Ferrer Maillol: "Asmodia. Don't lie to me. I was going to threaten you and let it pass."
"Turn yourself in for twenty lashes at the temple and be very glad that you are on Sevar's light punishment plan."
"This is why you don't have a seat at the table. You're simply too inexperienced."
"Let's be very clear on this: You are not being corrected for your ambitions. Your ambitions are good. The way in which you expressed them is bad. Twenty lashes, don't do this again."
Asmodia: "Acknowledged."
Ferrer Maillol: "Dismissed."
Asmodia: When it's over, Pilar offers her a cookie.
It's a cookie with sugar chips inside, which, in the mental scheme and code Asmodia devised to ask this secret question, means that Snack Service isn't saying that Asmodia's sponsor wants her to try to sabotage the Project, or warn Keltham. With her shielded thoughts and Hell immunity that make her the only person who could maybe plan that and get away with it.
...okay.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 78
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol sits Asmodia down and gives her the Talk.
When it's okay to undermine your colleagues. When it's okay to amuse yourself by tormenting your subordinates. The relatively rare circumstances when you should try to kill your superior and take their place, you are a lot more likely to get away with that if your superior wasn't valuable and isn't anyone's pet and was being visibly incompetent and you are clearly more competent than they are. Be conservative about evaluating that sort of thing; a lot of people get themselves worse-than-killed by having a self-favoring bias, and being shocked, shocked, that their new superior doesn't agree about them being more competent than their dead ex-boss. The tyranny is not there to be your friend, it's not your superior's friend either, obviously, but all else being equal the tyranny wants both of you working for it and producing for it. They're going to check whether any apparent incompetence of your superior was actually you sabotaging them and they were a decent performer before that. Encouraging that sort of gameplay is not in the tyranny's interest.
Your fundamental job responsibility that isn't directly to Asmodeus or yourself is about making your boss look good. If you try to kill and replace your boss, it had better make your boss's boss look good, and that's harder to pull off than you might think.
Seizing your boss's job without killing them is unreasonably advanced for somebody Asmodia's age. Anybody you've replaced like that is likely to hang around severely resenting you. Your boss's boss knows that, they mostly won't promote you into somebody else's place unless they're ready for them to die, or they have some other position to send them to where the two of you won't get into trouble with each other.
Also, Asmodia's boss is, depending on how you look at it, either Maillol, or Sevar.
The main moral of the Talk is that Asmodia should not try to kill her superiors and seize their positions until she is older.
Asmodia: It's kind of embarrassing, but Asmodia knows that she is being shown favor by being told this, and she will respond with the appropriate attitude of somebody who understands that she's being done a favor and that a return will be owed on it.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 79-80
Hemaka: "Can You stop giving Keltham cleric spells. As a - warning to him, that something is wrong -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "No - We did try to make the case to Otolmens, actually, but She quite reasonably rejected it."
Hemaka: "It's not an intervention -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "The gods do have a reasonably sophisticated conception of the status quo that isn't 'not taking any actions', and taking non-actions can be an intervention, otherwise none of this would work at all."
Merenre: "There's certainly a case to be made that in the ordinary course of events You would have withdrawn Your support from Keltham at this point? In light of how he's helping Cheliax conquer the world, and You condemn wars of conquest. I realize there's the question of how knowingly he can be said to be doing anything he's doing, but -"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Tried it. Split off a bunch of threads of attention and fed them different subsets of information We might reasonably have had about the situation if We'd not been paying it close attention. A couple of them de-cleric him but most don't.
And We don't - want to do that, anyway, except insofar as he's relying on his spells as an assurance he's on track that We have a duty not to give him if We can avoid it. He's inventing all the chemical industry needed to make the world stunningly rich. He's doing everything right. He's just ....doing it in Cheliax."
Hemaka: "They're going to come here first."
