What are you playing at, Cayden Cailean -

"Sure! Sounds like fun.

- don't worry too much about the heresy and treason. Heresy and treason are incorrect; proper ilanism won't take you there. We'll correct you promptly. But if there are thoughts you're trying not to think in the first place - rather than thinking them knowing they'll be corrected if they're wrong - it can be harder to master ilanism."

"I'll tell them so, sir, but I register that they're not Asmodia.  If my curse obeyed me and my curse worked, they'll think those thoughts without hesitating, and speak those thoughts, because they want to be corrected, and want to stop being muddled inside, and will understand if that means they need to be punished."

"I hope that's so, but even you, Pilar, have found yourself muddled, on occasion."

"I asked my curse for them to not be me, sir."

"To be less - what?"

"Less Good.  To not have any huge cracks in them where they didn't want their family going to Hell."

"Would you have not wanted your family going to Hell, if you'd had more confidence Hell would find the strength in them?"

"Asmodeus doesn't want me to care."

"I guess I didn't - put it exactly in those words, to my curse, there's only so much you can ask, when you've only got one planet to pick from and you're looking for people who already speak Taldane besides.  But I was looking specifically for people who could be ilani and Asmodeans, and I did not tell my curse to premise that on your form of Asmodeanism, sir, because I was acting on my own, and I thought, I don't want somebody like that breaking down if Sevar never comes back."

"I'm not the best possible version of what I am.  I don't believe the tropes made the one best person on the planet to be a Keeper of Asmodeus end up in Ostenso.  Somebody like that wouldn't have fit into the story they were weaving around Keltham.  These people should be the real thing, once they get training, what Pilar should've been for Asmodeus, that's what I asked, wanted, for my curse to find."

" - all right. We'll see if they can handle it, then; if they can't, better to know that sooner anyway."

"How much of the day, and night, should I plan on having you for?  With Asmodia gone, I think you're the only one here who still has what she called Probability-Sight, for the new ilani candidates to pick up using the artifact headbands."

"I can do this all day. This is, actually, where it all stands or falls, probably, not in some party in Egorian."

"As you say, sir."

Pilar doesn't like the driven and domineering person she turns into, when she wears the +6 Splendour headband; it feels tantamount to insubordination to make so many suggestions to her superior.

Her feelings are irrelevant.  Pilar will go on wearing this headband until her superiors tell her to take it off.

Or until Pilar realizes that she can serve Asmodeus better by taking it off!

Fuck off and die.

But yes.

Carissa resumes her lecture. 

"I think trying to do this on test cases where you know that there's something to be found trains only a part of the skill, and perhaps the least valuable part; the important thing is noticing it where it hasn't already been pointed out to you. But let's try some test cases anyway, just in case it at least helps develop the habit. You're a general; you need to know if the enemy army is moving to attack at the north pass or the south pass. They might feint, to try to trick you. They might split their forces, but they probably won't; it's a gamble and if you handle it right they'll lose both. You hear a report they've given their soldiers orders to make for the north pass, but the report could be a lie to deceive you. 

What features of reality are you looking for, what are you trying to see to figure out what's going on?"

"There's just - sight, sound, and magic, isn't there?  You can try to scry the pass or the approaches and even if scrying is blocked, if it's blocked in one place but not the other, that tells you.  You can post lookouts and check in with them, and if they fail to check in that's a sign, because absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence.  Or do you mean things on a bigger timescale like - if one pass is muddier, you see if they requisition supply wagons with wider wheels?"

"How many troops are in the report?  Were famous elite warriors spotted?"
 
         "Smoke from fires, and refugees; they're less likely if there's a feint, too."
 
     "Actual attacks at either pass suggest not feint, unless they're unsupported summons, which implies feint."
 
   "Whichever pass is more vulnerable they're likely to attack."

       "That's 'priors', you fool, she asked for 'evidence'."
 
