Carissa Sevar: DON'T LIE to Keltham don't even ambiguously lie to Keltham!!!!! We don't have protocols for 'mental health emergencies' because even alter!Cheliax doesn't have those!!! Asmodia seems to be trying to be helpful to Tallandria, fine, Asmodia DID NOT follow some established taking-responsibility procedure!!!! 

Security: Security clarifies, in case Keltham was getting the wrong impression here, that Cheliax doesn't actually have any standard procedures like Security is sure Civilization has, and Asmodia isn't trained in anything like he's sure Civilization does.  Security doesn't particularly know what to do either when somebody bursts into tears but isn't violent.  It's not really a Security issue per se.

Keltham: Yes, thank you, it wasn't very much of a ray of hope but it was hope and something needed to destroy it.

Keltham: Carissa, snap horrible decision before they get there, does she think Tallandria is still worth hiring?

Tallandria would've been on his list as a tier-2 even if she'd completely failed the exam, tier-1 if she'd done okay on it.  But at least in Civilization, this would be a symptom of somebody who ends up requiring tons of emotional support, and being a distraction, and it would be a famously bad idea to have her in your high-pressure startup.  'You mostly can't improve people, you can only filter them,' goes the proverb out of dath ilan.  Mainly if somebody can't handle the pressures of Civilization you want to encourage them to go to a Quiet City, or the Future, depending, and not have more kids who can't handle Civilization.  But somebody in Governance thought Tallandria would be a good pick for the Project, for some reason, presumably, and she did do well in chemistry.

Carissa Sevar: "I think you should not hire her, because she started crying in the middle of an exam. This project already started a godwar. It's - not a reasonable expectation of people who are emotionally fragile, to handle the sort of things that are going to happen well. And - it'd plausibly disqualify her from taking the Worldwound oath, if it'd happened before that, and that's the - benchmark our society has, for people who can handle really really serious things..."

Keltham: That's what he figured.

Nobody tell Tallandria that she didn't even need to pass the exam, unless it somehow seems like a very good idea for her to learn that fact.

Asmodia: Message to Korva:

Tallandria, I've been informed that Keltham is sending Maillol in to escort you out.  That's going to happen here exactly the way it would in alter-Cheliax, even without Keltham present, so everybody can see it and have the same story inside their minds.

Keep in mind that you're useful to me, even if to nobody else.  I don't intend to let you end up as a paving stone, ever, if you serve me well.

Korva Tallandria: Why the fuck would Maillol escort her - well, if Keltham thought that was a reasonable thing to do, then sure, but why the fuck did Keltham think that that was a reasonable thing to do. Why did people even tell Keltham.

- not the point. She'll go. She's not crying much anymore, although her makeup is messed up and her face is still kind of red and puffy, and her heart rate might be spiking despite the assurance.

Ferrer Maillol: Ferrer Maillol will enter the classroom, wordlessly looking sad and grandfatherly, and hold out a gentle hand to Korva Tallandria.  His body posture indicates without words that it's time for her to go.

Possibly Lady Avaricia has Sense Motive high enough to see through his Bluff.  Definitely nobody else, even with everybody in the entire classroom getting the bonus from knowing with certainty it's a bluff.

Korva Tallandria: Korva is mostly confused about why everyone (including Keltham, apparently), has decided that this is worthy of a crown fucking trial. In places that aren't Cheliax people do, actually, cry in only moderately stressful situations sometimes.

She'll go with Maillol just fine, though, and try to stay very firmly in the mindset of her alter-self, who is also confused about why people are having a crown trial about this, and is additionally really embarrassed. As opposed to her real self, who would probably be terrified if she were allowed to have emotions right now.

Asmodia: Asmodia picks up Korva's exam paper - Keltham will no doubt want to see it, it's data about what sort of person fails like this - and follows Korva out.

Alexandre Esquerra: Damn, Alexandre wishes he could lie like Maillol. Well. He'll get there some day. (Lord Asmodeus willing.)

Goodbye, Korva Tallandria, down in flames and no one to blame but yourself. One day when you're a paving stone in Hell, Korva, you may know that Alexandre Esquerra once thought of you as his most formidable rival. Briefly. Now to see how the rest of the class burns out.

Keltham: Keltham is here in case Korva Tallandria has anything she wants to say to him.  Otherwise, she can go with Maillol.

Korva Tallandria: Well, she's in the middle of being escorted away by Maillol, for some reason, so it's not going to occur to her that Keltham might want her to interrupt that to say anything to him, especially since a student breaking down in tears isn't a big deal, and he probably has more important things to deal with. But she'll wipe her eyes, smile, and half-laugh at herself, sadly, because that's what she intuitively feels like she would do if she were moderately embarrassed about being a crybaby in front of Keltham in a situation where the stakes for being a crybaby aren't actually that high.

Keltham: It'd be more reassuring if he knew the likelihood ratios from different internal states of possible mental health emergencies to an 'eye wipe, smile, and half-laugh'.

He'll nod at her in reply, and watch her go.

dath ilan: Fun fact!  Dath ilan has zero customs whatsoever against somebody leaving in the middle of a math exam, if they notice they're about to burst into tears but are otherwise still able to act as an agent in the world!  Who would even be able to stop them?

Obviously Korva Tallandria was too disabled to leave under her own power.  Or didn't trust herself to do that, and waited for escort while staying where other people could see her, despite knowing that would cost them in distraction and possible emotional distress of their own.

Just saying, here.

Asmodia: "How does this affect Tallandria's hiring chances?" Asmodia asks, because obviously nobody's told her anything about anything.

Keltham: "Negatively.  Why do you ask?  Also, any particular reason you were called to assume temporary responsibility there?"

Asmodia: "I'd been tutoring Korva up until that point and thought she had a lot of promise."

"I want to hire her myself, same arrangement as you made with Yaisa.  Well, different job, obviously."

Keltham: "Common wisdom out of Civilization would say that you're possibly getting sucked into somebody else's emotional spiral of doom, shouldn't try to fix people unless you are personally an actual professional people-fixer, and that there's a dozen obvious traps here that I wouldn't expect anybody in Golarion to understand.  Those include the most compassionate workplaces implicitly defiltering to get the most dysfunctional people who couldn't get jobs anywhere else, and compassionate people training people to malfunction by rewarding them with support and companionship when they do."

"I'm not going to veto directly.  Talk to Maillol, though.  I predict he'll be against it, and if he says no you'll have a constipation of a time persuading me to say yes."

"I suppose I should ask what you'd hire her to do, though."

Asmodia: "Possibly, help put my math lessons into a form where people who are neither Keltham nor Carissa Sevar nor Asmodia can understand them.  I had that thought even before her breakdown over math specifically."