Merenre: "My money's on Andoran, actually, unless we force their hand. Navies take time to build, Nefreti's an unpredictable variable, and once they have Andoran they have a much better position from which to hit us. ...I'm aware that is not very reassuring."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Correct, it isn't. - Nefreti, please stop that."
Nefreti Clepati: One of the houseplants against the wall turns into Nefreti Clepati. "Your staff overwaters those plants, did you know?"
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Are you here to help develop a war plan against Cheliax?"
Nefreti Clepati: "No, actually, I was just here to tell you about the plant thing."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 81 / Pre-Dawn
Keltham: "Wha?"
Keltham: "Who are you, where am I, and what's going on?"
lintamande: "Cheliax is lying to you about Hell," Cedtara says, first, just in case that's all she gets to say, and Cheliax does not swoop in to steal him back right that minute so: "Hell is a place of torture. Most people don't become devils. Most people just suffer forever. Even the ones who become devils lose everything about them along the way. There are thousands of times more people there than there are here in Golarion, and most of them long for death every minute of every day."
She's got some freaky facepaint, and scarification on both cheeks and down both arms. Her eyes are scanning the environment like she expects them to explode at any second.
Keltham: "How do you propose I figure out if that's true or false? Who are you? How did I get here?"
lintamande: "Ask your god for the spell 'Vision of Hell', fourth circle. I'm Cedtara. This is Pyrissis -" gesturing at the door. "We're trying to end the world. We need your help."
Keltham: "Pyrissis doesn't tell me anything, neither does Cedtara for that matter, that's something I would have thought myself unlikely to go along with so how are you planning to persuade me, how did I get here."
lintamande: "Grabbed you out of your bedroom. They almost certainly know you're gone. We have Nondetection up but it shouldn't, actually, stand against Cheliax actually trying, so we're probably going to get caught in the next minute or two. You would understand that the world had to end if you understood what it's actually like. Suffering, suffering, suffering, from birth to death and long after, inescapable, involuntary. Very few people would choose to be born into this world, if they got a choice, or choose to have children, if they got a choice about that. It all has to go."
Keltham: "How do you propose I verify that? How did you know I exist? Who's my god?"
lintamande: "Ask living people. Scry dead people. It's not a secret except from you, any book about Hell you read that Cheliax didn't select for you will say it, any person you ask that Cheliax didn't choose will know it. Presumably Abadar, have you got a first-circle truth spell?"
Keltham: "Yes, tell me what symbol that spell would show according to you, and I've noticed you not answering my question about how you even know I exist."
lintamande: "We work in small cells and this is a suicide mission that plausibly ends with me in Hell, I don't know anything like how we got the tip. The symbol is two curved lines, like so, it's some kind of economic theory thing. Abadar's not worth serving, though, He isn't doing anything about all of the suffering in the universe, he fought against Rovagug -"
Keltham: "Okay, look, if this is actually real and you hanging around here is going to get you sent to a place of eternal suffering then you need to tell me how to get back in touch with you people and then Teleport the fuck away from wherever this is."
lintamande: She beams fiercely at him. "We'll find you when you're out of Cheliax. Step back at least ten feet."
Keltham: Ten feet are backstepped. "If what you say is true I'm going to have to magically hide when I'm out of Cheliax, how do I get a message to you."
lintamande: "Don't hide from Sending, okay? And we'll contact you. Well. They'll contact you."
Pyrissis releases her grip on the magic item clutched in her left hand, and both of them are consumed, instantly, smiling, by five Beads of Fireball.
Keltham: "Sir. I regret my failure to retrieve contact information from them."
Ferrer Maillol: "Wrong priority. You pushed too hard there, at the end. We do not want them figuring out that this mission failed and repeating it, and that is a higher priority than tracking down one cell of Rovagug cultists."
Iarwain: (44 minutes earlier:)
Cayden Cailean: Can Cayden Cailean please have authorization for an intervention in the prohibited zone?
Otolmens: WHAT, WHY, and NO.
