"...secret-from-me prediction markets?  I don't know whether to be proud or annoyed, and will maybe delay that decision pending hearing about what secret prediction markets."

"The one that saw the most movement was about which girl would be the first whose mind or loyalty breaks."

"Did it ever pay out?"

"Twice. Pilar and Peranza."

Keltham draws, heavily, on the glibness, and even so, knows it probably doesn't look quite right.

"I doubt it succeeds, especially since they'd know this was a very likely time window.  But I request a scry, regular version fine, on Peranza, at the government's convenience."

"Unless you already know what really happened to her."  She - did seem to - Peranza was together enough to tell Keltham goodbye, even if that was scripted for her - or was that another illusion?  Illusion according to this level of reality, that is.  Or Dominate Person - would there have been signs Keltham could see, if Dominate Person was being used on Peranza - according to this level of reality -

"We've tried scrying her several times since the market resolved and have been unable to see anything. Our best guess is that she was executed and is in Hell; the other major possibility is that she was petrified and stashed in an unscryable location. Her soul changed hands in Dis for about a hundredth of what it was purchased for, which seems more consistent with 'she was in Hell and worth less than expected' than that much market movement off some communication from Golarion about the betrayal, but we don't know for sure, and can't rule out that Hell has noticed Abadar can see them when they try using markets and is trying to feed us false information."

"Snack Service said not to - jump to conclusions, take actions, I haven't reviewed exact words - until I knew the real story about Peranza including a fact that only one person there knew enough to deduce. I check that this person was not an Osirian who promptly solved the riddle and reported to you."

"It was not."

His employees were being mindread, which mostly rules out only one of them having access to a key fact.  Unless Security read it from them and didn't propagate it to anyone else there, including Abrogail or Aspexia.  That's possible but a hit to probability.

Obvious candidates for the one person:  Abrogail, Aspexia Rugatonn, Pilar via Snack-Service-thought-protection, that monk of Irori.

"Does Osirion have plans, thoughts, about what happens from here?  I suppose as protagonist, 'protagonist', I could try to make all of those decisions myself, but I am still unfamiliar with nonfake 'geopolitics'," a word with no Baseline analogue.  "In a more realistic setting you'd've made your own plans about what to do after I arrived, if you've had three months to plan."

"The impression of the away team that got you was that you're in pretty bad shape and we should plausibly give you weeks or months of recovery time, even in light of the stakes. Ione's agreed to teach some people Prestidigitation chemistry. We'll still end up behind Cheliax on that front, because we have many fewer wizards, but we can make the gap narrower, and I think Cheliax is in the long run going to run into some barriers to trying to develop themselves. This might change if our spies in Cheliax indicate they're making more progress than we thought they could. 

We're arranging to have groups of researchers from other countries immigrate to pick up the Prestidigitation techniques themselves, negotiating details with Ione now, so that the set of free people working on this is larger than Cheliax's, though we're trying to do that very quietly right now, so as not to provoke a countermove. 

Our best guess about what's going to happen is that Cheliax is going to be faster to start benefitting from very very cheap spellsilver, because they had three months' head start, and they'll have a tough call to make soon about whether to try to leverage an eroding initial advantage into some conquest or into being harder for the rest of the world to roll over. I don't know how they'll navigate that. Going to war with us is a reasonably likely possibility; so is withdrawing from the Worldwound so the rest of the world has to scramble to recommit forces we don't really have and logistics networks we haven't built there. Iomedae's been trying to prepare for that possibility; Her Church hasn't actually told us what specifically the plan is, but I think there are several of them and it's not a one-stroke winning move for Cheliax even if it'll be a very costly problem. 

In the longer run, once you've recovered, we want to pay you to improve our curriculum for teaching the principles of Law to the general public and to teach us on disease control and crop yields and textile manufacture and economics and whatever else people want to pay you the most to teach because it seems the most valuable."

"Taking weeks or months to finish updating would lack dignity... that word doesn't have any Taldane translation but maybe 'pride', 'dignity', the part of your self-image where you think you're not completely unskilled at Law-aspiring thought and you want to live up to the expectations you have of yourself.  I'll be aiming for tomorrow.  Maybe day after tomorrow since I also have to orient to Golarion as it appears on this layer of reality."  Part of Keltham is tired, now, and would just as soon speedrun whatever part of the game this is.

"If you don't wake up the day after tomorrow all better are you going to have a fit about that?"

"That, too, would lack dignity.  If I'm still not functional the day after tomorrow I will accept that situation, assess that situation, and figure out what to do with that situation."

"Well, I'm not going to try to talk you into taking longer than you need, but I don't think your help's going to be that much less valuable to us in a month compared to the day after tomorrow."

"I would not assume that to be the case.  Cheliax is making an assembly line - outside-item-assisted way of rapidly producing - intelligence headbands, currently at the +4 level, because that is how they turn spellsilver into having even more and better wizards.  If they can master enough Law to get started on the invention of science and technology in general, ways of understanding and manipulating the world, then, no, you may not really have a month."

