Carissa Sevar: "I have a shopping list," she says to Elias, turning around.

         "Do you now," he says.

"I'm going to need to be prettier. Every count's heir I've ever seen was stunningly beautiful. Don't you dare comment on my looks, I'll stab you. I'm going to need to be prettier. And I want a headband, and an allowance for crafting."

         "I don't actually know how much the inheriting daughter of a Count of - I mean, presumably they get their allowance from their county, which you haven't got -"

"Well, maybe you should get me one." That's absurd but Elias looks unsure if it's absurd, which is very satisfying.

         "Is this what gratitude for the extraordinary indulgence of your god looks like?"

"Gratitude? He wants a return. And I'm going to be perfect. - can I have the other girls' souls?"

          "No," says Elias Abarco, with the first certainty he's mustered in a while. 

"Some kind of option on them? Equity?"

          "You aren't worth a damned thing yet, kid."

"Asmodeus noticed me," says Carissa Sevar, but a rather different Carissa Sevar than she was ten minutes ago. Also she's about to have a panic attack but she's pretty sure she can glare Elias out of the room before that.

Keltham: Keltham wakes up, still feeling a bit muzzy.  What a long and complicated day he has had, full of surprises!  For a moment he envies the women in his research harem, who just get to hear lots of new and exciting knowledge and got raises and a sex-flavored mission and didn't have to compose new lectures or try to figure out Golarion.  Not that it's bad that their lives are less stressful than his, just, it would be good if his life was also less stressful than his life.

Maybe he'll put in a bit less effort into his first shot at wizardry than he was previously planning, so he'll have brainpower to spare for his date with Carissa after that.  After dinner?  After a light dinner.  He shouldn't be either hungry or overfull while, you know, that stuff is going on.

His life sure is complicated these days, full of structural uncertainty and random assorted difficult decisions.  But Keltham's not going to let that faze him!  Dath ilan raises strong minds!

But before he continues on to prove that yet again, he's going to lie here in bed with eyes closed a little longer, waiting for the muzziness to go away of its own accord.

And then he'll either head off to find somebody for wizard lessons (Ione?) or maybe join people for dinner, depending on how long he actually slept, because once again he forgot about that part where he is no longer wearing a wristwatch.

Carissa Sevar: Elias leaves.

She should not assume she's alone but she doesn't have that much more stamina for maintaining composure. She kneels at her bedside in a distinctly imperfect posture for prayer and hides her face in her hands and trembles violently until it's possible to think about something other than the apparent deficit of air in this room. That takes a couple of minutes.

Asmodeus noticed her. And Asmodeus has instructions for her. And Asmodeus does not want her to sell her soul, which - 

- okay, this is the most trivial feature of the situation, but it means she does not get permanent undispellable arcane sight, and she was really looking forward to that! And all of the other girls are going to have it! She's going to be falling behind in magic lessons and have no way to explain why. Not that she's ungrateful, but - Asmodeus could've given His instructions and also taken her soul -

- presumably that's false, actually, presumably it's actually important for some reason that Carissa keeps her soul, she doesn't understand and she shouldn't expect to understand, the reason here is not going to be in that space where a human thinking about it really hard can comprehend it, it's going to be in the space that a human can't make any sense of at all.

But there are some features of the situation that she ought to be capable of comprehending, or no one would have tried to tell her things. Asmodeus noticed. He noticed that she was trying to build the true philosophy, the version that they would have come up in dath ilan where everyone is smarter and lawfuller and carefuller, if they were also Asmodean, and He thought it was worth directing her to do it properly. And His direction was -

- she should write it down before she forgets -She stops praying to do that. 

Serve Me well in this world and you shall be raised high in it."

"Remember that you are not Irori.  Do not think yourself likely to succeed in perfecting yourself without divine aid."

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis, and accept that your rightful place is in Hell."

"Come to Me in Hell without thought of other choices, as mortals once did in the days before they were cursed with their own wills, and you shall be among the most treasured of My possessions."And written down, it's kind of weird, and she puzzles over it for a little while -

Carissa Sevar: She was trying to build Asmodeanism as smart lawful humans would have been able to generate it, able to understand it, able to build a society around it. But she was getting it wrong. "You are not Irori". What an odd thing to say, she didn't think she was Irori - well, maybe her vanity in fact got itself pointed that direction without her conscious attention - but she's not sure the problem is the vanity, because in the same breath she was promised to be raised high in the world, if she serves Asmodeus well in it, and among his most treasured possessions -

"Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis..."

- the problem is the Lawful Neutral. Keltham is Lawful Neutral. Keltham has taught her everything that she now understands, about the true theology, about what it would mean to have free will and know what to do with it. But Keltham is Lawful Neutral, even if he thinks he's evil, so his conception is a lawful neutral conception, of how things work. 

And Carissa belongs to Asmodeus, who is Evil, and so she's supposed to be designing the evil version of that, not the neutral one. 

Carissa has not actually put a lot of thought into what Evil is. Pretty much everyone is Evil, because that's how Pharasma sorts them. Doing big ambitious things in the world is Evil. Keltham's probably going to start reading Evil at some point because he did something Pharasma objects to, he's not in the two percent most Good people and pretty much everyone else goes to Hell. But - when she says Keltham's Neutral she's not actually talking about what Pharasma has to say, she's talking about something else? Keltham assumes they're all getting paid. Keltham would be deeply upset if he learned they weren't getting paid, and it's not because it affects him in the slightest. His sense of - honor, fair play, however he contextualizes it - rules out slavery, rules out assassinations, rules out tricking people - they're jokingly betting on whether Keltham's a sadist and she bets he is but he didn't jump at punishing the students, he fretted that he had no idea how to do it in a way that improved their understanding of the subject material and was worried he'd teach them wrongly to be afraid of school -

- she's not actually sure which parts of that are Lawful Neutral and which parts are dath ilan. But they stand out, as ways that an Asmodean is not. As ways that the ideal Asmodean theology would not be. And when she was trying to build something shaped like Keltham, Asmodeus Himself reached out and conveyed - that's too Lawful Neutral to be the truth. Give me the Evil version.

Well. Carissa can do that.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa has spent a lot of time worrying if she is loyal enough but almost none worrying if she is Evil enough. She's not squeamish. She doesn't refuse to report people out of misguided sympathy for them. She has whipped students who get bad grades, and practiced deadly spells on weeping prisoners. She is definitely going to go to Hell, and it did not really occur to her to specifically worry about how evil she was within the very broad category of everyone who gets sent to Hell. She hasn't heard of anyone getting in trouble for not being Evil enough. She hasn't even been threatened, now, with getting in trouble for not being Evil enough! 

...and maybe that's the point. Because there's a kind of Evil built of pure, sharp, selfishness, the choice to be concerned with yourself, and not with any of the other idiots populating the world, the thing she told Keltham, Evil as prioritizing the self. She thinks she's perfectly adequate at that, if she does say so herself. 

The devil wasn't like that. The devil saw her, spoke two minutes to her, and wanted to personally rip her into pieces. Because it'd be fun. Because, having seen her whole, destroying her would be more of a treat than destroying some other person. And there was a difference, though she hopes no one noticed it, when she stepped into his circle and threatened him back. He was threatening her because he felt like it. She was threatening him because she'd noticed that if she didn't learn to play she was going to lose very very fast. 

She is pretty sure, in hindsight, that every Evil thing she's ever done has been the first kind, the weaker kind, the Evil of choosing Carissa Sevar over every other person in the universe. She feels entirely unapologetic about all of that Evil; certainly no other person in the universe is choosing Carissa Sevar over themselves. And if they were, that'd be stupid and contemptible of them. 

And Asmodeus is saying that that's not enough. Well, it's clearly enough to get into Hell. It's not enough for the nature that devil possessed, not enough for her to actually succeed at the problem she has somewhat audaciously set herself, of explaining theology better so people aren't afraid of not understanding it any more than they're afraid of not understanding math, so they glimpse the outlines of the big, real thing there, even if that's all they glimpse.'Acknowledge the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis'. Mainly it's the ...desire to be on the winning side, coupled with the conviction Axis isn't it, but she's pretty sure that's not what He means. What was it the devil said to Elias?

She should write that down too, she's going to need to use it to argue for a headband.

             "Asmodeus's Queen and her slaves need not concern themselves proactively with Carissa Sevar's descent into cruelty, wickedness, and the darkness of her own soul; but if Carissa Sevar seeks to indulge of her own accord, she is to be prioritized for support as though she were the inheriting daughter of a Count of Cheliax."It's embarrassing, but she never until this point considered that prominent leaders might be so cruel and wicked because they specifically got training and theological education in it, because it is part of what it means to be a servant of Asmodeus. Probably you can't offer that to the whole country because it won't run well if everyone's going around trying to develop their capacity for cruelty and wickedness. But you can offer it to the person who is trying to reform all of Asmodean theology.

All right, what's an action plan for learning cruelty and wickedness and the darkness of her own soul. Possibly it makes sense to start by observation? She watched Contessa Lliratha and knew that she wanted that, wanted to grow up to be that, with an intensity that would have carried her through murdering lots of innocent people, which isn't quite the thing, but it's a start. ...possibly it makes sense to start by asking. She has specifically been told that she can get support, if she only asks. 

There's another thing she needs to master, here. The other thing the devil had that she didn't was presentation. Carrying himself in the world like he did things for his own reasons - and of course they were Asmodeus's reasons, he said it outright, but - but he carried himself like he was enjoying every minute of it. Carissa carries herself like she's loyal and competent and pretty sure she is getting a good grade, and that's not how to get a good grade in wickedness. There's a reason Asmodeus said 'the desires in yourself that have no place in Axis', rather than just 'acquire some desires that have no place in Axis', and she doesn't think it's because she has a secret kink for torture, she would've noticed that. It's because that's a way you can relate to Evil, not as some habits of mind for the defense of the self under threat but as the delight of the self in pursuing all it pleases, and in serving those who have even more power to do that -

I am ever your obedient servant, she thinks at Asmodeus, though it feels a lot scarier now that she knows there's a minute chance he's paying attention. 

