mad investor chaos Carissa lands on Elie
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"I am under the impression it's 4699 because it is 4699!"

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"Well, if that's true then my boyfriend won't come get me and neither will any other people I'm now tempted to call up. If you think it's 4699 you're presumably fine with me contacting them?"

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"I don't think I understand the half of what's going on here, but – " he tugs on the restraints – "I'm not in any position to stop you." 

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Two remaining scrolls of Sending. 

She'll contact Ione. "If you're in a position to pick me up, please do so." If she just contacted a nine-year-old there'll presumably be no response. 

There isn't. 

A 3:1 update, maybe; there are good reasons Ione might not respond anyway, but they're less likely.

 

And she'll contact, uh, Carissa Sevar, who'd be fifteen. "Urgent: convey following to Marcel Albareda: disregard previous communication. Acknowledge."

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Marcel Albareda is Carissa's spellcraft professor. It's not an impossible communication to get, though obviously she'll tell site security - 

 

"- acknowledge -" squeaks a fifteen year old Carissa voice.

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Well, if you test a theory and it passes all your tests, then probably you should consider the possibility it's true. Even if it doesn't make sense. 

 

 

Maybe Irori did it? As - not as mercy, that's not the right sort of thing - as a sense that she'd get this right, given the extra time to do so -

 

 

 

 

"Well. 

 

- I guess that answers my questions. Do you still want me to kill you or do you suppose we can come up with a less dumb plan than that."

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"I don't want to die unless I'm otherwise about to be maledicted. ...I don't entirely believe you're not about to deliver me over for malediction, but I do admit it doesn't make the most sense of everything else that's happened in the past two minutes. What year do you think it is? If you weren't sent here to capture me, who are you and what do you want?" 

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"4710! I was in Egorian about to fall asleep -" 'trying to fall asleep' is admitting a lot more weakness than she is interested in - "and then I was here. We lost Galt a decade ago. Infrexus does not rule Cheliax, he, uh, went out ice skating and drowned."

 

Which obviously translates to 'you aren't even really supposed to pretend that hard to believe it was an accident'. 

 

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The queen before him mysteriously drowned in her bath. It's always like that. But much more importantly – 

"We won?" He doesn't dare believe it. Even if she's telling what she believes to be the truth, and she has accurate information about the world, and her presence here isn't part of some costly attempt to destroy the revolution before it can succeed, it's too much. He'd had hope, of course, but the kind of hope that said that one chance in a hundred is still worth dying for. 

...it almost certainly isn't real. He still can't find anything else to say.

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"I mean I don't know what actually happened but the line in Cheliax is that plans to bring Galt into the kingdom halted because they overthrew their rulers, and then overthrew the rulers they chose to replace those rulers, and then overthrew the people who ended up in charge after that, and then just executed everyone with any Splendour or any noble blood, and then executed everyone who had a family member rumored to have been an Asmodean, and at this point are just so busy sending each other to Hell that we needn't bother."

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Yeah, yeah, they'll say anything to keep the slaves in line. But their false despair doesn't mean he can afford to indulge in false hope. 

"Anyway. Even if we agree it's 4699, it still seems unlikely that you travelled through time to get here. Are you prone to temporary loss of memory? Do you have a recent head injury? Or powerful enemies with sophisticated enchantments, and, uh, really opaque motivations? ...also how is your boyfriend a cleric of Abadar who isn't on good terms with the government, what's he doing in Egorian, does he need help getting out?" 

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"I do have powerful acquaintances with sophisticated enchantments and really opaque motivations! One of my theories is that this is Abrogail, who inherited from Infrexus." She says it fondly. "She's done similar things to me in the past, so I'd be sure it's her, except I have no idea where she's going with it. My boyfriend's not in Egorian, he's in Osirion right now, it's a long story."

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"From my perspective, you being enchanted means someone decided to give you eleven years of false memories and drop you in a basement in Galt. Is that the sort of thing she's done to you before?"  Weird behavior for a princess who's barely older than he is, but who knows what royalty gets up to. 

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"Well, on your theory, it's the sort of thing she gave me false memories of having done to me before! Which would be very strange behavior!"

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"All of this is very strange behavior however you look at it! I suppose your theory is that I'm either an actor or an illusion – no, actor, illusions are too easy to detect. It would convenient if you had Detect Desires, so you could see immediately I'm a terrible liar and can't bluff and don't have any Splendour to speak of. So, hmm, what's true if you have false memories, what's true if I'm part of a deception engineered by the king – queen – for her own inscrutable reasons? Actually engineering eleven years of cogent false memories seems prohibitively expensive even for royalty, it's more likely you have some kind of mental shunt to focus on the areas they did in more detail, so you might try, I don't know, selecting a dozen random weeks every year for the past decade –  really random, I've got dice – and trying to recall in as much detail as you can what you were doing then. It's not definitive but it would be something. But if I'm an actor then presumably I'm really talented at making up lies on the spot so we can't just try the same thing. I've got a pretty good idea of the differences between a real Galtan rebel and a Chelish agent pretending to be one, but I don't suppose you do. 

– the obvious next thing to try would be to get out of this room, since it's harder to fake a whole city than one man in a basement, but that's exactly what I'd say if was trying to escape. Which I am. I told you, can't lie to save my life." 

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"On a previous occasion Abrogail arranged for me to run around the palace grounds and interact with dozens of people, and I know fairly little about Galt! I don't think that'd be definitive. I'm actually kind of leaning towards pretending I'm not in a test set up by Abrogail, though. Firstly she'll have more fun that way, and secondly - if someone did, actually, either grab me out of Cheliax or make me remember some very important events that haven't yet happened, then it seems important to figure out what I want to do with myself in 4699."

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Élie's been surrounded by Chelish people his whole life and he still can't understand their bizarre indifference to believing things that are true. 

"...Fine. You can believe in time travel and I'll tentatively assume your memories have been tampered with until we get more information." This also means their current location is known to Chelish intelligence and they should try to get out of it immediately. On the other hand, if this place is known then nowhere is safe. "Do you have any idea what you might want to do with yourself in 4699? If you're looking for options, I can try to pitch you on overthrowing the government." 

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"Do I get to run the new government after I overthrow it?"

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"No, we're going to have a republic. I guess you could run for office." 

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"And you're just flat-out not going to believe me if I tell you that fails horribly and gets overthrown in three months?"

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"That depends? If you could tell me who gets elected and what their policies are and what they're overthrown for in a good amount of detail and it all seems to match the world I live in, it would at least be evidence. This might be an unfamiliar concept, but I really do try to conform my beliefs to reality and not the other way around. In that case, I'd want to learn from what we did – what we're going to do – wrong, and avoid making the same mistakes." 

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"I don't know the names of anyone involved but I do predict they'll all have an incredibly short life expectancy. ...could I convince you to try selecting who's in charge in a provably random way, just in case that works better."

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"It seems extremely likely to me that they'll have a short life expectancy, because whatever kind of government we end up forming I'm sure Cheliax will devote considerable resources to destabilizing it! ...I can seen argument that randomly selecting leaders is less vulnerable to foreign influence than electing them, since there's no propaganda incentive, but you could also argue the reverse, that manipulating the randomization process is easier than trying to convince half the population of anything, it's not obvious to me which one is true."  

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"The idea with the randomization is that you do it via a mathematical process every adult with intelligence sixteen or so and higher can verify and do themselves, so it can't be manipulated. I know a place that did it that way when they had to overthrow their government."

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