Abrogail Thrune II: Life in Cheliax has certainly become less boring since Keltham got here, Abrogail must admit.  Oh, and she looks like her real self now.

lintamande: The shellshocked spies stand there, staring. One of them has started crying; several are protesting. 

Amela waltzes over to ask the Queen of Cheliax for a dance. She's not not terrified, but no one but the Queen will be able to tell, and anyway this is probably a dream or poison-induced hallucination or something anyway.

Abrogail Thrune II: Of course she'll dance!  There's a difference between resisting temptation and refusing it.

Pilar : Pilar will go over and comfort that guy who started crying, APPARENTLY.  No, it's okay, this is all running on completely bizarre rules that make no sense and those rules say you don't get hurt.

lintamande: Do the rules say anything about whether he can sock her in the face, because he's going to try.

Pilar : You know what, sure.

Pilar has earned way more than just one justified punch in the face, over the course of everything her curse made her do today.

lintamande: He punches Pilar in the face.

"Any tidbits to take home?" Amela asks the Queen of Cheliax between twirls; she's a very good dancer. "Just so I can sell them and live in comfort for the rest of my days, which is my top priority, here."

Abrogail Thrune II: "What would Lastwall even do with them?  I can't exactly be blackmailed over it."

lintamande: "Oh, I haven't the faintest idea, they tried explaining to me once how this all redounds to the greater purposes of Good but it was incredibly boring so I left an illusion 'listening' and ran off to do something marginally more interesting such as needlework. They pay well, though."

Abrogail Thrune II: "...this really is strictly an offer, you do still get to go home if you say no, but are you sure you wouldn't rather work for me?"

lintamande: "You can't pay well enough, your Majesty. I don't really like being tortured. Lastwall pays in a literal eternity of not getting tortured at all in a fancy penthouse in Axis. They're tedious, whiny, a waste of space, everyone I like is here, I'm going to have to adopt kids from the Boneyard and raise them Chelish just so I can have anyone worth playing with, but do you know who'll have power over me? No one."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Well, that's fair."

"I would so much wish to tryst with you before you go, but anything that wouldn't be incredibly unsatisfying for me would break hospitality.  Would Lastwall enjoy hearing a bedroom story or two about their paladins?  From when I was a teenager and recently ascended, paladins got boring after a few years."

Pilar : Okay, so, now her curse has been fed and is satiated and she doesn't get tons of cake delivery missions once she goes back to the actual Project Lawful and the actually important part of her actual job.  Right?

Project Lawful: Pilar is really doing her best to kill the fun vibes here.

Pilar : That is correct.  That is exactly what Pilar is doing her best to do.  Now would Pilar's curse please answer the question?

Project Lawful: This will definitely last her curse at least a week!  Though, maybe a cookie here and there.  Nothing too inconvenient.

Pilar : A FUCKING WEEK?  SHE USED THE PALACE BALLROOM!

Project Lawful: Perhaps Pilar will in due time come to understand that this giant ballroom is only a pale substitute for the things that would make for a truly great party.

Pilar : Perhaps Pilar will check whether this curse follows her into Hell.

Project Lawful: Oh my!  It looks like that person over there doesn't think his country will accept him back, now that his cover has been blown so embarrassingly, and the Chelish Security talking to him is having a hard time being appropriately sympathetic.

Pilar needs to go over and make it clear that when Cheliax sends him home, it doesn't have to be his old house that he goes to, if that place isn't home anymore.

Pilar : Pilar's curse is very fucking lucky that it has greatly served Lord Asmodeus's purposes - this had all better actually serve Asmodeus's purposes - and also lucky that it doesn't have a face to punch.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Pilar.  In advance of a full review of the day's events, you may be graded as generally well done.

Pilar : That is good to hear, Grand High Priestess.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Any brief questions?

Pilar : There is something that she wants, but Pilar is not sure if it's an inappropriate desire to be rewarded, or if it is the case that for her to have this thing would serve Lord Asmodeus's interests.

Aspexia Rugatonn: Speak, child.

Pilar : Pilar would like someone to hurt her enough to require a Regenerate spell afterwards.  Other uses of her appreciated but optional.  And maybe a Nap Stack so she doesn't sleep too far in, after staying up that late.

This might serve Lord Asmodeus if it causes her to be in better condition for her real work tomorrow, after literally the most stressful day of her entire life, or it might be just -

Aspexia Rugatonn: High Priestess Jacint Subirachs shall be waiting for you as soon as you get to your proper dwellings, child.  Lord Asmodeus does not desire that his servants never receive what they might possibly see as rewards.  The Grand High Priestess's robes would not be so fine and expensive, if that was how Asmodeanism worked.  It is simply that such are arbitrary or useful gifts from above, and never earned or deserved from below.

Project Lawful: PL-timeline marker:  Day 4 / End.

Iomedae: Cayden. 

What are you doing?

Cayden Cailean: Just to check, is this about the oracle Nethys had me appoint?  Nethys suggested you'd be likely to ping me about that a few days later.