Cayden Cailean: The why is that Cayden Cailean has spotted a band of Rovagug-aligned mortals who are about to target the anomaly-securing-containing-and-protecting installation constructed by Asmodeus, in order to kidnap the anomaly and try to get him to destroy the universe. This is Cayden Cailean being very legible about that.
Cayden Cailean requests permission to update his oracle's curse with an information packet, after which Cayden promises that his oracle will stop the Rovagug-aligned mortals from obtaining the anomaly.
Otolmens: ...how about if Otolmens just SQUISHES the Rovagug-aligned mortals.
Cayden Cailean: Then there will be more Rovagug-aligned mortals later!
Cayden Cailean's oracle will make the Rovagug cultists believe they succeeded at their mission, which will diminish the incentive for them to try it again.
This will go a little better with some subtlety, Otolmens.
Otolmens: ...FINE. Cayden Cailean is authorized to carry out that ONE intervention ONCE.
Curse of Laughter: "SURPRISE NOT-GETTING-KIDNAPPED-BY-ROVAGUG-CULTISTS-IN-THIRTY-MINUTES PARTY!"
Keltham: "Bleaauuggghhh wha?"
Pilar : "SECURITY!"
Security: A lot of things happen very fast under conditions like this one. It's not even that Security believes Snack Service about the cultists but not about the thirty-minutes part. It's just, this is sort of what Security is programmed to do.
Keltham and Pilar are now in the (official that Keltham knows about) saferoom! Carissa Sevar and Ferrer Maillol and Jacint Subirachs have all just been shoved into it! And some of the more powerful Security! It all happened very quickly!
Other tier-1 researchers are going to a different saferoom, this one is at capacity.
Carissa Sevar: "Rovagug cultists? I guess everyone else is involved, so why not." She would like Keltham not to be curious about the Rovagug cultists's motives - no, lost cause. She would like Keltham not to ask the Rovagug cultists' motives. And not to find it suspicious if they aren't taken alive. "- is this definitely real Keltham - Keltham say something that no one raised on Golarion could come up with -"
Keltham: "That'd be easier if I wasn't half-asleep and my mind wasn't only generating things like 'reasons why masochists shouldn't exist' that anybody could've gotten off my transcripts if they had access to those... uh, really simple math I haven't covered. Uh. It's a trivial theorem that most useful proof systems can't prove themselves unable to prove a contradiction, because if they could, the hypothesis that they proved a contradiction would yield a contradiction, and then assumable provability would give you that a contradiction is actually provable."
Carissa Sevar: - hug.
lintamande: "I have confirmation from secondary teams that everyone in the facility is in a safe location," says Abarco. "We're calling in backup to intercept the cultists."
Curse of Laughter: Snack Service is having a telepathic argument about whether to actually stop and Maledict the cultists! Why are Asmodeans so suspicious every time Snack Service suggests not sending somebody to Hell? If the cultists know they've failed, they'll think they have to try it again!
Also, Cheliax might possibly want to observe how the Rovagug cultists are going to get past all their careful security. Because they totally would have if not for Snack Service!
Ferrer Maillol: Maillol is INCREDIBLY NOT COMFORTABLE with the concept that his installation's ACTUAL security rests ENTIRELY on Pilar's curse and, you know what, sure, let's get the Keltham impersonator and see how they do it, Maillol's vote is on that. Because if the Rovagug cultists can pull it off, Maillol apparently needs to have WORDS with SEVERAL PEOPLE. WORDS and FIRE.
Curse of Laughter: Don't feel too bad! It wasn't all Snack Service! Stopping this actually involved a direct intervention by Cayden Cailean that Broom's god authorized!
Keltham: "How do the cultists know I'm here?"
"How were they going to get past all the Security?"
"I have a lot of additional questions at this point."
"Is Cheliax planning to capture the cultists and hurt them until they answer your versions of those questions, if that's how interrogations work here?"