Carissa Sevar: Is there an available wicked thing to do? She could - 

- oh shit, she's late for Keltham's magic lessons -

Carissa Sevar: She can hurry off to those and worry about this later!

Ione Sala: If magic lessons take anyone to the library at any point, they're going to encounter Ione Sala, who has now been healed in flesh if not in spirit.

Very shortly after being healed, Ione Sala discovered that as soon as she gets a couple of dozen steps away from the library, she starts to feel a pull, a faint tingle, which she can intuitively feel would start to weaken her abilities after a time, and eventually rip her soul out of her body.  She's going to need sleeping arrangements set up in here, or in a room connected to here, or for somebody to make her a bedroom that's also a library.  And it doesn't feel like books are enough to make a place a library; people would need to be able to wander into her bedroom and read books there.  Ione also knows that she needs to occasionally read some of the books, and get new books sometimes.  They have to be books she actually wants to read; she can't just be doing it out of duty.  Otherwise she'll die.

Oracles get curses, don't they.

...this curse isn't entirely a bad thing.  It feels like Cheliax would have a hard time making there be a library that's also a torture chamber, and force her to enjoy reading books while she'd rather have her soul torn away so that the pain stops - like it would be hard to torture her to death over years in a way that satisfies her curse.  Maybe she couldn't easily be maledicted either, with the grip that libraries now have on her soul?  Is her curse one that takes her straight to Nethys's afterlife, is that why it feels like the curse would tear out her soul and not just kill her?  Nethys - she's trying not to think thoughts like this, but they still bubble up in the back of her mind - Nethys may have a different attitude from Asmodeus about making sure that His own slaves, so long as they worked hard and did their best, get protected from sufficiently painful fates?

No, she's being stupid.  Nethys wants her to be less afraid of Asmodeus and Cheliax, obviously, so that she doesn't treat them as having equal power with Nethys to threaten her and force her obedience.

...she wishes she hadn't thought that, it's going to make Cheliax trust her less after the next time they read her mind.  The problem is that Ione is now living in such strange new circumstances that she doesn't know yet which paths of thought will lead her to dangerous places before she starts to think them.  She does have to think now, and figure out what Nethys wants from her using her own wits.  Nethys can't give her specific instructions because anybody Nethys touches goes mad.

Ione has been taught since childhood that nobody really cares about her or ever would care about her, except for how she's of use to them; especially the gods, who could help, but don't.  It's pathetic to think that Nethys would give her that curse because Nethys cared about one tiny worm that didn't even ask to be His cleric.  Lots of mortals in the world die agonizing slow deaths and Nethys doesn't protect them.  Asmodeus is the only god who has enough use for mortals in general being competent, not just a few favored clerics, to make sure that children in Cheliax get an education.  And while it has occurred to Ione that this is propaganda, it has also occurred to her that it cannot just be a complete lie.  It's not like Nethys made her His oracle, or helped her in any other way, before she was in a position to be useful to Him.

But it's still - a little warm - to have a master who took real, visible steps to protect her against the worst that other masters can do.

So she will do her very best for Nethys, as she has been thoroughly incentivized, which will include (Ione is very aware that she must think this and believe it as sincerely as she can) being very, very, very obedient to the Chelish government and not inconveniencing them at all, so they don't separate her from Keltham and replace her with an imposter.

Keltham: Time for alternate_physics-reduced_capital_infrastructure-autarchical_personal_productivity-fantasy*!

Keltham exits his room, looking for any sort of local personnel or security personnel who can tell him which people he needs for magic lessons, or failing that, how to find Ione and ask her.  He'd ordinarily boop Carissa about that but Keltham is aware that Carissa herself might also want to nap before tonight, even if her day hasn't been as exciting as his.  If Keltham doesn't run into any visible security personnel, he will head towards the library to see if he can find somebody there.

(*)  A ten-syllable recursively-compounded term of Baseline that a literary author would use to describe the most important quality of Golarion magic from the standpoints of its effect on the plot: enabling one person to do important things without a huge supply chain** or a larger group that implements the effects.  Dath ilan has separately recognized a fantasy trope for phenomena that treat mental qualities as primary, but their literature doesn't tie up mentalistic!magic tightly with economic!magic; you can have one without the other.  Keltham has noticed that Golarion 'magic' is mentalistic!magic as well as economic!magic, but the economic!magic aspects are currently much more on his mind.

(**)  Literally "supply graph" in Baseline; using the inflection of the word "graph" which implies that, while ultimately causal and hence acyclic when unrolled over time, the graph is highly cyclic when its inter-time-slice dependencies are projected onto a single time-slice.  If you said the literal words "supply chain" in front of a dath ilani, they'd do a double-take and ask what the ass kind of supply graph looks like a chain.

lintamande: About half of the research harem has trickled back into the library; they have their spellbooks out and are negotiating trades of spells now that there's all this spellbook ink available. (It's expensive enough that no student has ever had half as much as she wants, but not so expensive that Keltham wouldn't find it deeply weird if his research harem didn't have enough of it, so now they do.)

Ione Sala: Ione is there too, of course.  She looks neutral.  Nothing she could possibly put on her expression is anything that should be on her expression.

Keltham: "Hi, all!  So I've been thinking about ways to teach me magic before I get magic goggles and among my potential stupid ideas is if anybody can both see magic and create a visible illusion that follows whatever magic does?  Though, uh, I'm thinking I should try things the completely normal way before I try anything more complicated than that.  So what's the normal way of casting one's first spell?"

lintamande: The normal way is that you visualize it from the sketches in the textbook, and spend a while meditating and trying to get a feel for the fact there's magic at your fingertips, and then you do things with it and get told what happened when you made that motion, and then you try to get it to shape into a cantrip. Which often takes weeks, but not always, if you're really smart and have prior exposure to magic.

Keltham: All right, let's try this the most direct possible way.  Keltham internally contains a Read Magic cantrip and can feel the structure, which looks the same as the sketches in the textbook.  That's useful for the visualization part.  Keltham will then meditate and try to feel magic at his fingertips, like when he cast Resistance and Greater Detect Magic and the truth spell before - he was paying attention -  as he holds his hand over a copy of Read Magic built up over somebody else's spellbook.  He will try doing things with any magic he thinks he might be feeling, and be told what, if anything, happened when he made a motion.

Possible hypotheses to distinguish include:

- Keltham, as a being of dath ilan untouched by gods, will prove to have zero magical aptitude and unable to affect the magic in any way.  (Seems unlikely if he's a cleric and cleric spells look the same as wizard spells.)- Keltham will have unworkably low wizard aptitude, as a result of coming from a heritage that has never selected on itself at all for facility with wizardry.- Keltham, having not come from a heritage in which wizards have had more access to contraception for however many generations, will do great at this.- Keltham, having the mighty mental disciplines of dath ilan at his disposal, and having played a fair number of subtle perceptual computer games, will do great at this for reasons having nothing to do with genetics.- Keltham will make a perfectly normal amount of progress for a Golarionite cleric with 18 Intelligence and zero prior magical exposure.- The first ten minutes of testing will not be enough to distinguish any of these hypotheses, because they're going to initially produce flat failure and that would've been true for any realistic sort of human being.

lintamande: Keltham can feel magic at his fingertips same as anyone, when he's touching someone else's spell-scaffold. It feels like holding your hand near a flame, except instead of heat his fingertips report the sensation of being dipped in honey.

The first ten minutes do not distinguish any of the other hypotheses because, yeah, you can't get it in ten minutes. 

lintamande: "I've heard the record is half an hour," says Meritxell. 

"I heard it took Nefreti Clepati an hour."

"She was eight, though. I think the records are people starting older, like Keltham."

Keltham: "Do you know which part of this is - the critical step, the one that's time-bound, for most people?  Being able to manipulate the magic, being able to manipulate it predictably, being able to manipulate it precisely, being able to manipulate it fast enough, being able to perceive the magic well enough to change manipulations in response to how the magic is changing, being able to remember the shape..."

lintamande: "I think closest to - being able to perceive it well enough to change manipulations in response to how the magic is changing? - once you're competent with the very very basics you end up usually blocked on figuring out the order of operations that lets you build a stable structure and holding it all in your head at once while you execute on it, but I think when you're learning the very basics the spell's too simple for that to be hard and you mostly screw up by - overcorrecting when it's a little out of line, thinking it's still working when it's not, poking it in a bad place because you don't know what's going on so you're fumbling around -"

Keltham: "All right.  I'll try focusing on perception.  Is this - a case where the standard advice to just meditate and learn to sense things, is as good as it gets, because people tried to tweak the instructions and couldn't get them to work any better?  Or should I be trying to apply standard principles like - forming hypotheses with my eyes closed, guessing, and opening my eyes to see someone's illusion of what happened?"

lintamande: "People've tried different ways of teaching it, but they also wouldn't have been trying that hard at making it take an hour rather than five for bright students, children's time isn't worth very much."

Keltham: "My time may not be worth that much either, if how fast I learn wizardry isn't a bottleneck on any critical path - which I suspect it won't be - but I'm also standing in a room full of potential experimenters.  So, like, why not, you know.  Is my clever-idea of an illusion trick something we can try?  Oh, language note, the Baseline idiom for clever-idea carries the connotation that clever ideas often aren't."

lintamande: "I would say 'brilliant idea', to carry that connotation," Meritxell says. "There's no reason not to try the illusion but we can't see magic and maintain a separate spell at the same time, we'd just have to show you after the fact."

Keltham: "Sounds like it'd burn through illusion spells fast, if you lost the illusion spell each time you used the Detect Magic cantrip again.  How many illusion spells here do we have prepped, that y'all have spare to spend on brilliant ideas?"

lintamande: Most of the students have an illusion spell prepped and some have two, which amounts to 12 of them.

Keltham: "All right, let's plan to only spend half of those 12 in case I've got even more brilliant ideas later.  Let's try cycle one of that, attempted manipulation followed by perception.  Meritxell, you're up first."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa remembers to slow down and take a deep breath before she rounds the corner that leads to the library. If she comes running in looking like something intensely confusing and life-changing just happens, then - if she were the kind of person who even might do that, then Asmodeus would've had nothing to say to her. She slows down and rounds the corner at the brisk walk of someone who is late, but doesn't mind that much, but does intend to get where she's going.

