Keltham: "Well, thanks.  I can't say you were the highest-quality girlfriend I ever had, but you sure were the highest quantity of them."

It's only after Keltham speaks the words that he realizes it's just what he would have said to Meritxell ordinarily.

Curse of Laughter: "Gregoria!"

lintamande: Meritxell blows Keltham a goodbye kiss, beaming. 

"Honestly I'm not sure what I add to this conversation," Gregoria said. "I could guess. Maybe we're hoping that the more faintly absurd this all seems, the harder Osirion's going to find it to convince Keltham he's out. Maybe we're just doing things at random because Sevar's too busy having a breakdown to come up with a plan. Uh, Keltham, I'm not attracted to you. It's not that I'm asexual; I'm a straight woman who is attracted to men. Just not you. It might be your face or some intangible chemistry thing but I think it's your personality. It seems to me that it was incredibly stupid to make your project of rebuilding Civilization also your project of having lots of kinky sex with admiring employees. Cheliax let you do it because we suck and do horrible things all the time, but you don't even have that excuse."

Keltham: "Your opinion has been duly noted!  A day ago I'd have said that was too Good for me but now I don't know what any of those words mean and instead I will note that I was trying to have fun while rebuilding the world!  I was attracted to you but only in a fucking way, really, so I'm not sure what you were doing here.  Snack Service?"

Curse of Laughter: "She just felt really strongly about that.  Yaaaisa Castilla!"

lintamande: "Oh, boy. If you're taking people with you, Keltham, I'd be delighted to come. It's not that I'm not a loyal Asmodean, I'm going to go to Hell when I die so I guess I might as well be a loyal Asmodean about that, it's just that I'm only on the Project to fuck you and I kind of figure something awful is going to happen once I'm useless. I quoted you my true prices, for sex, and not just because that one time you had a massive freakout about suspecting my prices of being wrong. I got paid my true prices so as far as I see it, we're even, except for the potential for an ongoing business relationship, which would be nice.

Once when you were doing an orgasm denial thing and then you got petrified for a day so the Project could catch up on all its lying work, I got myself off, because the extra day was really throwing me off. I figure that was only fair because you weren't paying me for those days, what with how we never told you that those days happened, but if you're mad, you know, fair. If I were you I'd be mad, though not about that specifically. 

I never really tried to explain myself to you, you know, as a person. You never really asked. I'm kind of assuming you don't really want to know, it's not really the point, and it's not really the point on my end either, so I'm not, like, mad about that? But if you want I can ask for a Splendour and try to explain."

Keltham: "You did not particularly give off a vibe of wanting me to ask, as I tried to read it.  Was I wrong about that?  Do you want me to ask, now?"

lintamande: "No! If you'd asked before I would've had to lie about most of it and if you ask now I guess I don't have to lie about most of it but I also, just, haven't got a story ready that's true, if that makes any sense? You might think you don't have to get a story ready, if it's true, but actually telling the truth is harder than lying. ...maybe that's less true outside Cheliax. I figure, we have a relationship that is about sex and money, and you're not responsible for me and I'm not responsible for you, and we're better off without things getting complicated."

Keltham: "Well, I won't ask then!  I am in fact, amazingly enough, feeling upset and betrayed about you sneaking in an orgasm, because the entire point was to build up the frustration in you!  You could have just quoted me a higher price to reflect the days I didn't know about, Yaisa!  I will give you a temporary pass because of the entire torturegod Conspiracy incredibly traumatic upbringing business, but we'd have to talk about that explicitly before resuming any such relationship."

lintamande: "Okay! I promise I won't fuck around like that in the absence of a torturegod Conspiracy, though I'll go on having a traumatic upbringing. I don't really think the traumatic upbringing was specifically the problem. I like you and I hope we do get to talk about that someday and not just because otherwise I'll suffer an awful fate."

Keltham: "Oh, if this is reality, there's going to be all kinds of stuff happening that is not me, like, walking away and forgetting that any of this ever happened."

lintamande: Yaisa smiles at him but does not offer a goodbye kiss.

Keltham: That's fair.  Keltham isn't offering to pay for one.

Curse of Laughter: "Unfortunately, Peranza can't be with us here today!  Obviously, they didn't tell you the truth about that event!  But, please don't make any decisions about things related to that, until you're sure you know the whole story there, including the key fact that only one person here knows enough to infer.  There's parts that you'll definitely find disturbing to hear about, but the Project and its employees didn't deliberately hurt Peranza much by Cheliax's standards or hers."

"Peranza wasn't in love with you.  She could've fallen in love with you, given the chance, but she was in circumstances she found pretty stressful and didn't have the energy, really."

Curse of Laughter: "And next up...  KORVAAAA TALLAANNNDRIAAA!"

"This is a good time to sit down, stretch, or take a drink from your wineskin, because this may take a while."

Korva Tallandria: “My feeling is that I think you suck,” says Korva, and then feels a small wave of relief, internally, that that really is what she feels, that she’s not lying to herself. “Not because you didn’t hire me, I think you were totally justified in that. There are actually an incredible number of other things I want to say about how much you suck, though, so I worry that whatever’s left of twenty minutes won’t be enough.”

“But I’ll give it a go.”

“I have lived my entire life in Cheliax. I think I was - seven or eight, when I realized that all the books were lying. Not just the textbooks, which were obvious, because they take out or invent whole noble lines and wars between semesters, based on what was most convenient for the government that year, and everyone had to act like it had always been that way. I mean - every book in every library has been either written or selectively edited to present a certain inaccurate picture of the world, although obviously a different one than what we fed you. We live in lies, Chelish people, the way fish live in water. I imagine you’re feeling very upset right now, and I want you to know that everyone in Cheliax has lived their entire lives inside a conspiracy of similar magnitude. The thing you’re feeling - all of us got it out of the way when we were children. But if any of us had thrown the kind of fit you’re throwing about it, at your age, we would have been tortured to death in public, and then gone to hell to be tortured for eternity, and then, if we had ever done anything otherwise worth remembering, had our names erased from the history books, as though we never were.”