Carissa Sevar: Rovagug cultists tend to be Neutral Evil. If they don't Maledict the Rovagug cultists they'll presumably go to Abaddon and get eaten. Carissa is - actually not sure she can order that, not in front of Keltham - even if it actually serves Asmodeus better in this instance to let a soul be devoured, you just - can't - what are you even doing, if you're willing to do that -
She is thankfully saved from having to consider this by Keltham's lots of questions, which are directed at Maillol not her but she's the Keltham expert.
She thinks that alter-Cheliax does not have a principled objection to hurting people until they answer your questions, if those people were trying to hurt you and the answers are important, but Keltham said ages ago early on the Project that he wanted people to not do that so they have told everyone associated with the Project to, if it comes up, ask first. Also they're probably not going to take the Rovagug cultists alive because Rovagug cultists famously tend suicidal.
Ferrer Maillol: "We don't have principled objections to that, in a case like this one, but standing orders on the Project are to ask your permission before doing that in the Project's defense, you seemed to have qualms."
"In this case, I wasn't rushing to ask you because it is not at all likely that any will be taken alive. Rovagug cultists prefer dying and are famous for doing so successfully."
Keltham: "Stop me if this is a stupid idea but I imagine that I would, if I was an experienced Security running things, let them get into my bedroom, if they could, to see how they were planning to do that."
Ferrer Maillol: "Already the plan. We're getting your possessions out of there now."
Keltham: "I am not especially happy about the implied point that my existence, my location, and those general facts about me implying that I am a good choice of person to kidnap if you want to unseal Rovagug, have spread to the point where Rovagug cultists have heard of it. The last Security reports I got, about who's known to know about me, did not imply the information had spread that far."
Ferrer Maillol: "I'm not happy either but mostly because I feel like I, or somebody, should have considered this possibility in advance of it actually happening. Broom's god prevents most other gods from messing with this place, but that relies on agreements between gods and Rovagug does not give a shit about those."
Keltham: "Good... point."
It occurs to Keltham that, if somebody had thought through this conversation, this far, then him suddenly needing to be extracted from his bedroom for some non-revealable reason, might have an assault by Rovagug cultists as a pre-planned excuse.
...he hasn't thought about Conspiracy possibilities in a while. The thought feels sad, and tired, and he wants it to go away and leave him alone to be with his Carissa and his Project.
Keltham consciously notes that part.
"If I said that I was feeling suspicious, not as much as when the Asmodia thing happened, but a little, and I'm kind of tired of feeling suspicious, and I asked if there's anything obvious to do that makes me be less suspicious, somehow, would you have an answer for that? I know it's not really Security thinking, but better that than just feeling too tired about it to figure out anything."
Carissa Sevar: Deeply unfair how things they don't even do count against them.
"- I don't think this is very likely to work, but it's cheap and it'd be informative - Cayden Cailean, can we get ...some balloons in here celebrating people in Chelish governance or Chelish Security who deliberately cooperated with the Rovagug cultists or tried to help them get into the fortress?"
Pilar : It isn't going in reality because Sevar isn't trying to help those people, and if anybody wants sudden balloons apparently from the curse, they're going to have to generate those themselves.
Carissa Sevar: She doesn't want that; she doubts the Rovagug cultists in fact have allies in Chelish governance, so there shouldn't be balloons.
Keltham: Nothing, which is evidence against naive Conspiracy, because naive Conspiracy sets Carissa up to ask that only if they've got some startling revelation planned. Competent Conspiracy knows how Keltham will evaluate it. Though you would think the Conspiracy would be competent, they've got a Probability-aware Carissa and Asmodia now, even if they didn't have them before.
"Not... actually the kind of suspicion I had in mind, though I guess it could help on having context for where this came from. More like, there's some other reason you had to get me out of my bedroom, couldn't tell me why, 'Rovagug cultists' are the excuse because that's what squares with the story about how this place is protected from gods..."