Iomedae: Nethys must have anticipated that your oracle would go around destroying My intelligence apparatus in Cheliax. Did you anticipate this also.

Cayden Cailean: Cayden Cailean shows Her a flash of memory; it is legible that this flash is true as this facet of Cayden remembers it.

: Nethys pings Cayden Cailean.: Cayden Cailean responds; connection established.: Nethys offers to pay the energy cost though not the intervention cost of bestowing four oracle levels on a Chelish girl who's otherwise about to sell her soul, and also, to help out with some of the fine programming on the oracle's curse that will result.: Cayden Cailean says WHAT.: Nethys renders legible that this fragment of Nethys believes this intervention will be, on net, at least this [exact quantity censored] beneficial to Cayden's interests, after taking into account the intervention-payment.  Though Cayden has hardly used any of His intervention budget over the last hundred years, anyways.: Cayden Cailean says that's not what Cayden Cailean was asking.  Also how does any Chelish oracle of Cayden Cailean end up that beneficial to His interests.  What's this Chelish mortal going to do, throw huge parties that get everyone in Cheliax too drunk to be evil?: Nethys could explain how, but then Cayden would have to promise not to explain any of that information to any other gods.  Like Iomedae, for example.

(Fragment ends.)

Iomedae: Well here is Iomedae's estimate of how much damage to Her interests has been caused by Cayden's oracle in the last day alone. Here's some supporting detail. Maybe Cayden should pay Iomedae for that, and if later it turns out that this served Her interests She will pay him back.

Cayden Cailean: Has Iomedae noticed the part where Cayden Cailean is now fairly exhausted from, among other things, fighting Zon-Kuthon.  Who coincidentally got sealed recently, into a vault of which Iomedae holds the key.  In an incident where Cayden Cailean's Nethys-targeted oracle was, at the very least, on-site.

Iomedae: Sure, one of the circumstances under which She'd pay Him back is if it turns out His oracle had something to do with Zon-Kuthon getting locked away, and that this is worth the costs of whatever the fuck the oracle is successfully doing to damage the interests of Good in Cheliax. 

Iomedae does not think Nethys is serving Good, here, and Iomedae does not think Cayden Cailean is very smart.

Cayden Cailean: Perhaps Nethys does not think Iomedae is very well-informed.

And evidently Nethys doesn't think that for Iomedae to be better-informed would well serve whatever Nethys is currently doing, which on net has been promised to be beneficial to the interests of Cayden Cailean, whose aforesaid interests do, in fact, include Good.

Perhaps Cayden Cailean's notion of Good is not always the same concept of Good as Iomedae's.  But that concept does, in fact, take into account matters like starving peasants and children trained to hurt other children and good people Maledicted into a Hell that even the bad people don't deserve.  Cayden Cailean in his mortal life may not have thought about it much, but when he thought about it, he would have nodded that, yes, that is probably bad; and that was before He became a god of, among other things, Good.

There is little that Cayden Cailean can usually do about those interests at all efficiently, given His actual domain, and so He usually doesn't like to think about it.  But He reminds Iomedae that those much of Her interests are also His.  If for once in His existence there's something that can be done about that by empowering a Chelish girl to throw better parties, Cayden Cailean is not going to turn away.

Perhaps in Iomedae's view Zon-Kuthon was an important long-term counterbalance to Asmodeus.  In Cayden's view, Nidal was a horror exceeding even that of Cheliax and one that had lasted far longer.  The two of Them may both acknowledge the points of the other, there, and yet attach different weights to them.  That the net effects of His appointed oracle probably had something to do with the downfall of Nidal may, indeed, mean that Cayden Cailean and Iomedae simply have different views of how much Nethys's intervention has already served Good, because they have different views of what was Good, there.

Iomedae: Iomedae expects that their values differences are real, but small, and still places more weight on the bulk of their disagreements being because Cayden Cailean is a moron (literally: because the actions Cayden Cailean is taking in pursuit of His values are suboptimal due to resource constraints Iomedae is less subject to).

Iomedae observes that, unlike Cayden Cailean, She is a Lawful god, which means, at the core, that legibility is cheaper to Her and that the way She splits Her cognition enables more complex commitments, at some expense in other exploratory abilities in Her architecture because nothing comes free. Iomedae observes that information beneficial to the interests of Cayden Cailean is probably information She would pay for, unless something is very strange.  Such as Nethys having figured out how to feed parts of him information that make them convinced of things the whole of Him does not believe, and how to let those parts make themselves legible to other gods, persuasively so. 

It could be something that sits in their very real values difference; something that Cayden Cailean is barely in favor of but which involves the total destruction of Iomedae and all Her followers and which therefore She is barely against. (If it were otherwise very good by Cayden's standards She, too, would favor it and work towards it; She doesn't think the values difference is very large.)

