???: A little laugh, as if sharing a joke. "Funny! But what if the Queen is not so content to leave you be, as you are to leave her to her unimportant temporal throne? Abrogail Thrune is very nearly the only person in Cheliax who would slay you out of hand, with Asmodeus having made His own interest in you clear. The slaves of Church and Queen have been instructed not to punish you more than you earn. Abrogail Thrune is not one of those slaves. She is Asmodeus's very junior partner, or so she presumes to see it. If Abrogail slays you to keep Cheliax all for herself, and protect her own interests, her pact with Asmodeus prohibits her punishment in Hell for that. It does not even contradict the wording of Hell's instructions. Are you really sure it serves your own interests, however selflessly Asmodean they may be, for Abrogail or some other non-slave like her to sit on Cheliax's throne?"
Carissa Sevar: "The slaves of Church and Queen have been instructed, also, not to be proactive in my education, but to leave it to me to seek; you claim to have seen the transcript, so you must be aware of this, and no slave of Church and Queen yourself." ....which is accusing the stunningly beautiful woman of being the Queen, which Carissa did not intend to do at the start of that sentence but it does seem to be the logical place where it logically went. Not that she believes the words; she merely said them.
Abrogail Thrune II: An appearance changes.
"My, my. Shouldn't you be kneeling, then?"
Carissa Sevar: This, too, might be a test.
- but might not. It's true, that Aspexia Rugatonn didn't want people being proactive with Carissa. And that there's very few people who would defy her, on that.
And once again there is the infernal difficulty that if it's a test it is not always obvious what is being tested. And that it being a test doesn't at all mean you can't die of failing it.
"Should I, your Majesty? I was taught to kneel if your entourage passed down a street I was walking on, but my school omitted any lessons for how to comport myself should you appear in my bedroom. Perhaps in bedrooms one prostrates oneself as for a pharaoh."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Mm. You saw the possibility, but you don't believe it's me. I suppose I should credit you for having thought of it at all. You might be surprised, how many people don't."
"I'm reading your mind right now, of course. Would you slay me if Aspexia Rugatonn told you that I'd outlived my usefulness to Lord Asmodeus?"
Carissa Sevar: The obvious reflexive 'no' would not be useful information, to the genuine Queen of Cheliax; the thought process might be, but she'll have to let it play out, and she doesn't actually know its exact contents until it plays out, which -
- it would be so irritating, to mostly have peoples' minds full of thoughts about whether you're going to kill them. Carissa will strive to avoid that. The other obvious not-reassuring answer is that this is not guidance Aspexia Rugatonn would give -
- because Asmodeus doesn't overthrow Pharasma -
- because even if you wanted the Queen of Cheliax taken out you would not involve any third circle wizards in your plans, they are weak enough to actively be far more of a liability than an aid -
- because Asmodeus's directions to Carissa are narrow, and Aspexia Rugatonn wants to interpret them narrowly, do the obvious things and not other things that cloud Asmodeus's vision with noise and confusion -
- but it is true that Chelish monarchs get assassinated a lot, presumably with the Church's implicit support, so maybe Carissa is the one misunderstanding, believing that Asmodeanism does actually say you shouldn't murder your Queen.
- some part of Carissa's brain chimes up that she shouldn't murder the Queen because the Queen is really pretty. Thank you that part of Carissa's brain for reminding her that humans are fundamentally contemptible beings.
- Carissa notes that the only people ever to have been acknowledged as killing a King or Queen of Cheliax is another of House Thrune, presumably because for everyone else Asmodeus's law does apply and does ban regicide and if you succeed they still put you to death, they don't make you a deal. That might even be part of the pact, that House Thrune can play among themselves but needn't fear their entire country made weapons pointed at them, needn't fear the chaos of being Taldor or of the civil wars before Hell rose to power in Cheliax -
- there are rules here and she doesn't know them -
Carissa Sevar: "Only if you command it, your Majesty," she says, and at this point indeed kneels.
Abrogail Thrune II: "Not the new playmate I'd hoped for, not the potential inconvenience I thought worth a personal visit. Understand, Sevar, I will not lightly break one of my senior partner's toys, but if I need do so, I will petrify you, ward the statue against detection, and bury your trapped soul deep enough that ages would not expose it again. Perhaps in time Asmodeus will see you in His embrace at last, or perhaps some little inconvenience will end all Pharasma's works before then, for all Otolmens's pains."
"Ferrer Maillol is a competent administrator, as Asmodean priests go, but he lacks vision." Abrogail's voice is not at all seductive, now, it commands, demands. "We are not satisfied with Cheliax being taught the outsider's secrets of metalworking. We do not expect Lord Asmodeus will be satisfied with it either. Not if other countries also come to possess those secrets. We desire that Cheliax gain advantage from this, Carissa Sevar. Why our Lord has instructed that we do not simply keep the outsider for our own, I do not know for certain, but it is not an instruction I intend to defy."
"This being so, we particularly desire that Cheliax not be left in an unfortunate position by an outsider propagating a powerful Lawful Neutral philosophy which enables its masters to unravel secrets of the magicless and perhaps the magical world; but which, introduced to Chelish students, inevitably casts them into heresy, so that only priests and the soul-sold slaves of Asmodeus can safely be taught it. We do not have enough of those to compete with Osirion and Lastwall if all their wizards and clerics and tinkerers are being taught those new ways. If the outsider teaches widely elsewhere it will be a trivial matter to steal his teachings, but we must be able to use what we copy."
"Maillol's previous instructions to you are revoked. His understanding of Asmodeus's will failed. You have no priority higher than learning the core source of power of Keltham's world, and transforming it into a form that Asmodean students can learn and remain Asmodeans. Better yet, burn and refine their iron to steel, show what their philosophy can become when it embraces power and pain, and wield that to raise a force that could crush dath ilan under our heel. Do that, and I, as Asmodeus's designate here, will say that you served Him well, and raise you high within this world."
Carissa Sevar: Is it completely ridiculous and contemptible to feel disappointed she lacks the deftness or ambition or whatever to be a new playmate to the Queen of Cheliax? Yes. Are humans completely ridiculous and contemptible? Also yes.
But she gets an assignment for her project, for the one she - yes, sensed they were going to need, in a world that had Keltham in it at all -
" - yes, your Majesty."
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail tosses a small bag down by where Carissa kneels. "Your crafting allowance, Sevar. A little gold, a little spellsilver. It will only open to your own hand, left or right, either one. You didn't earn it, but Hell's instructions do not say that I may not reward you a little more than you have earned."
"As for what that bag does to the hand that opens it, you're allowed to have it healed once it's over."
"If someday you change your opinions on the importance of mortal thrones and become a worthy playmate after all, do remember how early I started planning for that. Just because I like to play doesn't mean I'll entertain a serious possibility of losing."
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail leans over to blow out the black candle, and the moment the crimson flame goes out, it appears that she and the candle are gone.
Iarwain: Some kind of illusion? The Forbiddance is still up, isn't it? The bag remains by Carissa Sevar's hand.
Carissa Sevar: ...she stands.
"....security?" she says weakly. "I have, uh, the experience of having spent the last ten minutes talking with an intruder who represented herself as the Queen."
Iarwain: No immediate reply.
