put on an artifact headband if there are things around 100x worse than slave markets.  He.  Doesn't think.  He still doesn't think.  For now.

- Korva Tallandria, who was presumably heavily screened before being offered to the Project, publicly burst into tears supposedly in an 'ordinary' way not indicative of a huge mental break.  Keltham doesn't see what this points at, but it surprised him at the time, so it goes on the list.

- He's been promised a trip to Ostenso in 1 day, which might turn into 2 days.  He can supposedly get lots of books if he's a little patient.
-- In Conspiracy worlds, this means either that they can fake a lot more things on a day's notice to prep new spells, or that, on a day's notice to prep new spells, they can mind-control him... in some way that would have been too expensive or too risky or have downsides which is why they didn't do it immediately.

- Keltham was recently surprised, and should have maybe noticed a trace of confusion, when Cheliax said they wanted to make a massive nation-scale push at spellsilver, without having offered him nation-scale resources earlier on, even when it should've been apparent that Keltham was headed there.  And why one month?  That's a weird time interval in which to try to scale, given Cheliax's apparent level of state capacity and how urgent they've been about things previously.  Keltham doesn't have any idea of where that's going, he's just noticing a trace of confusion about the whole thing.
-- Seems worth noting that this new deal kicked off Keltham's own attempt at Conspiracy review.  If the Conspiracy is gauging him very exactly, that could itself be some sort of plot.  Like, Keltham isn't seeing it at all, but he's still noting it down.

...feels like some of thoughts, while productive, aren't maximally productive.  He should maybe be trying to take more low-hanging fruit.

So Keltham tries to remember, think back, notice things that surprised him very early on when the Conspiracy might have been worse at hiding things.  If you suppose that they got better at hiding things over time, even today, and then extrapolate that backwards in time, they'd have been very bad at it during the early days.

- It surprised Keltham, on the evening of Day 0, that Asmodeus was supposedly the only Lawful Evil god worth mentioning, except for one incredibly awful exception, and that all the other Evil gods were totally unworthy trade partners.  Are they possibly hiding Evil gods who would be decent competition with Asmodeus as trade partners?
-- In the same way that he's not hearing about other Evil gods worth dealing with, besides Asmodeus, why is Keltham not hearing anything about other Evil countries, besides Cheliax?

- Back when Keltham's unknown god could select spells for him, it selected (Day 1) Sanctuary, Aura Sight, Invisibility Purge, Spell Immunity, Glimpse of Beyond, and a spell that gave him a vision of horror that was supposedly Xovaikain; and (Day 2) 2 Auguries, Detect Desires, Detect Anxieties, Protection, Summon Monster III, Enchantment Foil.  Invisibility Purge and maybe Aura Sight is supposedly explained by Broom... or the Aura Sight was to tell Keltham his god was Lawful Neutral since his hosts didn't tell him that right away.  Sanctuary, Protection, Enchantment Foil, Summon Monster III, and Vision are explained if the Zon-Kuthon war was real.  Why were those spells there, in the world where the Zon-Kuthon war was fake?  The entire spell list should go into the set of things to be potentially explained in different ways.

- Galt has the only army that doesn't rape and pillage, because they're zombies... no, that was Ged, or Geb, or something.  If that's true there should be much harsher criticisms of Cheliax in the books, right?  Unless other countries are refraining from that critique because they know their own armies are no better?  That seems fairer than he'd expect Ranting Golarion Authors to be.

- It's supposedly surprising that he got 4 cleric circles overnight.  Carissa said this was incredibly rare, and explained it as Keltham's god worrying that he might need to fight.  This continues to seem well-explained by the Zon-Kuthon affair or just by Keltham being incredibly important, in Ordinary, but may have a different story in Conspiracy.  In particular, Keltham now knows that his saves against various spells depend on his caster circles.