“That is the world I grew up in, Keltham. And you know what I fucking did about it? I read more books. Because lying is hard, and censors can’t do it perfectly. I learned to do some of - the thing you do, that people think makes you so fucking special, where you realize that facts have implications, and can see that - if someone is illusioning a thing to look different, but they forget to change the shadow of the object, you can learn something more of what the object really looks like from the object’s shadow. I checked stories against each other. I took note of what didn't make sense. I read fiction, old fiction produced outside of Cheliax, which is differently hard to censor than history. I read the world by its silhouettes, even though I’d never be able to see it clearly. I have educated guesses, for what lies beyond the lies.”

“So I hate you, in part, because - you do all this talking, about wanting to see what the truth is, about wanting to believe whatever is true and not whatever is convenient. But how many things did you do today that you couldn’t have done on your second day here, before all the gods had taken notice of you? You read a couple books, great. They had utterly baffling social and cultural mores in them that you thought didn’t make any sense. Did you push for more, try to seriously figure out what was up with that by reading more books? No. You kept noting, over and over, that you didn’t know what intelligence ten people were capable of, even without anyone trying to hide them from you, even though it crippled your understanding of what could or couldn't be done here. Did you ever try talking to one deliberately, even once? No. You were confused about the concepts of law, chaos, good, and evil, and knew that you were; did you ever try getting a serious account from someone who differed from Cheliax on any of those axes? Literally once, I think, and in only one direction. - have you figured out what Evil is yet, by the way, because I’d love to be the one to make that in particular really come together for you if you haven’t yet."

Keltham: "I am listening."

Korva Tallandria: "It's hurting other people. I'm sure they'll give you access to a bunch of complicated philosophical definitions in Osirion, but the understanding that almost everyone actually uses, is that it's hurting other people. Making people suffer, either as an end goal or as a means to some other end. Treating people the way you saw them be treated in the slave market in Absalom, which is not remotely the worst this plane has to offer, let alone the lower planes. Killing people. Raping people. Torture. Theft. Anything that makes the world worse for people to live in. And, yes, selfishness is often a cause of that, because it's much easier to get what you want when you're willing to crush other people to get it."

"If you want to know how much of that we actually do around here - I dunno, ask the Osirians to give you some books on actual warfare. What happens to women and children in places that get attacked, not troop movements and generals. Ask them to describe how it feels for a baby to die slowly and painfully of disease, and how many babies that is, and then ask for the prices of a remove disease versus a raise dead diamond, and do the math about how many people have to experience that agony whenever a wealthy person is as careless with their life as you told us to be. If you want a starting point."

"Anyway."

"The other big reason I hate you is - "

“Well, you know, you probably only remember me from the crying incident, at this point, and are confused about why I'm even here. I started crying because I felt like being forcibly put on this project was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I wasn’t getting the answer to your question, couldn’t make the math come together, and I realized that that made me worthless and that they were probably going to kill me off early, and I’d be useless for the rest of time, only good for screaming and not for doing anything that I might need a mind for, and I was more terrified than I think I have ever been in my life. I was also furious with you, for teaching the way you taught, for starting this project that ripped me away from my otherwise less agonizing life, for being a shitty fucking cleric of Abadar who didn't manage to notice that you were working with people who were essentially slaves, part yours and part the government's, and that all of your supposedly free trade with them was a farce."

"I probably could have held it in if I’d thought it mattered. I didn’t, because at that point in time I underestimated what an asshole you were. I figured you’d either ignore it or think it was funny, like a normal person, or ask me what was wrong, like the decent and anomalously truth-seeking person you claimed to be, and I’d tell you a plausible lie about something going on in my life that you hadn’t known about and which made sense of it, which is really what is usually happening when someone bursts into tears, which I'm pretty sure they do more outside of Cheliax."

“Instead, you recommended that I be exiled from the fortress, for being some kind of emotional leper who would drag down everyone around me. The idea that they would have stored me in a different secure location is laughable. They would have killed me. The only reason I am not currently a burnt, quivering, sobbing, misshappen lump of flesh, as a direct result of your careless, stupid order, which came solely from you and ideas that nobody separately planted in your head, is that Asmodia saved my life by putting me on her consistency team, which I was pretty good at, I think. I was in charge of the team that wrote most of the books you read today. I'm aware that they mostly sucked, by the way, although it's actually really hard to produce that volume of content that fast even if you're barely controlling for quality at all, which is another reason you would have been able to blow this whole thing wide open if you had done it in the first few weeks instead of distractedly fucking all the pretty girls around you."

"Anyway. I think you think I suck. I think you're right about that. But you suck, too, asshat, and I think the way you acted speaks poorly of you from any philosophical perspective you want to take. And I don't think a smarter or a less selfish dath ilani would have fallen for this. Either one would have been enough, I think."

"That was me being evil, so we're clear. I think it's true, but I specifically want to say it because I want you to hurt the way you hurt me, to know that you're not enough and that you wouldn't have been hurt so badly if you were a little less pathetic as a person. That has been, like, something of a driving motivation for the past two months, the hope that I might someday get to say that to your face."

"Honestly, I really wish that I could tie you to a chair until I was done breaking down every single mistake you made and how ridiculously wrong you are about so much of the world around you, and also get it through your skull that there are hundreds of millions of people around you who are living stories as real and as genuine as yours, and that everything isn't fucking about you, even though the gods, for reasons that are totally unrelated to your actual impressiveness as a person, or to anything you've ever actually done of your own power, appear to be obsessed with you. But I doubt your escorts have the time for that, so if you want to know what you're missing, you're going to have to grow the fuck up and look the fuck around you this time."

"Asshole."

Keltham: Did she somehow miss the part where he's a young punk from a Civilization greater and brighter and smarter than himself, repeating back things told him by teachers more devoted to the Way than he?  Keltham had thought he was being pretty clear about that part, but maybe that was just illusion-of-transparency.

He is not going to argue, given what would (if this is reality) happen to Korva if he won any arguments.

"Interesting thesis you have there!  Sorry about almost sending you to Hell if that was actually in fact a thing in any way!  There's a number of things I could say about the rest of it, but mostly, let's continue this debate sometime when you're not going to have your thoughts read about it and get hurt for arriving at particular opinions."

"Next please!"

