Carissa Sevar: "How much nonsense could they possibly have gotten up to in - how long has it been, actually -" She doubts that time in Dispater's realm is particularly beholden to time on the Material.
Abrogail Thrune II: "You came back the evening of the day that you began at dawn."
"Thankfully, I have foreboding news to report that's not about your Project! This, we may hope, has fulfilled the tropes' need to present us with a disaster after things went so well."
"Our spies say that Keltham has accepted the Kelesh Empire's offer to supply him with spells, items, scrolls. It was plausibly immediately after he would have learned you were selling your soul."
Carissa Sevar: " - huh. What would my selling my soul even have changed for him -
- I don't understand it but I don't like it. What have they supplied him."
Abrogail Thrune II: "That's harder to be sure of. There's a 9th-circle caster of Sarenrae with whom they trade favors; Chelish intelligence thinks she is preparing to travel imminently based on echo effects around Sarenrae's temples, an administrator to replace the priest who'd be temporarily replacing their grand high priestess. They could supply him with a +6 intelligence headband if he doesn't have one already. They could possibly supply him a bound genie if he has the Wish diamond for it, which, if we're lucky, Keltham will use only for +1 Intelligence and not for destroying Cheliax."
"If he's gone back on only dealing with Lawful Evil people, it implies some change of plans. The question is from what to what. Looking at it from what might be Keltham's own perspective, he has just lost Asmodia followed immediately after by Carissa."
Carissa Sevar: "Do you think I should be preparing to go to him even if I don't know what my original plan was. It does not seem worth taking a chance on his destroying Cheliax."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I believe you should take a day or two to think, Carissa, with your new crown, before we decide that the tropes have given us no choice but to fly blind into your seduction plan. But I also think it is your own call, now. You are relinquished of Irori, and there must come a time when you tell me that you're making the next move of your game and I trust you in it."
Carissa Sevar: - nod. "I'll check in on the Project, then, put it in better shape to potentially manage my extended absence than it was last time, think with the new headband about ilani-making, Keltham seduction, Cayden Cailean, what Nethys does that gives Him almost-prophecy, assembly-lines for Geased Rings of Sustenance - I was thinking, what magic item could we give almost everyone, that'd be too useful to do without -
- and I'll let you know the next move, once I know it."
Abrogail Thrune II: "Drop me a note if you want to visit Egorian, or Absalom for that matter. At this point it's going to take a Mind Blank and 8th-circle escort to make sure nobody simply kidnaps you once you're outside a Forbiddance, by means up to and including Wish spells. We might as well go together if we go. - disguised, obviously."
Carissa Sevar: Is Abrogail just being - friendly? In a friend way?
No, she's probably misparsing it.
Carissa Sevar: "I expect if nothing catches fire I will want to visit Absalom in a week or two. It's getting embarrassing never having been. And I imagine we could have some fun. Disguised, of course."
Abrogail Thrune II: "You don't need to be friends with somebody to enjoy the thought of escorting her through a dangerous-looking part of town, looking weak, and what she'll do to those who offend her."
"Unless you're Pilar Pineda, in which case feelings of friendship are required to power your most effective special abilities. I asked Aspexia Rugatonn if the Asmodean injunction against pity still applied when the victim was Pilar Pineda having to put up with this, and Aspexia Rugatonn had to think for a round before she said yes."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm pretty convinced at this point that the silliness of Cayden's intervention is meant to distract us from something but this realization has helped not at all with figuring out what we're being distracted from."
Abrogail Thrune II: "I think He's possibly just that kind of god and doesn't have a choice, but He may yet use His domain of frivolity to distract us so long as He has to do it anyhow."
"...I must be about annexing Nidal, Carissa. You can linger about my Palace do you wish, if you need an hour's true rest, but for myself I must be about my way."
Carissa Sevar: "Goodbye, then, your Majesty, and good luck. If you miss me, kill some people I'd specifically find annoying, and I'll feel very thought-of."
Abrogail Thrune II: That's still not a permitted way for proper Asmodeans to relate to each other.