Carissa Sevar: "If it's half an hour until the cultists are expected to show up we could go back now?"
lintamande: "No," says Elias Abarco flatly. And then, with a sigh, " - if ordered to let you go into the room that the Rovagug cultists are going to arrive in soon of course I will do so but my strong professional recommendation is that you stay here. If a place is known dangerous you can simply be nowhere near it."
Keltham: "Snack Service."
Pilar : Totally safe in reality - does she say that -
Carissa Sevar: Yes, there's no reason it'd be different in alter Cheliax.
Pilar : "Here's a jellychip to celebrate how totally safe that would be."
Keltham: "Okay, let's run over right now to take a look, run back, I just don't want to fight my brain about this." It would've been better if he thought of it, instead of Carissa, but he probably wouldn't have.
Ferrer Maillol: "Do it, Abarco." And get Keltham's things out of his bedroom, very quickly, though they'll have to put them back afterwards.
lintamande: With visible irritation Elias Abarco opens the door of the safe room and stands aside.
Keltham's bedroom has several Security in it who've cleared it of his possessions and are double-checking they didn't miss anything. Nothing else is up.
Keltham: He'll trudge on back to the saferoom, moving quickly. He feels a little better, but not very much. It's probably the combination of being woken up before dawn, and having to fight what seems like an impossible-to-actually-win battle about the possibility that nothing around him is real, where even if that were true, he wouldn't know where to look, to make it all fall apart, to have it be revealed that none of the happiness he thinks he's winning is really his, or that this isn't what happens to Lost Dead people after all.
He'll probably feel better after he makes up for lost sleep, if he can.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 82-83
Iarwain: Nidal launches a massive desperation assault, targeting the wedge of Chelish forces near the Kintargo front, Black Triune come forth at last.
Aspexia Rugatonn is ready for them, as are some non-Chelish ninth-circles with very old grudges.
lintamande: Late that night, when all of them are low on spells, they get a panicked message from the commander of the second-to-easternmost Chelish fortress at the Worldwound. One of their patrols reported they'd been injured and were going to overnight at the most easternmost Chelish fortress at the Worldwound.
Routine evening communications with that fortress failed entirely. Its Wardstone is still holding - the lack of that would be obvious - but that might not be true for much longer.
Gorthoklek: General Gorthoklek will obviously send a major investigation, in force, immediately.
A pit fiend never runs low on self-teleportation.
lintamande: There are a bunch of cheerful paladins manning the fortress! They explain that nearly all the Chelish soldiers decided to renounce Asmodeanism, atone, and leave the Worldwound to live a better life elsewhere; of course, they didn't want to desert their posts, so they asked if the Iomedaeans would be willing to cover for them until the handoff to a new batch of Chelish soldiers could be arranged, which the Iomedaens gladly agreed to!
They are happy to swear to this.
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Is there any particular romance-novel trope you know about that -"
Abrogail Thrune II: "Burn. Burn them all. Burn everything."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "You cannot attack -"
Abrogail Thrune II: "The tropes."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "I shall stand here wasting my time until you are ready to make constructive suggestions, then."
Abrogail Thrune II: "This has to be related to Project Lawful in some way. Everything odd that has happened in the last three months has been related to Project Lawful in some way. The question is how."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Iomedae did, in fact, see something in Peranza's mind for deconverting Asmodeans, which She was permitted to inform her worshippers about?"
Abrogail Thrune II: "Too obvious."
Aspexia Rugatonn: "Abrogail."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm serious. It's too obvious. I would consider it if not for the clear trope involvement, but as it stands, no, this will be something else."
"We do need to be more cautious until we figure out what happened. I don't, quite, believe that its only meaning is a tactic to make us cautious. That too, I think, would not be the tropes' way."
Ferrer Maillol: Orders on what to tell Keltham about this, if anything at all? Where the reality is that Nidal launched a desperate counterattack, Cheliax was ready for them, and the war is looking to end within weeks.
Carissa Sevar: "I think we intended to tell Keltham that the war was going poorly and we wanted to make an unsustainable push on spellsilver, as setup for the pause."