Curse of Laughter: "Asmodia, please read the piece of paper that you'll find in your pocket!"

Pilar : Pilar doesn't think quite fast enough to grab control of her body back before Snack Service can finish saying it.

Asmodia: "Next up.  Piiiilaaaaaaar Pineeeeeeeeeda.  It was actually written with all the extra vowels.  I refuse to pronounce all of these exclamation marks."

"Resuming.  Piiiilaaaaaaar Pineeeeeeeeeda, faithful Asmodean, second-circle wizard of Cheliax, and unwilling oracle.  Chosen of Cayden Cailean, the glorious and exalted god of parties, sex, and drunken blackouts.  Who went to Elysium, and returned to Cheliax freely of her own will.  Also known as 'the cake girl', the Giver of Cookies, She-Who-Bears-Cake, Cheliax's Secret Weapon, I'm going to skip over this part it goes on for a while and the worst part is I'm sure it's all true.  Universally acknowledged to be the sanest person on Project Lawful, that's also true, even Ione would've agreed.  Bearer of the Curse of Laughter, also known as Snack Service, the bestest oracular curse ever.  Please welcome, and then truthspell, Pilar Pineda."

Curse of Laughter: Hundreds of multicolored party balloons appear around Pilar Pineda, and promptly rise up into the sky!

This is even more impressive when most of the planet doesn't know what 'helium' is, and sees the balloons rising without Arcane Sight or Detect Magic offering any hint about why they'd be going up instead of down!

Pilar : "I'm seriously going to fucking slay that thing someday."

Carissa Sevar: It seems pretty unambiguous to Carissa at this point that Snack Service is trying to leave Keltham in a state of utter inability to tell if anything is real or not. She has no idea why, but that's so obviously what's happening.

lintamande: The Osirians, watching the balloons, collectively draw all of the following conclusions: 

Evangelism for Cayden Cailean and all chaotic gods should definitely continue to be banned in Osirion, and probably the government should go much further. Snack Service should definitely be banned. Anything it writes should probably also be banned. 

Cake girl is a victim.

Premarital sex is definitely the road to all manner of existential horrors. 

Also, sending women to school is a horrible, awful mistake. 

The most outrageous and exaggerated stories of the sexual degeneracy and awfulness of Avistan appear to just be straightforwardly completely true.

It is better for everyone in Osirion to die than to become like Avistan in any way. 

Between the two characterizations of Cheliax that people outside Cheliax argue about, the one where the people of Cheliax are fundamentally deceived by Asmodeus/tricked through soul-selling and so on to go to Hell despite being basically normal people, and the one where Asmodeus manages to successfully make everyone in Cheliax into such horrible people they deserve to go to Hell, it's definitely the second one.

The world Keltham came from before this must, aside from its superior knowledge of alchemy, be an utterly horrifying place for Cheliax to have been able to pull off the harem play. 

Cayden Cailean has either ceased to have any qualities whatsoever besides inane silliness, or really desperately wants Cheliax to believe that and is willing to make horrifying expenditures of resources to make it look like He has nothing going on besides inane silliness. 

The new cleric of Abadar is clearly in the middle of a profound and horrifying breakdown and should probably spend several months in a monastery in the mountains, desperate as everyone is to speak with him. 

Also, Snack Service's illusions are really compelling - the balloons don't appear illusory. Which raises the question of whether literally everything that has happened since they arrived in Cheliax has been an elaborate deception meant to persuade them of one or more of the above things. 

Keltham: "My entire Civilization used to spend, I think the calculation was, something like 1% of planetary income on trolling each other.  Snack Service is doing medium-okay by our standards given its technological constraints."

Curse of Laughter: Is that a CHALLENGE?

Pilar : NO.

Curse of Laughter: It was totally a CHALLENGE!

Pilar : Pilar walks forward, receives her truthspell, and then speaks.

"Yeah, not really sure what to say here.  Everything I told you about the relationship between myself and Lord Asmodeus was true, Snack Service said to make sure it was.  I think that Cheliax is -"

Pilar realizes that she is unable to say 'Cheliax is a great place and doing everything right' under truthspell.

She's had horrifying realizations like that before; it doesn't cause her to have a total meltdown the way it would've three months ago.

"Cheliax is the only place I've ever heard of where I can exist as myself, Hell is the only afterlife I can imagine myself going to, Asmodeus is the only god who fits me in any way.  I was similarly honest when I described to you the kind of sex I like, that keeps me in my place.  I've always enjoyed being forced into sex, I was never actually in denial about it, that was a lie to see if we could get you to force me into bed without my saying yes to anything."

"I went to Elysium because of my curse.  They showed me what Hell was actually like for the people in it, and spent a lot of time apparently trying to talk me out of things and telling me how much Asmodeus didn't deserve me.  I came back to Golarion willingly, to serve Asmodeus in this world, and then in Hell."

"My big breakdown after your Keeper lecture was actually about the part where I realized I didn't want my mother and sister to go to Hell, and Snack Service told me that it'd arranged for my family to be kidnapped by Osirion, atoned to Lawful Neutral, and killed so they'd end up in Axis instead.  I am still a bit salty about this where relations with Snack Service are concerned, but Aspexia Rugatonn says that Snack Service seems to have done the right thing to serve Asmodeus's interests, therefore that is the truth."

"Not particularly attracted to you.  You are not nearly, nearly, nearly Evil enough."

Keltham: "Sorta figured.  There was definitely something, magnetic, sexual, about your whole character concept, but you were clearly too advanced for my level of perversion.  I figured I'd get there someday."

"Obviously, I'm going to have to do a lot of refiguring now, about a lot of things."

There's only one person left, now, and he just wants to hide, go to Osirion without hearing it.

...to be fair to Snack Service, that one person was the important one, and, without hearing all of these other confessions, earlier, for context, whatever Carissa had to say wouldn't have been - whatever it was - it wouldn't have been coherent with anything.

Curse of Laughter: "Second to last, but first in Keltham's heart, Carissa Sevar."

"Oh, Aspexia Rugatonn, we're going to need another ten minutes here."