Keltham: "You could potentially hire, say, Jacme, for that, and not risk getting sucked into somebody else's emotional spiral of doom."

Asmodia: "I expect Korva to be better at it."

"Are you vetoing this?"

Keltham: "No.  It wouldn't actually be my choice in Civilization, who you get to hire, and I'm reluctant to exercise whatever further power I have here.  Delegating to Maillol, mostly, whether he still wants her around in this fortress."

"I know that I don't understand terribly well how things work in Cheliax, know that I may be making a lot of wrong inferences based on how things would work in Civilization, and do have any inhibitions against ripping a life-rope out of somebody else's hands when somebody else is throwing them one."

"Just - be careful, Asmodia.  In Civilization this would potentially be the start of a story about the grim doomfate of Asmodia.  Not in a tropes way, a reality way.  You'd better not be Evil enough to take her on out of compassion unless you're very sure that you're Evil enough to cut her loose.  Next on the list of proverbial traps here is that if somebody doesn't want to go to a Quiet City, or Hell, I guess in this case, and you're the only place they have to stay that isn't that, that's a trap for you as much as for them.  And neither of you are likely to be happy in the trap together."

Carissa Sevar: " - to me this all sounds like dath ilan desperately trying to implement patches for having bred their population for Good incredibly aggressively for generations, where Chelish people will simply fire someone if they are not an asset in a typical week, and not hang out with them if they are unpleasant to hang out with. Asmodia, if Korva's not actually very good at this but cries on you about how you're the first person to ever be nice to her, are you going to be conflicted emotionally about hiring Jacme instead?"

Asmodia: "I won't be, and I'm confident of that," alterAsmodia states honestly, and, so far as she knows, in green.

Asmodia doesn't wonder whether that claim has become unreliable, now, for her, until after the words leave her lips.

She doesn't take them back after.  There are limits to how much of her heresy she's willing to show openly.

Carissa Sevar: Carissa does not like how much of this situation was unpredictable to her - why'd Tallandria break down, why's Keltham taking it this strongly -

- but she thinks that Keltham arriving at the strongly-held stance that you should as a matter of principle never inconvenience yourself to keep someone else out of Hell/Quiet Cities (what an ominous name) is a positive development on the whole though she really really wishes she had more of a handle on all of the moving parts.

"I think it's a good idea to have Maillol looking out just in case, but - Cheliax doesn't have that conventional wisdom and in this specific case I think it's because making that error would be incredibly rare. In Good countries you get - people living sad small lives so they can care for their aging parents and disabled siblings who don't care to go on to Heaven yet. Here kids are raised better.

- also people here might...cry more...I wouldn't want her in my unit at the Worldwound because sometimes your friends who don't have a resurrection arranged will get killed in front of you and you need to be able to keep doing your job, I wouldn't want her on the Project because sometimes we get attacked by Kuthites and have to take a sword for Keltham, but I don't particularly expect incompetence in jobs that definitely don't require those things." A lie, but one she's pretty sure is true in Taldor, going off observed crying frequency of kidnappedrescued Taldane girls.

Keltham: "Like I said.  Leaving it to Maillol to decide if it's okay for her to be in the fortress."

He'll wait until Asmodia is gone before mentioning to Carissa - by Message, because he doesn't particularly want Security to hear - that you might have thought Keltham's dad would have been one of the more relatively selfish people in dath ilan, but Keltham's dad still got caught in a trap like that anyways, for three years or so, before Keltham's dad met Keltham's mom.

Carissa Sevar: - hand-squeeze. 

She honestly has no idea what exactly this supposed trap is but - maybe it's revealing too much, to say that. 

"May I ask you for a favor?"

Keltham: "You can ask, and I can take responsibility for saying no if I don't want to, because if even I can't do that, it's embarrassing for Civilization in front of Golarion."

Carissa Sevar: "If I am ever making you sad, and you think you'd be better off not dating me, leave. If I cannot expect you to be that Evil I'm going to be worried all the time."

Keltham: "Think that falls under the category of if I can't, it's my own fault, no?  By Chelish standards."

"It's - obviously what I'd try to do?  I wouldn't want to do that to you either.  You are not the sort of person my dad got temporarily doomtrapped with.  But it's hard to promise anything for certain when you're afraid your 'genes' might predispose you to a mistake."

"I'll tell Ione she's the one person responsible for calling me out on it, if she thinks that's happening anyways."

Carissa Sevar: "If you do that it's your own fault. Anyone would agree. 

But I'd like to cry on you, when you push me that far, and not wonder if I'm causing you to make some kind of mistake your overly-Good society bred you for.

Probably Ione would catch it."

Keltham: "Totally different kind of tears, Carissa, unless I'm very mismodeling one of you or Tallandria."

Korva Tallandria: Korva is pretty sure that Maillol's office lives more in real Cheliax than in alter-Cheliax, so she allows her real self to have some thoughts, though it's still not - well, actually, the emotion her real self seems to want to feel is the kind of quiet clarity she gets when the internal screaming breaks off to make way for thoughts that matter again, so sure, her real self can have emotions again, if it's going to be responsible with them.

Her honest assessment of herself is that she obviously fucked up the math test, but she acted in ways that were perfectly resonant with how alter-Korva would have acted. Nobody else acted how she expected their alter-selves to act, though, except for Asmodia, so she suspects that project leadership is going to have a much dimmer view of her guesses at what alter-Korva would have been doing, and she's going to need to course-correct, if they let - well, Asmodia said she was stealing her, so she probably should actually figure out what the appropriate course correction is and not worry about the scenarios in which that's a pointless exercise.

She bows her head, clasps her hands, and waits for instruction.

Ferrer Maillol: Real Maillol has no particular reason to speak to this failure.  Apparently Asmodia wants her for something, so any useful conversations are pending on Asmodia.

Asmodia: Asmodia will be there soon enough!

"Highpriest Maillol, Keltham is leaving it to your alter-self to talk me out of my intent to employ Korva Tallandria, citing it as your own decision whether Korva can stay in the fortress."

"Is your alter-self opposed to this sufficiently that alter-Asmodia couldn't talk him out of it?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Think my alter-self would plausibly tell you that he was monitoring the situation and stood ready to withdraw his permission for Tallandria to be there at any time."

Asmodia: "Sir, I'm not asking you what your alter-self would plausibly say, I'm asking you what your alter-self would say.  Keltham thinks in probabilities, not places where you definitely wouldn't -"

Ferrer Maillol: "Good catch."

"I think my alter-self is a little tougher to talk around to this, if you don't have a better excuse than Tallandria possibly helping to write your math curriculum.  Unless she can actually do that."