Carissa Sevar: Then Carissa's going to get dressed, take her ....agonizing Bag of Holding? and step out into the hallway.
Iarwain: Well, there's nobody in the hallway, so far as that goes.
Carissa Sevar: - Keltham. The first priority when there's any suggestion that security has been compromised. Carissa runs.
Iarwain: She's intercepted before she gets far, by somebody who looks like Atanasio Torres.
"I no longer envy you the attention you get," the person who looks like Atanasio Torres observes. "Zero-one-nine-four-eight, yes that was the Queen. Need a sleep spell or will you be able to manage on your own?"
Carissa Sevar: - any illusions show up to Detect Magic?
Iarwain: Not at her caster circle.
Carissa Sevar: "I don't need a sleep spell, but I need to report first. Is Maillol in the temple?"
Iarwain: Torres didn't think she'd fall for that trap, but trying is a habit he doesn't think much about. "Just back from his four-hour meeting in Egorian," Torres says dryly.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa wants to come up with some kind of wisecrack about that but she's having her adrenaline crash now and she's too tired. "Mmmm," she says, because she does appreciate the warning, and goes off to the temple. To knock on Maillol's door. Hopefully someone else has already told him the news so she at least won't be breaking it to him.
Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol is relieved to see Sevar here so quickly, because it means that Sevar and the Queen are not having sex, which would not have been something he needed in his life. He's tired enough from having to kneel patiently while three eighth-circle wizards argued about why nobody figured out heritage math if heritage math was actually that simple; and the Queen of Cheliax read transcripts of Sevar's thoughts while having sex, while making interesting, and obviously deliberate, facial expressions, where Maillol could see them.
"Sevar. I confirm that was Her Infernal Majestrix."
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. Am I supposed to provide my best recollection of the conversation."
Ferrer Maillol: "Her Infernal Majestrix has instructed that I am not to proactively inquire into the contents of her conversation with you, but if you seek instruction of your own accord, I am allowed to laugh. Those were her literal words."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, it seems like you could use a laugh. Sir."
Ferrer Maillol: "I do not need my life to be any more humorous than it already is, in fact. And you need to get enough sleep to prepare spells today. If your questions aren't going to keep you up, ask later, and if they will, get a sleep spell. Unless it's brief."
Carissa Sevar: No, it's just that she's really curious about her Evil Bag Of Holding. "Good night, sir."
Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodeus uphold you, Sevar." He has her new intelligence headband now, in fact, but he's not giving it to her until she's slept enough to prepare spells, because wizards are all insane.
Carissa Sevar: If wizards are insane they are in good company with, apparently, the entire rest of the world including the gods.
Carissa has a lot of practice at waking up for a life-or-death fight in the middle of the night and then going right back to sleep. It is in many ways a combat wizard's core skillset. She sleeps immediately and soundly, with her Evil Bag Of Holding clutched at her side.
Keltham: Keltham wakes up more muzzily than the previous day, to dawn's light coming through his windows. The non-fully-opaqueable windows seem less like a design flaw if clerics have to pray for their spells during the dawn hour.
All right. Let's do this.
Keltham reviews his notes from the previous night, written appropriately cryptically, and then prays, trying to cast his mind Beyond, maybe in the direction that wasn't the three space or one time, looking toward his deity: the Lawful Neutral god of people wanting to follow the protocols they must follow in order for their interactions to be mutually beneficial, come to the Pareto frontier, coordinate without vast enforcement costs, summing to powerful societies and markets even when people largely pursue their own individual interests individually, because they never step on others in order to do that.
Requests, obviously subject to amendation should his unknown god deem there to be better spells he could get:
0th: Detect Magic, Guidance1st: Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, keep Sanctuary2nd: Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment3rd: Invisibility Purge actually, how about his god only reassigns him Invisibility Purge, or Glimpse of Beyond, if Keltham still might need it3rd: Owl's Wisdom, actually Honest Pricing also seems good here4th: Early Judgment
And also:
If conditional spell assignment works at all for communication with his god, please assign Read Weather (1st).If the communication doesn't cost much, please assign Lighten Object (1st).If the communication seems like it should be error-free and reliable, please assign Air Bubble (1st).If Keltham should speak freely and teach as much as he can to his hosts, please assign Light (0th).If Keltham should instead stall them with relatively less dangerous material, please assign Create Water (0th).And if Keltham should run the ass out of here today with just Carissa and tell nobody else where he's going, please assign Lay of the Land (2nd).
Any remaining slots should be assigned as his god sees fit.
...Keltham would also like to talk, if now is a better time than yesterday, for whatever reason. Keltham has many questions about how he can best cooperate in a mutually beneficial way with his god.
Abadar: Presumably Pharasma's had time to review Otolmens' reports by now and the absence of communications from her suggests that it's fine to proceed as normal?
Otolmens: It is TRUE that Pharasma has now had time to review Otolmens's first report about the anomaly.
However, Pharasma has NOT had time to review the second, third, fourth, or most recently FIFTH additional reports that Otolmens THEN had to file dealing with the ABSURD and INCREASINGLY RAPID escalation of DIVINE INTERVENTIONS around the region She SPECIFICALLY SAID everyone needed to STOP intervening in. Abadar may be familiar with the THIRD report in this sequence. It concerns the mortal's acquisition of SEVEN CLERIC LEVELS. Yet ANOTHER report concerns an intervention by ASMODEUS who Otolmens is aware is GOOD FRIENDS with ABADAR. Then there are interferences by NETHYS and for some reason CAYDEN CAILEAN and Otolmens is still wondering what IOMEDAE was doing in that pseudohypothetical chat.
Otolmens is willing to entertain that there are possible replies to a prayer which would make further events LESS COMPLICATED, such as commanding the anomalous mortal to REMAIN STILL AND NOT MOVE FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS. Is Abadar planning to send a reply like that?
Abadar: Mortals literally die of that. And also, Abadar does not command his mortals, He trades with them.
Otolmens: Otolmens FAILS to see why a mortal dying would be BAD as they are LITERALLY DESIGNED TO DO THAT and do so ALL THE TIME but if for some reason it IS bad then the NEARBY mortals will no doubt HEAL that one.
Abadar: ....well, the mortal did want to use a secret code to ask whether to give Cheliax good information or stall them. Abadar knows that god-agreements prohibit using cleric spell assignments as a poor man's Commune but. Perhaps Otolmens would consider it acceptable for Abadar to tell the mortal to stall.
Otolmens: Instruct the mortal to CONCEAL information? CONCEALING information usually makes situations MORE COMPLICATED because then agents have DIFFERENT PICTURES of what is HAPPENING and their actions do not conduce to ANY coherent strategy or goal, even those goals that most mortals usually share, such as NOT DESTROYING REALITY.
Abadar: A compelling argument!!! Cheliax is currently concealing information from the mortal and Abadar just wants to straighten that out, which will probably make the situation less complicated, for all the very good reasons Otolmens just listed.
Otolmens: WHY are the surrounding natives concealing information from the anomaly. Do they suspect that, if given any information, the anomaly will use it to DEDUCE THE NATURE OF REALITY and then DESTROY IT.
Asmodeus: Yes!! They do!
Abadar: Oh, come on.
Asmodeus: Asmodeus cannot exactly see everything going on down there but a lot of what His mortals are concealing is, indeed, of the 'true nature of reality' flavor. Abadar should absolutely not blow that up within 57,000 time units just because he's sour that the mortal hasn't gone to Him.