Iarwain: If Carissa had come from another place, a place with wristwatches where people more commonly checked the time, she might have realized that in just a few more minutes, it would be exactly the same time of day as when she had first run into Keltham, yesterday, at the Worldwound.

Iarwain: And she might have worried...

Iarwain: That...

Iarwain: Not enough interesting things had happened to her over the last 24 hours.

Iarwain: Just coming out of invisibility, heading away from the library, are a man and a woman.  The man is pale, thin, tall, clad in simple tight black robes with red trim, with a magical-looking mace belted at his side.  He wears a cheerful joking grin, the sort that might seem genuinely humorous to anyone outside of Cheliax who had never been to Cheliax or met anyone from Cheliax.  He's attractive in a way that requires at least 18 Charisma, and radiates a dark male magnetism which promises that, while this man will definitely kill you once he's finished with you, he will show you quite a good time first.

Beside him is a taller and paler and older woman in elaborate layered dress, black with wide red fringes and tassels, themselves ornamented in gold and rubies, with a horned crown on her head wrought of twisted platinum.

She is identifiable to any informed Chelish citizen as a personage second only to Her Infernal Majestrix Abrogail Thrune II on the list of people who could have everyone in this building killed on a whim, Aspexia Rugatonn, the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa kneels, immediately, before she has actually thought all the way through questions like "what is she doing here" and "what am I doing here" and "am I sure that's her" and "did she talk to Keltham" which seems like the kind of thing that would've been a disaster, but she must be here to talk to Keltham, why else - 

- well, maybe just to lay the Forbiddance, Forbiddance is permanent and can only be dispelled by a more powerful caster which is to say, if the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn cast it, that it can't be -

- Carissa has recently concluded that she needs to get more ambitious, that being small isn't safe anymore, but she still dearly hopes as she kneels that Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn's business here has absolutely nothing to do with her.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn, Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, measures the woman kneeling before her with a careful eye and a half-dozen magics.  If Carissa Sevar is an exceptional woman in ways beyond a native talent for wizardry, this is not yet evident.  But then, if Sevar was that self-evidently extraordinary, she'd have been fast-tracked more than she was.

There are not many times when Asmodeus intervenes directly in Cheliax; Aspexia prefers not to be ignorant about any of them.  She is knowledgeable of history and secrets, though, and so less confused by this intervention than others might be.  While other possible readings exist, the degree to which Church and Queen have been ordered not to take the initiative in originating actions impinging on Carissa Sevar are suggestive of circumstances having triggered some divine compact to which Asmodeus is signatory.  The divine view of reality and negotiation gives more prominence than mortals do to notions of 'leaving things alone to become as they would otherwise have been'; perhaps because gods have been able to formulate a sensible notion of what that means between themselves, where mortals could not.

An obvious further guess is that this compact's signatories include Irori among their number, and that Asmodeus is contesting with Irori for Carissa Sevar's soul in some ancient challenge governed by rules.  Though if Carissa Sevar is wavering between Lawful Neutrality and Lawful Evil, Asmodeus is being unsubtle in His blandishments - the temptations more seem like inducements that would be offered to a soul already standing on Asmodean ground, not a soul wavering between a choice of paths.  Overt blandishments for a soul to set proudly aside, while being more covertly tempted by a sense of being treated as important and valuable?  Perhaps.  Carissa Sevar's eidetically reported reaction seems not particularly expected of a nascent follower of Irori, but that could be a masquerade.  Sevar has not been mindread more than she would be otherwise; they are not to be proactive about her correction.

Someone else in Aspexia's position might wonder whether Asmodeus would be pleased, if she disobeyed Asmodeus's orders in order to preemptively insinuate temptations to Sevar, show her how important she could be, before Sevar had sought out theological instruction of her own accord.  Such actions on a mortal's initiative would not, could not, cause Asmodeus to be in direct violation of divine compact.

Aspexia does not even consider it.  One of the foremost ways in which a Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is shaped, is to predictably not behave in ways that make it more expensive for Asmodeus to keep His compacts.  Improvising circles around your orders can rather tend do that.  If Aspexia was the kind of priestess to circumvent her orders, Asmodeus would have needed to take that nature into account in choosing her orders. 

More importantly, when you are Asmodeus's priestess, the first and foremost thing you do is what Asmodeus has told you to do.

In the situation as Aspexia Rugatonn mostly suspects it to be, a contest triggered between Asmodeus and Irori, there are many words that could be spoken to Carissa Sevar to benefit Asmodeus.  There is a beastly, fleshly impulse that wants to find some excuse to maneuver Carissa into asking for instruction, to arrange the situation so that Carissa Sevar chooses to seek her descent into darkness - to win, herself, the challenge against Irori, to Asmodeus's glory.

There is not the slightest chance that Aspexia Rugatonn will skirt the rules to try any of that.  She's been told not to be proactive, and that is a plain instruction: hands off, don't speak to Sevar unless spoken to, Sevar is to cast aside her own will and not have it stripped from her.  One of the many glorious benefits of being an Asmodean is that you can just follow orders.

There are also other possibilities for why her Lord would have instructed them so.  Sevar's soul may have had hidden value great enough that trying to exchange it for permanent arcane sight would have been too unbalanced a trade, and failed; and Asmodeus may not have wished this fact revealed to Sevar herself.  Or Asmodeus may have some incomprehensible preference about this particular soul, it may have some ancient shape sentimental to Him, for which reason Asmodeus desires Carissa Sevar to come to Him in Hell and put aside her will of her own accord.  There may be some benign process underway which would be interfered with by Sevar gaining arcane sight, and interfered with by other actions natural to Chelish agencies, which Asmodeus desires to be left alone to proceed to its foreseeable outcome.

Or there may be many things going on at once, many pots that Asmodeus has in the fire, that His orders impact simultaneously.

By simply obeying her orders and not improvising, Aspexia can avoid interfering with her Lord's plans in any of those cases.

Some of the apparent confusion of these orders may be due to how Hell rendered down Asmodeus's will into words.  Asmodeus's thoughts are too great for mortals to know, and reflect truths unspeakable in this world under divine compacts.  Having those thoughts pass through a succession of devils, each younger and stupider and less bound by the compacts than the last, does not in any way surpass this fundamental barrier between start and finish; and if this were not so, all of Asmodeus's instructions would be passed by way of Hell.  Then any process by which Hell tries to translate Asmodeus's thoughts into mortal language must inevitably change, and indeed, mutilate, those thoughts.  There are both advantages and disadvantages of that process, compared to a direct divine revelation:  On the one hand, there are wiser devils in Hell to oversee the initial stages of translation; but on the other hand, by the time the final words are heard, they are stripped of other overtones that mortals could hear directly in a god's voice.

An apparently important subtlety of Hell's phrasing, seemingly key to a puzzle, may stem only from some devil phrasing something poorly and not foreseeing what a mortal would make of it.  This is yet another reason to just follow Hell's commands without trying to brilliantly improvise around the fine edges of their exact details, when Hell has interpreted Asmodeus's will into mortal language; the commands' edges may not have been placed that finely.

Aspexia Rugatonn has gotten this far in life by combining the executive capacity to manage fractious subordinates, plus great initiative and independence and ambition of her own, plus the cruel and tyrannical disposition to be a priestess of Asmodeus, with a genuinely intuitive understanding of why it can sometimes be a good idea to just follow your orders.  Her ascendance to the peak of Asmodeus's church can be seen as inevitable, since there's only a billion or so people in Golarion and it is unlikely enough that even a single person like Aspexia Rugatonn came to exist there, let alone two.  She worries about what will happen to her carefully crafted church after she dies.

Oh, and there's also the fact that this entire affair has now been the subject of: two direct interventions of Asmodeus, four cleric circles bestowed from Abadar, two oracle circles from Nethys, possibly something to do with Irori, and two oracle circles from yet another unidentified Lawful Neutral god still under investigation.  In retrospect, Aspexia really should have put up the Forbiddance first thing in the morning, no matter what else was on her schedule.

It would be genuinely arrogant, under those circumstances, for Aspexia to imagine that she knows precisely what is going on and can plan precise dances around it.  Thankfully, in this case, Asmodeus has given her orders by way of Hell, which she can follow.

So Aspexia knows exactly - indeed trivially - what she plans to say to Sevar.  Aspexia plans to say what Asmodeus's orders call for her to say.

Iarwain: The man speaks.  "Carissa Sevar.  I am Rathus Ratarion, Paraduke under Her Infernal Majestrix.  If, and only if, you are not urgently about our Lord's other business, the Most High bids you walk with myself and her, while she goes about casting a Forbiddance upon this place.  If you have theological questions, do not speak them to her.  The Most High would not usually be the one to instruct a fourth-circle cleric, which is the precise fashion in which our Lord has commanded us to treat you; and as the Most High has approached you here, such instruction would not be sought of your own accord, as Asmodeus has also commanded us regarding you."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa stands, and falls in behind the both of them, and is slightly impressed with herself for managing to do even that gracefully; internally, she is shaking. She wonders if there is a fashion of instructing students that imbues them with sufficient awe in their superiors without leaving them somewhat debiliatingly terrified in their actual presence; perhaps awe and terror go together inevitably, but if any place had decoupled them, dath ilan would have. And Keltham wasn't frightened by Contessa Lrilatha, though objectively speaking he should have been, and perhaps that was just an error. 

"Who would, ordinarily, instruct a fourth-circle cleric?" she asks the man once she's sure that her voice will convey at least no less dignity than an average Chelish wizard manages.

Iarwain: "A fifth-circle cleric or higher, depending on the question; the senior cleric stationed here should suffice for many such.  There are questions that would naturally be referred from them to the Most High -"  A slight hesitation.  "But I should not, I think, attempt to insinuate what those questions would be, while you stand in the Most High's presence not sought of your own accord.  You might be led into asking those questions, and that would constitute our being proactive, which our Lord has been very clear we should not be.  I believe that I should come quickly to our business here, Sevar, and reduce my risks of accidentally being proactive."