"I do not think, at this point, that you move quietly for fear of provoking a countermove.  I think you call together every Lawful or Good country in the world, have them send all of their brightest people here or to a facility located in neutral ground - possibly inside the Ostenso nonintervention zone, if the god who originally set that up can force Cheliax to agree to that.  Intelligence 19 teenagers wearing +6 intelligence headbands, brilliant accomplished researchers who are not past their useful working lifespans."

"Cheliax didn't allocate +6 intelligence headbands, I think, because that level of resource commitment would've tipped me off that I had the political pull to demand - scries on other countries, Greater Teleports - as I eventually did.  Though, to be clear, that was mostly me being stupid.  What I should've done shortly after the supposed godwar was demand that Cheliax fill a bag of holding with the unfiltered contents of a Chelish library.  I mean, I did not know, fundamentally, that I was facing a Conspiracy on a level where it would be defeated by a test like that, but - it would have ruled out some Conspiracies and that is what I should have -"

"Anyways.  I do not need to be fully functional to do politics, 'politics'.  That does not require my full intellect the same way as teaching epistemology, Law-inspired skill of figuring out what's true.  If you're not the one making decisions like these, I should talk to whoever is, and get things rolling on the criticalpath, today.  Uh, criticalpath, the path through the graph, connected lines, with the greatest minimum time to complete, such that the time to complete the criticalpath is the time to complete the whole project."

"Until we've learned how to make spellsilver cheaply, we cannot afford to give anyone a +6 intelligence headband. We certainly can ask countries to send talented researchers here to learn from Ione, which is what I just explained we have done, though none of them have native intelligence 19, obviously."

"This is not really a situation where you get to scrape up whatever resources you can 'afford' and hope you win with those.  'Reality doesn't care what you afford.'"  (It rhymes and scans perfectly in Baseline, in the way of Central Cheating Poetry.)

"Asmodia gained her first apprehension of the Law by borrowing Aspexia Rugatonn's headband for two hours while Rugatonn was getting two hours of sleep, if I'm not - mixing up those stories the wrong way, I haven't checked transcripts - anyways, do you have any artifact headbands of your own that you can let people borrow for two hours, to see if they can gain a first apprehension that way?"

"Though - now that I say it - Asmodia must have been a unique success case who they could never duplicate again.  I can't imagine that one experiment working out great for them, and then they never try it on anybody else?  Though Asmodia also said she was disloyal and they knew that, so maybe it does work and they didn't try it again for that reason -"

"Anyways, do you have an artifact headband that people can borrow for two hours while the usual owner is sleeping?"

"Nefreti might. I'll ask her, though I'd expect her to have already volunteered any help she feels like offering. I do think that drinking her wine ought to be helpful to people for this; it doesn't do precisely the same thing as a headband, but it improves performance on tasks that require Intelligence and Wisdom."

"The wine works for me, I usually have some every day."

"How long does it last?  How much does it cost?  Does it stack with headbands or the spellform enhancements?  Is there any quantitative way of comparing the effect to headbands?"

"Nefreti's lasts more than three hours, it stacks with headbands - or whatever other enhancement, mine are the earrings - but I wouldn't expect it to stack with something that just made you better at a particular skill unless it did it indirectly like my jeweler's loupe."

"It's one gold for a drink, if I recall. The general principle is that two things that enhance Intelligence won't stack with each other, but something that enhances Intelligence and something that enhances an intangible nearby thing, like the wine does, or enhances - luck, ease, like Ismat's loupe -- do. Of course, Cheliax has access to the wine too, this isn't a relative advantage, though I think it'd be much more inconvenient for them to send people to Osirion to buy it and if they have their own casters make it it'll be weaker. The spell isn't hard to cast but the effects are tiny if it's not someone as powerful as Nefreti casting it. 

The obvious way to compare to a headband would be to ask people drinking the wine how much more they'd pay if it worked like a headband, but I don't know anyone to have tried that."

"Not really cheap, but yes, that sounds like potentially the sort of thing we should be stacking for everyone.  Except possibly myself, because Nefreti Clepati is not allowed to help me in any way, theoretically, so I'm not going to be drinking her wine, she might stop making it."

"I'll push again on talking with the planners and decisionmakers on this, today.  Looking back, my behavior in Cheliax did not make sense, even on its own terms, because I felt embarrassed about pushing harder on issues like that.  And there's aspects of this that you may or may not have thought about, for example, that it will probably be to our advantage to buy a large number of intelligence headbands from Cheliax."

"Can't you just ask if you drinking the wine will make her stop making it or not? - I don't think you can get an etiquette waiver for the pharaoh."

"Sure, I could try asking if I'm visiting Ione anyways, which is also something I was thinking of trying to do today."

"I've been advised that the pharaoh has sufficiently good augmented reading-people skills that it verges on Detect Thoughts.  If that's true, it sounds like I should in any case not be meeting him in person and just - working through the equivalent of whatever you have for a text channel around here, like transcribing words that get sent back and forth after a short time delay."