Aspexia Rugatonn: "I grant and compact on behalf of Cheliax to another ten minutes, added to the twenty, under the same terms as before."

lintamande: "We can just leave," the Osirian leader says to Keltham. "The fact this serves Asmodeus is strong reason to think it doesn't serve you."

Keltham: "There is a chance that this is reality," which subjective probability has actually been growing, these statements may be wild but they don't feel put together wrongly the same way as - as, in retrospect, a lot of other things have felt, over the last months -

"There's a chance this is reality, and, if it is, then yeah, I need to hear all the things that are said under truthspell."

lintamande: Sure. They'll truthspell Carissa. 

Keltham: ...Keltham will cast this truthspell himself, actually.

Carissa Sevar: She's been ordered not to speak, though.

(Also she is in a state. It's not actually the losing the crown and having everything she cared about collapse to pieces on her - she was impaired, by that, she was not at her best, but that's not what got her to her current state.

What got her to her current state is standing here helplessly while Snack Service prances around acting out the story it has apparently been planning for a long time.

Tropes are real.

Stories are real. This is a story. This is a story run by something sympathetic to Snack Service.

 Carissa is not the kind of person who can ever really wish she didn't exist, or even didn't exist in this particular context, but it's definitely the most horrifying context imaginable to exist in. She'd much rather go to Hell forever like Peranza, to be tortured and not changed, than be in Snack Service's story.

Nothing feels real, nothing feels like it possibly could be real or possibly could matter, everything she hates most in the world has absolute power over her and only wants to use it to mock and humiliate her, everything is a lie and specifically a lie aimed at the very concept things happen for reasons instead of because it amuses Cayden Cailean and Nethys.

When the balloons rise into the sky she feels herself giving up on the very concept that the state of the world depends in any way on what actions you take.)

Keltham: It takes him a moment to work out why Carissa isn't talking.

"Carissa.  You can talk now - the earrings are supposedly still real on this layer of reality?  How were you going to get around it if I ordered you to speak truth?"

Carissa Sevar: "Security could suppress them temporarily. But they're not - they're not supposed to be possible for me to get around, that'd kind of ruin the whole point. Cheliax's commands to me can contradict yours, but - my own will certainly can't. 

That came out - a lot more miserable, a lot more cynical, than it would have yesterday, I'm sorry. I'd consider it - a really big mistake, if mistakes are in fact the kind of thing it's possible to make instead of everything being scripted which is kind of what I'm currently thinking is going on, but, okay, you're valiantly trying to live like this is real and matters so I'll try too. I haven't been hurt nearly as badly as you, here. And I'd regret it for the rest of my life, if you walked away thinking that I'd mostly been hurting myself, or - weakening myself - for you. I wasn't. It turns out that being paralyzed here while Cayden's shitty manipulative fucking puppeteer mocks us all is not the kind of being powerless I'm into, but, hey, I did notice that pretty much immediately, so I'm pretty sure I would also have noticed if it were true of anything else, of anything with you.

I read your mind, the first day we met, right after Tongues had worn off. I was a good Asmodean. I knew that I was weak and flawed and that I would suffer in Hell until I was perfect. I wasn't that scared, I figured I'd just have to get really, really good, so that much of me could be preserved, in the devil-making process, so that I'd make a really good devil. But I read your mind and I wanted that, I wanted my thoughts to be entangled like that and to move like that and to chase down implications like that, I wanted to be able to follow them the way you followed yours. I told Maillol you were very important. I didn't decide to join the project, obviously, I was ordered to, but I never - uh, except during my date with Abrogail - regretted it for a second. I knew what was possible and I wanted it. 

I don't like Hell. I'm Lawful Evil, I obey Asmodeus, I don't mind hurting people, I don't get worked up about how, oh, no, torture, I'd still rather endure a hundred years of it than the twenty minutes of Chaotic Good we've just been subjected to. But I don't like feeling like people are weaker, instead of stronger, when they get hurt, if you don't hit them just right, I don't like the ways that the fear of Hell makes them more pathetic instead of less so - I'm very pathetic, right now, so you can't take any of this as particularly criticism of other people, understand, but I can see it, very clearly, how pathetic everyone is all the time, and I want it to stop, I want people to be like Her Majestrix who it's absolutely illegal to casually call 'Abrogail' by the way, I want to be like that myself, or at least like, a piece that fits in with that, strengthens it, instead of just falling short of it. And Cheliax doesn't produce people like that. It's not really trying, honestly. As long as they go to Hell - and they do go to Hell - it doesn't matter. But it matters to me, and as soon as - we started - I was thinking about how to fix it. I wanted to understand you, I wanted to be like you, it felt like not just everything I'd always wanted from my life but also everything I'd always wanted for the world. Something beautiful, instead of something that we were all - buried under, flinching from. 

I didn't plan on falling in love with you. I planned on becoming an expert on you, and understanding you, for the sake of my project of building Asmodean ilanism. And then - in addition to being good at thinking - you were so indignant, at the ways the world was bad and could be better, you were so - enchanted, at the idea that you could have the things you wanted, the things dath ilan couldn't give you - I don't really believe the things you told us about dath ilan, by the way, I kind of think there has to be some kind of horrible conspiracy behind the scenes, but maybe that's just because I'm projecting.

It felt like when I was yours, you and I were both more complete. 

I thought they would torture me until I stopped having stupid feelings like that, but they didn't."

Carissa Sevar: "I got put in charge of the project while we were in Egorian. I got into an argument with Maillol about how we were handling it, and I saw - that Cheliax had entirely the kinds of people Cheliax built, people whose lies left - shadows - because in Cheliax you didn't need your lies not to leave shadows, half the time you really didn't want people to believe them anyway - I think dath ilanism will be much less exciting to people in other countries, in some ways, I think part of what happened was this - chemical reaction - between the ways Cheliax built people and the ways dath ilan did it. I had the idea of setting up the date with Her Majestrix, I wanted you to see that getting really, seriously, horribly hurt could be really good for me, and to feel possessive, and maybe a bit jealous, that she knew how to do those things you didn't know how to do. 