Aspexia Rugatonn strides briskly ahead of both of them, but not fast enough that it would be strenuous for the other two to follow.  It's plausible that she intends to make a quick circuit of the entire grounds, perhaps for purposes of Forbiddance.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa keeps pace. 

It....seems likely that she is being reprimanded? If she had been proactive, and sought out the senior cleric stationed here, then Asmodeus could have delivered whatever instruction He intended -

- except, He could do that anyway, right -

- well, He said to seek it out proactively, and she hasn't done that yet, so if it's a test she failed, which is terrifying, except also, it has been less than an hour, and she spent the entire time reflecting on what questions she was going to ask so as to do the job properly! She's not complaining (even internally) that it is unfair, for her to have failed the test; the test is whether she's useful or not, and there's no fairness in that. No one shopping at the market and picking over vegetables, leaving out the bruised ones, worries that those ones aren't getting a fair shot. But it seems like the test isn't necessarily discriminating very well, if spending an hour thinking through what you're going to ask before asking is failing it.

So possibly she is - not being reprimanded? Evidence for this theory: she isn't in even a little bit of pain! Possibly she is just being - because it's very unlikely that the offer to walk with Aspexia Rugatonn was extended without specific intent - reminded of what it means, to be raised high in this world by Asmodeus; reminded of what she has been offered, if she is good enough.

And possibly she is being evaluated.  Actually, that shouldn't have come to mind third. Asmodeus bothered with her; this is confusing; possibly it is confusing even to Aspexia Rugatonn, and she wants to know whether it is some specific feature of Carissa as a person which prompted the offer or whether it was, effectively, offered to the girl who got in with Keltham fastest, on the assumption all of them would be minimally competent from there - that doesn't quite fit, but she doesn't have a better theory to replace it with - 

- well, if it was something specific about Carissa, the only thing she can think of - the only thing that felt like a thought pattern no one else in Cheliax had thought before - was the question she was puzzling over during Keltham's lesson, about how to reconcile dath ilan's teachings of law and chaos and heredity and humans having been copied rather than created and what free will is. Her going interpretation, she thinks vaguely, of Asmodeus's message, was that she was being too Lawful Neutral; she was going to reconstruct it all and arrive at the wrong place. She is grateful for the warning, and intends to take it to heart, and won't try again until she's better at Evil. But presumably Asmodeus wouldn't have said anything just to save her from becoming a heretic and dying of it, so it must be important, in some way outside her; maybe, if she gets it right, she can convince Keltham. That's probably her top guess, if she had to name one. (What's confusing about it, what's the strongest argument against it.... well, if a really good theologian was projected to succeed at convincing Keltham, they'd have gotten a theologian in to do it, that's a little confusing.)

Iarwain: "First, I am to deliver this copy from the eidetic memory of Elias Abarco of the complete event.  It includes Elias Abarco's report of the precise words of all instructions from Hell.  Any clear errors or omissions in Elias's report which appear to you are extremely serious affairs, and are to be reported to us at once; if you are doubtful, report your doubts accurately, and magic to clarify your memory will be provided you.  Once you touch this paper it will become readable only by you, barring great magics.  Report nonetheless if it is stolen, or, as a clever spy might arrange, apparently lost due to your own carelessness under very embarrassing circumstances that you are sorely tempted to keep secret.  It may be destroyed by burning at your own discretion, though I would suggest being very certain you have perfectly memorized Hell's conveyed instructions before doing so."

Paraduke Rathus Ratarion hands Carissa a paper written in very precise, very clear handwriting, containing to all appearances a complete and accurate transcript of the entire event, including the part where she threatened to eat the devil's heart and everything she said to Elias Abarco afterwards about wanting to be pretty, and the rest of that.

Carissa Sevar: The thing she's tempted to say is 'thank you', as if it's a favor; she restrains herself. It is a very valuable thing to her but that's got nothing to do with why it was handed to her; this is sacred material, a communication very distantly from Asmodeus himself, and it ought to be correct, as their duty to Him. She reads through it. "This matches my recollection on a first review."

Iarwain: "Good.  There remains then the matter of your first set of requests for Chelish state support in your indulgences, a matter in which I have been deemed the person best suited to make decisions.  I have come to a preliminary decision on all of your requests here."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa glances back down at the paper to be entirely sure what she said.

"I'm going to need to be prettier. Every count's heir I've ever seen was stunningly beautiful. Don't you dare comment on my looks, I'll stab you. I'm going to need to be prettier. And I want a headband, and an allowance for crafting."

         "I don't actually know how much the inheriting daughter of a Count of - I mean, presumably they get their allowance from their county, which you haven't got -"

"Well, maybe you should get me one."

         "Is this what gratitude for the extraordinary indulgence of your god looks like?"

"Gratitude? He wants a return. And I'm going to be perfect. - can I have the other girls' souls?"

Wow. She really did say that. She's still not in pain so she's going to conclude she doesn't regret it at all. Yet.

Iarwain: They are now outside and circling briskly about the grounds, paths through moderately pretty gardens with an unusual number of red and black flowers, going to near where fences and defenses begin.  Aspexia is frowning, not at Carissa, but with a surveyor's eye, suggesting that she is considering where to place the borders of her Forbiddance in a place convenient to moving some of the defenses inward.

Iarwain: The Paraduke continues speaking.

"There exists a tension between two elements of Hell's interpretation given to us of Asmodeus's will; which is a hazard of Hell interpreting and distorting Asmodeus's will into such commands as may be spoken in language to mortals.  We are, on the one hand, to reward you no less and no more than you have earned under Asmodeus's Law.  On the other hand, to support you as though you were an inheriting daughter of a Countess, if you seek to indulge."

"Interpreting and resolving such tensions, in Asmodeus's direct interventions conveyed by way of Hell, is ordinarily business of the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn.  It is in this capacity that she is overseeing my own interactions with you now, in case I make any errors in my interpretation, while she had other business about this place."

To all appearances, Paraduke Rathus Ratarion seems entirely unbothered by the prospect of needing to execute confusing instructions from Asmodeus-by-way-of-Hell with the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus watching him in case he requires correction.  Perhaps he is, in fact, unbothered by it.  This is unlikely to be among the hundred most stressful days of his life.

"The Most High currently believes we are to resolve the tension in our instructions thus: reason as if you were the inheriting daughter of a Count of Cheliax, and decide your requests as though we were being asked what treatment of an inheriting daughter would be a matter of concern according to the principles of Her Infernal Majestrix's reign."

"In regards to your request to seem more comely, if an heiress of a Count was being forced to grow up with an ordinary appearance, it would be a non-Asmodean behavior of small but noticeable concern to Church and Queen.  If the pattern was repeated, or if it was done with deliberate attempt to prevent that heiress from indulging in vanity, it would become a matter of greater concern."

"In such an event, I, Paraduke Rathus Ratarion, minister over the Asmodean culture of the nobility under Her Infernal Majestrix, would be dispatched by the Majestrix to speak to this hypothetical Count, inquire into any hidden reasons, and perhaps suggest a correction.  In this case, the Count in question does not exist, and so the Count may be considered to have mounted no counterargument and yielded the issue."  This statement is accompanied, very briefly, by that humorous grin which might look genuine to anyone who'd never been to Cheliax.

"A wizard-potionmaker pair that has recently treated county heiresses has been located, and you will be conveyed there tomorrow for your first treatment.  After dinner-time tomorrow, which, given your reported schedule, seemed least likely to cause you to miss any important lectures from the person that Hell referred to as your teacher.  Despite the general importance and urgency of obeying Asmodeus's commands, I ruled out having it done at once, since the inheriting daughter of a Count would not have someone else's appointment canceled for her to accommodate her the same day as she made the request."

"I will not ask if this is to your satisfaction, as a county heiress would not be so asked by myself.  Nor is it appropriate for you to express gratitude towards me.  I am not granting you favors.  I am conversing with a hypothetical parent of yours regarding which indulgences are deemed a positive sign in a young Asmodean noble, and Her Infernal Majestrix's state is then acting in that absent Count's capacity using such resources as a Count would allocate."

"If any of this process and reasoning seems less than completely understandable to you, speak now, as it concerns Asmodeus's commands and hence is of great importance to clarify.  I may not be present here in person to interact with you in the future."

Carissa Sevar: See, they are more like Keltham than normal people, they'd make more sense to him, Contessa Lrilatha did but she was trying to so that wasn't much evidence but this man, too, would make sense to Keltham, there is a truth that both of them are climbing towards, only dath ilan doesn't have gods to guide them towards it and does have a billion people with an average INT of 18 working on it -

To Keltham she would say 'I think I understand', because she suspects Keltham values apparent effort towards - acknowledging her own errancy, towards admitting that this is not the sort of set of sentences which one would rightly be perfectly sure they understand - but this is Cheliax. Her errancy is accounted for. "I understand," she says, only because it's quicker than the pause he'd give for her to admit confusions if she had any.

Iarwain: "After careful consideration, I have made a preliminary ruling that your request for an intelligence-increasing headband, and for a crafting allowance, seems to me to come less under the heading of a desire to indulge in Asmodean behavior befitting young nobility, and more under the heading of your requesting a reward not yet earned.  If the inheriting daughter of a Count were told to produce results meriting an intelligence headband and crafting allowance, or else go without, the Church and Queen would not object."

"I would not hand you title to the souls of your rival women even if I could.  While the goal is laudably Asmodean, it is not one which should be immediately satisfied in a Count's heiress as an indulgence.  It would be more proper for her parent to instruct her to triumph over her rivals herself."

"The request for a county is intriguing, and perhaps even, arguably, indulgent; but it seems to stretch the interpretation of the wording for prioritizing you as if you were an heiress, and to be too much of an unearned reward.  While it was an admirably Asmodean ploy, I put forth on behalf of Her Infernal Majestrix, and the Most High agreed, that if such had been our Lord's true will, Hell's interpretation would have said to make you an heiress, not to prioritize your support as though you were one.  We were sensible, of course, that you were likely just teasing poor Elias with that request, but Asmodeus's orders to us do not actually say that it matters."  Another cheerful-appearing, humorous-appearing smile, which vanishes just as quickly as before.