But all things considered within the Carissa Sevar Seduction Plan - to which Abrogail is minister as much as Carissa Sevar was to Keltham - Abrogail isn't going to say that to Carissa until later.
She'll kiss Carissa thoroughly, instead, and be off about her way.
Carissa Sevar: Right, then, she too should be getting back to work. She may have only been away from the Project for one day (she's pretty sure subjectively the time in Hell was at least thrice that) but people can be very much idiots in one day.
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune heads off to work, and wonders, in the back of her mind, if she's done Carissa Sevar more service than disservice, in her life, and would be permitted to go to Her someday if she entered into Hell calling Her name.
Well. She's definitely done Carissa more service than disservice by the standards of Hell.
One more reason to conquer at least Avistan, though it's not like she'd need any reason at all.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar returns to Project Lawful beautiful, terrifying, wearing an artifact out of Hell on her head. She explains that she sold her soul to Dispater for a price the Church would like her to not disclose at this time, and then went to the Queen's celebration of Nidal's surrender. No one questions her.
Her priority for the day is trying to get Pilar's candidate ilani to notice the thing about the world where all its features are connected, where every observation tugs a hundred invisible strings, where if the spellsilver process gets slightly worse when you substitute eggshells for bone then that's almost as informative as if it got slightly better, but also where if the price of a good is puzzlingly high, you had an error elsewhere in your picture of the world, where the question isn't whether anything has been proven or even whether anything is suspected but whether anything is likelier in one world than another.
If she has time then she's also going to try to convey the intuition that if there's a vendor who sells out of his goods three hours earlier than anyone else there needs to be an explanation for that which isn't just 'his are higher quality', and that if countries go to war that's confusing because it suggests two opposed people believed they would benefit from something that would superficially appear to benefit only one of them, and the whole general complex of habits of expecting things to be in balance, and, when they're not, seeing why not.
She's no Keltham, as a teacher, by which she means that she remembers near-perfectly everything he said and can refer to transcripts and also has something like 6 Splendour on him at this point. Her ilani ought to learn faster.
AAAAAAAAAAA (Security): She'll get about an hour into that before some poor Security fool has the temerity to interrupt Carissa Sevar's important work with a supposedly very very urgent message:
There's a Gate to Hell at the edge of their Forbiddance and a Cornugon (greater devil, could probably slaughter this whole facility) who wants to see Snack Service within the next two minutes.
Carissa Sevar: ....well that does seem kind of urgent. Go ahead, Pilar.
Pilar : She knows what this is about. On her way, very quickly, before the Gate closes.
Curse of Laughter: "Tell Mister Dispater it was a pleasure doing business with him!"
Iarwain: The mighty devil speaks not one word of acknowledgement to this before the Gate closes about it; from the beginning it never stepped foot in Golarion.
Pilar : And Pilar returns, and pulls away her commander to report. "Lady Sevar. I have good news. Possibly. Sort of."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, go ahead."
Pilar : "Snack Service permits me to tell you that it received of Dispater a +6/+6/+4 headband and a +4/+6/+6 headband. It says that these are the property of Snack Service, and it is very important that they stay the property of Snack Service, because if Hell sells or gives them to Cheliax including by proxy or what looks to the treaty definitions like a Hellish plot, it comes out of Hell's intervention budget and will get charged to Cheliax. Whereas so long as these headbands stay the effective property of Snack Service, their uses come out of Cayden Cailean's intervention budget. Supposedly. Also they're going to be used in a very important way to benefit Asmodeus. Supposedly."
"I asked if Project Lawful could borrow the headbands in a friendly way without paying, if Snack Service wasn't using them right away. Snack Service says sure and we can have them for at least the next 24 hours, it doesn't make any guarantees past that point."
"If you don't have a better idea of what to do with them, sir, I suggest that we pass them around our potential ilani and try to teach them very intensively for a couple of hours each to see if they can get Probability-Sight via artifact headband the way Asmodia did. Only without the heresy and treason, hopefully."
Carissa Sevar: What are you playing at, Cayden Cailean -
Carissa Sevar: "Sure! Sounds like fun.