Right now, the state of affairs is that Iomedae is being treated adversarially - with Cayden expending resources to reduce her access to resources - in the service of a Nethys plan. This is plainly wasteful. For one example, they could just have Cayden tell Her 'hey, I would have acted as so to reduce Your resource access' and have Iomedae stop using those resources, conserving overall resources for Good, with the benefits thereby split. Maybe, Cayden could just stop that, and try not expending the resources of Good against fellow forces of Good, and get Himself together to think about what shape of commitment from Iomedae would enable that.

Cayden Cailean: It all comes down to trust, doesn't it, now that prophecy has been shattered over even the shortest timescales.

Trust, or rather the lack of it, is the reason why the gods had to fight Zon-Kuthon to get Him to enter the vault - rather than Zon-Kuthon simply calculating that His interests would be better served by going quietly into imprisonment in exchange for a payment, as He did long ago when Abadar bribed Him to go into an exile that should have lasted longer than it did.

Zon-Kuthon in particular, being Void-touched and not something that other gods dare to look at too closely, could not simply have provided Them all with His estimate of how much damage He could do, and go legible around that estimate, and have that be believable.  And so They all had to fight it out, for a day, to learn how much damage Zon-Kuthon could really do, and show Zon-Kuthon how much damage They could really do to Him, before in the end, the vault door could be closed on Him.

Of course, Nethys could have told Them all fairly precisely how much damage Zon-Kuthon would actually be able to do, and told Zon-Kuthon the converse.

A pity, then, that so many gods see Nethys as scarcely any more trustworthy than Zon-Kuthon.  Especially, of course, those gods who never were human, whom Nethys has more than small reason to dislike.

Cayden Cailean actually thinks Nethys is a pretty cool god, personally.  This opinion hasn't really moved downwards since Nethys told Cayden Cailean to put an oracle somewhere and then Zon-Kuthon attacked her location and then Zon-Kuthon got sealed and now Nidal's endless horror is ending at last.

If one is to go around being very logical about such matters, and proving that there's never any point in playing out a conflict, how about if Iomedae updates Her trust in Nethys to match Cayden Cailean's, so that She and Cayden Cailean don't have a persistent disagreement about that?

Iomedae: Iomedae agrees that the persistent disagreement speaks to the poor reasoning ability of at least one of them.

Cayden Cailean: Or, perhaps, different parties perceiving Nethys as having different incentives in what He reveals, incentives that would themselves shift as information becomes more widely shared instead of private.  Among the reasons why Cayden Cailean trusts the information He did receive from Nethys is that Cayden Cailean isn't allowed to show it to Iomedae, meaning that Nethys was not incentivized to distort that information in a way that would persuade Iomedae.

Not that They'd all have this problem if They all knew exactly how Nethys worked; rather than, as is actually the case, it being the other way around.

Iomedae: Iomedae predicts that a lot more people are going to go to Hell because of Cayden's tampering in Cheliax. She intends, for as long as Cayden continues wasting resources on opposing Her, to waste further resources figuring out some specific people this is true of and telling Him about them. Or they could both stop wasting resources! Either way works!

Cayden Cailean: Part of the reason why Cayden Cailean is trusting Nethys is that Nethys has not simply asked Him to take things on faith, but built an agreement that is in part conditioned on watching how things play out.  A foolish waste of time if Cayden Cailean knew Nethys as well as Nethys knew Cayden Cailean, but that, of course, is impossible with Nethys.

It was Cayden Cailean's estimate, at the end of all Nethys showed Him, that there was, indeed, no better way to let this play out than to let Iomedae expend some of Her budget on proving to Herself - and anyone else watching - how certain things play out.

And if Iomedae - or certain other gods - were the sort to immediately believe Nethys about what was shown, or to believe Cayden Cailean if He reported being persuaded of a thing by Nethys, why then, Cayden Cailean really wouldn't be able to believe Nethys, given Nethys's incentives.  If Nethys's claims had the power to immediately persuade any god without further demonstrations of facts, and not just to partially persuade Cayden Cailean, well then, maybe Nethys would just say whatever was to His own advantage, after all.

Iomedae: Nethys already might be doing that, Cayden. Not lying, exactly, but promoting to our attention, of all the worlds He sees, the ones that suit Him best, and telling us they are the best ones He could find.

We'll see.

Cayden Cailean: (Thought not sent to Iomedae.)

Nethys could, but would Nethys do that, is the question.

Nethys once was human, and never really had the chance to pull all of Himself together and properly finish turning into a god.  Nethys, when he was human, probably had friends, and probably ever went out drinking with them of a night.  Maybe one of those friends was like Cayden Cailean, maybe not, only Nethys knows now, and given the incentives it doesn't do much good to ask.  It's still a probabilistic factor that slightly affects how much Cayden Cailean thinks Nethys is likely to present Him with a godly, inhuman, calculated betrayal.

There's an old saying that Lawful Evil has alliances, Chaotic Good has friendships, Lawful Good has both, and the Abyss has neither.

With prophecy shattered, and gods who can't fully see one another, maybe in the end it all comes down to this:

That Iomedae is not someone who could ever have been friends with Nethys, as mortal or god.