Asmodia: "Security said she thought she could.  I am far more confident in her ability to contribute to my Wall, however, that’s why I actually want her."

Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodia, we're not actually discussing whether Tallandria can work on your wall, we're discussing whether or not Keltham knows she's still in the fortress."

Asmodia: "Yes, sir."

Ferrer Maillol: "Not sure what kind of mistake you were making there.  Smells a bit like alter-Cheliax becoming too real for you.  Whatever it is, fix it."

Asmodia: "Acknowledged, sir."

"Tallandria, is there Keltham-visible work alter-Tallandria could do, that would talk alter-Maillol into letting me keep you around?  For that matter, does real-Tallandria even want to be visibly still here?"

Korva Tallandria: "Alter-Tallandria can, in fact, write expanded versions of Keltham's math curriculum, which will be useful if the project ever scales up enough to require employees who aren't our top dozen people. I would like to remain here and attend your lectures and any other math review lectures given by other researchers, even if I can't attend Keltham's, since it'll help with that goal."

She's... also baffled as to why crying during a math test would lead to expulsion from the compound, but that seems more like a Wall question.

Ferrer Maillol: "Mm.  Not actually easy to figure out alter-Maillol here.  My first reaction... it took alter-Asmodia around eight minutes to argue him into that, assuming she was being stubborn enough about it, and then alter-Maillol told her fine but Tallandria had better be producing and not causing any more fuss."

Asmodia: "Has Keltham ever seen you take eight minutes to be argued into anything and then change your mind about it?  Real-Maillol tends to weigh things up quickly and -"

Ferrer Maillol: "All right, fair catch again.  It can be hard not to think of alter-Maillol as weaker, and yes I get that Keltham doesn't see him that way."

"You spent - let's say about as long as this actually took - and then I made my snap decision that I was going to let you try it, let you fuck up if that was what happened, and let you get hurt enough to learn a lesson but not enough to affect your job performance before I intervened."

"She's all yours, Asmodia.  Real-Cheliax too.  Note that Security reports Tallandria was thinking we're fucking up alter-Cheliax realism by even having this be a notable deal there, you might want to debrief her on that."

Asmodia: "Keltham definitely also thought it was a large deal, but I'll prioritize asking Tallandria about what the web of connections is like there and what Keltham might figure out later."

Asmodia: Asmodia will then take Korva away, to the other side of the fortress, the hidden side, to her Wall.

She has a new pet now!

Korva Tallandria: Well, that certainly could have gone worse.

Korva will follow Asmodia out, and then wait to speak until spoken to. Even if Asmodia was right to see promise in her, she's still going to need to work hard to show her that it wasn't a mistake, after that little performance.

Asmodia: Asmodia's secret lair has high-quality tea and snacks!  She is, in fact, a minor Power in this fortress.

After Asmodia has set out some snacks for both of them:

"All right, Korva, tell me about your theory of how everything we did was wrong for alter-Cheliax and what you think needs to be done in the future to be consistent with it."

Asmodia is feeling weirdly cheerful and excited about this!  It's probably having her own pet.  Practically her own slave!

Korva Tallandria: Moderately deep breath.

"I think it's bizarre that everyone decided to act like it was an emergency, worth the time of both the High Priest and of Keltham himself. In other countries, in other places, I don't think people would have done that - not in a school, anyway, because crying during a difficult test just wouldn't be that uncommon, especially under moderately stressful conditions like the ones that we're operating under. Maybe in the middle of a secret government project, but it still doesn't sound right."

"Apparently Keltham thought that this was a huge deal, too, though. If he's the one who assumed that, and other people followed his lead, well - we've just accidentally confirmed a bunch of things that caused him to make that assumption, without us understanding what those things were, which is sort of terrible. If one of our people decided that it was a huge deal, and Keltham went along with what he was being told - well, I guess in that case we at least have more control over the situation, although we still have to figure out why alter-Cheliax is like that."

"I am totally baffled at the idea that crying during a test would lead to expulsion from the compound. I didn't even think we were allowed to leave the compound after failing out, the other dropouts are all still here. I have no idea what his model is of why silently crying during a math test might make someone a danger to keep in the same building, and if we have any more information on that, then I want it, because I don't have it now. I'm also baffled that everyone involved would make that snap judgement without at any point asking what caused the crying fit, instead of assuming, although maybe the alter version of the High Priest was expected to ask about that, and maybe he did."

"I was expecting everyone to pretty much ignore the crying. I thought Keltham might ask about it, in which case I was prepared to give him an explanation of why alter-Korva was crying. I really didn't expect it to go any further than that. I think that in most places - including Taldor, and including Cheliax of the past - teenage girls actually just cry sometimes, and this is moderately embarrassing for them if they do it in a serious situation, but it's not much of an update about them at all, besides, yep, that sure is a teenage girl, and in some situations it isn't even that."

"Now, of course, we have to find out what Keltham thinks happened. If we were following his lead - well, we want as much information as we can get about what his thought process was, then, so we can determine whether to correct it - if it makes assumptions about the way people are here that are going to turn out to be wildly, obviously wrong if he ever interacts with people who haven't been carefully screened for being the most emotionally stable people we have, or for that matter if any of the other current students here ever have similar emotional reactions to Keltham's math tests, which doesn't seem impossible - or whether and how to confirm whatever assumptions he made about me, and by extension the rest of us. If he was following our lead, then... gods, I still need to know why he thought the High Priest might expel me from the compound. But I suppose we could, hmmm... well, he did warn us that some of researchers might go insane, or had gone partially insane already. Is it possible that everyone assumed that that was happening to me and reacted in line with how they've been reacting to other events in that bucket, or with how they would have wanted to react to those situations with hindsight?"

Asmodia: "Hold on, let me get a transcript en route."

Asmodia goes outside to page Security, she needs a transcript of this whole situation from the start, urgent priority since situation may be ongoing and recovery may be required.

(And strike the section of transcript where Keltham says Korva was slated to be hired even if she failed the math test; that's not vital info to Korva's understanding, and they don't need one more lie to Keltham / Korva doesn't need one more thing to conceal from Keltham that she knows.)

Advise Sevar that there's a question in progress about how likely students are in alter-Cheliax to cry during math tests, and whether somebody is going to need to tell Keltham at some point that something he thought was happening, was not happening, but we're still in the middle of figuring out what was happening.

When Asmodia is back:  "I think I'm going to recommend to Sevar that we not lean as heavily on the Taldor framework in the future, or at least, not tell newcomers so much that's what we're doing."

"This isn't as bad as the case where Avaricia suddenly decided she knew all about how nobility in Taldor worked and therefore she must be authorized to act a particular way.  You needed to improvise and you only improvised as much as necessary, good job on that, but still."