She did, uh, an immersive hallucination, sort of like some of the things that have happened to you over the last day, and made me think that I'd failed, and you'd figured it out, and were leaving, and now I was going to be tortured and petrified and buried underground so I could never have Hell. It was - really good for me." She is relieved she can say that, she hadn't been totally sure. "Horrible suffering generally is, if I survive it, if - if it's personal, if I'm the audience, if I matter. 

You might be wondering why I didn't tell you the truth once I realized I was in love with you. The obvious answer is that Security was monitoring me very closely and would have Dominated me and then figured out an impersonator somehow however much credibility it cost us. That's - not the whole answer though it was definitely happening. I tried to escape once, as part of the plan by which we all tried to escape in order to figure out what a convincing fake-escape would be like, and it didn't work - 

- another part of the answer was that you weren't ready. Even - even in the world where your values didn't collide too hard with ours once you'd had time to think, or in the worlds where I fixed up Hell and by the time we had to tell you about it it wasn't really very objectionable, it'd have hurt you, to hear it, and I never enjoyed hurting you. There's lots of stuff that fit fine in Ordinary that I didn't tell you, because I didn't want to hurt you. There are children, babies, in the slave markets in Absalom. We bought them all before your trip, so you wouldn't see that. - uh, and gave them back to their parents afterwards, to be clear."

lintamande: (There is some concerned communication among the Osirians to their superiors in Sothis, about slave markets.)

Keltham: "So.  I'm not really - able to process this very well, right now.  Hence the transcripts."

"For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the only reason I can process this at all is because of all the context I got from everybody else going before you.  Otherwise I'd just be listening with an ear to, trying to rip down this next layer of reality, and that would be all I heard."

"Snack Service isn't playing games, or isn't just playing games.  It's optimizing.  The question is what for."

Carissa Sevar: "Isn't that the question. We've been debating it for months, haven't gotten anywhere. Maybe it'll be clear once you're in Osirion. I am pretty sure I hate being treated like this for the sake of Good optimizations exactly as passionately as I hate being treated like this for no reason, but obviously I don't expect Snack Service to want to avoid harming me, given all the givens. Harming me is plausibly part of what it's optimizing for, and that would be reasonable, since if I could harm it I definitely would.

I think I don't want to talk about Snack Service.

I talked with Subirachs, at one point, about how awful it felt to - be doing this to you - I explained that I'd been conceptualizing it as - service to the Lawful Evil Keltham we were hoping to awaken from his Lawful Good upbringing, hoping to make able to understand everything without it breaking him and willing to take it, once he had it. Iiiiii think that like many of my plans was running on willful self-deception but it was how I was thinking of it. I tried - to make as much real as I could - they didn't tell me when you were planning to attack me and drag me off - I ordered everyone else to not pretend with you -

- uh, I did, at one point, on a day you were petrified, have sex with Elias Abarco, I didn't want to, I tried to stop him, and I'm sorry, that I did it and that I didn't tell you even though I couldn't tell you without blowing the whole thing open. Aside from that I actually tried to do what you asked of me, the best I could, and to make sure no one you were sleeping with was - the thing you were so scared we all were -

- I'm not trying to convince you I wasn't incredibly Evil. I was incredibly Evil, I hurt a lot of people. I'm just trying to convince you that I love you, not just in a way where we have feelings we don't know how to describe but in a way where - I tried, to make the thing I was doing bring you joy and not hurt you secretly, except I was lying to myself about everything. 

And to be clear, I still am, probably, lying to myself about some things. Since I'm still Chelish, and this is still my project, and I can only achieve any of the things I want to achieve if I manage not to steer myself off any cliffs of heresy in the meantime. I wouldn't - take the things I'm saying right now as particularly right, about what happened. When you come back - if you come back - I think I'll understand it better, and I'll be able to give you a proper confession. 

In private. Because this is ludicrous."

Carissa Sevar: "But, uh, the parts I'm sure about are - you were what I needed, and I was very happy, and you were making me stronger, and I loved you, and I still love you, and I'll probably always love you, and I hope some day once you've made whatever determinations you need to make, about what's real and how the world works, you'll come back for me."

Keltham: "Yeah, about that."

"Aspexia Rugatonn.  What's your price on Carissa Sevar?"

lintamande: - some nervous mutters pass among Telepathically Bonded Osirians. Osirion has slavery for debt and as a criminal punishment. .....maybe the criminal punishment situation applies here? None of the things confessed to so far were, actually, crimes.

Abrogail Thrune II: She has been doing a lot of calculations, in her mind, and this is not, from several of those angles, a sensible thing to do.  Bringing herself into range of a small army with only this much protection, for example.

But it is clear enough that Abrogail Thrune belongs within this lineup, that is now beyond all dispute.  Given that truth, to stand back would defy tropes, possibly, and not only Chaotic Good semidivinity.

And Abrogail Thrune has her pride; in no small sense she is her pride.  If there is a greater person within her that contains the proud image of Abrogail Thrune, it is not very much greater, for being so much filled with it.

It is beneath her pride to wait to be summoned, beneath her pride to be dragged forth by tropes, beneath her pride to hide from a place of the story where she belongs because of fear.

Dimension Door.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Return to us reading Lawful Evil, ready to own and use Carissa Sevar as she must be owned and used.  She will certainly be for sale to you then, and at a reasonable price."

Aspexia Rugatonn: Abrogail -

Abrogail Thrune II: Shut up.  This is the correct thing to do from multiple dramatic standpoints.

There are a number of factors that enter into Abrogail's decision here.  One of those is that, in her cold judgment, if Sevar goes with Keltham to Osirion now, their cleric of Irori is not coming back.

Another is that it is not, even now, determined exactly what manner of story this may be; and it may not be too late to establish that Keltham must become more Evil than this to win Sevar's heart and her ownership.

Had Sevar sold her soul, the decision would be more fraught; but Abrogail thinks she would make it this same way.  She is not defying Hell's command.

Carissa Sevar: Somehow, Surprise Abrogail is the thing that makes Carissa's brain fully return to functioning. Surprise Abrogail is just a common feature of the world you have to be constantly on the lookout for, it's not something wacky and incomprehensible. 

"I'd be grateful for permission to kneel to my Queen," she murmurs to Keltham.

Keltham: "No.  Somebody has rather trampled on my pride, if she is a real person; I find that I have not much care for hers, at this moment."