...or more likely not.  Even Cayden Cailean knows that, whether He likes it or not.  He is a god now, and unavoidably knows the quantitative degree to which camaraderie matters.  They are all gods here, and if this is how it turns out for them in this world, it would probably have turned out much the same in a world where Nethys and Iomedae had been friends.  All the logic would have been the same.

Iarwain: PL-timestamp:     Day 5 / StartPL-placestamp:   Coast near Ostenso / as-yet unnamed fortress

Carissa Sevar: Carissa wakes up and immediately checks if there are any notes around or Security around or indications that something awful happened while she was asleep. 

Iarwain: Nope!  If anything's already going horribly wrong today, Carissa doesn't have any information about that at all.

Carissa Sevar: She gets up. Fixes her hair, because she expects that looking like a mess isn't going to help her in front of the High Priestess. Dresses nicely, for the same reason.

And then heads over there to get the bad news. If there's bad news. There's always bad news.

Jacint Subirachs: Mostly, Jacint is not meant to be in charge of anything here except Carissa Sevar.  But yes, she's also, temporarily, the commanding officer overnight, if one is required, while Maillol and Sevar wait for their Rings of Sustenance to start working.

How does Carissa Sevar look this morning, to Jacint's very experienced eye?

Carissa Sevar: She hasn't seen Carissa before the date with Abrogail, so it's impossible to judge exactly what's normal for her, but she's not obviously and conspicuously damaged, just a bit slow and hesitant and probably much easier than usual to scare or disconcert, and also coming down from a minor panic attack about the experience of waking up, which hasn't been a good one lately. 

Carissa Sevar: "High Priestess. I'm here seeking instruction, specifically on whether I can resume command and more generally on whatever I ought to know."

Jacint Subirachs: "A day matters little to a project and much to a recently broken slave putting herself back together... is what I would usually say.  Now that I've been acquainted with the true records of Project Lawful I am amazed at how much seems to happen in a day.  It is like some god is meddling with you, not so much to any visible purpose, but simply causing everything to happen as fast as possible."

"Under ordinary circumstances I would advise you to leave Maillol as executive through the day, unless you have urgent project directives to issue, but it would not terribly surprise me if you did."

"Do you want a summary update on yesterday's and last night's news, before you decide?  There are no disasters in it."

Carissa Sevar: No disasters is good. ...somehow it feels hard to believe any news is good. " - yes, please."

Jacint Subirachs: "Yesterday and last night, Pilar Pineda rooted out from Egorian a number of Lastwall's spies, including indirect ones whose countries were themselves being spied on by Lastwall.  Apparently Pilar is able to convince herself that spying on us is dangerous unpleasant work, and that somebody can justly be congratulated on it being over and going home unharmed, and that this warrants a surprise party for them."

"Plausibly Pilar may have gotten all of the spies providing Lastwall with direct or indirect access to our operations.  For so long as it appears so, the Queen has signed a compact requiring her not to engage in any unusually nefarious plots, for certain terms and definitions thereof. Pilar's curse insisted."

"This has raised the profile of Project Lawful even further, but in a way that, it is hoped, will almost entirely misdirect attention away from this fortress and Keltham.  The highest-profile such event, a grand party in the main palace ballroom, had Pilar disguised as Meritxell.  On current plans, impersonators for Pilar, Meritxell, yourself, and occasional others, will continue to appear at the Imperial palace, in order to make it appear that the dreaded Project Lawful girls continue to operate from there, and Pilar will conduct weekly sweeps."

Carissa Sevar: ...wow, okay, actual good news. "...I really hope Cailean's just an idiot and we're not being outmaneuvered. But - excellent."

Jacint Subirachs: "We mortals are almost certainly being maneuvered like the little toy dolls we are, to the gods.  The question is whether Asmodeus is being outmaneuvered and I would normally bet on our Lord to take Cayden Cailean in a battle of wits.  Even so - we should remain alert for signs that such is not the case."

Carissa Sevar: It is an accurate correction, of course. Carissa bows her head.

Jacint Subirachs: "Do you have new project directives already in your thoughts, Chosen of Asmodeus?"

Carissa Sevar: "Keltham might want Meritxell and I want to figure out how best to give her to him. On a larger scale, no. I have - some thoughts about the overall aim and structure of the project - but if your advice is that those should wait, they can."

Jacint Subirachs: "Only you can guess whether it can wait, Chosen, with those thoughts unspoken.  I would say that it only should wait, if it also can, and also if to think or speak of these thoughts places strains upon parts of yourself.  You look less fragile this morning than last night."

Carissa Sevar: "...I'll explain it until that starts to seem unpleasant, then. The project cannot endure in its current form forever. Eventually Keltham will find us out. He is too powerful for us to immerse him in a lie forever. It seems damaging to the project, for it either to be doomed to failure or to define success so narrowly as to be satisfied if he leaves in four months furious with us all. One backup plan is for me to go with him; I do want to position myself for that insofar as I can. 

The other is to corrupt him. 