"People need to stop thinking that, if they know how something in Taldor works, they know how it works in alter-Cheliax."

"Alter-Cheliax is clearly not in fact Taldor.  Even a short visit to the Facility showed me that relatively educated women in Taldor have much worse Bluff than we've already shown Keltham in upper-tier Ostenso wizard students.  Keltham already knows that incoming students are accustomed to showing very tight emotional control by dath ilani standards, and that he has to repeatedly tell students to give him any feedback on how he's doing."

"That's probably not why he thought a big emergency was going on, but nonetheless, he already knows it."

"It's occurring to me that people - know which reality they all live in, and agree on that, because they spend years inside it together, and what we have here is a situation of everybody trying to improvise pieces of reality.  Telling people that we sometimes take inspiration from Taldor is one thing, but it's just not true that when you know something true about Taldor you know something that's authorized to say here."

Asmodia is weirdly not more-panicked-than-usual about this, the way she'd normally be?  Maybe because she has a minion to help her now!

Korva Tallandria: "I think there are a lot of problems with the Taldor framing, yes. In this case I think the crying thing is more general - I think that lots of places have people occasionally cry in stressful situations, including the real Cheliax. Reasoning being that I am from the real Cheliax, and I started crying. That makes me pathetic, by our standards and perhaps by Keltham's, and we can give Keltham a story that's consonant with that, but I think there must be a way to make it consistent. The big problems are - if Keltham later sees me acting in a way that isn't consonant with what he assumed we all agreed that my mental state was, or if someone else starts crying later in a way that makes Keltham suspect that it's actually less of an emergency than he assumed, which seems - unlikely, but not so unlikely that it isn't a way that we could get unlucky, in a project where everyone is operating at this level of stress."

Asmodia: Security brings in the transcript, which Asmodia quickly skims.  It includes more of Korva's thoughts than Asmodia had seen before, but not, unfortunately, Keltham's.

Resigning herself to being a paving stone?  Ouch.  That's - bringing up bad memories of, like, all of Asmodia's entire life before the Gardens of Erecura which Asmodia has mostly been trying to forget about of late, as is probably healthy for her since alter-Asmodia doesn't have those memories anyways.

"All right, new read on this whole situation, Security speculated that Keltham was supposed to be notified in alter-Cheliax, probably because they thought it was a, large event, as it would in fact be in Cheliax, also because Keltham has previously been pretty unhappy about not being told things, Keltham was told but not in a way that signaled it was a large event, Keltham reacted to it as a large event, Keltham asked Sevar what she thought about it, Sevar thought it was a large event."

"Maillol hasn't told Keltham at any point in this transcript that he thought it was a big deal.  Maillol may have acted or emoted in a way that doesn't show up in the transcript, I'll have it checked with him.  But this situation may be partially recoverable if Maillol calls back Keltham asking Keltham why he thought this was a major emergency.  If we think that's a good idea."

Asmodia passes Korva the (briefly censored) transcript.

Korva Tallandria: She reads it.

"Hm. 

"If he thinks I'm having some particular pattern of 'emotional spiral of doom' - I'm not sure I can act consistently with that, not knowing what it is, which makes it risky to keep me around anyplace where he can see me. The safest thing to do in the short term is going to be to remove me from anywhere that he can make direct observations of me, let him think that nothing more complicated than his existing hypothesis actually happened, although that might break down if he does decide to ask further questions about the specific reasons for it. There are longer-term risks from confirming everything he thinks is happening and then letting him see some other element of human behavior here that comes into conflict with it, but I'm not sure whether those are outweighed by the amount of mistakes people might make in the recovery - the high priest would have to have a strong sense of what happened in alter-Cheliax and why his alter-self's assessment of it is, if we want to take that route, which might be just as fraught."

Asmodia: "The safest thing is to figure out what we're doing in alter-Cheliax and do exactly that.  Every time we ask what's safe for the Conspiracy, we act like the Conspiracy."

"Right now, in alter-Cheliax, it sounds like maybe Maillol is gently talking to you with his great Asmodian priestly competence at that, like the expert emergency response personnel that he is, finding out what really happened.  He definitely didn't talk for five minutes, and then snap-approve me taking responsibility for you so that he could get you out of his office."

"We need to figure out what really happened in alter-Cheliax, and then we need to figure out what alter-Cheliax tells Keltham about that.  It's fine if that contradicts whatever theory Keltham has now.  What it has to not do is contradict the way he's seen Maillol, Sevar, myself, Security, you, act about it."

"The naive Conspiracy plays along with whatever Keltham believes.  The real alter-Cheliax, the alter-Cheliax that's true to itself, the alternate plane of existence where there's an actual alter-Cheliax if there is such a thing - the real alter-Cheliax doesn't play along."

Korva Tallandria: "Okay. What I was thinking at the time was - I misbudgeted my time last night, spent too much time and mental energy that I didn't have on things that weren't making sure I had the Rule of Succession down pat. I did some work with the Rule of Succession during breakfast, but I wasn't getting it and I was getting frustrated. Then we got the test, and I knew I didn't know how to do it, and - I guess I panicked, panicked in some really specific way that meant I was fine at some kinds of thinking but stopped being able to read math. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I realized that I was going to turn in something totally worthless, and I wouldn't get the job."

"That's all green, what really happened. Now, specifically in alter-Cheliax - alter-Korva had gotten her hopes up about getting the job. Her older sister died in the last year, and she's still grieving it. She'd been hoping that if she was hired, she would be able to make the money necessary to buy her a resurrection, and get her back. The grief hit her fresh again, when she realized it couldn't be fixed, combined with the knowledge that it was her own fault for being stupid and making dumb mistakes. She realized she was crying, and she put her head down about it."

Asmodia: "Older sister real?  Keltham - I can't predict if he'd try to rez her once he's got a spare 10,000gp, but we need to be ready if he does."

"Also if she's not real, veto because we're not being faithful to the Probability of dead sisters."

Korva Tallandria: "Real older sister, really dead. But I don't think we should use the real one; the real one was executed for apostasy, not dead of consumption like alter-Korva's, and we can't trust her to take orders. I do have a cousin about the same age who really did die of consumption; plausibly we could use her, or maybe a completely different actress if we think that people who have actually been in Hell for a few years are going to be harder to control in the relevant ways. Which seems... possible, given we're lying about what Hell is like."

Asmodia: "No shit, Korva.  Your alter-sister is doing great in Hell and you're in no hurry to rez her.  If you accumulate enough money and pull working for me that you can actually rez her, and you feel like doing that, do it off the books where Keltham can't see."

