No, the entire point is that Ulyssian's bullshit detector is good enough that we have a shot, but only if we devote energy to sifting through her statements for deceptions. We figured out she was Anathema before we bloody Exalted. If you look carefully, you'll note that nothing she did in that chat was empirically false; vague to the point of uselessness, yes, but no outright lies.
That does seem somewhat questionable.
She will know that we continue not to trust her, can find ways to work around that or even use it to her advantage and, while Uly has lots of areas to improve upon and a ridiculous amount of challenges to take care of, she focuses on nothing but improving her ability to scheme and would be putting all of her resources and attention into any betrayal plans.
At the very best continuing to distrust her is going to give us a chance at seeing her betrayal coming and given our tendency to go to Nilul in order to deal with any social problem simply because we need that good results, I even doubt that.
In spite of all our vigilance she could easily have fucked us over while ostensibly doing her best to calm our family down during calibration and can very much do the same during this event because we have literally no way to tell the difference between her failing to handle things, her intentionally screwing up, her just being a meddlesome friend with priorities that make Uly uncomfortable or her setting up some slihgtly longer term betrayal.
Even if one were to assume that, yes, she is indeed going to betray us at some point, the sheer amount of energy we keep putting into double-checking everything she's saying could very well not be worth the effort, especially not compared to just stopping to associate with her at all, which past experience has shown is clearly not going to happen.
Nilul has been central to so many of our safety nets, attempts at damage control and operations that continuing to distrust her is starting to have some
serious costs.
We're about to enter a situation with socially specced Elder DBs present, are going to be around for an entire week, have only Nilul for support and have on top of that apparently decided to start things off by getting Uly out of his comfort zone and into a situation where he has to rely very heavily on Nilul to have any chance of coming out ahead. Trusting Nilul here will give a signficant bonus to our cooperation and we do kind of need whatever advantages we can get for this.
Whether she really is only acting or not, trusting her would help our efforts here and in the future a lot. If she is playing us for a fool, it does a lot to convince her to stick around and keep working with us if only out of enlightened self-interest and, if she's being genuine, it does a lot to reassure her that she is making the right call with this.
We have solid reasons to trust her regardless of what the case is, because the alternative is not really guaranteed to do much against a betrayal and can do a lot to speed it up or cause it regardless of which is the truth.
Not to mention that at this point continuing with distrusting her mainly because she's good at the skillset that makes her so useful is honestly becoming more and more dof a straing on their relationship for Uly to do.
Yes, Nilul completely avoided the questions we actually asked her, but that's not something you can really use as an argument against her, because it fits both a genuine Nilul with her trust issues and a competent Nilul planning on betrayal.
The only thing that incident really shows is that Uly continues to have no social grace whatsoever.
Seriously, he asks a question that a deceitful Nilul is neither going to give a straight nor an incriminating answer on and one that a genuine Nilul is going to give an evasive half answer to and, as was to be expected, all he really got out of it was nothing substantial, if she's being deceitful, and a Nilul that feels like shit because she can't bring herself to be upfront about the whole thing, if she's being genuine.
That's not really something you can be upset over not getting an answer to, that's just Uly once again being a dick to his friends.
It's starting to get to the point where you can really question whether Nilul is neither falling back on her Manipulation skills during friendly conversations because she can't bring herself to do otherwise, nor because she is still deceiving him, but simply because Uly is kind of an asshole, doesn't really trust her and might just decide to kill her if she fucks up her Charisma roll too badly.
Just like there were very good reasons for her to put all her effort into making sure someone as socially incompetent as Uly doesn't give her very dangerous secrets away (which is honestly more than enough to justify her Charm use, whether it was really "mindrape" or not), there are very good reasons for her to make sure she has her entire dicepool to throw at dealing with someone as dangerous and capable of ruthlessness as Uly that doesn't even trust her.