Abadar: The thing Abadar is angry about is that the mortal is being systematically lied to and exploited when he would be a really excellent trade partner for decent people.
Asmodeus: And he'll get around to it, no doubt!! But the impatience is unbecoming, really.
Abadar: It seems to Abadar that Otolmens might reasonably consider Asmodeus's conduct in Hell a threat to the stability of the Material Plane, if concealing it is necessary to prevent threats to the stability of the Material Plane and Asmodeus has never before been bothered to conceal this. It seems to Abadar that the mortal wants a nice rich stable world, and is more likely to endanger it if he ends up getting the wrong subset of information about the world, like might happen if you are Asmodeus and maliciously lying to advance your own interests. It seems to Abadar that containing the mortal by trying to learn his dangerous secrets while concealing Asmodeus's own dangerous secrets is an obviously doomed plan and it's absurd for Otolmens to countenance that and not countenance Abadar telling the mortal a small set of true non-inflammatory things such as 'Cheliax is lying to you' and 'my country has preexisting contractual arrangements for similar situations and will respect your intellectual property'.
Otolmens: Otolmens is becoming increasingly WORRIED about what Asmodeus is PLANNING if it is not simply CONTAINMENT. If the surrounding natives are withholding information from the anomaly-mortal as part of a PLAN by ASMODEUS then perhaps it would be better after all if Abadar told His mortal not to -
Nethys: Nethys would like to say hi again! Nethys knows you're looking in this direction! Nethys knows you're wondering whether Nethys really has a plan that encompasses all of this chaos and is leading up to something interesting! And if Nethys does have a plan like that, what is that plan's objective? Could it possibly be the destruction of all reality?
Well, Nethys is proud to announce that Nethys DOES have a plan! Definitely! A plan that encompasses even Abadar's own predictable reactions to how things are going so far! Nethys isn't going to tell you anything about the objective of that plan, though. Then you would get bored and stop looking, and Nethys finds it useful to overhear your conversations.
Otolmens: WHAT.
Abadar: Keltham gets - a sense of inhuman presence, stronger than last time, and if you were going to assign emotions to sensory passing thunderstorms, more frustrated, and -
0th: Detect Magic, Guidance1st: Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, Protection from Evil, Fairness x22nd: Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment, Augury (x2)3rd: Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires, Summon Monster III4th: Early Judgment, Enchantment Foil
Keltham: That... is confusing.
First of all, the communications channel failed utterly. Not too surprising in retrospect. If it was a technique that worked, people would use it all the time, and have invented more complex codes for god-communication by now. Obviously not reliable reasoning the way it would be in dath ilan, because his Chelish hosts could be concealing well-known techniques from him, and also because the entire planet of Golarion is one enormous gap of otherwise expected social competencies. But still, not too surprising that it failed; Golarion continues to not look like gods are running the place or even talking to it a lot.
He's now got:
0th: Detect Magic and Guidance.1st: One Truthspell, two Honest Pricing, a new 1st-circle Abjuration spell, his old Sanctuary, a new Comprehend Languages.2nd: Owl's Wisdom, two of an unfamiliar divination and two of another unfamiliar divination, one of which is hopefully the Early Judgment he asked after... oh, one looks to go by touch, that's probably the Early Judgment if he got it at all.3rd: Unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar conjuration.4th: Unfamiliar abjuration.
Keltham: ...at least there were no Illusion spells.
Keltham: If there's a message in what's left, it's not obvious to Keltham without knowing what other spells he has. At least, not unless he has to negotiate prices twice today. Negotiate prices urgently? Hurry up and negotiate a price on info already?
Or, "They would otherwise cheat you, if you didn't have this spell, worry more about being cheated"?
Should he tap himself with the spell that's probably Early Judgment... no, actually he shouldn't do that until he's around somebody with a Dispel, Keltham doesn't think. It doesn't have to be Early Judgment. Keltham doesn't need to say that he already suspects what the spell does.
Keltham thinks. Not just about spells. He has queued things to think about.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa wakes up again to her own internal clock, which is lots better than waking to the Queen of Cheliax evaluating whether to petrify you forever. (She's mostly not thinking about that. It's - she'll just stop being able to do her job if she dwells on it too much.)
She gets dressed and takes her Evil Bag of Holding and goes to check in.
Ferrer Maillol: Sometimes Maillol wishes that priests, also, actually needed sleep in order to prepare spells.
"Sevar," he says, not permitting any trace of fatigue to enter his voice.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm soliciting correction or advice, if you have any."
Ferrer Maillol: "Going to need additional context, Sevar. My superiors seemed relatively pleased by your performance, mostly because nobody could figure out how any more competent seducer could've gotten more success on Keltham. What you did shouldn't have worked, and the fact that it did is suggestive that conventional methods wouldn't have."
Carissa Sevar: "Specifics." Sigh. "Her Majesty wanted to know what I'd do if Aspexia Rugatonn told me that Asmodeus wanted the Queen killed. From where I'm standing it looks like all possible answers to that question are at least one of heresy or treason but if there's actually some standard answer that'd be great to know."
Ferrer Maillol: "That's our Infernal Majestrix, all right. The answer in real life is that it's not the real Aspexia Rugatonn, or, I suppose, Aroden returned from the dead and got the drop on her with mind control. For Asmodeus to move His clerics against her Infernal Majestrix would violate His pact with House Thrune."
Carissa Sevar: That's so soothingly not heretical or treasonous. "Thank you. She also gave me this Bag of Holding and said that I may heal the injuries after I use it. Do you know what it does? Am I intended to use it?"
Ferrer Maillol: "Even if I did know, Sevar, I wouldn't tell you if the Queen didn't. If the Queen wants it to be a surprise, it's a surprise."
"I expect the Queen told you the bag contains something you want, besides just pain. If so, I expect she expects you to try it, and that she will re-evaluate her impression of your courage if you don't. This should be obvious, Sevar, and I have not had so much sleep in the last two days that you should try my patience."
Carissa Sevar: No one showed up in your bedroom to threaten you with nonexistence, Carissa wants to snap back, but for all she knows they did, and anyway there's no point in arguing that she has justification for being bad at things; the project doesn't care. "Do you have the books on Taldor."
Ferrer Maillol: "You'd think the Imperial Ministry of Historical Accuracy would have enough writers to get one fictional history written in a day if they split up by sections. Turns out, 'We've got a mysterious truth-detecting outsider on our hands and your fictional history needs not to read as obviously false to it from directions that none of us even understand' is not a request that their previous careers have prepped them to handle."
"What I have for you instead are the three best actual books on Taldor that could be located. And a ten-page outline of the rough course of pseudo-Cheliax since fifteen years ago, all of which had to be produced by Inner Ring people not worried about getting executed for heresy if their entire story wasn't just about the flawless excellence of Hell and House Thrune. We're working on finding some way to get the rest of your book written by less important people. Security outside your room has both items."
Carissa Sevar: "That's probably enough for us to work off for today. I should see drafts, I'll notice some things that read false to Keltham that other people won't - I am surprised that it's not broadly believed someone better at seducing people would've been better at seducing him, is it -
- uh, am I importantly wrong about some of the things I told him that I wasn't even lying about."