"Do we - think that someone in alter-Cheliax, Korva in alter-Cheliax, doesn't break down in tears just because they can't get the job?  They also need a dead sister they were hoping to rez?  If you're telling the complete truth about what drove you to a breakdown here - and if you were foolish enough to be concealing anything else, you'd better unconceal it right now, because there will be a Security check later - then it's just true that you encountered a stressor large enough to break you in real-Cheliax.  Any time we can go with something very close to the real story, we usually try to do that, because it often has a ring of realness to it that a more dramatic story lacks."

"The stakes for getting the job are higher in realCheliax, but people in alter-Cheliax suffer less crippling penalties for breaking down in tears.  Plausibly that balances out."

Korva Tallandria: "No, I didn't cover why I started crying in real Cheliax. In real Cheliax, I also realized that I wasn't going to get the job, but in real Cheliax I thought that meant both being kicked off of the project and being required to stay in the compound not doing anything else, or else be killed and sent directly to Hell. And - I didn't feel like I'd learned enough, being mortal, I felt that I would look very worthless in terms of real skills to the devils in Hell, and that they wouldn't want me. Not just the way they wouldn't want a project girl; I thought that I had been turned into someone worthless by the project, someone who could have been moderately valuable if I'd just gone to the Worldwound and been a normal wizard, but who was instead going to be frozen at what I knew in young adulthood, because I'd been pulled onto this project and then cast off with nothing else to do with myself, nowhere else to grow. Even if project leadership didn't kill me, I wouldn't be allowed to do anything real, the sorts of things that might have made me more valuable in Hell. And I hated myself, and my circumstances, so much, in that moment, realizing that I wasn't inherently worthless but might have been rendered so, or nearly so, in the last week. That's why I started crying. Because I was upset about what the project might have done to my eternity."

Asmodia: "I truly don't envy Sevar her own job.  Prediction, Sevar's going to have an additional lecture about this, where she tells everyone how much she is going to make sure anybody in her fortress stays useful to her, including them being tutored in ringmaking or other advanced wizard skills, which Paxti and the others are.  If that's what it takes to get people not to break down on math tests in ways they wouldn't in alterCheliax."

"Prediction, it's still not going to work.  People in Cheliax, their whole previous lives, they're all fucking... I don't even know what word I want to use here.  'Scared', I guess, and the fact that everyone's required to believe they aren't scared means that they can't think about whether or not a situation is actually scary."

"I'm going to try selling Sevar on how much we show everybody else that nothing bad was allowed to happen to you and then maybe at least this crop of newbies will actually fucking believe the Chosen of Asmodeus about fucking anything."

"Which does still leave us the question of whether the job-stressor part and the fear of failing out of the Project and being stuck in the fortress was enough to get to alter-Korva."

Korva Tallandria: "I don't think so, not on its own. If you're not worried about it hurting your eternity, the fortress isn't a bad place, and alter-Korva doesn't have other reasons to care that much about the money that everyone keeps throwing around. There's probably something, if we've fenced ourselves in everywhere else, but it doesn't ring true to me."

"I do think - if the claim that my alter-self is in no hurry to rez my sister and isn't sad about her death was an order, then I'll take it and work with it, but in case it's the sort of thing I'm supposed to dispute, I think it's wrong. My sister has a young son that she's missing the childhood of, and alter-Korva would miss her, too. People in other countries - even Good countries - do, actually, grieve and feel sad about it when people die, even when they think they went to afterlives where they're having a wonderful time. I think it we build into alter-Cheliax that people don't grieve here, ever, that runs a risk of running into problems, too."

" - also I don't think you can resurrect people who were executed for apostasy, but that's - sorry. Not what we're talking about."

Asmodia: "It's illegal by default, but if the Project drops spellsilver prices by a factor of ten, I expect that to not be an obstacle to Project Lawful girls.  Well, researchers, if any of the male candidates make it."

"Sevar might overrule me if she sees some way it plays into her own game of corrupting Keltham - like, if she's sure Keltham will choose not to resurrect your sister, and expects that to be good Evil progress - but I am reluctant to make that be the story, given that we can't actually rez your actual sister.  Keltham could ask to scry your sister.  It's a truth that leads into too many other possibly required lies."

"There's nothing else in your life, alter-Korva's life, that she'd have been emotionally attached to doing, if she could only get a million gold pieces to do it with?"

Korva Tallandria: "No. Not that I've thought of. When Keltham assumed we wanted money I was offended at the wrong assumption; when Pilar told me I'd get a duchy if we won, I was annoyed with her for assuming I would want one. I've been thinking about why alter-Korva was even here, given she couldn't have been kidnapped into it, and I think I can piece together enough half-reasons to justify it, but - not reasons to cry about failing. Not ones I've thought of, other than wanting her sister back.

"I could probably think of some things that people who weren't me might want. They'd be harder to play, if he ever saw me again, because I not only don't want them but am learning that I apparently feel contempt for the idea of wanting most of them."

Asmodia: "I wish I could be on all of the Telepathic bonds constantly monitoring all of the situations and think quickly enough that in a situation like this I could actually talk the entire thing through with you fast enough to determine that you were not crying in alter-Cheliax."

Otolmens: Otolmens is not messing with the correctly-thinking mortal AGAIN after what happened LAST TIME.

Asmodia: "Option one that I've been able to come up with here, alter-Korva is weak, cracked under ordinary pressure."

"Option two, alter-Korva did have something she desperately wanted to do, she doesn't want to talk about it, Security truthspelled her just in case but that doesn't mean the rest of us know.  Mostly, we don't mention that to Keltham because it's private to Korva, we just tell him she hoped too hard.  If Keltham presses, which I predict he won't, Security tells him that it's about your dead sister who committed a murder and got executed over it, it's illegal to bring her back without a Crown order and you thought you could get that by outperforming."

"I predict Sevar vetoes option two, but want to give you a chance to sell that over option one.  I'm halfway inclined to veto it myself. on grounds of how much it sounds like you might be a romantic interest fated to Keltham by unbroken prophecy, like Sevar, which is... one of those complexities we didn't want to try to explain until you'd all mastered the basics.  But I think we may just need to press ahead and explain the tropes tonight, at this point."

Korva Tallandria: "A - can I -

"You know what, no, I don't think alter-Korva wants to resurrect a sister who committed murder. I think I can manage weak. I am weaker than most Chelish people. If those are our options, that seems like the more plausible option, and if we don't act like it's absolutely unthinkable for largely untested students to turn out to be that weak, under these conditions, then it doesn't even fence us into making it implausible if someone else happens to crack later, too."

Asmodia: "All right.  We're rather in the middle of a Wall disaster recovery here.  So I'm going to have Sevar updated on what we think was going on, check if she approves a Maillol interrupt."

