"I swear to you, Keltham, that the other end of this Gate is within the interdiction zone set out by Otolmens."

"Carissa, follow me and otherwise take no voluntary action," and Keltham walks through.

Carissa follows. 

Ione follows very quickly.

She follows too!

This room is a big, big library, probably not quite as big as the one he briefly scry-saw in Absalom. There's a fire crackling in a very large fireplace, and a thick woolen rug on the floor. There are windows; they look out on a grubby city-or-maybe-village with a lot of horse poop in the road.

"So if, hypothetically, you wanted me to believe that any of this was real, you could earn a lot of credibility points by presenting me with a complete story about reality all of which made sense in retrospect."

The Gate closes behind them. "That is what I got all of these books for! But I can tell you what the books say, if you would like. Hell is not voluntary, and is full of torture. The Church of Asmodeus had little purchase in Golarion, until Aroden's death plunged Cheliax into a thirty year civil war so destructive that by the time the Asmodeans won it, less than half the pre-war population remained. Since then, under Abrogail's grandmother and her successors, they have shaped Cheliax into a place where everyone lives in obedient terror or dies."

"They realized immediately that they would have to keep this from you. Nethys knows everything, but not all at once, so I can't tell you exactly how they did that; but I think Ione will know. Nethys picked Ione just before the interdiction was placed, and was not able to give her any instructions, but I think she has done very well."

"Do you by any chance aspire to someday cause some very big explosions in Cheliax," she adds to Ione. 

"Haven't really had a chance to form any aspirations like that before, what with all the mindreading.  But just on immediate reactions, rescue operation on Cheliax.  Explode Asmodeus."

"How did I get to Golarion, why did I land on Carissa, especially if she's not real, why didn't you intervene earlier if you could have intervened at any time, what is up with Snack Service, who's my god, what am I allegedly supposed to do next on your theory?"

"The powers that brought you here are beyond the gods. I think you called them tropes, and thereby got closer to looking straight at them than most people ever do. Carissa is a real person, who is really in love with you, and also she's a loyal Asmodean who wronged you terribly trying to obey her superiors; I think probably you should try to change her mind about that, now that she's allowed to think. I was not allowed to seek you out using knowledge from the fragments of Nethys that I am, as they are subject to the interdiction; however, today knowledge of you came to me via a path not touched by gods at all, so I scried you, and waited until you had your girlfriend because you'd be so sad if you left without her. 

Cayden Cailean decided to commit himself wholly to the task of making sure you didn't rape anybody despite having lots of sex in Cheliax which doesn't really understand how not raping people works. He told Asmodeus this served Asmodeus's interests too, presumably because you in fact could be even more mad at them than you are, somehow. Your god is Abadar. I think the next thing you should do is read a lot of books, though the next scene I am looking forward to is you talking Carissa out of Asmodeanism."

"Mmhm.  And this story's reason why Cheliax doesn't use Greater Scry to see me here, Teleport in, grab me, Teleport out again?"

"The temple is shielded from scries and Sending and bars teleportation. Also they would be starting a war with Andoran, but in some worlds they do that, so I don't want to rely on it!"

"And if I asked you about the result of my picking a random book, opening it to a random page, and reading out the first sentence there?"

"My vision is not that precise, not where prophecy is broken. People cannot be as random as they'd imagine but they can behave in a way that goes different ways in nearby worlds."

"Well, this part is something I'm pretty sure it's heavily determined I'd do, in quite a lot of worlds."

"How many letters are there in the sentence I'm currently speaking?"

"Sixty one."

She computed that answer faster than Keltham could check it himself, but maybe not faster than somebody with an Intelligence headband.  Definitely too slow for a precog.

Add that to the claim that Cheliax lied about Ostenso's closeness to the Andoran border this whole time, which has the feel of one of those made-up-in-retrospect stories -

There's a lot of calculations Keltham has been letting his wordless perceptions do, without thinking in words, hoping that it would defeat lesser mindreading or the sort of mindreading they can afford to use all the time.

Keltham didn't think in words why he had to be very careful of any Conspiracy attempt to get him to step outside Cheliax for a moment, why he had to check that the Gate led to a location still inside the interdiction, that only covers a relatively short distance around Ostenso (according to relatively early Conspiracy statements), and therefore still inside Cheliax (if none of this is real).

After all, invoking his compacted right to leave Cheliax without interference might not apply if he wasn't in Cheliax.

But this isn't that clever plot, apparently.

So it's just the one where they try to delay him for a day, until they can prep more powerful spells.

He turns to look at Carissa Sevar.

His Carissa.

For what may be the last time.

And then Keltham turns back to the old woman, who, if you look at her carefully enough, and try to see possibilities through your own faceblindness to Chelish faces, does not look definitely not like somebody he's met before.  If that person wore a wig and applied colored makeup, disdaining magical disguises, for fear of his Glimpse of Beyond spell that he still holds.

Gate is 9th-circle, and if anything they told him in Cheliax was true at all, there indeed aren't many people in the Inner Sea who can cast that.

To the old woman, then, he speaks.

"Do you really think that this doesn't happen in dath ilani stories?"

"There's a thing that the protagonist says, sometimes, at the end of a genre-aware eroLARP.  And I say it now."