Ferrer Maillol: "One. I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific. Two. Are you sure you want to be more specific, given that your mistakes seem to be playing excellently to Keltham and that you are still, basically, an Asmodean and bringing him closer to our Lord. Asmodeus made that your call, Sevar, it was very distinctly not left to me or even Rugatonn to decide."
Carissa Sevar: 'still, basically, an Asmodean' stings even though Asmodeus chose her and she already knows it was partially because she's doing theological innovation far above her previous station. She tries very hard not to use that as an input into what to say.
"Keltham's going to have the other girls too, and if I'm doing something wildly unlikely then they're not going to do it and that's going to go badly. And I don't think we can put that off very long, though we could probably do a week if we have to. If you think my ignorance of this is really important to preserve we can have someone else brief the group on Carissa-errors they should pick up, but they won't know how I got to the errors, and that's a - substantial black box I'm working around...if there's nothing significant enough that it'd come up in advising the other girls then I guess those things can go uncorrected for now."
Ferrer Maillol: What are Sevar's actual heresies? Maillol can't easily count them.
Most centrally, Sevar believes that Asmodeanism is about making everyone ultimately better off, which is the central example of propaganda that gets fed to the Outers and that the Inners know better than to believe. Lots of Outers know better on some level, they just know that they'll die if they say it out loud or even if their thoughts are too honest about it, producing a kind of pseudo-belief that shreds apart words from wordless knowledge; an inner disintegrity that is then useful for many further ends in molding people, and probably aesthetically pleasing to Asmodeus as well, though it's hard to be sure with gods.
Maillol does not think the time has come to drop that particular enlightenment on Sevar. She has had too little taste of privilege and power, she is too close emotionally to Lawful Neutrality and too exposed to Keltham's contrary examples.
Sevar thinks that Cheliax's tyranny is painful in part because the pain is educational and necessary and ultimately beneficial to the people being punished. She thinks Hell is painful in part because that pain is necessary to produce the useful and refined beings that Asmodeus desires as tools.
Maillol is not sure when, if ever, she'll be ready to hear that the cruelty is the point. You get told that either after you've sold your soul, or after Asmodeus has chosen you as a cleric.
Maillol doesn't think he should just refuse to answer either.
"Sexually, you seem to have acquired the idea that it would be right for Keltham to do as he wished with you, once you gave yourself to him. On conventional Asmodeanism, one would say that it is right for Keltham to do as he wishes with you because he has the power to get away with it within a lawful system that offers you no defense. Keltham could come by that power because the Church told you to be obedient, because Asmodeus and his greater slaves like myself gave you to him to do with as he pleases, or because some girl was born into slavery to her slave parents and Keltham bought her and decided to enjoy strangling her in bed."
"Don't misunderstand this as critique of the strategy you ended up executing, Sevar. Telling him that it was okay because you consented was an excellent move. He wouldn't have gone for it otherwise and he's just starting out with his first tentative steps away from his Lawful Good society."
"But the fact that you believe what you told Keltham seems to have more to do with certain bizarre personal hangups of yours about events in countries that aren't even Cheliax. Right now, Sevar, the number one person most likely to drag you off to a bedroom and do as they will with you, is the Queen of Cheliax, who is not, to the best of my knowledge, male, and has no doubt killed any number of men after making good use of them. Whether any of them consented is utterly irrelevant to her soul's standing with Asmodeus. She's the Queen of Cheliax. There's no recourse from her, no appeal, no court, she doesn't just have the power to do what she wants with you, she has the legal right, which is the difference between Evil and Lawful Evil. Then for her to take what she wants from you, if she happens to want it, is the most natural and Asmodean thing in the world."
"That you think it's more Asmodean from the Queen's perspective, if you happen to have consented, if you happen to have given yourself to her, is the heretical part. Maybe it's more Asmodean for you if you become a willing slave to the one who hurts you, a shadow of how it will be in Hell. It is not more Asmodean for the Queen to think that it becomes more right if she has your consent. That will not be what Asmodeus is thinking when you come to Him in Hell."
"The obvious endgame on seducing Keltham would be to lure him deeper into sadism and domination with this talk about consent, and then lure him further to the point where he feels that he has the right to make use of somebody who hasn't consented to him at all, and does that. That will be the point that he starts to detect as Lawful Evil and be bound for our Lord's Hell."
"And Sevar. This is not a male-versus-female thing. Asmodeus really, really doesn't give two shits about that. You've met our Queen. You should already know better."
Carissa Sevar: "- I understand. Thank you. I think I can get Keltham there, if we don't ruin everything in the next month before I've had time."
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol reaches into his desk, and then pauses, because he has a feeling he needs to get this part of the conversation done earlier, in order for them to happen at all, because Sevar is about to be distracted.
"If you're looking for somewhere to open the Queen's gift, Sevar, try the torture chamber on the right; there's no torturer currently on duty there and the junior priest stationed outside has healing spells. Though doing that right away may come at the expense of being able to prepare spells before you're scheduled to brief the other girls in the morning, depending on how elaborate the Queen's gift turns out to be."
"It's also been suggested to me that you, Sevar, had to buy your own intelligence headband because requisitions was being weirdly obstructionist about it and gave you a two-week delivery time. The one you purchased will, on this version, arrive with the next delivery we get, later today. You say that where the girls and Keltham can hear. Then somebody, possibly Ione, should mention to Keltham the wild but unlikely theory that the delay is because they're planning to prepare cursed intelligence headbands, which exist just like cursed versions of most other magic items exist, and in particular have been famously known to do subtle influences and mind control and even make people dumber on certain subjects without realizing it. It's not impossible that they had at least one cursed headband lying around to substitute for the one you bought, to slip it to you immediately. The point being that Keltham shouldn't just ask to borrow your headband from you, though that's in any case something that wizards tend to be really fucking insane about."
"Those are lies to Keltham, though," except for that very last part, "so your final call. The suggester wasn't in our chain of command."
Carissa Sevar: "...probably a good idea. Or someone can suggest that the delay is because you have to check if they're subtly cursed, and then Keltham can generate for himself the hypothesis that we might be doing that deliberately."
Ferrer Maillol: Right, well, that's basically what he had to say to Sevar, or it had better have been, because now he's not going to get anything sensible from her for a while. Maillol reaches again into his desk, and offers Sevar the intelligence headband.
(He wishes it was possible to actually curse the things with some subtle maleficent voice whispering to wizards to not be so insane about intelligence headbands.)
Carissa Sevar: - blah blah blah Carissa is a good Asmodean her only motivation is to be a less imperfect slave.
She puts it on.
Carissa Sevar: She's felt it before, of course, she has Fox's Cunning and uses it sometimes when she's stuck on a spell structure, or on how to get an enchantment to lay nicely. It's wonderful, it feels like the difference between being groggily half-awake and being properly awake except on top of awakeness. It feels like the sort of conversation you have with another person where each of you sees exactly where the other is going so you get three words into a sentence and the other person says eagerly 'yes' and you can move on to the next piece, having placed a conceptual pointer, except with just one person.