Carissa Sevar: Carissa's hanging out with her boyfriend trying to make unforced conversation about unrelated things!

Keltham: Keltham will have moved on to unrelated things, then!

Keltham: ...though probably not without having expanded at least little on concepts like, yep, Carissa sure did call what happens to overly Good people if they try to improvise taking care of other people with mental health problems.  A lot of dath ilan is set up to route people like that into actually adequate situations for them, like Quiet Cities designed not to drive them crazier or unhappier in a hundred subtle ways; or, failing that, make it really clear to them that it's 100% okay if they want to just go into cryonic suspension, their friends and family will be fine, it's not their duty to stick around.

Keltham: Maillol knows what he's doing, right?  He should definitely know what he's doing much better than Keltham would.  Keltham can't improvise a handling mechanism better than what Cheliax already has in place.

...at least, Keltham could, possibly, think that, if he didn't know that everything about Golarion was simultaneously broken by his standards and that their mental health system is probably just "Hell takes care of it" which Keltham needs to remember is okay.

And not what he should be focusing on from either a Good or an Evil perspective.  Good says, help all of Golarion and not one person close to you, Evil says, don't make Dad's Mistake.

Keltham: But if they are supposed to be talking about unrelated things, Keltham will talk about unrelated things!

Carissa Sevar: Maillol has decades of experience with helping people deal with shock, grief, death, and so on, at the Worldwound; Keltham probably finds something inadequate about how Golarion handles sad people because has anything not been disappointing to him yet but she really really does not think this is something he could handle well. Also priests are sort of intrinsically comforting, because they're known quantities - Asmodeus chose them, they're going to be predictably His servants. 

- unrelated things.

Keltham: Keltham did need to check whether Sevar thought that the level of distraction being imposed on the other researcher-candidates was high enough that it should partially invalidate the test from Keltham's perspective.  His model of Sevar's model said no, but he needs to check with her.  Seriously, like in real life, with respect to how normal researcher-candidates work, not Invincible Carissa or Chelish Dignity should-universe answers.

Carissa Sevar: - she doesn't think so? Her guess is that they mostly if they noticed at all rather than being absorbed in their math went 'wow that's weird I wonder what went wrong' and then Maillol came in and they figured they didn't need to worry about it. He could give them a little extra time if he wanted. 

Keltham: ...that doesn't square up with anything else about how Keltham was imagining people or societies worked, but at this point Keltham is just going to wait for Maillol to report back, rather than quiz Carissa about it.

Ferrer Maillol: Here's Maillol!  Looks slightly worn and sad, but not much more so than his usual self.

"Keltham.  I need to ask, do you have particular reason to believe that Tallandria was having - how did you put it - a mental health emergency?  Near as I can tell, Korva Tallandria cracked under test pressure in what seems like a very ordinary way, excepting only that I would've thought a screened candidate for this job would've been tougher than that -"

Keltham: "Okay, hold on.  Stop.  Come to a complete halt.  Go into reverse."

"What do you mean, cracked under test pressure in a very ordinary way.  Ordinarily people don't - crack?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Nobody in dath ilan ever bursts into tears while taking a math test?"  Maillol is certain that this happens in Taldor.

Keltham: "Possibly if their 'appendix' suddenly bursts, but then you say out loud you're having a medical emergency, you don't - become mentally disabled to the point where you don't even trust yourself to walk out of the room and need to stay around other people who can subdue you if necessary -"

"Okay I think we probably all need to back up and check a lot of basic assumptions.  You first, why would anybody burst into tears while taking a math test?"

Asmodia: "Korva, sudden emergency question, do people in Taldor just walk out of exam rooms if they're about to cry, because in retrospect, it's incredibly obvious that's what they do in dath ilan unless they're completely disabled."

Korva Tallandria: "No.  Not unless they're having a bigger breakdown than the crying itself, and outright throwing the test. I'm - not certain but I'm pretty sure, for most tests."

Asmodia: "Right."

"Well, it's obvious that we were all living in different realities, and now it's time to desperately make like there were only two of those and not three."

Ferrer Maillol: Maillol is trying to explain the underlying patterns of, forget the math part, teenagers breaking down crying during any kind of test in which they don't know the answers and the future of their career is at stake.

Keltham: When you don't know the answers and your whole future career is at stake is not a good time to start crying.

Ferrer Maillol: Yes, that is why people who can't master the "not crying on important math tests" life skill are less great candidates for the Worldwound.  Outside the Worldwound the stakes are not that high all the time, and Tallandria apparently hadn't been exposed to any situation this high-stress in her life before.

Keltham: Okay, but if it's an actual emergency self-management situation requiring a temporary fix, there's, like, twelve different things anybody could do to switch off or dissociate an emotion...

...none of which anybody in Golarion has any training with, causing them all to have the emotional management options of, like, ten-year-olds, except insofar as they have sheer brute willpower for plowing through anyways.

Right.

Updating.

Keltham still doesn't get why Tallandria didn't just walk out of the room.

Ferrer Maillol: Because - social conventions are heavily against just walking out of a room during an exam.  It's the sort of thing that gets somebody dropped from their hard-to-get-into wizard academy, and if the rules were any different on Project Lawful, nobody told Tallandria that.

Maillol realizes this may not make sense to Keltham for a while.

Keltham: "Carissa, is there a fast explanation here relative to your model of my model?"

Carissa Sevar: " - probably, like, half of people are the kind of person who has sufficiently poor emotional management skills they start crying during an important test. Maybe six in ten girls, two in ten boys, yes I know that doesn't make half when I started being more specific in my head those are the numbers that came out. The wizarding academies try to filter it out because at the Worldwound not having emotion management skills will get people killed, I expect the project also filtered for it so Tallandria must have never done it before, but it's not rare generally.

Sometimes one might start crying during a test, recover, and finish the test, and this would be much less problematic for their continued presence in their wizarding academy than leaving the room during the test; one might even cry during a test without anyone in charge noticing, if the room doesn't have several Security who've been told to communicate as much as possible to Keltham."

Keltham: Keltham will now attempt to adapt for the fact that his entire worldview, all of his social reflexes, all of his thinking patterns, his deep implicit ideas about who is supposed to do what when, that his ideas of what he is supposed to think about and what a Startup Founder is supposed to think about, are all inhabiting a different reality that is not this reality!

"Okay, so if Tallandria wasn't - having a complete mental breakdown - does her cracking during math tests correlate with a rare Golarion neurotype that is very talented at chemistry, and if I don't hire people who crack on math tests, I don't get to have any top-percentile chemistry talents?"

It's actually pretty hard!  Especially when you can only do it one piece at a time wherever your mental attention happens to be focused that instant, and your mental attention is also being focused by patterns from the wrong reality.