Ferrer Maillol: "Sounds like we tell him nothing, then?"
Carissa Sevar: "I think so. The war straining Cheliax's resources is a useful excuse on several fronts, anyway."
Ferrer Maillol: "Sir, I don't have clear orders until you tell me 'Yes' or 'those are your orders', not 'I think so'."
The Chosen was doing better about this, recently, until just now. Hopefully this backsliding does not indicate the Chosen being distracted by anything she should not be distracted by.
Carissa Sevar: Distracted? Her? That would be pathetic. "Those are your orders. Convey to our forces, or those of them allowed to know who I am, my congratulations, and not my annoyance they didn't take long enough about it I could reasonably petition Abrogail to be archduchess of Nidal."
Ferrer Maillol: "Sir, you also need to explicitly tell me that you're joking, otherwise it's an actual order."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm joking." Not even with him; with Abrogail. "Is there anything else?"
Ferrer Maillol: Funny thing happened at a Worldwound fortress recently...
The Queen of Cheliax is of the opinion that they're meant to think this is Iomedae getting access to an Asmodean-deconverting idea from Peranza's mind before she died, but that the reality will be something different, because this has been too foreshadowed to be a valid plot twist.
Carissa Sevar: "If She had a general version of that you'd expect Her to be using it more aggressively, really. Unless that was just a test, or unless its usage in Cheliax itself runs into the interdiction in a way using it in one fortress doesn't -
- why? Those soldiers were defending our world! Even if you could, what do you gain - "
Ferrer Maillol: "Does the Worldwound treaty keep working if the gods, and soon the rulers, are expecting Cheliax to conquer the world? Why defend it so Cheliax can take it? Maybe they just walk away from the Worldwound and leave Cheliax to defend it entirely on its own, right away, by way of slowing our rise."
Carissa Sevar: Maillol says it without any visible emotion, for all he's spent half his life there, but Carissa, who spent only six years, feels a surge of emotion, and enjoys it as one of the first such feelings she's had in a while that didn't need to be carefully managed.
"I hope, one day in Hell, they regret that specifically, on top of everything else."
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 84
Keltham: Spellsilver production down to 2/5 usual cost! They got here in one jump from 3/5 to beneath the 50% cost barrier. The level where different things start to become possible in the economy, rather than you just having a sales advantage over existing sellers, even if they don't get any more improvements from here - and they're still going strong.
Though it's still 2/3 if you only use tier-2 Prestidigitators. Or more like 90% if you use only non-core-Project Prestidigitators (Asmodia reports).
(He'd be even happier if not for that lingering, recently reactivated part of him, wondering if his improved spellsilver processes actually matter to anyone, or if they're just something that somebody dreamed up to keep Keltham busy for unguessable reasons. Well, besides the obvious guess about 'Cheliax' or whoever only really needing him for his genetics.)
Carissa Sevar: The +2 headband items are successfully employed by some average Wondrous Items enchanters to make a +2 headband at quadruple speed. Carissa hands out +2 headbands to everyone in the Project who doesn't yet have them.
Keltham: He landed in a broken world, and he's fixing it.
+1sd to start, and more on the way.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 85
lintamande: Contessa Lrilatha comes to the fortress to deliver her proposal for a one-month massive push on production of spellsilver using Project techniques. There's accumulated demand to catch up on and some big needs that are worth meeting now even if spellsilver's going to rapidly get even cheaper than this, and to get started on some work that'll take advantage of the possibility of it getting rapidly even cheaper than this.
They want to give all the non-core-Project Prestidigitators Asmodia's working with headbands, now that Carissa's setup for rapidly producing +2 headbands is working, and try to train several hundred new ones, including moving a bunch of people over from other industries and paying them to try to pick this up instead; they want to open several new mining sites; they want to spend a very unsustainable amount of money as a one-off to encourage the transition towards a much more spellsilver focused economy, and they want to make a ton of spellsilver very fast.
