"It's on the wall now in green, I guess, if it doesn't look like we can revise it retroactively. Maybe it should have been orange and that's the issue here."
"We lie to Keltham as little as possible, but the truth isn't safe either. The fact that Asmodeus is Lawful Evil is on the wall in red, not green, because, true as that fact is, Keltham has correctly seen that fact as an anomaly in the light of other lies we've told him about Asmodeus."
"Keltham makes deductions using Laws we don't know. I'm trying as hard as I can, and I can't begin to read far enough ahead of him. To him, what you're describing about Avaricia isn't a fact about her, it's a fact about an equilibrium of forces we don't understand that hold Avaricia in place, like a balanced element inside a spell being hung. Forces out of real-Cheliax that even we in real-Cheliax don't understand."
"There's an Avaricia like that in real-Cheliax. Does that Avaricia exist in Taldor? Does she exist in alter-Cheliax? Does she have a Lawful Good mother? Keltham has met a fake paladin that we intended to be realistic, that paladin would not have seemed like Avaricia's father."
"It's not enough for your version of Avaricia to be above others. The others have to know that they're below her. She doesn't hide that she thinks she's better than all of us, on her first day in that strange place, she flaunts it openly and without caution, because for others not to oppose her then and call her out on it, confirms her place and her power."
"There's probably a less Asmodean version of that pride in Taldor, that's still pride. Maybe only among children whose mothers are not Lawful Good, I don't know if it's in Lastwall. I - I'm not sure how I know this, but I would bet at a very high probability that it's not in dath ilan. That Keltham will see it as something very strange and hard for him to understand, he will kneel down to peer closer, he will ask questions, he will be driven to understand it. Ione is not wrong that there is something of Nethys about him and his world -"
"I'm still not explaining this right. Keltham can feel the difference between fiction and reality, I think, on some level below all his Law and math. He knew that Manohar hadn't really put an artifact headband on me, and his thought transcripts shows that it was just - how it felt to him."
"What you did feels to me... well, it feels like fiction, first and foremost, a pose, a mask. And that's bad enough even if your alter-Avaricia would do it, because Keltham is so watchful, for signs of fiction being woven around him, we should have picked a different alter-Avaricia instead."
"Much worse is that it's fiction out of the true Cheliax, and not the alter-Cheliax we've been constructing."
"If even I can sense that, I'm very worried that Keltham can sense it too."
"Which is why you need to, yes, spell everything out very very explicitly and not take me by surprise about the way that alter-Avaricia - suddenly thrusts out a huge new theory of what it's safe for Keltham to believe about the equilibrium that produced an alter-Chelish heiress who is very much like a real-Chelish heiress."