That feels important. Instead of one project, with a time limit we don't know, we have two projects moving in parallel - the project in which Keltham comes to understand Golarion, and the project in which he comes to be corrupted by it. We've just got to make sure the corruption stays out in front - that he never learns anything too Evil for where he's at at that moment. Already he can learn things he couldn't have the first day, I think."

Jacint Subirachs: "I've looked over some transcripts of your interactions with Keltham, and join my opinion to that of an experienced honeypot specializing in Lawful Good targets, and also that of our Queen, that we all have absolutely no idea why anything you are doing is working as well as it does.  If you think there's a chance we can stay ahead of Keltham, there is literally nobody on Golarion positioned to contradict you."

Carissa Sevar: "I want to fix that at some point, it doesn't seem like it ought to be incomprehensible to others and if we're going to try giving him Meritxell she at least is going to need to learn. But not today, I think, unless you have nice narrow concrete questions."

Jacint Subirachs: "If the Meritxell matter is something that might happen today, then it is today's task to figure out how to - I would not say, give her to him, Meritxell was already given when Keltham first laid eyes on her, the question is convincing him to take."

Carissa Sevar: It's funny, because four days ago Carissa absolutely knew that she had quite possibly become Keltham's property by catching his attention, but somewhere in the ensuing days of trying to convince Keltham that she could be if he wants, she let that slip out of salience, and now it sends a shiver down her spine. She doesn't hide that; the whole point of being here is correction. "I'm going to try to convince him that you can actually acquire the overwhelming majority of girls as your possession and have this be good for them, if you play it right and have the power to have it be real. Meritxell, ideally, shouldn't have to do anything more than prove me right."

Jacint Subirachs: "If your plan benefits from her training or retraining, that is among the ways in which I am resource to you, Chosen.  I cannot match our Queen for deftness and most slaves do not have your potential to be brought out, but there are still some things I can do."

Carissa Sevar: "I want her to have a lovely time for Keltham, even if he's being as cruel as he knows how to be, ideally moreso if he's being as cruel as he knows how to be. Or to learn to fake it but I don't know if we have time for that. If you can train that, then I'll focus on convincing Keltham to try it. - update me, if it's going slowly, and I should slow him down correspondingly."

Jacint Subirachs: "There's a small sad saying among slavers, you can't burn clay to iron whatever the heat.  If Meritxell has no innate nature turned to masochism and submission... one might in a week train her to fool a nonexpert, and of course if her user doesn't really care then simple fakery will oft be enough.  To train Meritxell to where she fools Keltham's unknown arts of sexual perception?  I think, over any reasonable amount of time, that simply requires her to start with a convenient amount of potential."

"Or, I suppose, it requires that we are willing to spend a very large amount of gold on turning her into a book and rewriting her.  But we'll be lucky if Absalom has one such scroll for sale at any price, and never mind two of them."

"It may also be that Meritxell is there or nearly there, and that I am hardly needed.  Do you wish me to assess Meritxell for current state and quick trainability in what it is that you wish, and then perhaps the others?"

Carissa Sevar: It wouldn't have occurred to Carissa that it worked like that, rather than some people just having very high standards for who they could actually enjoy giving themselves to, but she isn't the expert, here. "Yes, please. You're aware of my directive to clear all serious punishments with me?"

Jacint Subirachs: "I am, though if you mean that to also apply to slave retraining, that further extends my timescales and restricts what I can do at all."

"I am reminded of a thought: if you have not already selected that poor unlucky girl," these words not being spoken in a tone of genuine sympathy, "who is to join you and Pilar in continued punishment, I recommend carrying out the random selection where all can see it, and know that the selected girl is, indeed, unlucky and not disfavored."

Carissa Sevar: "Emergency slave retraining is authorized, whatever it requires; if it makes Meritxell worse at following along in class, I've already discussed with Asmodia feeding all her clever insights to Meritxell so Meritxell can keep being impressive. ....let's gather the girls to introduce you, explain all this, and do the draw. ...if you think I'm competent for that. I think so."

Jacint Subirachs: "I agree.  Though the girls are currently in Security processes for training their palace impersonators, and that may have a few more minutes to run."

"Since we took them all aside individually for that, before they had a chance to prepare spells this morning, I expect more than half of them think they're to be killed, as often occurs after one is required to train one's impersonator.  I made a deputy's guess that this decision was not worth waking you for; letting someone be afraid despite your promises of safety, and then showing them that their master spoke truly and will be merciful, is just conventionally good practice when that would occur in the ordinary course of events."

Project Lawful: Paxti isn't staring wide-eyed, because Cheliax.  But anybody whose Sense Motive surpasses Paxti's Bluff, which includes everyone else in this room, will be able to tell that surprise is the particular emotion she's holding back.

"I request permission to repeat and rephrase that to make sure I understood it correctly," Paxti says.  (Keltham has made them do that a couple of times.)  She waits for the nod, and then continues.  "My impersonator needs to play the role of me, if after I'd been pulled from Ostenso wizard academy, I'd been transformed into an incredibly deadly Chelish agent, who previously people haven't heard about, because anybody who's seen her is dead."

     "Correct."