"You will receive by tomorrow's evening a lightly enchanted dueling dagger, whose wounds heal more easily but which causes greater pain.  It will be simple in style, but suitable for a Count's heiress to carry, and would be appropriate for her to use to stab somebody who commented on her appearance."

"You are permitted to argue these preliminary rulings, especially by reference to implications of Asmodeus's interpreted instructions which I may have failed to comprehend.  Do you wish to do so?"

Carissa Sevar: "No." She is not very surprised to learn that she cannot have a headband, a crafting allowance, a county and the souls of her rivals just because Asmodeus said (something that got translated down as) that she should be somewhat indulged. "How should I make my requests of the Cheliax government acting in the stead of my Count, in the future?"

Iarwain: "This location reports daily to both Church and Crown, or is intended to do so, once it has stopped generating an additional top-urgency report every hour as presently seems to be the case.  If your request is not more urgent than that - which a Count's heir's request ordinarily would not be - there should be a cleric on site who is responsible for maintaining communication; direct your messages to them or have a report delivered to them, for forwarding to my own office."

Carissa Sevar: - nod. "The other girls, who sell their souls, are going to have permanent arcane sight. It would be unsuitable, I think, for a Count's inheriting daughter to be studying magic with a peer group all of whom had such a substantial advantage she did not."

Iarwain: The man smiles drolly.  "Hardly an indulgence in darkness, Sevar.  It also seems unwise for us to attempt to undo one of the most direct effects of our Lord's unexplained actions.  It is possible that a critical point in this entire affair is that everyone with arcane sight here will be fooled by some trick or illusion, which only you will successfully resist.  Though that is less probable today than it would have been historically, when prophecy was unbroken and the gods' commands more often had such effects.  And if you do enough to merit the loan of an item enchanted for magical detection or arcane sight, it will be loaned to you, as Asmodeus commanded us to reward you no less than you had earned.  The Most High is fond of regularly pointing out how much our lives can be simplified by just following Asmodeus's commands precisely."

Iarwain: They've completed the circuit of the villa.  The Grand High Priestess halts her strides and makes a silencing gesture, then takes an incense burner out of her dress's folds, followed by enough incense that - if you have any sense for the grade of incense she's using - it is going to constitute a significant part of the Chelish government's expenses for today.

From a wizard's perspective, this cleric spell takes her a shockingly short time to cast, for a ritual of that expense and permanent effect.  It's over in less than a minute, an extremely smoky and fragrant one.

Iarwain: When it's done, the Paraduke speaks again.  "This affair is confusing.  Some might even say, alarming.  Our Lord did not forbid us from questioning you about it.  The instructions we did receive, however, imply a generally high degree of caution.  The Most High has guessed that, if we would otherwise press you with questions, our Lord would probably have needed to command us not to do it, given the character of His other commands.  By avoiding pressing you with questions, then, we can perhaps have saved our Lord some cost and space for other instruction."

"With that said, if there is anything you want to say about this whole affair, the Most High wants to hear it.  But you must not treat that truth as a command from the Most High.  If that were predictably the way you behaved, Asmodeus might have needed to expend greater costs to tell the Most High not to appear before you and listen silently to you, if that is something she should not do."

"In thinking this way, the Most High instructs us, we are to ignore entirely the fact that Asmodeus has already acted.  We are not to reason in any way that includes the fact that Asmodeus has already omitted to instruct us to avoid questions.  We must still act to avoid wasting our Lord's time and energy, even now that it has already been spent, because His own sight spans time and our own actions in a way that our mortal perspectives do not.  We have been cursed with free will; but we can choose not to use it, and make ourselves predictable instead."

"I can barely understand the matter, myself, but the Most High understands it better and it is she who instructs:  This opportunity to speak must not be taken by you as a veiled order from the Most High."

"If, however, there is anything you want to say about this entire affair, the Most High Aspexia Rugatonn bids me say to you in her presence that, should you have received other revelations from Asmodeus, or know of other relevant facts rendering this affair more understandable, she has not deduced on her own part that Asmodeus intended her not to hear of it."

Carissa Sevar: And maybe they aren’t reading her mind, if that would entail being proactive? It’s bizarre to think they might not have been, and she doesn’t intend to put any weight on it, but - but maybe she’s going to have to say her speculation aloud if she wants it known by her superiors, without the plausible deniability about whether she thought it worth bringing to their attention.

“Asmodeus has not otherwise communicated with me,” she says. “I - if I had to guess why me, my best guess was… during Keltham’s lessons I was trying to work out a reconciliation of the things dath ilan knows, about how humans came to be and how they learn and in what arenas they can learn the patterns gods run on, with theology as it was taught to me. And I think the instructions were perhaps aimed at - me doing that right, rather than how I was doing it, which was too Lawful Neutral.”

Iarwain: Paraduke Rathus Ratarion now has additional questions.  He opens his mouth to ask, albeit more subtly and gently than he usually would, exactly what new theology Sevar thinks she was inventing that would merit direct correction and encouragement from Asmodeus Himself rather than from her superiors.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Tread carefully, Aspexia Rugatonn sends across their open Telepathy bond, tinging her thoughts with just enough coldness and hints of the lash to remind the Paraduke to be concerned with his continuing possession of his skin, and not just his curiosity or indignation.  Say nothing proactively that this frightened child might possibly take as a hint of correction.

This sort of lunacy drives Aspexia Rugatonn completely up the wall.  What if this child did, in fact, stumble over some thought that the current priesthood of Asmodeus would not have thought on their own, and Asmodeus was trying to correct and encourage her in that?  Wouldn't they have received orders very similar to the ones Asmodeus gave them?  Why is this Paraduke trying to make Asmodeus's life more difficult in possible cases like that one?  Yes, what's going on is more likely that Sevar thought something so Lawful Neutral that it triggered an old compact between Asmodeus and Irori, but if that's what's actually happening then it is beneficial for Asmodeus that Sevar seems to believe she's being encouraged to work on a more Lawful Evil theology.  A beneficial delusion which, in that possible case, they can avoid disturbing by following their orders.

Iarwain: Ratarion doesn't show any hint of a wince outside, but after a moment's thought, he realizes what he probably did wrong.  Yes, if there's some contest between Irori and Asmodeus going on, Sevar should not be snapped out of any delusions she has about inventing her own theology, so long as it's a Lawful Evil one.

Automatically Ratarion now opens his mouth again, now with the intent of saying to Sevar that the Most High would no doubt find it interesting to hear of any thought which merited Asmodeus's direct attention -

Aspexia Rugatonn: Stop.  Stop being proactive.  Stop showing initiative to help our Lord accomplish His goals after He gave you more specific instructions than that.  Just obey in a way our Lord would have found predictable.

Aspexia Rugatonn sometimes permits herself the vanity of thinking that she has come to understand a tiny bit of Asmodeus's divine frustration.  No matter what orders Asmodeus gives, there is always some part of mortals - even of her, but she is managing it better - that thinks "obedience" means treating Asmodeus's orders as constraints, or worse, hints as to what Asmodeus is really trying to do, by which means the mortal can helpfully understand what Asmodeus is really trying to do, and then cleverly navigate around the edges of Asmodeus's order-constraints to accomplish that better.

Aspexia has tried telling other people that they need to become more the sorts of beings that Asmodeus can easily and safely steer using brief instructions.  It doesn't seem to help.  Nobody other than her ever gets it.  She is speaking some word that is not in the innate language of their being.

Aspexia once devised the parable of a three-year-old child whose owner must instruct it to navigate it through a dungeon full of traps, using a limited budget of words.  To teach her student clerics how the world must look from Asmodeus's perspective.  To make them ask themselves how much they'd want the child to plainly follow direct orders where it got those, versus showing creative initiative for all the cases its orders didn't seem to cover, versus responding quickly to the unexpected, versus the child trying to deduce what its orders "really meant" and going the extra mile on its owner's inferred goals.

The parable didn't work, so she requisitioned access to a dungeon and bought some three-year-olds and tried making her clerics actually run the exercise.  So they could see what happened when the three-year-old acted towards them like they were acting towards Asmodeus.

It still didn't help.  There seems to be something about the concept that is contrary to the nature of a mortal soul.  Mortals just end up with goals, even if you tell them to take Asmodeus's goals as their own they still end up with goals, mortals don't just obey they end up with a goal of obedience and then they start trying to figure out how to dance around the edges of Asmodeus's instructions so they can obey Him even more.  Aspexia can see what they're doing wrong, but she has never been able to successfully get that concept inside of a fellow mortal.  She can talk it at her flock but they're still mortals after she's done talking.  The training games she's devised didn't seem to help much outside of the specific games themselves.  The way that a mortal should obey, the way that a distant god who can't communicate clearly and doesn't have much time to think about them would want them to obey - "corrigibility", she once tried naming it to her flock - it's just so alien to a mortal's nature.

Aspexia Rugatonn sometimes permits herself the vanity of thinking that she has come to understand a tiny bit of her own owner's frustration.

Iarwain: "While I imagine the Most High is curious about specifics," Ratarion says, a few moments later, "if you would like any manner of theological instruction with respect to your ideas, I believe our Lord's orders imply that the senior cleric at your installation would be the one to converse with, and they could also pass a report to the Most High not intended for any further correction.  Alternatively, if you do not yet seek such instruction, a report on your current thoughts, not intended to seek any form of correction, could be sent directly to the Most High -"  A slight hesitation.  "Though I believe the Most High would wish me to emphasize that neither of these are - commands, attempts to push around the edges of Asmodeus's probable orders regarding the degree to which we are not to be proactive - if you spend time urgently composing such a report, and miss a key lesson from your teacher, if you focus your thoughts on the Most High's reactions and pay less attention in class, we would have perhaps managed to do a form of damage that Asmodeus would have need to give further orders to prevent - you should not, I am trying to suggest, go too far out of the path you would otherwise take, to file any report, if it seems you would never have done that without us coming here and being proactive -"  Ratarion does wince visibly, this time, and then emits a very charming smile.  "Not being proactive really is quite hard for a mortal, isn't it?  Perhaps I should simply be silent."