Abrogail Thrune II: "You were barely a real person when you arrived in Golarion, Keltham out of dath ilan.  If there is any more substance to you now, it's because we led you, step by step, away from the small, hemmed-in, crippled being they tried to make of you.  That indignation you're feeling now?  The fact that you'll now let yourself have that much pride?  We gave it to you."

Keltham: "Was I missing the part where you gave me a reason to believe anything you're saying when you're not under truthspell?"

"If you're not going to join the truthspeaking party, the remaining question I have for you is whether you're willing to sell me the right to take any of my other employees with me, free of Cheliax, at a reasonable price.  To be clear, unreasonable prices mean I get them later and you don't get anything in return."

Abrogail Thrune II: Asmodia is not wrong that Keltham will have access to Ione Sala and that the version of the story Ione tells will, even if honest, likely be untrue, and omit anything that paints Cheliax in a better light.  Ione must needs be counterbalanced.

Asmodia - to call her a 'defection risk' would understate it, she's a defection certainty.

Yaisa - also a defection risk, but of no value to Cheliax now...

But no; Abrogail does not want Keltham to have a masochist with him.  Abrogail wants Keltham to find out exactly how impossible it is for Osirion to provide him with his true needs.

Meritxell - would be an excellent choice, otherwise.  Abrogail would in fact like Keltham to have somebody alive and Chelish by his side, simply to remind him of how utterly dull all the women in Osirion are by comparison.  And yet, not a masochist, so there will be a need in him that he must return to Cheliax to obtain.  Or begin an embarrassing and probably ultimately unsatisfying search in Absalom, if Abrogail reads those tropes right.

The problem being of course that Meritxell knows far too much.

Gregoria - does not want him, and Abrogail would like to send with somebody Keltham will let himself have sex with.

Pilar, same problem, even leaving aside all the other problems.

So she has no options, and must choose one of them.

"Meritxell Narbona is not for sale to you.  It'd be a mockery when Hell owns her soul, and we have always dealt fairly with the Evil Keltham who could be.  But I am willing to send our loyal subject with you, for a time, if Osirion offers strong guarantees of the sanctity of her mind, and that she will be returned to Cheliax at our demand."

"It is not in our interest to abandon you to Osirion to hear their errors and mistakes unargued, or leave their own little foibles not pointed out.  I do suggest visiting or scrying the slave markets in Sothis quickly, before they have a chance to clean them up for you, if you'd not end up living inside another constructed illusion.  All that the fake priest of Abadar told you about their treatment of women was true as well."

lintamande: "The aim of all of our policies is building a prosperous free society where people make Axis and not Hell. We are very eager to learn from you about how to do that better." says the leader of Osirion's forces, but quietly to Keltham because his job is to avoid sparking a war with Cheliax, here.

Keltham: "If your goal in keeping back the people who care about me is to use them as hostages against me, know that I consider it a threat.  Of the Lawful treatment of threats, I have already spoken, but I can say it again if you didn't read those transcripts."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I've read them.  Asmodeus Himself instructed us to take no hostages against you.  All of my calculations are being done never considering the hostage value.  Asmodeus did not instruct us to avoid keeping behind anyone you cared about, if that was simply the result of our best path for our own benefit."

Keltham: "Interesting claim, from one not of dath ilan, that you could do such calculations and confidently know they were unbiased.  It's possible you'll find out at some point that you should've been a little less clever and less exactly literal about what your god was trying to tell you not to do."

"Korva Tallandria not among my options here?  She seems like she'd do a better job of pointing out everything wrong with Osirion."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I admit, I wasn't particularly thinking that you wanted her."

Keltham: "Dath ilan has proverbs about the kind of advice that's easier to get from people who aren't friends with you.  Try it yourself sometime."

(It's a wordlessly obvious choice if you're dath ilani, for reasons that include Korva having just very loudly declared herself to be an Obvious Dath Ilani Story Protagonist who seeks out the truth and uses it to destroy things, Korva seeming like she'd be more useful for ripping apart the next layer of reality, the commonality with which dath ilani stories have plot turning-points where somebody gets tied to a chair and lectured on every single thing they're doing wrong; and, finally, the point that Korva seems to be maybe not doing as well at handling Cheliax compared to Meritxell.  Two days earlier Keltham would have questioned that last motivation as overly Good; he is now questioning that questioning.)

Korva Tallandria: Korva does not search within herself for a preference between Cheliax and Osirion, between Keltham and her Infernal Majestrix. This is less suppressing anything and more just not putting in the effort to stretch in a particular direction.

She does look to Asmodia, though, carefully, almost invisibly, to see if Asmodia is sending any remotely visible signals about where she thinks Korva should be angling to go, if Korva has any opportunities to angle.

Asmodia: ((Asmodia is massively torn between how this would be clearly good for Korva and clearly bad for Asmodia.  Asmodia is not of course giving any outward signs of this, at least not at Korva's level of Sense Motive.))

Abrogail Thrune II: "Don't worry, my dear innocent boy.  None of my advisors are friends with me."

"As for your fascinating, I daresay somewhat Asmodean request, I fear I shall have to decline.  We did not mirror your own error, Keltham; Korva Tallandria is now become far too valuable to Cheliax," and is a defection certainty and knows too much.  "Will you have Meritxell, then, or nobody?"

Keltham: Keltham turns to his upcoming hosts and raises his eyebrows in inquiry.

lintamande: "We'll - commit to chaperoning her, and to not reading her mind or enchanting her, as is illegal in Osirion anyway. I cannot without more consideration commit our government to sending her back, if when you ask for her she wants to stay."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Then we can, perhaps, send her along in some short time when your government has reached a decision there."

"You're not even asking if Meritxell wants to go, Keltham?  I'm pleased."

Keltham: "Yeah, see, the whole mindreading and torture thing makes the concept of informed consent or even having opinions really quite questionable.  When Meritxell has been placed beyond the reach of all threats, and had a time then to think for herself, it will afterwards be possible to meaningfully ask her if she wants to go back."

Abrogail Thrune II: And meanwhile, you don't even ask, or give her a chance to express her opinions.  Very good.