- The wacky wizard teacher boasting about himself, in his book about teaching wizardry, said something about punishing students after class... because they couldn't concentrate if you did that during the day, which doesn't sound like the point was just teaching-to-intuitive-mechanisms, and... is Keltham remembering correctly that the wizard teacher said something about keeping them after school so they couldn't just get healed?  Okay now that Keltham is actually thinking back on that, WHAT.  At the time it was just blurring into everything else being weird and wrong and incomprehensible, but now Keltham has some context and that doesn't sound like... Pilar... maybe it does sound like Pilar but it doesn't sound like Carissa and supposedly not everybody is like that.
-- Maybe this is Keltham misremembering something, and he should ask for another copy of that book.  Or test Conspiracy/Ordinary on whether that book happens to be one of the ones destroyed in the attack on the archduke's villa.
-- okay, but meanwhile it still goes on the list, in case this is somehow the one piece that causes everything to make sense somehow

- He was surprised by the whole Chelish 'dignity' thing, where everybody seems relentlessly cheerful even if they're actually confused and bewildered.  If that's a dead giveaway of anything, the Conspiracy might not have realized at the time they needed to hide it.  Keltham doesn't see where it goes, but it's a surprise so it goes on the list.
-- People in the streets in Absalom did not have the Chelish 'dignity' thing going on.  People had all sorts of facial expressions.

Okay, yeah, the Conspiracy looks kind of fucked at this point.

Keltham is hitting like 5% of the problematic points that Asmodia identified in the complete transcripts (that everyone carefully edited in case of Keltham demanding transcripts).  But Keltham is hitting some of the largest points.  If anything that's worse, it means Keltham will be thinking about the important points without a lot of distractors.

...maybe Keltham can still manage to get everything wrong, if he puts together those pieces without knowing what the correct answer is supposed to be?

Maybe.  Maybe they can get that miracle.  But then is Keltham going to get his guesses wrong enough that he doesn't - just conclude that things still don't make enough sense on any known hypothesis, and that he needs to try an Owl's Wisdom and a Fox's Cunning to work it out.  Does Keltham not demand that Cheliax go Teleport to an ordinary Chelish library in the Queen's dominion, today, and grab all the history books that fit into a bag of holding, like he just thought about?  Does he end up wrong enough to go to sleep tonight without answers?  That's the miracle that Asmodia isn't seeing and that she doesn't think they can get.

Carissa seconds that; this is just what a loss scenario looks like, with the only remaining possibility being the fake escape plan. Keltham in fact picked up that they might've been making mistakes early on; they were making mistakes early on; they lose. 

They should still try the fake escape plan, modified to be as tropey as possible, because a 5% or 10% chance is much better for Cheliax than nothing. But they should also probably be preparing to invade Osirion. 

She feels sick, but not in a way that's very impairing. 

The books in Tien have shown up. She orders them placed beneath the Rope Trick with a note Keltham can read, rather than interrupt him.

Keltham sees it through the screen, out of his peripheral vision.  The note is in large letters, but it's hard to read up here, through the screen.

Not particularly thinking about what he's doing, Keltham casts Prestidigitation, then turns the screen near-invisible.  A fly, apparently startled by the event, buzzes away.  Keltham isn't focused on that part consciously; he's still having a bit of trouble reading the note, so he grabs a lens-shaped volume of air and changes its refractive index until the note enlarges in his vision and becomes visible.

Something in the back of his mind notes that Keltham really is become a magic-user, now, something that belongs in Golarion and couldn't use all of itself elsewhere.

...his books and newspapers from Tien have arrived.

Good, Keltham guesses.

There's a developing sick feeling in him like maybe he doesn't need them.  Is there a point?  A Conspiracy that could fake the Chelish history section of a library has had time to pick nonproblematic books out of a distant place that doesn't think much about Cheliax, and maybe try to quickly censor or edit those...

And yeah, if Keltham is feeling that sick way about things - like things are going to fall apart as soon as he takes the items on his list, and starts looking for connections and ways to fit them together - then maybe it's time for him to, go ahead, and finish this, if his mind already knows where it needs to go.

Carissa is sitting on the grass, below him, looking cheerful, as Chelish people do, messing with her headband-manufacturing-assistive devices.

'His' Carissa.

Keltham's not - not really reasoning it through carefully, when he does what he does next.  Before that.  It might be a giveaway.  The Conspiracy is reading his mind anyways.  That's not certain, the Rope Trick could defend against it.  The Conspiracy wouldn't have told him about Rope Trick if that was a real possibility -

Keltham just does it anyways.

He writes a note, and carefully pushes it out of the Rope Trick, underneath the edge of his Prestidigitated fragile screen.

So, what does Conspiracy Carissa think of Keltham?

Obviously Conspiracy Carissa's simulation of Ordinary Carissa, won't really know.  Or will say something Conspiracy Carissa thinks is useful, though, if it's visibly useful, to him, it leaks bits.  Maybe, if they're reading his mind, and if they're expecting him to figure it out, they're past worried about leaking bits, and will say something else carefully designed to manipulate him -

Keltham doesn't know why he's doing that.