Carissa Sevar: ".....no? And I have no idea how you got there? I think you probably shouldn't hire her, like I said. I'd think it was fine to hire her for a normal chemistry project but not one where we get attacked by Kuthites and might all end up half-Keepers."

Keltham: "Okay, but the conventional wisdom out of Civilization is that a project like this one would end up with a lot of very weird people, and you still want to exclude the mentally unstable ones but you've got to be really careful that you're not excluding, like, Lady Avaricia..."

"Does Golarion possibly just not have the whole thing where four top chemists in the world marry in pairs and their kids marry and one of their kids is an unbelievable genius chemist and the other one manages to commit true-suicide at nineteen."

Carissa Sevar: And it's not that the one murdered the other?

"If I heard that I wouldn't be very surprised but I also don't know of it as a - known phenomenon?"

Keltham: "So basically your planet doesn't have any geniuses except maybe via artifact headband, but, on the flip side, it's fine to go harder on screening mental traits in your employment process..."

"Not the most urgent question, I guess."

"I'm - continuing to feel very much out of my depth, here.  Carissa, Ferrer, you're both satisfied that things are proceeding here - basically as they should be proceeding, in Golarion?  I'm not supposed to administer a new math test to her in private and see if that makes a difference?"

Carissa Sevar: "I bet she'd do better on a new math test in private, at least plausibly so, but the whole reason I think you shouldn't hire her is that this is an incredibly weird isolating destabilizing project and you should hire people who are unusually stable and capable for it."

Ferrer Maillol: (It took him a split second to remember Keltham expected the lower-ranked person to speak first, and cross that with the Chosen being beneath him in alter-Cheliax.  But Maillol did remember in time to speak in the correct realAsmodian order, which is also the correct alterCheliax ordering.)

"I'd mostly say things are proceeding as they should.  Except for a slight concern about how this makes two of them."

"Asmodia first, though that was seemingly very different in nature.  Then Tallandria, who plausibly could have looked like a stable candidate up until this point, and than cracked for the first time when she was under more pressure than ever before."

"Neither case by itself would worry me the way the two do side-by-side."

"I am having Tallandria privately go through a light Security screening, to truthspell her about whether she's said everything she knows to be relevant.  But if there's nothing in there that Security decides we need to know, they don't tell us."

"My understanding is that Tallandria has had relatively little Law exposure.  And I do think there's a tendency for more talented wizards to be a little less stable, sometimes, in Golarion.  The state did send us an assortment of interesting people."

"I only ordered the screening because - how did you put it?  'Why trust what you can verify?'  I have made it clear to Security that any previously undisclosed involvement of Law-based reasoning in Tallandria's breakdown is something we need to know about."

Keltham: "Well handled, then.  On that part of it, I don't know enough to judge your performance on the rest."

"What'd you decide about Asmodia's request to hire her?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Unless you know something I don't about Tallandria being more volatile than she looks, I'm leaning yes, but with my watching the situation.  Closely enough that, if it starts to go wrong, I can shut it down after Asmodia learns a valuable life lesson and before she loses significant usefulness to your Project."

Keltham: "What does shutting it down, in that case, entail for Tallandria?"

Ferrer Maillol: "Stowing her in some other high-Security installation that could use another second-circle, and isn't quite as massively vital to the future of Cheliax and Golarion."

"Or Hell for a couple of years.  Which I personally think is an option Tallandria ought to be jumping on, given that she has a rare option to do that and get resurrected at state expense.  But that's an option I haven't pressed, beyond gently mentioning that it exists.  Compared to most people, priests of Asmodeus are known to have unusually correct opinions about that."  Maillol smiles slightly, but visibly.

Keltham: "Why are most people wrong about that, though..."

Ferrer Maillol: "Let the Church know if you ever figure that out."

"Any else?"

Keltham: "No.  Thanks."

Ferrer Maillol: "It's my job."  He departs.

Carissa Sevar: "Seeing him always makes me feel bad about how much nonsense our project gets up to that he has to write reports to Egorian about."

Keltham: "I figure any week we haven't started another godwar yet is a week Maillol ought to be grateful to us.  After all, he's the one who said that the key to happiness is to start with low expectations, and then, presumably, never update them so you're constantly pleasantly surprised.  That part he didn't say explicitly but I don't see how else this trick would work."

Carissa Sevar: "Yes, I think that's it. Wouldn't work for a dath ilani, but works quite well, if you're Chelish. I don't know if he's managed to keep them so low as to be pleased with the lack of a godwar, though."

Keltham: "Yeah, if we don't start another godwar soon, or some sort of project disaster, Maillol may start taking current conditions for granted.  Then his" hedonic treadmill "niceness demand level will adjust.  We can't let that happen."

"Any gods out there that would be really easy for us to annoy?"

Carissa Sevar: "Hmmm. Calistria's supposed to be quick to anger?"

Keltham: "And what pisses off Calistria?"

Carissa Sevar: Raping people. Abusing your wife.  That's probably not the most strategically useful answer to give. "If I were desperately trying to translate into dath ilani I would claim that She hates it when someone defects against you and you don't defect back, but I suspect that if for some reason you were to spend a week studying Calistria's teachings you'd tell me that's not the right translation exactly."

Keltham: "Right then, well, there's one god whose teachings I agree with too much to offend in that particular way.  Though I continue to have no idea how she's not Lawful Neutral."

Asmodia: "And that's today's first crisis done with!  Welcome to Project Lawful by the way.  At least we have cookies."

Why is Asmodia feeling so weirdly cheerful about having Korva assist on her Wall?  It's not the first time Asmodia's had minions!  Asmodia in Ostenso would sometimes force other students to do things for her!  Because if Asmodia didn't sometimes do that she'd obviously be one of the academic victims who got forced to tutor and serve more vicious students!  Is it just that she's got more leverage over Korva than Asmodia has ever had over anyone before, and now she can invest in training Korva to be more useful and have that actually pay off?

(The Chelish dialect of Taldane does have a word for 'friend'.  It just doesn't use it for anything.)

Korva Tallandria: "Yeah. Uh, sorry for causing you a headache already. So - I know you have visible and invisible things to juggle, but are there specific things we know we need to get out ahead of right now, while we can?"

Asmodia: "I think at this point, I sit you down and explain to you about the tropes.  It's an unexplained part of the entire Wall, from your standpoint, and you can't work without knowing."

Korva Tallandria: " - right. What, uh, are those." And are they going to cause her to turn out like Yaisa, somehow, she really really really doesn't want to be another Yaisa.

Asmodia: "All right.  So.  Um."

