"I don't think Keltham said to use probabilities then, so I get to count that."

"Look, we're drifting off-topic again, probably because of something to do with the ratio of time we've spent awake to asleep over the last day.  Did you say anything important while my attention drifted off?"

"I think I delivered a prophecy, but now I don't remember it either takaral."

"Interesting.  I can actually tell you said takaral on purpose."

"I wasn't trying very hard to fake it."

"Look, I'm not feeling happy about this Gregoria Suicide Plan.  I bet Sevar also won't be happy about this Gregoria Suicide Plan.  I bet Maillol is unhappy in a way that involves fire."

"We'll be fine.  They wouldn't use fire in Taldor."

"They would if somebody showed them this plan."

"You invented this idea and three-quarters of what's in here!"

"That doesn't mean I can't look back, think about how far I've come, and realize exactly where I have arrived."

"Also all the problems are in the remaining one-quarter, obviously."

"I think the logic is probably a lot clearer if you have grasped the key fragment of the Law of Probability, which, once you possess it, reshapes all of your thoughts and not just those thoughts which involve numbers -"

"Asmodia, listen to me.  If this were a temple of Nethys and I were in charge, this would be the point at which the experienced fourth-circle cleric of Nethys tells the first-circle cleric of Nethys that she is clearly on an exciting journey of the mind full of new ideas, and she's going to be locked in a nice safe cell with no weapons or spellbook until she finishes takaral."

"How fortunate for Project Lawful that I am in charge and not you.  Also you've never in your life been to a temple of Nethys, stop making things up."

"I flipped through all the Taldor romance novels looking for any mention of the word 'Nethys' and there were two pages about a temple of Nethys in one section."

"And that's the point where the high-ranking Asmodean sets the low-ranking Asmodean on fire.  Yes yes you're not Asmodean, fine."

"Look, I'll try to put the Law I'm using into words, you may well be able to follow if you pay attention.  What we're trying to avoid doing is letting Keltham narrow down a single Conspiracy world that he can figure out.  We want to do things that make internal sense in the Ordinary world, even if they might seem sort of weird and complicated there, but which would be more complicated and hard to square up internally in the Conspiracy world.  Yes, there's ultimately a world where that all makes sense, because we're living in it, but we want to make that world hard for his mind to narrow in on, and when we use weird complicated logic that's inconsistent with the logic we've previously used, that helps us so long as it's less weird inside the Ordinary world."

"The fact that we told him about Cunning and headbands isn't good but it also means that we were stupid then, and now if we do something very complicated and smart and clever about it, even if Keltham thinks of that possibility, it won't match up with our previous stupidity in telling him about Cunning at all."

"And you don't think Keltham has read a dozen books back in dath ilan where somebody tries something exactly like this on the protagonist, what with him coming from a world of actual dath ilani where none of the thinking you're using is the least bit special."

"You don't get it!  Yes, Keltham can think that we just planned the whole thing.  But, if Keltham imagines a masterful intellect," like the one she has now, "the part where we previously told him about Cunning and had to execute the whole clever plot in the first place won't make sense.  The villains in dath ilani books will be smarter and more competent than we previously were in the actual Conspiracy world."

"And if he figures out that we really were learning as we went along -"

"That's the loss condition we inevitably reach eventually, where Keltham has enough information to figure out the exact world he's living in, but we can make that harder for him.  He won't jump to that conclusion right away.  It's like - putting extra coinspins on top of duck for lunch, merchant ships coming in from Absalom instead of merchant ships from anywhere.  A more complicated idea is one that he has to assign lower probability to start."

"And Keltham isn't a perfect dath ilani.  It may be possible to confuse him enough and win.  If I have a sufficiently powerful headband, and he doesn't use any enhancements himself, I mean."

"Right now, Keltham has seen evidence that, if the Conspiracy is real, it's not actually that competent, because we weren't.  The first time we do something smart, before any other time he's expecting us to be smart, we've got to get as much mileage as we can, out of that, because afterwards he'll be on the lookout for smart things."

"And besides getting him not to use enhancements, you yourself said that the most confusing thing we could do to him -"

"I regret all of the choices that led me here."

"No!  You were right!  Righter than you realized!  Right now, all Keltham's attention is on the idea that the Conspiracy world is trying to make him believe he's inside the Ordinary world.  On the simple truth, exactly where we don't want it.  At the very least we want to make it be complicated for him."

"So we make it look like he has Ordinary adversaries trying to falsely convince him the Conspiracy is real, and then he has to doubt all the evidence and not just the evidence we'd rather he didn't doubt.  And if the Conspiracy faking the Ordinary world faking a Conspiracy is exactly what they do in dath ilani romance novels, then those villains would never have told him about Fox's Cunning."

"And this is the point where they set somebody on fire even in Taldor."

"Let me guess, you think Maillol says that we want to keep the Ordinary world simple and believable and just not make Keltham think about things too much?"

"Sevar says that.  Maillol says, Abarco, hurt her."

"Well the ship of apparently simple and believable stories has sailed, what with Cayden Cailean handing out cookies.  And even if it hadn't, Keltham is a dath ilani.  He's going to think about things no matter what.  All we have is a choice of what he spends his Conspiracy-decoding time trying to decode."

"Okay, look, what are you actually thinking at this point?  Specifically?  Maybe it'll sound more convincing to me if you sketch it out the way Keltham would see it."

"Keltham wakes up tomorrow, is allowed a chance to pray first - we don't want to let him pick out spells after he knows what he'll be doing with them - and probably do some other things, eat breakfast, we can't time it precisely to after he prays.  Suddenly there's an emergency, no, they're not supposed to say what, he gets rushed straight to Maillol's office."

"Maillol says that he realizes exactly how stupid this is going to sound -"