For whatever it's worth, if they're reading his mind, he intends - to compute things without whatever Carissa says, he won't consider it in his evidence for Conspiracy, or against it, just like if he found somebody with a missing head and needed to figure out without that whether they'd been murdered.  Keltham can't really do that, he's not smart enough or wise enough to be a judge in a court of Civilization, but he can just, read whatever it is, and then put it aside and not think about it while he's adding up the rest of the evidence.

She said that to him, that she knows exactly what Conspiracy Carissa thinks of him.  Maybe there was a reason Carissa said that.  So he'll ask.

Sure. Okay. 

Her instincts have always been the only thing that's any good for fighting Keltham, anyway.

Conspiracy Carissa wants you to beat her fair and square, so she knows you'll win when we're both trying.

And she'll have been hoping, all along, that when you learn the truth you'll go to her superiors and say, all right, now if we're going to get started on restitution, here, the first thing I want is Carissa, body and soul, to sell in those markets in Absalom if I like, because she should never have been yours. 

That could be Ordinary Carissa, guessing at what exactly-herself inside the vaguely-defined-Conspiracy could be thinking, sure.

If it means anything else, Keltham will figure it out after he figures out the Conspiracy.

First, because it sure would be tragic to arrive at a grim conclusion by mistake -

Actually, no, that would not be too tragic, not unless it leads him to do something disastrous - which - there's things he can do, that one would not think would be disastrous, rechecking conclusions under mental enhancement for example -

- anyways, to be balanced, he's supposed to also list out the things that weigh against Conspiracy.

Most prominently among them:

Why didn't they just cast Suggestion on him?

...

- because people develop resistance with repeated exposure
- because it in fact only lasts a few minutes rather than hours, and Lrilatha or whoever would literally run out of spells
- because people affected by it are stupider about related subjects, in a way that would've affected Keltham's useful spellsilver research ability

It's evidence, strong evidence even, but not infinitely strong.

It would've just felt - like if he'd said any of those things, back then, after Lrilatha's demonstration - that it would've been like, he was trapped forever in maybe-Conspiracy, immune to all evidence, and unable to be happy with the Carissa who apparently loved him.

Peranza said that she realized she wasn't happy and wanted to go to Hell.  A very ordinary thing to happen in Ordinary.  In Conspiracy there'd have to be - some reason to pull Peranza, who isn't in Hell at all now - well, there could be a reason Keltham doesn't know, why Conspiracy would do that.  But it stands out as something that feels more probable in Ordinary than in Conspiracy, pointing to something else that has to be true in Conspiracy, if the first part is true.  Actually you could say the same about Korva breaking down in tears; that's strange in Ordinary but it's even stranger in Conspiracy.

If they're just lying to him about everything, why haven't - Keltham is having trouble figuring out how to pin down the exact discongruity here.  Why not have Lrilatha swear an oath to him that there's no Conspiracy?  Okay, maybe Lrilatha didn't do that because it would directly stake her credibility against Conspiracy's credibility, highlight in his attention that in Conspiracy worlds the oaths also aren't real.

Cheliax negotiated with him and had some weird asks in the Project contract, if they're just planning to steal from him, like the clause about two-thirds of Chelish profits going into a Cheliax-only investment fund, that Keltham negotiated down to half.  That made him slightly suspicious, and doesn't gain them anything if they're planning to steal everything anyways, so why include that if the Conspiracy just lying about everything?  Because there had to be some weird pushy asks or it would have felt suspicious to Keltham, if 'Cheliax' had just given way on all his asks immediately?

...Carissa did say very early on that Asmodeus's domain includes compacts.  Carissa talked about there being a 'Lawful' alignment axis very early on, and gods and afterlives falling on those axes.

Maybe Keltham can offer to pay Lrilatha 1000gp for ten minutes during which she either gives true answers to his questions, or says nothing, and then she actually does have to follow through, or refuse the compact.

...why wouldn't they just use an illusionary Lrilatha?  Or is that also not allowed?  Keltham can - sort of see it being not allowed - on some plausible background assumptions about how Lawfulness and Lawful gods work.

Well, among his options if he ends up uncertain are to request a paid truth-else-silence compact with Lrilatha, and see if she's mysteriously in Hell and can't get back until tomorrow...

"Welp.  We're fucked."