"In my first public appearance, 'I' am going to be executing a noble traitor we uncovered a few weeks ago, who's going to cooperatively lose to 'me' in a way that looks like his sorcery just doesn't work against me for unknown reasons - I'd guess if he doesn't play along he gets to die a lot more painfully than that?"

      "Correct on the first part and the second part is none of your concern."

"Is it permitted to ask whether Pilar Pineda was somehow involved in selecting me as the particular person who got this role?"

      "Does that matter to how your impersonator should act?"

"No."

      "Then you don't need to know."

Maybe Paxti is wrong about this, but she's guessing that if Pilar wasn't involved here, they'd have just told her 'you don't need to know' and not asked if it was relevant.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Therefore, Pilar did not do this to be friendly.  Pilar obviously expects to be repaid.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Pilar did not do this because she is anyone's friend.  Pilar expects to be repaid.

Friendship is un-Asmodean.  Pilar is not the best person in the entire world.  Pilar has some really huge favor in mind.

      "Are you done with that stupid smile?"

"I would be smiling like that if I was actually doing this, and I'm showing it so the impersonator can get it down right."

      "If you're joking -"

"I am not.  Although - where is 'Paxti' on the spectrum of her superiors being permissive?  Spoiled duke's daughter vs. being kept very firmly in line, punished for the slightest trace of unprofessionalism?  That matters a lot for how I'd act in her situation."

      There's some glances among the Security, before, with almost visible reluctance, they inform Paxti that Project Lawful girls do have something of a reputation for being given some amount of disciplinary leeway.

"And this is meant to fool, ideally, people who know me from Ostenso wizard academy, or relatives?"

      The impersonator isn't looking particularly happy about this, which really says something when you have that many ranks in Bluff.

      "It's meant to be as accurate as possible," confirms Security.

"Understood.  In that situation, I think I'd probably start by making the most dramatic entrance I could manage, maybe something with a lot of fire if I could pull that off -"

Carissa Sevar: “As I see it,” Carissa tells her assembled project girls, “the success or failure of every day is measured in the following terms: how many things, even tiny things, did Keltham learn that aren’t true of Taldor, and how much did Keltham discover in himself that Axis can’t offer him. We lose if he ever learns something he isn’t ready to accept. High Priestess Subirachs is here to try to make you valuable enough that Keltham will change his own rules to have you; I’m here to try to keep you from saying things that separate Cheliax from Taldor.

A question you might be considering: what, then, is the role of our lessons? The answer is that only an Evil dath ilani is competent to lie to a Good dath ilani, and so we will have to become them, and that Keltham isn’t going to want girls who can’t keep up with him, so the girls valuable to the project are the ones who can. All of us would have been taken off this project by now, if learning how to think wasn’t totally essential to it, or if it was possible to learn how to think like a dath ilani with anything less than a full time effort. A dath ilani is very nearly priceless to Cheliax. You have the chance to become one. You should be utterly ruthless about arranging to succeed at your lessons; if you think of something that might help, request it. If you think of something that’s getting in the way, we will check if we can be rid of it.

The punishment order I laid out earlier is obviously heretical. It probably won’t work. It has been authorized anyway because it is that important for all of you to master this art: a thousand important things might be set aside, if that makes you faster at learning to think. 

I’m going to do the draw now, for who gets punished normally, so the effects of punishment don’t get mixed up with the effects of believing your superiors are out to get you, or anything like that. Mind, even if you’re selected, you aren’t being unduly punished, you just aren’t being experimentally neglected. Here are slips of paper with all your names."She demonstrates them, mixes them.

lintamande: Girls shift anxiously in their seats. Try not to pray, because you're definitely not supposed to pray to be wrongly exempted from punishment.

Asmodia: Asmodia is trying very hard to convince herself that, when she decided to come back, she didn't expect any reprieve like this in the first place, and also, that if she gets singled out for the worst of this, it still won't be a bad thing nearly bad enough to make up for the good thing that happened to her, it won't prove that something else hates her equally as much, maybe she got the help she did because this was going to happen to her, to help her survive it, because if she were fated to be drawn now and hadn't received that help earlier, it certainly would have broken her, which it isn't going to now, right...

Someone, somewhere, Asmodia thinks to herself, and watches Carissa Sevar draw a slip of paper.

Carissa Sevar: "Tonia," says Carissa, trying not to actively sound cheerful about it because then Tonia will want to kill her which will confound her experiment. "As Asmodeus wills it. You're in good company, I got myself in trouble at the palace and spent yesterday in the Queen's company. Now I'm fourth circle.

You're all dismissed to breakfast; the High Priestess will take you aside as convenient for her."

lintamande: It's not actually reasonable to be upset about what's neutral news, not bad news, but Tonia is to a Chelish person visibly upset.

Pilar : Apparently her curse thinks she's not supposed to give Tonia a cookie or a hug.

Maybe she'll suggest to Sevar later that there should've been some kind of extra privilege associated with this.  Or is the whole point that they're trying not to be heretical with Tonia?