Right now it's mostly just making it harder to refocus her attention away from the Queen's threat to petrify her. Which is silly. The threat made sense: Carissa is glad to live in a country where Queens issue such threats, because contemplating their overthrow really is a very grave crime and if there were no penalty more serious than more quickly meeting Asmodeus then more people would do it, and that wouldn't do. Carissa understood this incentive problem to mostly be solved with a very, very protracted death but she can appreciate why the Queen would have assessed Carissa's own incentives as being different. And very simple.
And she's not going to overthrow the Queen, because she isn't an idiot, so it's fine. Except that it seems like there are actually a lot of ways that Carissa could fail, from here, in ways that made people very angry at her, and -
- it's always been true that she'll go to Hell no matter what.
- digression, why does Maillol think that the Queen might want to have sex with her? Why would the Queen want that? Should Carissa want the Queen to want that? She leans no, because being around the Queen more feels like it makes it more likely one ends up a statue underground. Maybe if she has succeeded tremendously at her project and built dath ilan but evil and better. If that happens probably she will not end up a statue underground.
(The Queen could be bluffing. Asmodeus has chosen Carissa, perhaps He wouldn't tolerate that. There was no hint of it in her voice or manner but then, there wouldn't be.)
Okay, setting that aside with more mental effort than it ought to take but not more than she has on hand.
The Queen implied that Asmodeus instructed Cheliax to let Keltham go, when he leaves. Which makes sense of why Contessa Lrilatha was willing to concede that in contract negotiations; it was commanded already. Why did Asmodeus give those instructions? The Queen's right, that Keltham isn't a relative advantage for Cheliax at all if no one can learn his teachings without ending up a heretic. That seems really important to understand. She's not coming up with anything but it's standing out now in her memory as a question, along with 'why isn't Abadar talking to Keltham' and 'is Otolmens right to think Keltham might end the world' and 'how badly do I have to screw up to get turned into a statue' -
Queen's present before she gives the Taldor briefing, or after? ....Carissa kind of wants to be in a lot of pain right now, so that settles that.
"Thank you," she says perfunctorily to Maillol, and goes off to the torture chamber.
Iarwain: The priest on duty nods at her as she goes by, apparently unconfused or just uninterested as to why she's going into the torture chamber by herself.
Carissa has been in torture chambers before, on both sides of the restraints. This one is much smaller than the one you'd find in a larger temple, with stations for only two prisoners and one torturer; and it's fancier and better-decorated with glaring crimson mood lighting, because it's in the temple built into the private summer villa of an archduke. But aside from that, it looks like a very ordinary and conventional torture chamber in an Asmodean temple.
The bag is quite small, even for a Holding bag. You could fit your hand into how large it appears to be, if you tried, though the Queen did say it triggered just on being opened, and not with sticking your hand in.
Carissa Sevar: Well, if she gets blood all over her clothes there's magic for that. She sits down and opens her present.
Iarwain: Which hand?
Carissa Sevar: Left, she doesn't need it to write. Though she's going to heal it anyway.
Iarwain: As the bag comes halfway open, it leaps up around Carissa's left hand, over her wrist, snapping tight.
Most sexual masochists prefer a gradual buildup of their pain. This bag is the opposite of that, as if somebody was trying to make the experience unpleasant even for a masochist, maybe as a challenge.
Torture details spoilered.
Molten-iron heat on her index finger, instantly there from zero buildup, lasting for maybe a quarter-minute, and then it cuts out and is replaced by the sensation of her middle finger being flayed, which goes on for another quarter-minute.
(It's probably not actually molten iron; real molten iron would burn out nerves quickly and end up feeling mostly like the pain of an amputation.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa screams. Rich people soundproof their torture chambers, usually, and even if they didn't the church while doing a secret operation certainly would, but she wouldn't actually be able to do anything different if this were going to give away everything to Keltham.
(It is decided: Carissa does NOT want to have sex with the Queen of Cheliax.)
Abrogail Thrune II: "Good girl," whispers Abrogail Thrune's voice into Carissa's ear, seductiveness backed by vast Splendour. "Go ahead, scream more. Let it all out."
Torture details spoilered.
The flaying cuts out. Needles of cold far below the freezing point of water stab into her thumb. This time it's only five seconds before her pinky gets dipped into boiling acid, with the cold still stabbing at her thumb.
Carissa Sevar: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH....is Abrogail Thrune somehow personally listening? How? Why? Doesn't she have a country to run? Is this even informative about anything?? ...maybe it's a test about whether Carissa will try to draw her hand out of the bag, but she's not an idiot and that obviously wouldn't work? She's glad it wouldn't work, otherwise she'd in fact find it really hard not to.
Iarwain: The bag goes on treating Carissa's hand to a variety of different extreme unpleasantnesses, switching faster and faster as the bag continues its work, as though trying to deliberately avert someone's ability to lean into the pain and come to any kinds of terms with it. This is not a bag of pain; this is a bag of suffering.
Thrune's voice continues to whisper seductive encouragement. Depending on how much spare brainpower Carissa has (admittedly with her intelligence headband) she may note that at no point does the voice address her as 'Sevar' rather than just 'you'.
Iarwain: At the end, Thrune's voice whispers to her that she can claim her reward now - Thrune doesn't want to discourage girls from being good - and that if she would like to try this again, before sending the bag back to the palace at the end of the day, it can be recharged by any sixth-circle wizard.
The bag comes off Carissa's wrist and falls to the floor, now open, to the fading sound of Thrune's seductive laughter.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa spends a couple of minutes on the floor trembling and sobbing and restraining herself from vomiting. That's without looking at her hand, which she's pretty sure will set her off again.
Well. She's not going to worry anymore about pushing Keltham into being more intense than she can't handle. She is not sure if that's what the Queen was aiming at or if she just thinks it's funny.
She's pretty sure that asking for the bag to be recharged so she can do it again would be flirting with the Queen, which she should not do. But who turns down a challenge from the Queen of Cheliax to prove yourself intense enough She will definitely regret that. Down that path lies statues, which is a different kind of thought than 'down that path lies horrible pain'. Down her own path lies horrible pain. She knows that. She should expect many days in Hell that are like that, even if she's a very promising student, because there are things you can only learn that way. She...genuinely doesn't think it's the fact that that was the most AWFUL FIVE MINUTES OF HER LIFE - or however long it was - is the reason she's not asking to do it again.
When the pain and nausea have subsided enough she can breathe evenly she looks at her hand.
Iarwain: It's a wreck, but the kind of wreck that can be handled by a medium-strength cleric, not a Regeneration spell.
Carissa Sevar: Okay.
Carissa's just going to -
- right, her spellsilver! She's going to get her spellsilver out of the bag. Very carefully.
Iarwain: There's spellsilver in the bag, some regular silver, gold foil, tiny rubies, two packets of sapphire dust, and Chelish currency. Somebody with a great deal of Splendour has very accurately guessed how much of a reward needs to be in this bag for Carissa Sevar to feel, even taking the torture into account, that the Queen was doing her a favor on net and not just in a not-killing-or-petrifying-you way.
Carissa Sevar: ....awwww. It's kind of like cuddles. The monetary equivalent of cuddles. You can handle anything if afterwards someone will tell you you're very impressive and give you cuddles, or spellsilver.
She scoops it up and puts it into her breast pocket and then makes herself stand up and stagger to the door by promising herself there will be healing on the other side of it. She looks godawful and she's well aware of it but there's probably time to put herself together before explaining the Taldor plan.
