belltower | (Reply)

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Elspeth's power does and has always done two things you aren't accounting for here: 1) scale intermediate values between absolute truth and absolute falsehood, and 2) "tag" statements with what might be called connotations about their place on the truth spectrum. She prefers to speak in definite truth as known to her. If she does otherwise, her level of confidence (including "this is definitely fiction/scarcasm/exaggeration/metaphor/hypothetical of any kind") is conveyed. Therefore:

1. Comes out "colorless" but not A Lie, tagged wild-guess or hunch or whatever as appropriate.

2. Probably gives Elspeth a nasty bit of eye-twitch while she forces the words out, comes out tagged "does not compute".

3. Comes out varyingly true depending on the quality of Elspeth's evidence. "My father is dead" if she said it before age five would come out true (she heard it from an honest person who was highly motivated to learn the answer) but not as true as things she knew from direct personal experience, like her age, the present weather, or what she had for breakfast.

4. See 3. If Elspeth's only source of information on a topic is a specific person telling her about it, then "Person A told me X happened" will always come out truer than just plain "X happened", though depending on the quality of the testimony the latter could still come out quite strong.

5a. Tagged as either exaggeration or approximation depending on whether the number is actually anywhere near a million.

5b. Self-"subtitles" the idiom - if you were translating this sentence into a language that didn't have this metaphor, you wouldn't do it literally. Elspeth's truthiness does this translation for her even within English.

5c. Tagged as metaphor.

5d. Tagged as appropriate.

6. Tagged as "this is uninformative babbling", sort of like what would happen if she sang a song consisting of nonsense syllables.