Here are her projections about what next month's project financials report to Keltham will look like under various scenarios about how well the push works out.
She has one of Carissa's glibness pins, because why not, even though her Bluff was already ludicrous.
Keltham: It's at this point that Keltham realizes that, yeah, Cheliax wasn't really taking anything seriously until he was practically finished with his entire product development phase and delivering the equivalent of a finished prototype, which is maybe just how worlds fundamentally are absent competitive venture capital markets and prediction markets. And that he was too embarrassed about socially pushing, to correct any of that by demanding, like, ten times this budget, immediately, please.
Wow. Imagining making that request still makes him wince, even imagining doing it over knowing how things would turn out.
...he really is not actually a mad entrepreneur by nature, apparently.
Because, yes, this is obviously how you'd do things if you were taking anything at all seriously.
Oh well.
Probably nobody really got hurt, except a bunch of children drowning in ponds because he didn't want to take off his social-comfort clothes, and they all get afterlives, right.
...It would've been nice if he'd noticed that under his Owl's Wisdom.
Keltham: Keltham will nod along to everything. He probably wants to take another hour to review in more detail, and a day before signing anything, but he is basically completely on board with this proposal.
lintamande: Great; any questions he has will be conveyed to her.
She thanks him, with great sincerity, for all his work, and leaves.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 86
Keltham: He signs, and manages to feel some enthusiasm about it.
These dark thoughts are probably some kind of weird brain state that's terrified of actually succeeding at the thing. Or a brain state that is having social difficulties about massive bets being made on his work, even when the prospective expectation of success is clear and materially evidenced, not resting on his personal assurance at all; if something weird goes wrong, it will still be very clear what the reasonable prospects were and that they didn't rest on his promise alone.
Carissa Sevar: The next stage of the Keltham corruption plan is a very pretty set of earrings Carissa has just completed. They act as Geas, with a simple command: don't say stop. The order Keltham gave her, with the secret logic Abrogail saw - that if she ever did refuse him, he'd know the premise of the whole thing had fallen apart. So this, of course, is the way to take that certainty from him.
They're very impressive workmanship.
She's going to wait, she thinks, until after the suspension. Things feel - fragile. Not any specific things, just things in general. Keltham seemed persuaded by Lrilatha; Security says that no one has been inspired to treason by the knowledge that Cheliax is about to win for good. Why risk breaking their momentum towards the most difficult, terrifying, lonely thing she's ever imagined commanding?
She's terrified of it. She keeps thinking of bizarre and implausible ways she might fail to wake up. What if Abrogail's deposed. What if Osirion attacks. What if Civilization is wiped off the face of the planet but Carissa, trapped in stone, can't go to Hell.
It's the winning move, and she likes winning moves, and anyway she has to serve Asmodeus first whatever she happens to want, but she can't help it feeling like the worst thing in the world. And she can't help feeling, on some deeper level, like -
- she's gotten much better at what she's been charged with doing. She is more Asmodean. Subirachs is pleased. She has encountered no indications that Abrogail and the Most High are anything less than delighted with how she has expertly managed the falling-apart disaster of a project she inherited into the greatest triumph in Chelish history. Keltham is in love with her, and whether or not she's still in love with him she doesn't think about too much; she's trying to have less feelings these days anyway. She has a new guiding heresy, of sorts, which is that the more of the flaws in yourself you correct before Hell the more of what and who you are you get to retain in your shaping into a devil.
The Rovagug cultists have been devoured in Abaddon, and Peranza's in Hell, and it's really a testament to human weakness and fragility that she can manage to be haunted by both of those things, but she can.
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 87
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 88
Project Lawful: PL-timestamp: Day 89
Keltham: Okay. It's pretty clear they're going to get spellsilver into the target range.
It's time to consider what it is he and the Project want to do next, after that.
Keltham: ...is he going to regret not using an Owl's Wisdom on that, he wonders.
He supposedly doesn't owe that to anyone or anything, but -