Carissa Sevar: "If there were an agent here in my place which was smart enough, they could imagine out a Carissa, exactly as she stood an hour ago, on her way to go to magic lessons with Keltham and the rest of his girls, and project out when she would have sought correction, and exactly how she would have clarified all the questions she was contemplating, and so that Carissa could continue on her trajectory unimpeded by this conversation, or any future ones that the things I might want to explain would necessitate, and we could discuss all of the specifics while leaving that Carissa out of the loop, so to speak, to do precisely as she has been ordered.

I'm not that smart, and I'm not sure anyone is, past the end of prophecy, but there's a simpler approach, of tracking down those impulses that this conversation might have unwisely insinuated into Carissa, and choking them off, and preserving myself in the state of one who has attracted no proactive interest whatsoever, while still having told you everything useful I can. I will try, because it is my desire to be inexpensive for Asmodeus to direct, and because it is my desire to get your advice without you being obliged by my inability to avoid following it to barely give it in the first place. But I suspect my trying will be imperfect, because I am not smart enough to contain a Carissa; I am one. 

I think a Count in this position would give his daughter a headband."

Aspexia Rugatonn: This is what always happens when she tries to explain to her fellow mortals why they need to be easier to steer.  They start thinking even more complicated thoughts and inventing elaborate ways to be easier to steer that would involve doing even more things, pursuing goals, and even, in this case, increasing their intelligence.  Aspexia is not even angry anymore.  She is just numb.

Iarwain: "I believe we are approaching the point where our putative Count would find the heiress's insistence to be less adorable, Sevar.  The senior officer at this installation would be an appropriate audience for any assertions by you that a headband would be necessary to your work -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia Rugatonn speaks out loud for the first time.  "Hold," she says in a clear cold voice.  "I have received a message.  The Lawful Neutral god who bestowed two oracle circles has been identified.  It is Otolmens.  Have you been told who that is, Sevar?"

Carissa Sevar: "Goddess of - keeping the world intact -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I would, under other circumstances, regret having just completed this Forbiddance here, which would make it more difficult and expensive to move this project to the other side of Golarion from Cheliax.  However, any matter which merits Otolmens's attention is one which you cannot escape that easily, and requires getting at least off the local plane."

"If this project had not been the subject of two direct interventions by Asmodeus, and been created as a result of Asmodeus's intervention, I would order the deaths of every person here except for Otolmens's oracle, and hope that this had been sufficient."

"It is a sufficiently severe matter that I am now stating directly, though still without direct threat or consequence otherwise, that if you know anything I should know about this, before I offer Asmodeus a further costly opportunity to guide me, I believe that not only Asmodeus but every Lawful god and most non-Lawful gods would prefer that you share it with me."

Aspexia guesses, though it's a less certain guess than usual, that if Asmodeus wanted her to not ask questions about a fucking Otolmens event then Asmodeus would have used His limited communications budget to communicate that to her directly.

Carissa Sevar: "It's got to be about Keltham. Am I the only person who has read his mind or did someone else get in on that before he got clericed and it became risky - or have you got an expensive way to do it anyway, I think it's worth it -"

Aspexia Rugatonn: "Ignore any channels you think I may have for receiving information about Keltham other than yourself, including your own past reports.  Speak to me as if I'd never heard of the man, explain to me why Otolmens is acting."

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham is from a world with an average intelligence of 18 and a billion people, well-coordinated. They are richer than us and have invented many things we haven't which should nonetheless function in our world, some underlying laws being the same. He has patterns of thought that I'm pretty sure don't occur on Golarion at all - he's just better at thinking, he's not smarter than me but it's like he's half overcome the curse of having a mortal brain through deliberate practice, and he thinks of himself as very weak at it, compared to a dath ilani with an aptitude, and he's trying to teach us. They have dangerous ideas and dangerous inventions which aren't known to Keltham, held by Keepers, but probably possible to derive independently, and Keltham doesn't know how they handle people who derive them or which things he shouldn't reinvent. Lrilatha warned him about that. They screened off their entire history because there was something dangerous in it."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia thinks.  The more thoughts of her own she has, so long as she holds them lightly, the easier it will be for Asmodeus to point to any of them, if any of them are correct.  If, indeed, this matter merits Asmodeus's attention at all.  It - could be that Nethys and Otolmens have some rivalry after the fashion of more ordinary gods?  Nethys dropping two oracle circles, followed by Otolmens responding with two oracle circles, is suggestive of that.  It could be that there is some more ordinary divine game going on and not the world ending.  Asmodeus isn't acting like the world is ending, and Abadar shouldn't be dropping four cleric circles on somebody who's going to end it.

Aspexia spares a moment of frustration for how it is impossible for consecrations, forbiddances, wardings, or literally anything else, to keep Nethys out of anything.  Ordering Nethys's oracle killed and maledicted would be an obvious tactic, but Nethys's oracle seems like she might be harder than usual to maledict, or even take out of her library.  Which means that Nethys was thinking about Chelish responses, not just being insane.  And if they kill Ione Sala and Nethys's clerics resurrect her, then Nethys's clerics may find out what's going on here with Keltham, if they don't already know.

"I will soon pray to Asmodeus.  My default intention, which Asmodeus may choose not to correct, will be to equip Otolmens's oracle with invisibility items and a weapon and permit him to monitor and intervene in events in this facility as he wishes.  He will have pointed out to him Keltham and Ione Sala - she is now, allegedly against her own will, an oracle of Nethys, if you had not been informed of that - as possible objects of his attention.  Do you, Sevar, wish to offer any corrections, however slight, to my default plan?"

Carissa Sevar: "I think Keltham would agree to put all his teaching on hold indefinitely, if you told him Otolmens oracled someone, which you could do in addition to empowering the oracle, if you expect to have better options to present Asmodeus later."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia does not scream at Sevar about how causing every single intervention of a god to have lots and lots of different effects is not always helpful to that god.  It's not that Aspexia would balk at screaming this repeatedly at somebody while burning off their fingers and healing them back, it's that she's found doing so doesn't help.

"Otolmens's existence is considered a secret because of how we do not wish to direct more attention to Her domain.  It is more in accord with usual policy surrounding Otolmens, to not call this matter to Keltham's attention and potentially turn his thoughts in that direction."

"This policy is not mostly about the chance that Keltham will act deliberately, Sevar.  The problem lies in turning people's thoughts in a direction, calling their attention to the harmful thing.  If you tell someone that Otolmens worries they might destroy the world, they may ask themselves how they'd do that or ask themselves why they'd do that.  I would, ordinarily, just kill and maledict him, but Asmodeus told us not to do that, and also Abadar has made the man His cleric.  It is a frustrating situation to be in, and in those situations, it is often wiser to do less than to do more, if you have not been instructed otherwise."  Says the three-year-old in the dungeon, and lives a little longer.

"With that said, would you recommend moderately strongly, especially if your recommendation is based on information not known to me, that I come before Asmodeus with a default policy of warning Keltham explicitly?"

Carissa Sevar: "No." Maybe dath ilan has categorically adequate training in how to take that information and not make things worse with it, not think about all the implications or the likely mechanisms. It would not be surprising if dath ilan did. But Keltham hasn't directly said it does, and her argument seems obviously true of Golarion people, who are worse.

Aspexia Rugatonn: "If you come across any further information on this Otolmens event which you think is relevant, standard protocols call for you to report it separately to the highest priest and senior military officer of this installation, to be separately reported to myself and Her Infernal Majestrix.  You are not to assume that any such information has been reported by other channels; duplicate it.  Follow these instructions unless you are quite sure that your other instructions from Hell or Asmodeus supersede them."

Carissa Sevar: "I understand."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I'm going to go talk to Otolmens's oracle, then pray.  Do you consider it necessary to insert yourself into that discussion?"

Carissa Sevar: What kind of person - no, broader than that - what kind of mind of any kind would answer 'yes' to that question. "No, Priestess."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Aspexia flies off toward the villa at speeds only slightly visually distinguishable from teleportation.

Iarwain: "I believe I shall see myself out," says Paraduke Rathus Ratarion.  "Enjoy your date.  Though that wasn't an order - you know, I think I should just go."

He gives Sevar a cheerful wave, walks just outside the Forbiddance, and vanishes.

Carissa Sevar: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh she's not just being stubborn and childish about the headband, she actually thinks that she is not capable enough to function at the level required for survival in her current situation and she doesn't really have a plan B - well. Plan B is to become as good at thinking as Keltham, who is not smarter than her. But it'll take time that it's not at all obvious she has. 

She stands up. Walks back inside. Tries to contemplate the odds that Asmodeus will, after all, tell Aspexia Rugatonn 'sure, kill them all' -

Aspexia Rugatonn: Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has never heard of Otolmens, which was obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't know what this whole project is about, which was also obviously going to be true in retrospect, and doesn't have much of an education, of course, and has not received any helpful revelations from a primordial inevitable who would have a harder time talking to him than even Asmodeus would, of course, and is having a hard time understanding what is even going on at all, of course, let alone why the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus would be trying to have a plainly spoken discussion with him, of course, and Aspexia could no doubt have foreseen this herself if she'd spent an additional minute thinking about it in advance, of course.

Aspexia keeps her temper under absolute control.  When she gets home for the day - if, indeed, she ever does get home for the day - she's going to order a dozen slaves sent to her, bask in their understandable fears for a while, and then set all of them on fire.

Why.  Why did Otolmens pick him.  Why halfling slave #958245?

...because Broom is a simple predictable mortal, who will do something predictable in the future, if Aspexia had to guess.

All right.  Aspexia will not modify her predictable initial plans unless Asmodeus tells her to.  Broom gets a greater invisibility ring and a dagger of assassination; and what Aspexia hopes is exactly the right level of gentle suggestion not to kill random Asmodeans without a reason, and that the reason is supposed to have something to do with his new god and Her purposes, not just Broom's previous grudges...

Aspexia is glad that she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, but, in fact, she doesn't have to work on this project or live in this villa, so everything is fine.