  "If they can't fit their whole army in one pass, dividing their army is more likely."

        "Also fucking priors!"
 
 "A lot of this depends on the quality of your reconnaissance; do you have Lesser Planar Ally'd imps for recon? Or other invisible teleporting summons with good senses?"

        "That's a factor that affects which evidence you get, it's not something that you look for!  Am I the only person who understood the question here?"

(Carissa is testing a new theory about humans: that they bullshit themselves and everyone around them slightly less when the topic is winning a battle that will happen tomorrow. The Worldwound was better than Cheliax, and she thinks the real concrete consequences were why; there's only so much you can play Who's The Evillest, if you will all die of not doing your jobs. Were there rapists and thugs and bullies at the Worldwound, yes absolutely, were there people who put inordinate effort into elaborately entrapping people or addressing slights to their honor or doing the Evillest thing they could think of, no. The demons did Cheliax a favor and ate those.)

"There's some good ideas there. Now, an ilani, listing off all of those, asks how much evidence are they? How much more likely are we to hear a spy report they're going north, if they're going north? How trustworthy are our spy reports, how hard would it be for them to have sent us lies, compared to how likely it is that if they're truly marching north, we'll hear it? For any bit of evidence, you can think of reason it's conclusive, or think of reason it's a feint, but what you want to do is ask which world it's more consistent with, and by how much. Does anyone want to try venturing, for some of the evidence they came up with, how strong it is, as evidence."

"So for something like - what kinds of wagons they're requisitioning - I think it's maybe like, almost even, if somebody comes and tries to sell you a report like that, because they could just be trying to plant information.  But if you had a lot of different things like that you could check, from different sources, and you got to pick one at random, instead of there being only one obvious thing for your spies to try to learn from one obvious source, then I think it'd be much stronger, like... four to one?"

"Or even more than that, because realistically war involves not that many faked spy reports.  I've never heard of a case where an enemy tried to fake somebody out completely by adjusting a hundred little things like that."

Pilar storms into the classroom, bearing artifact headbands.  Pilar has never really been all that comfortable with correcting other students in class -

- until now.  Now everything is fine, for real and not like she was pretending to herself before, because Pilar knows these people can take it.  Pilar hates that she works like that but she does.

The new ilani will be better.

"All right, you muddled incoherent pieces of slime, sudden new plan for the day.  One of you at a time gets intensively tutored by Carissa Sevar while wearing a +6/+6/+4 headband for an hour, then by Meritxell while wearing a +4/+6/+6 headband for an hour, and then you get a +6 Intelligence headband for an hour to go think about it by yourself.  You can hang around and listen to other people learning, if you want, but don't fucking interrupt them.  This is how Asmodia got her Probability-Sight, more or less, and we're hoping the same happens with you."

"That kind of boosting has caused other people out of Cheliax to go traitor.  You, theoretically, are supposed to be better than that, if my curse worked correctly.  If that 'theoretically' is wrong, speak the fuck up about it.  If you're afraid of being punished even though you're not supposed to be afraid, say that.  Carissa Sevar will decide what do about that, using options that potentially include not punishing you for it so that you retroactively won't have been afraid to speak out."

"Bad thoughts can be corrected easily.  Being afraid to think is much harder to correct.  If you're finding yourself afraid to think, something is going wrong with our lesson plan and we will do whatever it fucking takes to correct that, with options that potentially include running Detect Thoughts on you and hurting you until you start to think again, or fucking not hurting you at all if predictably hurting you would've caused you to never admit to yourself in the first place that something was wrong."

"Raise your hand if you fucking understood that."

About a third of the hands go up.

"Fun.  Well, maybe you'll understand it once you're wearing a fucking artifact headband."

"We'll start with... you.  Monserrat.  This is a +6/+6/+4 headband.  Put it on and don't fucking argue."

"Yes, sir."

...she wasn't really planning to argue?  But she's not going to argue that, either.

Oh.