Iarwain: Breakfast is better than it was yesterday, not as nice yet as it was as the villa, but things are still being set up on the project site.

Keltham isn't here yet.  Pilar and Ione are, if anybody's got Additional Questions for them before Keltham arrives.  Or Asmodia, not that Asmodia seems particularly interesting in any way.

Carissa Sevar: If they treat that girl as special then all they'll learn is that punishment+being treated as special has good effects, which Carissa, based on her own experience, suspects it does, but which is not a scalable training program. 

Breakfast is worse than in the palace, but still quite nice. She sits with the other girls so she can show off her new ability to hang a fourth-circle spell. (Detect Scrying and Rainbow Pattern, Detect Scrying for obvious strategic reasons now that she's famous and Rainbow Pattern because she'd like to stop getting into hand to hand knife fights with attackers.)

She can also answer questions if people have any for her.

Pilar : Message from Pilar to Sevar:  Suggestion, Tonia goes to the head of food lines and similar, or us if we feel like it.  Good Asmodeans get precedence over heretics even if the heretics are following orders.

Carissa Sevar: Interesting. Concerned then we'll be measuring whether feeling special is good for people not whether punishment is. Maybe worth it for morale.

Pilar : If feeling special is what it takes, we can take ten people destined to be real dath ilani and put them in class with a hundred others who have to defer to them.

Carissa Sevar: - yeah, fair.

She announces Pilar's food line policy while floating herself a croissant over to where she's seated because at fourth-circle you should really have an Unseen Servant or two live at all times. 

lintamande: Tonia smiles at Pilar. Slightly suspiciously.

Pilar : "I'll assign myself a punishment for it later."

Iarwain: Paxti would like to know from Sevar the policy on Paxti being allowed to ask Pilar a lot of questions about topics including how exactly 'Paxti' ended up as an invincible hunter of traitors.

Carissa Sevar: "The most important respect in which everyone at the palace disappoints Asmodeus is that they are constantly gossiping about things they don't need to know. I think we should aspire to disappoint Asmodeus in a slightly more inspiring way than that."

Iarwain: ...this does tend to quiet the Additional Questions that might otherwise have been asked of Ione or Pilar.

Pilar : Message from Pilar to Sevar:  That reminds me, I made a lot of decisions about the image of the fake 'Project Lawful' while you were out of contact yesterday and Rugatonn was out of the palace.  Others seemed to think the project director was supposed to be the one in charge of that policy.  I offer myself for your review and your correction at your convenience.

Carissa Sevar: Acknowledged; after lessons today, maybe. 

Being nice isn't okay as long as you punish yourself afterwards, you know, Pilar.

Pilar : Acknowledged.  Someone may need to watch me on that, I spent half of yesterday needing to feel cheerful on behalf of spies I was telling to get out of our country.

Ione Sala: Ione is still occasionally ending her sentences with 'Takaral'.  Has she been told yet how she's supposed to explain that part to Keltham?

Carissa Sevar: It doesn't really seem worth lying about, in Carissa's estimation: the truth is confusing but doesn't speak particularly poorly of Cheliax, and fits with what Keltham knows of Nethys.

Keltham: Keltham enters the breakfast hall and starts to beeline straight for Carissa, but halts even on that mission to stare at Pilar, who no longer has a sword inserted into her, Asmodia, who he last saw in a much more gruesome and also dead condition, and Ione.

Keltham: "Glad to see you're all right," he says, directed at all three of them.  "Part of me didn't believe it until just now.  Ione, your problem wasn't a physiological one, are you all right?"

Ione Sala: "Aside from an increased protective feeling towards my books and occasionally ending my sentences with the name of the Herald of Nethys who delivered my vision.  Ship's now sailed on everybody here knowing all about my personal hobbies, by the way, but I don't regret it takaral."

Keltham: "Somebody ought to be paying you something for that, probably quite a lot actually, and I will make sure that it happens if it hasn't already."

Ione Sala: That thought legitimately hadn't occurred to Ione at all.  Is it how things work in Taldor?  She's got no idea there either.  "Thanks," she says for lack of anything better to say.  "I'll start thinking about book-related magic items."

Keltham: "Pilar, that was pretty badass and I owe you one temporary discarnation's worth of favor, possibly more if Nidal had plans with a next step after killing me."

Pilar : "If we're tallying that, you owe me a five subjective-day trip to Elysium worth of favor.  Time ran faster there.  It wasn't terrible but I got some things straightened out while I was there and hopefully I go to Hell next time, or at least that's what they told me."

Keltham: "Noted and is it bad enough that we shouldn't move the whole project to Elysium and get everything done five times faster?"

Pilar : "I didn't get a lot of studying done while I was there, let's put it that way."

Keltham: "Hell any better on those grounds, Asmodia?"

Asmodia: "I hadn't really adjusted enough to Hell or being dead to learn much, I think?  I learned a handful of relatively simple spell diagrams and that's basically it... I'm not sure I could explain why I ended up learning that rather than something else, except for the part where the devil I made my advance arrangements with had those books on hand.  Being dead was disorienting for me though it was more disorienting at the start than at the end.  No timeweirdness, Hell's Lawful."