Iarwain: The priest on duty doesn't raise an eyebrow, just taps her hand with healing.
Carissa Sevar: Great! She'll just put the bag in her pocket with the spellsilver for safekeeping, splash some water on her face and fix her hair, then!
She's still walking shakily but that ought to wear off.
Iarwain: Security near her room will appear and deliver the Taldor books and the alt-history outline to her.
Carissa Sevar: Excellent. What has she got to work with.
lintamande: Taldor has been around for nearly a thousand years, and has a civil war with brutal regularity at nearly every succession, because the next Emperor is appointed, technically by the Senate, a vestigial body in the capital with no real influence except once every few decades when it is called upon to name the next Emperor. The processes the Senate is supposed to follow are stunningly opaque and complex -- the word in Carissa's language for 'excessively complicated' stems from the capital city of Taldor -- and there's no mechanism by which the Senate's rulings are enforced, besides that they lend the named person a lot of credibility. Needless to say, that doesn't really work, and peaceful successions are at this point practically the exception; unfit or young Emperors have a tendency to be elevated only to swiftly die of it, ruthless outsiders sometimes have a go until they misstep in the capital politics they don't understand and die, the army is always cheerfully threatening to proclaim a general as emperor....
Emperors tried in various ways to secure a preferred successor -- naming a co-emperor, say -- but it was common for junior co-emperors to be killed when their senior co-emperor died or lost his foothold.
Taldor is mostly feudal, but the Emperor appoints the rulers of some provinces directly, and those military governors are supposed to be especially loyal to him and his enforcers, if a fight is necessary. Of course, if you let your military governors accumulate too much power in their own right they might overthrow you. Of course, if you keep the people who concern you most close to home they might assassinate you.
Despite all this Taldor has remained a major global power, mostly for two reasons: firstly, even its outlying fortresses are a thousand years old and nearly unassailable (including by one another, during civil wars), and secondly, Oppara itself is a magnificently walled and warded city, and it's said those walls will outlast the world. It's lost some ground to Qadira, and some to Galt, but it's still larger than Cheliax.
Carissa Sevar: Keltham's going to be so offended about all of these things!! But they'll have whatever bizarre correlations they're supposed to, because Taldor is a real place that really exists. Carissa speed-reads some book and makes some notes on the outline and then goes to the library to present to her students.
Iarwain: As Carissa enters the room, Pilar clears her throat from a lurking corner near the door, and then hands Carissa a very nice-looking piece of cake, on an elaborate plate. "Surprise!" Pilar says. "This is your congratulations-on-seducing Keltham party! Have some cake."
Carissa Sevar: Yeah, that's incredibly weird. Carissa is less than delighted.
"For all you know, I failed miserably," she says, taking the plate and setting it down on the nearest desk. "Perhaps in dath ilan they have entirely different anatomy and we both got horribly confused."
Iarwain: Pilar says nothing, just scurrying around to the nearest chair and perching there next to Paxti. She doesn't quite look embarrassed about the whole thing; more like she did it on somebody else's orders that she isn't going to argue with.
All other girls present are giving her exactly as much of a strange look as you'd expect in Cheliax, which is to say, it's not at all dramatic or exaggerated, but it's definitely detectable to another Chelaxian.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa will just.... ignore that and move on.
"All right. First, on settling sadism bets, the answer is yes. Also do not propose a bet with Keltham because dath ilan has a deeply bizarre norm that the thing you bet during sex is nonreciprocal services, which would otherwise, naturally, not be a thing because anything anyone does they should get something in return for. Yes, he thinks that still applies here where he has knowledge any government would slaughter cities for. Yes, I think it's plausibly worth trying to convince him that Evil has more fun, but you've got to be careful about it. I'll give much more specific instruction to anyone who seems to be getting close to him but the essential bits are - you want to be here, it's ridiculous that anyone would threaten or coerce you into being here if you didn't want to be, you might be exceedingly transactional about your intentions towards Keltham but it's your transaction that you expect to enrich you. You can, if you'd like, have one mean boyfriend who didn't treat you like that in your backstory, especially if you've got hangups to explain, but coordinate with me so you don't all do it. I do not want people who are inexperienced with pain in bed, or sexually inexperienced generally, trying to let Keltham hit you; we're working with a narrative where some people really like that, and most pain here or in Hell is because some people really like that, and if you've obviously managed to talk yourself into it that has decent odds of coming out.
You are going to not lie to him about anything that's not essential. I get transcripts, I will light you on fire, you will be grateful I did because otherwise my boss would have to do it and he has a longer attention span for it. The key thing here is that Keltham notices different features of the world than us so we don't, actually, know all that much about how to lie convincingly to him. So the less you force us to fit into the lie, the easier our lives are. Say 'I don't feel ready to talk about it', say 'I should have learned that in class but it was the week my sister died so I wasn't paying attention', say 'I'm having a hard time putting it into words', say 'can I recommend you a book? I forget all the details myself'. You all want to show off by being competent, but we will get more out of Keltham if we are weak, flawed, confused, and therefore wouldn't be expected to have good answers to all of his questions. He already thinks everyone in this world doesn't know how to think. If you can't think of a true thing to say, or an approved in-story thing to say, the thing to do is to let him believe that even harder.
Questions?"
Ione Sala: Ione speaks first. She's recovered, now, something of the demeanor of a student among other students, when she needs to play that role. "I already offered myself up to Keltham as somebody who would do anything he wants without asking anything in return. I'm not actually into pain, but didn't take that off the menu at the time for obvious reasons. I didn't represent myself as already experienced in service, or as desiring him sexually, if it's important that I lie about neither of those things. Further guidance?"
Carissa Sevar: "...I think that works fine, as long as you keep not lying about those things. Did he not immediately ask what you were getting in return?"
Ione Sala: "I represented myself as being willing to do it for the knowledge, when I made the offer." Ione smiles briefly; she would be willing, under entirely different circumstances.
Iarwain: Paxti's shiny new arcane sight shows that the circlet Carissa now wears is a powerful magic item.
"You've got an intelligence headband. When do the rest of us -"
Carissa Sevar: "We're going to delay it as long as we can because outmaneuvering smarter Keltham's going to be even harder, maybe impossible. Officially, Acquisitions said it'll be two weeks and I went ahead and ordered one myself, which I can afford to do and you can't because I've been earning a generous salary from Cheliax for my work at the Worldwound for six years and you haven't. The gossip is that this is because, you know, some intelligence headbands are cursed, and even worse some are just a tiny bit cursed, make you see things in a particular light, and optimistically Acquisitions is making really sure the project headbands are good and pessimistically, well, they could be manufacturing them a little cursed. Please attempt to have a little bit of subtlety in causing this gossip to reach Keltham's ears. I actually suspect that only the 'optimistically' part needs to be said and he is competent to fill in the rest.
Also we are going to be hiding a lot behind you guys not actually being all that well-educated, not actually knowing that much history or politics or economics, because magical education in Cheliax is very specialized. The smarter you are the harder it is for you to make innocent mistakes.