"I suppose it does befall me, at this point in the lineup, to describe my own relationship with you, Keltham."

"When I ascended to this throne, I promised myself I wouldn't die of old age on it.  That, after all, would mean that I'd played my reign far too safely, and lost out on most of the fun."

"It would be fitting for me to lose my head and crown to the person you could become.  Someday.  Sometime in my sixties, perhaps."

"Not this Keltham, though.  That would be absurd and embarrassing."

"And meanwhile, Carissa is due some punishment for her failure.  But I will take personal care of it, and ensure that her due punishment does not weaken her.  And before you think to object, be told that such as Carissa Sevar cannot be allowed to punish herself, which is the alternative."

"So I shall take charge of your Carissa, for a time.  She does need a keeper.  But I'll keep her properly owned by you, awaiting her true master's return.  I haven't forgotten the compact you forced me to sign, after all, that if an untampered truthspell ever shows Carissa to love me more than you, she's to be delivered to your ownership in chains."

She's leaving out a very great deal about their relationship, her and Keltham and Carissa.  But there are secrets Abrogail must yet keep, for how they chain into other secrets to one aware of tropes.

Oh, and the last line of course is for the Osirians' benefit.  What must they be thinking, now?

Iarwain: One of them is thinking that she's quite certain that a woman of Irori could manage to be her own keeper, did she wish.

Derrina: Derrina signed up for an advertisement for a rapid response group that might need to fight an army, in a good Lawful Neutral cause, so long as she was hanging around Sothis anyways.

Since she didn't know that advertisement was aimed at the interdiction zone, her signing up doesn't count against Irori, as Derrina understands it; Irori's interventions outside the noninterference zone are not bound to avoid causal impacts on the zone, they simply cannot be chosen on the basis of their zone impacts.  Everything touches everything, sooner or later.

Still, to tell Sevar, within the zone, the information that she learned directly of Irori - that might be a bit much.  She is not privy to the exact boundaries drawn by gods; she should not push them.

"I can stay in Cheliax and keep watch on Carissa Sevar for you, Keltham of dath ilan, if Cheliax grants me appropriate safe-conducts about it," Derrina calls from within the army.

Abrogail Thrune II: "And what negotiating leverage would enable Osirion to demand such a thing?"

Derrina: "I have some idea of what Keltham is prepared to pay for Carissa Sevar's safety, as it happens.  But allow me to give a more Chelish answer.  Keltham, truthspell, please."  Derrina is already walking towards him.

Keltham: ...sure.  Tap.

Derrina: "I herewith resign from Osirion's army and relinquish my pay from this expedition."

"Be told, Abrogail Thrune, that if I'd attacked by surprise, I could have killed at least you, and probably also Aspexia Rugatonn."

Derrina, as it happens, is being totally honest about this.

Golarion combat balance is normally structured around the assumption that a heavily speed-focused 10th-level monk cannot, before she attacks, read off a scroll of antimagic field.

Carissa Sevar: - has she, this whole time, been completely wrong about Osirion and everyone in it. 

Because -

- even if only one in a million of them is like that -

lintamande: The rest of the Osirians are mostly busy concealing their reactions of 'wait, we had a girl along?' and 'wait, we had a girl who can assassinate the Queen of Cheliax along?' and in many cases 'wait why didn't we do it, then'.

Abrogail Thrune II: "Wouldn't be the first time I've been killed.  Keeping me dead is a lot harder.  Now who's this with the temerity to make that claim?"

Keltham: "Whoever you are, and however you know things, I appreciate whatever it is you're trying to do, but I was still hoping to resolve all of this without violence."

Derrina: "If saying that out loud is the limit of your grasp of negotiations between powers in Golarion, Keltham, then I'll be pursuing my own purposes here without your help."

"I am Derrina of Jalmeray, monk of Irori."

"Keltham, tell Carissa Sevar to take those damned earrings off, now that it's become clear that you can't just order her to follow you to Osirion."

Keltham: "Fair, thanks for reminding me.  Carissa, remove those earrings from yourself."

Carissa Sevar: She does. Drops them back into her bag. 

Monk of Irori.

Osirion is less cool than Carissa had briefly imagined it might be.

Abrogail Thrune II: "You've succeeded in attracting Hell's attention, Derrina of Jalmeray.  What do you intend to do with it?"

Derrina: "There's other powers taking an interest in all this besides Hell, and I see no particular reason why Hell should be allowed to charge around making a reckless mess of things."

"Mine is not the gift of tact, especially to royalty.  I don't trust you around Carissa Sevar.  My options for doing something about that did include killing you by ambush and Teleporting that overpriced headband of yours to someplace it wouldn't be easy to get back, which would have impeded your meddling after your resurrection and probably lost you your throne.  I chose to play somewhat nice instead.  If there's to be no reciprocation in kind for that forbearance, the next person who has that option - perhaps me again, someday you're not particularly expecting it - will not be so kind."

Abrogail Thrune II: "I'm afraid, little piece that'd be a player, that Queens cannot afford to go about giving concessions to anyone who threatens their person.  It's not how things are done, especially in Cheliax.  I'd fall from my throne a day later, did I give in to such a demand.  Comprehending this draws on the same underlying faculty as 'tact', and it seems you are missing it entirely."

Derrina: "Tell me then, Queen of Cheliax, who understands these matters so much better than I, what alternative do I have to deciding that you've become a hindrance to Irori's purposes and ending your reign?"

Abrogail Thrune II: She is, of course, still reading Carissa's mind.

"Carissa, dear, can you talk to this lunatic for me?  I do fear that humoring her is increasingly beneath my dignity."

Carissa Sevar: - she'd been yearning to, but obviously she's not an idiot and does not interrupt anyone's conversation with the Queen of Cheliax. 

"The crown's not overpriced," she says, now, without missing a beat. "I wore it, today, to argue with Keltham as a seventh-circle priest of a religion I'd made up, and also finish the earrings, which originally did something narrower, and also do all the things he tried to occupy my time with.