Keltham: "Okay, and, I realize this is a dumb question, but just to check, you didn't come back with any new special abilities, right?"

Asmodia: WHAT.

"No," she lies reflexively, they are in public here, "and if it's okay to ask in public, why are people asking me that?"

Keltham: "I told them to ask.  Sorry if that inconvenienced you at all, it was something of a massively stupid idea in the first place... you can ask me about it later if you've got more questions."

Asmodia: Asmodia does in fact have more questions.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa's not Abrogail at reading people but that didn't actually look like the reaction of someone who is only hiding that Hell isn't very nice about making you do spell diagrams.

She'll ask later. And Message Asmodia they should talk later.

Asmodia: ...great.

Oh, well, nobody's going to ask too many questions if a Project Lawful girl suddenly needs to send an urgent message to Gorthoklek.  Actually they won't ask any.

Keltham: Off to check on Carissa finally!  How does she look to his almost absolutely undiscerning eyes?

Carissa Sevar: Healthy! Cheerful! She's sitting with the other girls, which she doesn't usually do, and having her Unseen Servant fetch grapes one at a time. "Morning, Keltham!"

Keltham: "Greet the day, Carissa!"

"...don't rush this at all, but, any time you do happen to be very sure it's okay, I have additional questions about your own new superpowers."

Carissa Sevar: "I am fit for duty but will be so bold as to suggest you get yourself a plate of food first."

Keltham: He shall obtain the food plate.

He shall then sit down next to the Source of All Answers.

Carissa Sevar: "Did we ever explain to you how wizard levelling past third circle works at all."

Keltham: "Fighting monsters was implied.  Sex was not."

Carissa Sevar: "It's not about fighting monsters, it's about using magic while you're physically and mentally at the edge of your abilities - in a state where some people - not all people, some people stall out - are able to take in a little more of the magic they're using. Yes, we've tried drugs that make the heart race, they don't do it. It doesn't matter if the danger is real but it matters if you think it is. 

I don't think it'd be a good idea to tell you everything that happened yesterday, but, uh, at one point I found myself restrained and helpless in a very fancy enchanting workshop where I had been left to contemplate what I had coming, and casting spells did not work to get me out of this at all, but six feet away, on the wall, there was a shelf of spellsilver. And I thought to myself, you know, I can't actually think of a principled reason you can't bridge that with a scaffold and use spellsilver that far away, except for how it'd be ridiculously hard and might mess up the spellsilver and there's usually literally no reason. So I did, and started transforming my armillary amulet -" she taps it "- into a weapon I could use to break out, except it would've taken way too long, the weapon I wanted is a three day enchanting project, but I thought of some ways to do it faster, and Abrogail let me at this for a while because it was funny and then went back to what she'd been meaning to do with me. And I don't specifically know that I levelled from that but it was representative."

She's not keeping her voice down. It's a good story.

Ione Sala: "Six feet away?" Ione says, not bothering to keep her voice down; she's not an Asmodean and she is not too scared to openly ask questions.  Albeit, in this case, the question was 'Six feet away?' which now that she thinks on it is not a very intelligent question.

Iarwain: 'Abrogail'?! thinks the entire rest of the class plus a pair of visible Securities off in one corner.

Carissa Sevar: "Want a demonstration?" she says cheerfully to Ione, and pulls a chunk of spellsilver from her Bag of Holding to hand off to her Unseen Servant, who can hold it at the appropriate distance. 

" - Keltham you're not going to appreciate this properly but you should have Detect Magic up for it, all the same -"

Keltham: He is definitely missing some context but Detect Magic is a thing he can do.

Iarwain: Ione and Pilar, without quite thinking about the implications of what they're doing, perform Detect Magic too.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa concentrates. 

And she flings magic out from her fingertips like it's silk scarves and she's one of those silk scarf-dancers, and there's nothing for it to catch on at the other end but she's building another layer under it to keep it up, and another layer under that, moving the scaffold's center of gravity out and out and out with nothing but her will and her quick-moving fingertips supporting it. it takes a long time. Building a scaffold takes ten minutes normally. It's hard to look away from, though. 

It's easier, the second time, and in the first delightful flush of competence she tells the Unseen Servant to move back another foot, and her scaffold-bridge shivers and twitches and stretches and bends and - holds, touching the spellsilver, seven feet away, and she grits her teeth and starts coaxing the power that spellsilver holds to move towards her, right here, see....

And she doesn't actually want to ruin her Armillary Amulet or waste her spellsilver, so she stops, once she's moved the first tiny mote of magic to her throat where it belongs.

Keltham: It's pretty!  But Keltham is lacking some context on exactly how impressive this is, and dath ilani do get bored quickly, which means that over the course of minutes he's gotten around to also trying to analyze all the other active magic visible in this room; and noticing how everybody is watching this amazing feat but only he, Pilar, and Ione have any magically visible signs of Detect Magic being up, or need to recast it at any point.