Keltham is under the impression you were screened for willingness to bear his children; I think that's just true, but if it's not, you now explicitly have permission to lie about it. Keltham is under the impression you are getting generously paid; I think that's just true, because I have told everyone that we're doing as few lies as possible, but if it's not, you have permission to truthfully say 'I was told we would be generously paid and if the money isn't there I'm going to go to whoever's in charge here and make a nuisance of myself' and then to come to me, and maybe to lie after that depending what's up. Keltham is under the impression that if you didn't want to sleep with him, no one would make you; you have permission to lie to him about that, but also, if you find yourself getting cold feet in bed, you won't actually be punished for telling Keltham 'wait, I think actually I'm not ready and I just want to cuddle', because that presently advances our goals. That said, if Keltham ignores you about that, that would be great news for the project and you should make sure he has a really pleasant time about it and ends up with the impression he was right to ignore you. I strongly expect that if you try to tease him by getting him really turned on and then saying 'no' he'll just give you a hug and say it's okay, so if you are trying this route you're going to have to try something a lot subtler and cleverer than that, and you should run it by me.
We aren't telling him about the soul arrangements, but if he somehow learns of it, the line is that it's normal for people in dangerous lines of work to arrange their afterlife in advance so they don't end up in Avernus in general processing, and that as a bonus these business arrangements are hotly competed for among devils so a good negotiator can get some reasonably powerful magic out of making their afterlife arrangements. But that's only if he somehow finds out. I, and some of your colleagues, don't have arcane sight, because our contractual arrangements were a bit different; we're still working out the best story for that so for today you should conceal having it.
Other things you are explicitly expected to lie to Keltham about: who his god is. It's going to be an obscure Tian one. Whether all fourth-circle clerics have a weaker personal aura should they differ from their god in alignment; it doesn't come up much in Cheliax because it can't happen with an Asmodean cleric but you'd expect they wouldn't. Whether Cheliax is systematically concealing things. Whether Hell involves involuntary torture.
And, of course, everything to do with the character of Cheliax as a nation. We're going to be pretending that Cheliax is Taldor."And she explains her reasoning, again, and explains the key outlines from the fake timeline and from the books about Taldor. "At this time I'll take questions, but my plan is actually for you to spend the rest of the morning learning enough about Taldor that you can be a magic-tracked shut-in who plausibly lived there."
Iarwain: "So I've been thinking," begins Paxti, "and I realize it was just a book, but I don't see any reason why the plot of The Damnation of Sir Nicolau wouldn't work in real life if the target was Keltham instead of a paladin. Only with a series of different girls, rather than one woman with a disguise amulet. First girl, obligate fetish for being forced, requires him to role-play forcing her, but she asks him to do that in advance. Second girl, loudly remarks about how she can't achieve sexual satisfaction without being forced and it doesn't work for her if she has to explain it to the man, and we all explain to Keltham what she's hinting and encourage him and note how she never said she didn't want it, he tries it, it seems to go well for him. Third girl, always staring in fascination while that's going on, but looks away blushing and can't seem to talk about it. Fourth girl acts angry but in a way that's obviously sending mixed signals. Fifth girl is straight angry at first, but warms up once she's pinned down. Sixth girl begs him to stop and acts overtly horrified, but by that time he's so used to it always being a pose that - wait, I skipped one in the sequence, in the book there were seven -"
Ione Sala: "In the book Sir Nicolau damned himself on the sixth* disguise, but she kept going to be sure they ended up in the same depth of Hell together, after she killed him and herself," corrects Ione. "...not that I'm agreeing this is the slightest bit workable as an idea. If Keltham is a sadist then dath ilan has sadists and his world will have romance novels and he will notice that we are running the stereotypical plot of a romance novel on him."
(*) Romance novels approved and distributed by the Chelish government may not accurately represent exactly which sexual behaviors first produce alignment shift.
Carissa Sevar: "Dath ilan actually discourages its sadists from noticing, because - Keltham thinks - they haven't got people who like pain and they haven't got any other outlets aside from paying people a ton of money for it, which I think wouldn't even be as fun. But I do think he'll notice if we're running the plot of a romance novel on him, it's too - you wouldn't expect to run across those people in that order unless something was up. And unless you're very good at faking sexual reactions he'll notice what you're actually into, dath ilan does train that skill. Also Keltham has in common with paladins that in real life the biggest barrier to seducing them is them endlessly going 'I don't want to risk you having a child I couldn't take proper responsibility for'. I think there's no point trying to convince Keltham that that's Good, I get the sense dath ilan has lots of children-related taboos which we should mostly just try to steer very far clear of. -relatedly, you're not allowed to point out to him that he could use magic to make you have an abortion.
That said if anyone does have a convenient fetish for being forced that seems valuable. And once he's had some time to adjust we might be able to work with having threesomes where one girl forces the other and if Keltham objects both of them are like 'we're having a great time here????'."
Iarwain: "I have the convenient fetish, not obligate but would be easy to pretend it is," reports Pilar.
"Unlikely to actually be sexually attracted to Keltham under any circumstances, will need training to fake it if he had training to detect it," says Asmodia, after some inward agonizing about how to phrase this in a way that doesn't sound like she's being noncompliant.
Carissa Sevar: "It might be good if attraction to Keltham is not represented as universal, for plausibility reasons. Maybe just tell him you take a long time to develop attraction, though, and put some effort into learning to fake it, so that if it's convenient later we have the option. Pilar, I authorize you to lie and claim it's obligate, as seems situationally appropriate." Carissa is trying to be VERY SERIOUS about authorized lies to Keltham only in case that helps people break the habit of habitually lying about everything.
Iarwain: Paxti and Ione seem to have developed their own sub-conversation.
"Adventure of Ameron," Paxti says.
"I don't think any of us can convincingly fake being half sea-creature," retorts Ione. "I'll concede you could come closer than many."
"I meant metaphorically - never mind. A Girl Corrupted By Books but with Keltham as the girl."
"Fine except for the part where the outcome is the exactly precise opposite of what we want."
"I'm not suggesting we run the entire plot, I'm suggesting that in real life it would inevitably go wrong for Keltham and then we'd get what we want. Perverting Adan."
"That is literally the worst idea I've ever heard. It violates -"
Carissa Sevar: Now both of their hair is on fire. Just a little bit of fire, a cantrip of fire, if they're good at patting out fires it won't even burn their hands. "We don't have much time before Keltham is done preparing spells, and you all need to spend it becoming familiar with Taldor. Are there any more questions."
Iarwain: None that any dare speak aloud.
Carissa Sevar: "Great! Keltham has no reason to think I have any authority here and you will lie about that if he asks. Let's all sit together and read about our history."
Ione Sala: They scatter to desks, but even with more than one girl to a book, there's not enough books for girls. "I'd offer to grab another copy of Taldorian Chronicles from Ostenso, but Keltham knows I can do five a day and he might ask where the first one went," Ione notes. "It sounds like he'd accept my saying that I reserve a book-use per day for personal reading, but that's a lie so I'm checking it."
Carissa Sevar: "Yes, you can say that if it comes up."
Ione Sala: Ione briefly goes into the library's other room and returns with an additional copy of the Chronicles. She's curious about whether anyone else here has been told the full story about her, yet, but she's not going to ask.
Carissa Sevar: "When you run across something that's interesting or memorable or especially anything surprising, anything that wouldn't be true of Cheliax, share it."
And they can get to reading about Taldor. Carissa's so glad she doesn't live in Taldor. It sounds like a tedious undirected nest of snakes.
lintamande: Shortly after Keltham is done praying there's a knock on his door.