Asmodeus: Awww, Asmodeus's favoritest pet squirrel in all of Golarion has been spooked by Otolmens hanging around!  To be fair to His pet squirrel, this is literally among the most reasonable possible reasons for a pet squirrel to become spooked.  His pet squirrel is probably not deducing the context about how Otolmens freaks out every time the laws of physics do something She thinks they shouldn't, like throwing out the anomaly-squirrel, and now She is hanging around Golarion being upset about that.

He sends a faint nonsemantic touch of reassurance.  Gods are allowed to do this to their clerics without it being very costly from the intervention budget, so long as they don't do it often enough or reliably enough that it starts to form a signaling code.  The part about making Otolmens's new oracle be invisible is weird and unpredicted, but Asmodeus doesn't have time to pay much attention and His pet squirrel probably knows what it's doing.  It's not worth an intervention, almost certainly.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom has spent a long lifetime looking and sounding, and in some cases thinking, exactly as wise and intelligent as will not get a slave punished under a variety of circumstances.  This usually does not call for very much apparent wisdom and intelligence; it is better to let your masters look down on you, when that does not give them a reason to punish you.

When the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus explains matters to Broom using carefully dumbed-down clauses - about how he's been chosen by the goddess of preventing the world from ending, and he's allowed to kill an Asmodean if he thinks it stops the world ending but shouldn't do so otherwise, except that if he feels a very strong impulse to do anything he should probably do that whether or not it involves killing someone - Broom displays exactly the level of apparent wisdom and intelligence that makes him look like a gruff old halfling sweeper who was in fact able to grasp all that and will do it reliably.  He thinks he understands, mistress; some people might make a world-threatening mess that destroys not just Cheliax but all of Golarion, and if it looks like they're going to do that, Broom will clean it up.

Broom does not plan to do this as a masquerade, or think any worded thoughts about it; it's just a reflex by now.  Like so many others in Cheliax, Broom has become not a very distinguishable person from his mask, even to himself.  It may not occur to Broom for a while yet that he is now allowed to be wiser or more intelligent than he previously needed to look to his masters.

This, too, is mortal nature, if you put someone in a position where they are not allowed to look too intelligent or wise, and then take them out of it.  There is momentum, but a finite momentum, and it is hard to guess how far that momentum will last.

Keltham: Keltham has now guessed, and then been shown, what happens when he tries to touch magic, on four different occasions.  He's burned his remaining Greater Detect Magic for the day on watching what happens when other people interact with spells above scaffolds, though he can't hold his concentration on Greater Detect Magic while trying his own magical manipulations; and before his spell ran out he also took another look at people catching cantrips.  He's not forming solid perceptual generalizations about what does what.

But he's ever played hyperdimensional arcade games with lots of hidden information and subtlety.

"I get the impression that Detect Magic is not showing all of the - latent information, hidden facts - about what goes on with magical structures.  Like, two magical configurations that looked the same to me, in the illusion you're showing me, could have other different facts about them, not visible in the illusion, not visible in the detection spell, which would change how the spell reacted when I touched it.  In particular, I touched it what I thought was the same way twice, and even though it seemed to have reset to the same starting point both times, it reacted pretty differently.  Maybe I touched it differently, which could be true, obviously, but going on general behaviors and my intuitive sense of the pattern, I think that - something changed in the hidden background.  Does that sound right?"

lintamande: "- maybe?" says Meritxell. "Magic is deterministic, but the illusion probably isn't conveying enough to fully determine it - if I touch it it'll do what I want every time, for something as simple as a cantrip, but I don't know what additional features of the situation I might be paying attention to that I'm not properly putting in the illusion. For the kind of spell where it won't do what I want every time, I'd be failing to pay attention to its momentum properly, or failing to pay attention to the viscosity it gets from having been recently manipulated, or failing to track an interaction it's having with other nearby magic, but cantrips are so easy that you don't have to account for all of that."

Keltham: "Deterministic and fully-visible are different concepts and I maybe shouldn't have asked about them together.  Even if the parts I can't see are the same, and I actually am touching them differently, or those other parts are just reacting to changing things like viscosity - are there parts I can't see, in the information here?  I mean, even changes of viscosity from having been recently manipulated implies there's a current-viscosity state that isn't being shown, are there a lot of other - facts-that-can-be-true-about-it, hidden-information," he uses the Baseline term because he just can't stand it, "latentvariables, that I'm not seeing?"

lintamande: "There are parts you can't see, yes. You have to infer their state, though for a cantrip you don't have to infer it very precisely."

Keltham: Keltham is a very self-disciplined person who would not set anything on fire right now even if he had the economicmagic to do that without buying a flamethrower.

"I realize this may not be the usual order in which these things are taught to children, but can I just have a quick review of all the known equations or even rules-of-thumb governing all the properties that magic actually has?  Has any progress been made on getting a copy of any of the books like - Principles of Spell Design, I think was one of them - that would have information like that?"

lintamande: - they can try but all the known rules of thumb are not quick and all the equations are not known. Principles of Spell Design lays out all of the heuristics you can use but you still usually fail, when designing spells with all of those in mind; it's speculated that gods can see all the hidden properties exactly as clearly as the visible properties and that's why it's not hard for gods to design spells. 

They launch into all the known rules of thumb, usually with the caveat that casting cantrips doesn't actually require this. You can think of one aspect of magic as lagging the visible aspects like so, requiring more energy to move and moving more slowly when it does but also requiring more energy to stop; you can think of another as reacting badly to close contact with itself, and resisting spell structures like such or such, which is why no spells have structures like that; you can think of this other thing as possible to tug into alignment only by sort of jiggling the spell, and you can tell you've got it when you don't get any reverberations when you do this -

And people have, of course, tried hyperdimensional representations that capture all that, but it's hard, and usually less useful to learn than the heuristics if you aren't specifically doing spell design, and none of them have arrived at equations that if solved for let you invent spells, despite having headbands and plenty of motivation. It's understood that the number of ways magic interacts with itself is just very very large, for high circle spells, and it's not reducible complexity.  

It is, someone ventures, sort of like the thing Keltham said, about how knowing how objects move doesn't let you catch them in the air.

No one has found Principles of Spell Design yet.

Ione Sala: Ione Sala has now realized two things.

First, she knows where there's a copy - several copies, in fact - of 'Principles of Spell Design' in the Ostenso wizard academy's library.

Second, her oracle's curse allows her to borrow copies of nonmagical books in general circulation, from libraries Ione has already visited and spent time reading inside, if she's been inside the part of the library that has those books.  Though it's not teleportation, and she can't use it to write messages back; the books just temporarily disappear from their current libraries, and temporary copies of them get created in her own library.  She thinks she can do five books per day at the current power - circle? is it a thing that has circles? - of her oracle's curse, and a borrow lasts for a day unless she expends one use on renewing it.

Ione has the best curse ever.

It's tempting to imagine that Nethys did that because she would have wanted it.  But that's pathetic; Nethys isn't a Good god who would be thinking like that, even if Good's own propaganda was true.  If she has this curse, she's meant to use it for Nethys's benefit; which, so far as Ione can possibly guess, means using it to push Keltham's research forwards.

This is... also going to make her a lot harder to replace with an imposter that can fool Keltham.  But that is not why she is doing this, she is not trying to make Chelish security's life more difficult for her own benefit.  Her god has given her an ability which is clearly meant to be used for the benefit of this important Chelish project that Cheliax is spending lots of money on, and she is only going to use it for that.  She is completely not going to argue if Cheliax tells her to pretend that a book isn't there or can't be retrieved.  In fact, she's going to lie to Keltham and say there's sometimes unpredictable exceptions in which books she can get, specifically so Cheliax can order her not to get something and she'll have an excuse.  She is a very good and obedient oracle of Nethys who doesn't want Chelish security to gouge her eye out again, it was very unpleasant, and Ione definitely feels very scared and threatened by that (even if they can't destroy her the way Nethys can).  Even Nethys is clearly being somewhat cooperative, since the inability to write any messages back is probably there to reassure Chelish security against information leaking out that way.  But it also wouldn't be the best possible service to Nethys to ask Chelish security's permission to reveal this ability; they might say no, and that is clearly not Nethys's will here.

"Keltham, wait a second," Ione says out loud, "let me write you a note about something."

She starts to scribble:

I have a secret ability to borrow up to five ordinary books, for a day each unless renewed, if they're in a part of a library that I've been to.  Though they're just temporary copies, you can't write things in them permanently, and there are weird exceptions about which books it works on.  I think for a project this important, I'll accept if the other girls get suspicious I can do it, or even if you just want me to announce outright that I had a secret like that.  Do you want me to get you Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library?

Is security stopping her?  She's really sorry about talking to Keltham first like that, she really is, she didn't do it to make their lives harder, but she doesn't believe that Nethys would want her to offer Chelish security a veto on using her powers to help this important Chelish project at all, which is how Nethys obviously intends them to be used, for Cheliax's benefit, Nethys even made it not involve real teleportation, there could be a pact about this between Nethys and Asmodeus for all they know, Nethys obviously has an interest in Asmodeus succeeding here, and she's very happy to not retrieve particular books in the future if Chelish security says so, and she even lied to Keltham about that like a good obedient Nethys oracle should, without anybody needing to tell her that, please don't hurt her.

lintamande: Security is not stopping her though if a halfling were to stab her they would NOT BE SORRY, just saying.

Keltham: Keltham gets the note.

Keltham reads the note.

Keltham stares into the air for several seconds.

"Yes, please," Keltham says.

This is just so reminiscent of an ero-LARP where the potential romantic interests all have special powers, and Keltham accidentally hit on this girl's unlock condition unreasonably early, and now she's going along with the script and revealing some of her hidden story and offering him the scripted level of in-game abilities and sexual access.

Not that Keltham has ever had anything remotely like the money to pay for sex work on that level, of course.  And he's not the sort to read the scripts for LARPs he's too poor to play as the protagonist.  But it's such a trope to subvert and parody that it's spawned entire massive genres of secondary literature, some of which has become really good and famous and a topic of widespread discussion in its own right; to the point that people who've never read a summary of a novel deconstructing the storylines of actual scripted-longterm-multiplayer-sexwork, nonetheless know all about the tropes for Capability Harems.