"This is something of a long and very weird story.  I'll try to separate facts from inferences," and try to lead you away from thoughts about whether the gods who once were human are trying to fake out Cheliax into believing in this whole story, just in case I was right about that originally.

"Keltham landed near the Worldwound at a point where he would run out of the cold into a Chelish installation.  He didn't land in the middle of the ocean, or for that matter, materialize a hundred yards off the ground, or in space, or in the Plane of Elemental Fire.  If you think about a cloud of probability density spread out evenly across all of Golarion's surface, to say nothing of our larger multiverse including other planets and other planes, it's very obvious that Keltham didn't land at random according to a cloud of probability like that."

"Something put Keltham where he landed, something that, one infers, cared about what would happen after he landed there."

"We then have the question - besides Keltham not just dying on the spot, in what other ways was this force maybe selecting where to put Keltham?  Maybe not just within Golarion, but inside our whole multiverse, maybe even many possible multiverses?  Keltham seemed to believe that dath ilan knew for sure that existence was very wide, much wider than just our multiverse and dath ilan's universe that he showed us."

"When Keltham ran out of the cold into that Chelish installation, the first person who could cast Tongues to speak with him, it turned out, was Carissa Sevar."

Asmodia: "Keltham and Sevar, I'm told, are matched improbably well in terms of their romantic compatibility.  Sevar is, to this day, the person who understands Keltham best out of everyone who's tried, including the Queen of Cheliax with whatever ludicrous levels of Splendour she can bring to bear.  Experienced honeypot instructors specializing in Lawful Good targets are saying that they do not understand why anything Sevar is doing works as well as it does."

"And Sevar... frankly strikes me as being more at risk of falling in love with Keltham for real than she'll admit to the rest of us.  I'm guessing here, yes.  But if my guess is right - you would not expect an average Chelish woman, a random Chelish woman, to fall in love for real with Keltham.  You wouldn't expect a random Chelish woman to be tempted."

Asmodia: "From Keltham's perspective, Golarion is even more improbable on that level.  Keltham has sexually sadistic tendencies.  His Lawful Good world tried to make sure he never found out about that.  Keltham thinks that's because dath ilan has no masochists.  He thinks masochism itself is unlikely, that it's not a kind of thing that - that heritage-selection would produce naturally - he thinks that people who want to be hurt, who enjoy pain, who want to be taken and forced into submission, would end up in dangerous life situations having fewer children.  If the sadists of dath ilan knew what they really wanted, they'd just be sad, so it was dangerous-information to them."

"You could counter-argue, and I think Sevar has, that tendencies like that could actually help people survive, if they ended up in situations very common in Golarion.  Dath ilan, maybe, has fewer of those situations.  Or maybe Keltham is right, and the gods intervened to make masochism be a thing in Golarion."

"The point is that from Keltham's perspective, he ended up in a world where sexual desires of his that had no counterpart in dath ilan - desires where, Keltham thinks, he would not expect a counterpart to exist in most reasonable parts of reality - could find fulfillment here.  The masochists he ran into are wizards, meaning he can try harder to hurt them without damaging them too much.  Keltham has healing powers he can use on his masochists afterwards.  These are all things that dath ilan doesn't have, that dath ilan thinks ought to be unlikely, that they wouldn't expect to find in a random world.  All of them make life much more convenient for somebody with Keltham's sexuality."

"And even if Keltham is wrong about Golarion having been selected for that - even if most worlds out there are just like that, and dath ilan is the weird one out for having no healing magic and no masochists - there remains the implausibly good match with Sevar in particular."

"You might speculate, then, you might infer - though it is not of itself an observation, as Keltham teaches to distinguish - that whatever landed Keltham here was, possibly, trying to set him up with a romance."

Asmodia: "It's... not a very nice romance, really.  Not the nicest romance Keltham could possibly have had.  He did end up in Cheliax with all of his romantic interests constantly lying to him about everything."

"It's not something you'd do to Keltham if you were just trying to be nice to him, make sure he found sexual and romantic fulfillment."

"It's something you'd do to Keltham if you were putting him somewhere that a romance novel would start up around him, a novel with a dramatic, conflict-riven plot."

"In particular, a dath ilani romance novel.  With common patterns, 'tropes', out of a dath ilani romance novel."

"Keltham doesn't know all his love interests are lying to him.  But he knows he landed in a situation where he's around a number of different interesting girls with interesting different backgrounds and special powers.  That, he found suspicious, after he arrived.  He doesn't know how weird it is that Pilar Pineda was selected as Cayden Cailean's oracle and bestowed with cookie powers.  He doesn't know that Ione is the one oracle chosen of Nethys.  But he knows that he's around other girls with special powers, an improbable and surprising number of them, and that is to him an obvious signature of a dath ilani romance novel."

"Or as dath ilan calls it, an 'eroLARP'."

"Keltham has tried making predictions about how events would happen around him, if he had in fact been selected and placed somewhere that further events would develop, by unbroken prophecy, in the way of an 'eroLARP'."

"We are concealing from Keltham how many of those predictions have, in fact, come true."

Asmodia: "In alterCheliax, Sevar is not the Chosen of Asmodeus.  There is nothing special about Sevar that is causing Hell to delay its purchase of her soul, or, as we've presented that to Keltham, 'making afterlife arrangements'.  Then Sevar should be able to make her afterlife arrangements and get her own Arcane Sight."

"Keltham predicted that, when Sevar went off to try to sell her soul, something mysterious would happen that prevented her from selling her soul.  He didn't know about Sevar's previous failed attempt, he just predicted that she'd fail that time, because it would be what happened in a dath ilani romance novel."

"Sevar turned out not to be able to sell her soul again.  They arranged for her to get permanencied Detect Magic somehow, no I don't know the details.  Sevar came back apparently all cheerful about having sold her soul, for Arcane Sight plus enough spellsilver to have an excuse for being able to make Keltham-corrupting magic items later."

"Keltham had a panic attack about whether there was some incredibly clever reason that the government of Cheliax would need to lie to him and fake selling Sevar's soul and somehow fake the Arcane Sight, because that would be what happened in an 'eroLARP'."

"Sevar managed to talk Keltham down from his being, in fact, completely right about all of everything," including Sevar being a hidden cleric, very likely, just based on how the rest of that went, but Asmodia's not going to get into that.

"That was one incident.  There were others, particularly including a conflict with the Queen of Cheliax, that I am apparently not allowed to know all about," presumably because Keltham won embarrassingly hard.  "From Keltham's perspective, he successfully managed to avert all of the antagonisms with the Queen that his 'tropes' would predict, casting severe doubt on his whole 'eroLARP' theory."

"From everyone else's perspective, I'm told, practically everything that Keltham predicted actually happened, but in a way where we prevented him from seeing it."