Keltham: Keltham shall accordingly go to the door and open it.
lintamande: It's a man of about 40, wearing glasses. "Keltham? I'm, ah, a researcher studying minor and geographically bounded deities at the University of Westcrown, and I was asked yesterday to figure out, uh, which god you are probably a cleric of. I have the report here, would you like me to leave it, or stay and explain it?"
Keltham: "I wish I could say I'll no doubt understand the entire thing on my own, but this is not in fact the case. I can read through it first, unless you think it's better to preface it with something."
lintamande: "No, go right ahead." He hands Keltham eight handwritten pages, bound together with thread. "I can wait in one of the sitting rooms?"
Keltham: "Sure." Keltham takes and reads, leaving his door open.
lintamande: The researcher's best guess is that it's the Lawful Neutral deity Yaezhing, worshipped in a small coastal country in distant Tian Xia. He has copied from other texts some pictures of Yaezhing's symbols, and they're not a perfect match for the illusion that appears on peoples' foreheads when Keltham casts his fairness spells but they're not far off, and it's noted that these are from adventure memories by Avistani adventurers who passed through the country, so the likeliest explanation for the mismatch is poor recollection. One of the adventure memoirs claims confidently that Yaezhing is Lawful Evil but that memoir has a number of errors.
For completeness he's also included some other symbols that are approximately as good a match, with notes on why the relevant deities were disqualified - this symbol is a good match but the god is a nature god who usually takes the form of volcanos and doesn't pick clerics. This symbol is an acceptable match but the god is a Chaotic Evil demon lord of the Abyss, best known for the time he led a bloody campaign to wipe out all the descendants of Azlant. This symbol is associated with an ancient Azlant god thought to be dead. And then gods without symbols but which otherwise seem like good matches: Kofusachi is attested to have truth-telling and trading spells, which is incredibly promising, but he's Chaotic Good - his domain is something like abundance and the state of resources where they are so plentiful one needn't be bothered to charge for them. Possibly he's hoping Keltham will bring that state to Golarion? No symbols similar to Keltham's are attested but a page of further information on him has been included all the same. Abadar is a Lawful Neutral god of commerce but his symbols are extremely well known, they're these, and his first and second-circle spells offered to his clerics are also well known, they're spells for ship navigation and preventing goods from rotting. Just in case he stopped by a church of Abadar in Westcrown to ask if Abadar has a lesser known aspect or associations with this symbol, but they didn't recognize either the symbol or the spell.
With that established here's all that is known about Yaezhing. It's not very much. One of the memoirs has only a single passage, copied in full into the report; it claims that the people of this small coastal country live in great prosperity despite their lack of fertile land, for their god grants them freely knowledge of truth, and so they all trust each other and trade fairly, and mock the peoples of larger cities who by necessity trust no one and must stand watch at night against thieves. One of the others gives Yaezhing's divine realm, Setsendu, in Axis, and a domain of his as Justice; the third is the one that claims Yaezhing is Evil, and that Setsendu is in Hell, but agrees that Justice is a domain of his, as are Cooperation and Trust. Idols of him are drawn with bulging eyes, a long face, and a red beard, but that's indicative of practically nothing, especially with the gods that aren't ascended humans. There are vanishingly few books on him in Avistan; the author says he's reached out unsuccessfully to other libraries, and there's probably mentions buried in some of their books but it'll take a long time to find them.
And the page on Kofusachi, just in case it's actually Him somehow: Chaotic Good god of prosperity and abundance, mentions (meticulously copied, not very detailed) of trading and truth-telling spells, primarily worshipped in Tianjing, called The Laughing God, holy symbol is reportedly a 'string of seven coins'.
Keltham: Keltham reads through it all slowly; there's a lot of unfamiliar terms here, and he is more than usually on the lookout for things that don't make sense. That Golarion itself, does not make much sense, is the central problem there; but still, Keltham is looking, and noticing the many small confusions.
Kofusachi: Has the trading and truth spells. Doing coordination correctly could look Chaotic to the locals if there's a norm, a single uniform way of doing things, that isn't correct coordination. The god of coordination could look like Good, if, say, good general levels of social coordination are a public-good, and public-goods are what everyone unselfishly wants everyone else to have? The god of coordination could be mistaken for a god of prosperity and abundance, if people didn't understand what was producing the prosperity and abundance.
Yaezhing: If there's gaslighting going on, then Yaezhing is obviously the god they want him to believe in. Yaezhing hasn't had much impact on his people, for being the god of coordination; but then, coordination isn't quite the same concept as industry, and no god anywhere has granted Golarion real technology and science.
...he knows too little of gods to know which parts are confusing because they're fiction, and which parts are truth that confuses the alien with the wrong priors.
Keltham will keep this document, obviously, and later check it against other archival-type writings to see if a noticeable difference of style between other archived writings, and these supposedly variously sourced writings, suggests a LARP writing team having frantically produced them overnight.
Also the words 'Good', 'Evil', 'Lawful', and 'Chaotic' are repeated often enough for Keltham to notice that the person who granted him Share Language (Taldane) last night probably had a slightly different concept of those terms than Carissa? 'Good' seems innocent, naive, an object of a kind of contempt that has little currency in dath ilan; Carissa’s ‘Good’ sounded more like dangerous fanatics out to optimize you even if you tell them not to. 'Evil' feels like it has undertones of power and sadism in a way that seems reminiscent of some things Carissa said in the cuddleroom, but in a sort of creepy icky gloating status-laden way; 'Lawful' has undertones a lot like 'Evil'; 'Chaotic' sounds like dangerous insanity and wild predators. The connotations are subtle and hard to describe; the connotations already hammered into Keltham's brain yesterday are competing with them. He already knows those words of Taldane, or his brain thinks it does.
Keltham: Keltham goes hunting for the scholar, finding him in a nearby sitting-room.
"I hope it's not too much of a surprise or an imposition if I say that most of what I need to understand this is background material," Keltham says. "For one thing, I was previously under the impression there were a lot fewer gods than this seems to imply, and that they were all global rather than regional entities. What are the numbers like in total?"
lintamande: "We don't know. There are fourteen gods with well-established churches on this continent; most of them also have presence in Tian Xia. Then there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of more minor entities that create only a few clerics at a time. Those are often geographically bounded, possibly just because if their gods are small they can't pay attention to a very large share of the plane. We believe there are many gods who never pick clerics. Gods are sort of only a human category anyway, for 'entities that can cleric us'; Pharasma and, say, Yaezhing, are going to be very different entities. It's said that there are things next to which Pharasma is small, and we are preserved because they're not paying attention, but no one has any proof beyond visions they had."
Keltham: "What does it mean that Yaezhing is a geographically bounded god?"
Keltham is trying one of the first Deliberately Deceptive Maneuvers he's done outside of Diplomacy / LARPs, Assuming The Premise. Keltham has noticed confusion about Yaezhing being Tian-only and mainly about a small coastal country, because smaller gods can't pay attention widely, and that god managing to pick up his prayer in Cheliax. Rather than asking explicitly about this and giving the scholar a chance to correct an unintended implication of a lie, Keltham is instead asking how Yaezhing is bounded rather than whether Yaezhing is bounded.