Ione Sala: Ione walks to the other room of the library, why is there a spring in her step, there should not be a spring in her step, she should be terrified right now, borrows Principles of Spell Design from the Ostenso academy library, brings it back, hands it to Keltham, and quietly sits down again.  She's at least managing not to smile, she really would not blame security for killing her on the spot if she looked the slightest bit smug right now.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa walks in. She looks - well, to untrained eyes, perfectly normal, perhaps like she spent slightly more time than usual on her hair; to Chelish eyes, like she went to Hell and back - which does happen sometimes, Dis occasionally extends an invitation to the living for its own reasons. 

By the time she's walked into view of Keltham and sat down she has it under control, mostly.

lintamande: " - you want page ten," says Meritxell, who is going to be daunted by NONE of this. 

Carissa Sevar: They're all looking at Ione. Why are they all looking at Ione? Carissa prefers not to be looked at, all things considered, but she really expected to be looked at, at this point. She looks at Ione too, in case whatever they're all looking at is actually evident. 

lintamande: "There's a Forbiddance up," says Peranza, trying really hard to sound confused rather than angry.

Ione Sala: Ione smiles at Peranza.

Oh god she shouldn't have done that Nethys is going to smite her now.

lintamande: "Page ten and some more on page thirty eight, I think," says Meritxell somewhat loudly. 

Keltham: "Thanks, Ione, Meritxell," Keltham says, and reads as directed.  He is a stern soul and can worry later about whether or not he's now living inside a Walker novel.

Ione Sala: Ione is not saying anything to anyone, unless they ask her explicit questions and admit to everyone else how much less they know than Ione, in which case Ione will still not tell them.  Or maybe she'll tell them something true that makes them be even more confused, or just lie?  It's hard to decide when you have so many tasty options.

lintamande: No one asks Ione any questions though Asmodia attempts to read her mind. 

The book has an orderly list of heuristics for telling what the unobservable dimensions of magic are doing. Most of their activities that you have to worry about for low-circle spells are being attracted or repelled by other magic nearby them, or having momentum of their own once tugged on indirectly by tugging on an observable dimension. The strongly recommended way to handle this, as a new wizard, is to practice with small tweaks until you get a feel for it; some people report success trying to imagine and explicitly track what the other dimensions are doing, but most don't, and it becomes practically impossible to do a fully-encompassing version of as you approach higher-circle spells. There are a couple interactions to explicitly track, starting at first circle: they are such-and-such. There are twice as many at second circle. 

Ione Sala: Ione Sala makes her Will save, glances to see if Keltham is looking, and then flashes a kindly smile at the girl with half her own combined caster circles.  Asmodia is lucky she failed so miserably, her feeble mind would probably crumble if she succeeded in peeking into the thoughts of an oracle of Nethys.

She's going to get piled under later and it's going to last for a while.  She may as well live it up briefly now.

Keltham: This... plausibly is going to help, Keltham feels more oriented by knowing what's going on in the background and what kind of surface effects to look for, being caused by what, even if he can't do math to it.  Maybe it's a weird vestigial dath ilani security blanket thing but Keltham feels less like he's flailing around in empty air and more like he's flailing around in air that has visible objects in it.

"I'm reaching the edge of how much stamina I allocated to spend on this.  I think next the plan says I try to cast -"  Keltham has to think back on which spells he actually has.  Shit, he didn't think to use Eagle's Splendor while interacting with Lrilatha, which was almost certainly what that spell was for... oh well.  He can use the two spells one of which is Eagle's Splendor (not as important here) and one of which is Owl's Wisdom, then have security cast Haste on him, then cast Guidance and try to catch it, then try to catch Read Magic - he thinks that was the plan they came up with this morning.  "Well, I get some spells cast on me and then try to catch my remaining cantrips.  How long do Owl's Wisdom and Haste last, respectively?"

lintamande: "Owl's wisdom is up to two minutes per caster circle," the girls chorus, distracted from their meaningful glaring at each other. "And Haste is up to two rounds per caster circle."

Keltham: "Right, so Owl's Wisdom first, then.  Can somebody call in whoever's doing Haste, before I do?  And somebody please show me the gestures to catch Read Magic again."

lintamande: Yaisa goes to the door and opens it and returns with the nearest visible security wizard; everyone else demonstrates how to catch Read Magic.

Keltham: Keltham, somewhat hesitantly, tries casting his first mind-boosting magic that affects himself, given to him by his unknown but hopefully friendly god.  The spell Carissa identified as Transmutation, similar to the structure of what Carissa showed him for intelligence-boosting.  The one that seems more like it should be Owl's Wisdom, going on either tiny intuition or sheer blind guessing passing itself as tiny intuition.

lintamande: It does something -

"That's Eagle's Splendour," Meritxell beats everyone else to saying. "It does charisma."

Keltham: This is truly odd.  Something that Keltham has been doing his whole life, without really focusing on it that much, became weirdly much easier.  He's aware of his posture, what his posture is saying, how he could change it to project different emotions outward.  He knows - what he could say, to express these thoughts, or even to lie - but exactly because of that, it feels much more like any words he said would be something like a lie, a pose, at least until he became used to this state and it became more natural.  He could fling his arms wide and announce how overjoyed he is, and make it look real, or speak with quietly subdued enthusiasm, and make that look real, but Keltham does not know, under this spell, how to do anything that is real.

Eh, might as well go all in while it lasts.

"This is really rather odd," Keltham says with a more charming smile than any girl here, or indeed, anyone in greater existence, has seen on his face before.  "But distracting from magic, I fear.  I hope I am not taking too much of security's valuable time if I ask them to bide a short while before Hasting me, until this wears off; no more than eight minutes should it be, and maybe less."  Interesting how 'dashing gentleman' Baseline rhythms are coming out in Taldane; he hopes it's at all accurate and not just silly.

lintamande: "Of course," says the nearest visible security-person, smiling. The spell provides no particular aid in interpreting his smile aside from making it apparent that smiles are a thing one can do in subtly different ways on purpose for subtly different results.

Keltham: "I do not know if I will ever request this spell from my god again, and foolish as I am, I forgot to think of this contingency earlier - but does anyone have any simple exercises for me to perform, in the realm of acting and emoting?  I'd gain skills and experience, if I could, before this spell fades."

lintamande: "Pretend to be a duke receiving your idiot son who just got in trouble for rhinocerous racing in the streets," says Tonia. "Meritxell's the idiot son."

Meritxell takes this in stride, and bows. "Father."

Keltham: Duke sounds vaguely big and authoritative.  Company president?  Very Serious person?

Keltham shifts his bearing older and more dignified, and sorrowful with a hint of frustration.  "Son.  Rhinocerous racing again?  Really?"

lintamande: "It's not like last time, Father. Last time, I fully acknowledge, I was irresponsible and caused a lot of property damage which was rightly taken out of my allowance. This time, we stayed off Queen's Avenue entirely, and only knocked over one carriage. And furthermore, it wasn't my idea, Callisto challenged me, and I did not think I'd be doing right by you and the name you've honored me with, if I refused and had him name me a coward."

Keltham: Keltham's total ignorance of vast amounts of context is almost completely unable to interfere with his acting momentum!  "Son, has it ever occurred to you that there is a certain irony, or comedy even, in letting yourself be put into self-destroying situations for fear of being called a coward?  I name you meta-coward now."

lintamande: Meritxell heroically manages to keep a straight face at that. "Father! Should we embrace every injury to our name rather than falsify them?"

Keltham: "And what, do tell, is this injury to our name, this proposition untrue, which could not possibly hold in any world in which you raced rhinoceruses, and so was decisively refuted by your acts?"

lintamande: "That I was afraid to race rhinocerouses!!"

Keltham: "Son, your logic, while possessed of a certain local validity, lacks an appreciation of greater contexts.  Are you afraid to take half your earnings, and set them aflame?"

lintamande: "- well, not if they're in gold, sir!"

Keltham: Er, right.  "Gold melts if the flame is hot enough.  Anything melts if the flame is hot enough.  Do you see where I'm leading with this, my son?"

lintamande: "You're going to light me on fire if I do this again?"

Keltham: With Eagle's Splendour running, Keltham doesn't crack up at this.  "I am saying, son, that like a sufficiently hot fire, the notion of proving oneself unafraid to do things has a certain dangerous generality.  How about if, in the future, you prove yourself unafraid of refusing to do things to prove yourself unafraid of them?"

lintamande: " - yes, Father. Okay, pretend to be a thief casing a magic shop to learn its protections before you rob it, and Ione, you're a shopkeeper who is trying to figure out whether he's going to make a purchase and whether you'll offend anyone powerful kicking him out."

This is, of course, a substantial social favor to Ione, though there's no indication of that in Meritxell's gesture; she might've chosen a classmate at random. 

Ione Sala: ...Meritxell thinks Ione has got secret connections and/or magical bloodlines going for her, rather than HERESY, and Ione is going to pay for this later but for this one golden moment she'll take it for everything it has.

"Good evening, sir," Ione says graciously, standing up from her chair.  "Can I interest you in a slightly used mud golem?"  She gestures at Asmodia.  "It isn't pretty but that doesn't mean it lacks all possible use."

lintamande: Asmodia smiles pleasantly and only slightly murderously.

Keltham: Thief?  But a master criminal would be picking somebody else to impersonate - somebody rich, from context?  Charming rich person?  Oh, interesting his thoughts are moving faster on this subject too.

"My, you undersell your wares, I think.  This is a fine mud golem!  Look at its smile!  What about this one here?"  Keltham gestures towards Pilar, and then, as soon as Ione's eyes shift in that direction, Keltham takes several lightning glances around the room before moving his gaze back to Ione, wow that's interesting he thinks his expression somehow did this thing where even if somebody was watching him that would have looked more natural and casual than it was.

Ione Sala: "Oh, that one is far more worthy of you, sir," the more he takes out on Pilar, the less he'll take out on Ione, if Keltham happens to be a sadist.  "An Alak-Kuata original, that one is, from Osirion!  Have you ever had the pleasure of owning any golems of Sothis's making?"

Keltham: "Not yet, I must say!  A recent shipment?"