It's not the Asmodean way, for Her Majesty, who can have of me whatever she pleases, to offer a deal, that I could wear that crown and try to keep Keltham, if I acknowledged afterwards her right to hurt me for failing. But if she'd offered that deal I'd have taken it, and she did offer the crown, because she wants me to be stronger, because she knows she'll lose, in this world we're lurching towards, if everyone around her is weak. 

I don't know very much about the faith of Irori. What I do know might be a lie. But if I said, that I still have things to learn from the Queen, and that I have a project presently facing a substantial transition in its operational priorities, and that there are people on that project who believed me, when I told them I'd fix Hell - would I be speaking in your language, then?"

Derrina: "And yet now you are bereft of that external aid, and no longer at what you imagine to be your best.  She lent you an aid and then took it back and now here you are, weakened."

Carissa Sevar: " - I suspect there's an entire complicated theory of usefully maintaining continuity on your goals at different levels of cognitive enhancement and it's closely related to the theory of obedience to Asmodeus and that I can make progress on it. But sure, at the moment, having only the barest outlines of it, I'm weakened. At the end of a day's exercises your soldiers aren't in peak fighting shape, but if you never exercise them they'll never reach it."

Derrina: "Irori as a mortal wore no headband, cast no Wishes, begged no Miracles, when he made his own way to godhood.  True godhood.  If your Queen values your strength, she will allow you to learn of the Way of Irori, which is not a Way of faith."

This, of course, is a test.

Carissa Sevar: "Well, I don't want to be Irori. He hasn't fixed Hell."

Derrina: The correct answer is any variant on 'I'm myself, not Irori'.  'Fuck your obvious test' is also acceptable.

"Then it seems clear enough that I have meddled in the affairs of one learning to walk her own Way.  I hope you do not stumble and fall in it, Carissa Sevar, especially not in this place.  But I am taught that I must steel myself and let you make your own mistakes, and so I shall."

Abrogail Thrune II: "Enough of this wasted time.  Carissa Sevar is free to become an Irorian does she so choose.  She surely is capable enough for it.  But it is not her deepest nature and she would not be her truest self with only herself as her own owner.  Begone!"

Derrina: "If that is truly so, then so be it, but that determination in the end can only be her own."

Then Derrina Teleports, and not to Sothis either.  She's not going back to Osirion until she learns if she's still welcome there; she's never been very clear on how governments and armies work, but she suspects she's probably broken some rules.

Carissa Sevar: It's okay, she wants to say, apparently tropes are real so you don't have to worry about normal things like cause and effect and the base rate of things working out for people who want to reform Cheliax. 

She's so mad about that. 

Abrogail Thrune II: "I do believe we're done here.  Goodbye, Keltham out of dath ilan.  All that you prize in Cheliax will still be here waiting for your return, when you return."

Keltham: "Thanks for having me.  It was a lot of fun right up to the end, if you ignore all the quiet notes of disquiet that I should not, apparently, have ignored."

Keltham taps his own forehead, and his last truthspell flashes Abadar's sign into existence.

"Just so we're very clear here.  I taught you very little of the Law I know and nothing I considered relatively dangerous.  If Cheliax uses what I've taught it to threaten other countries, I will tell Osirion to draw a circle on a map of Cheliax and then I'll destroy everything inside that circle."

"That's not a threat.  It's my policy on cleaning up my own messes, and not inconveniencing others through my own stupidity.  You're free to do with that fact what you like."

Carissa Sevar: Would he really - but, yes, he would. And maybe resurrect her afterwards. 

(Is that not a threat? It really seems like a threat. Somewhere along the way Carissa lost track of what a threat is.)

lintamande: The leader of the Osirian forces extends his hand.

Keltham: Keltham reaches back -

Carissa Sevar: "- can I give you a present?"

Keltham: "Sure," Keltham says, though he's not sure how much more reserve he has - actually he's being stupid should've just had somebody tap him with Eagle's Splendour again.

Carissa Sevar: "They're, uh, little bitty swords that make you better at bluffing. I invented them because the project had us lying a lot. Just in case you need it."

She hands him one.

Keltham: "I wasn't really planning to do a lot of lying, but - okay."  He takes it and doesn't activate it.

Asmodia: Ione is gone, so now it's her job, Asmodia guesses.

"Keltham, the Project has been hugely sheltering you in a lot of ways, you are way too easy to read and you will need that pin.  I'd suggest you activate it right now, and if not then definitely before talking to any royalty of Osirion, even if you're not planning to lie."

"Further warning, the Pharaoh of Osirion will be able to read you anyways.  His Sense Motive is said to basically be nonmagical Detect Thoughts.  There's rules you will find strange about what you're not allowed to say in Osirion about the Pharaoh.  Ask about those very quickly."

(Asmodia only knows any of this due to hanging around Korva, to be clear.)

Keltham: "Your advice is noted."

Carissa Sevar: "I'm going to miss you. Don't - hurt yourself - and, once you're ready, come back for me. If you take too long about it I might send additional presents so I can at least rest assured you're not lonely and miserable without a single overengineered sex toy to keep you company."

Keltham: "Don't worry, if you're a real person, I'll definitely be seeing you later.  Possibly after literally anything standing between us has been obliterated."

"Broom, I can notice you now, stop that."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Coming along on the trip seemed easier than arguing about whether I should."

Keltham: "Right, well, this is Broom, agent of the goddess whose purpose is hidden, I don't really get him very much, he can turn invisible, I would prefer he not do that around me though, I assume you've got contacts with his people, bring him along but maybe check him out before you let him loose."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": "Broom, former halfling slave sweeping the halls in the archduke of Sirmium's villa, before I was chosen as the oracle of that goddess in the same moment as was Ione Sala chosen of Nethys.  Aspexia Rugatonn did not wish to interfere with Her purposes, whatever they might be."

lintamande: The Osirians look utterly unsurprised. "In Osirion halflings are free," their leader says. "We'll take you."

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom": Broom will extend a hand, then, in the same moment as does Keltham.

Broom is, in fact, rather cheerful about this turn of events, though he doesn't show it, of course.

lintamande: And off they go. 

Otolmens: ASMODEUS.

Otolmens: We had a DEAL, Asmodeus.

Otolmens: WHY is the anomaly NOT in the anomaly containment zone?

Iarwain: ProjectLawful.com:  exists