- don't worry too much about the heresy and treason. Heresy and treason are incorrect; proper ilanism won't take you there. We'll correct you promptly. But if there are thoughts you're trying not to think in the first place - rather than thinking them knowing they'll be corrected if they're wrong - it can be harder to master ilanism."
Pilar : "I'll tell them so, sir, but I register that they're not Asmodia. If my curse obeyed me and my curse worked, they'll think those thoughts without hesitating, and speak those thoughts, because they want to be corrected, and want to stop being muddled inside, and will understand if that means they need to be punished."
Carissa Sevar: "I hope that's so, but even you, Pilar, have found yourself muddled, on occasion."
Pilar : "I asked my curse for them to not be me, sir."
Carissa Sevar: "To be less - what?"
Pilar : "Less Good. To not have any huge cracks in them where they didn't want their family going to Hell."
Carissa Sevar: "Would you have not wanted your family going to Hell, if you'd had more confidence Hell would find the strength in them?"
Pilar : "Asmodeus doesn't want me to care."
"I guess I didn't - put it exactly in those words, to my curse, there's only so much you can ask, when you've only got one planet to pick from and you're looking for people who already speak Taldane besides. But I was looking specifically for people who could be ilani and Asmodeans, and I did not tell my curse to premise that on your form of Asmodeanism, sir, because I was acting on my own, and I thought, I don't want somebody like that breaking down if Sevar never comes back."
"I'm not the best possible version of what I am. I don't believe the tropes made the one best person on the planet to be a Keeper of Asmodeus end up in Ostenso. Somebody like that wouldn't have fit into the story they were weaving around Keltham. These people should be the real thing, once they get training, what Pilar should've been for Asmodeus, that's what I asked, wanted, for my curse to find."
Carissa Sevar: " - all right. We'll see if they can handle it, then; if they can't, better to know that sooner anyway."
Pilar : "How much of the day, and night, should I plan on having you for? With Asmodia gone, I think you're the only one here who still has what she called Probability-Sight, for the new ilani candidates to pick up using the artifact headbands."
Carissa Sevar: "I can do this all day. This is, actually, where it all stands or falls, probably, not in some party in Egorian."
Pilar : "As you say, sir."
Pilar doesn't like the driven and domineering person she turns into, when she wears the +6 Splendour headband; it feels tantamount to insubordination to make so many suggestions to her superior.
Her feelings are irrelevant. Pilar will go on wearing this headband until her superiors tell her to take it off.
Curse of Laughter: Or until Pilar realizes that she can serve Asmodeus better by taking it off!
Pilar : Fuck off and die.
But yes.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa resumes her lecture.
"I think trying to do this on test cases where you know that there's something to be found trains only a part of the skill, and perhaps the least valuable part; the important thing is noticing it where it hasn't already been pointed out to you. But let's try some test cases anyway, just in case it at least helps develop the habit. You're a general; you need to know if the enemy army is moving to attack at the north pass or the south pass. They might feint, to try to trick you. They might split their forces, but they probably won't; it's a gamble and if you handle it right they'll lose both. You hear a report they've given their soldiers orders to make for the north pass, but the report could be a lie to deceive you.
What features of reality are you looking for, what are you trying to see to figure out what's going on?"
Ex-Criminal Wizard Student Who Received His Wish To Have His Criminality Beaten Out Of Him: "There's just - sight, sound, and magic, isn't there? You can try to scry the pass or the approaches and even if scrying is blocked, if it's blocked in one place but not the other, that tells you. You can post lookouts and check in with them, and if they fail to check in that's a sign, because absence of expected evidence is evidence of absence. Or do you mean things on a bigger timescale like - if one pass is muddier, you see if they requisition supply wagons with wider wheels?"
Class Chatter: "How many troops are in the report? Were famous elite warriors spotted?" "Smoke from fires, and refugees; they're less likely if there's a feint, too." "Actual attacks at either pass suggest not feint, unless they're unsupported summons, which implies feint." "Whichever pass is more vulnerable they're likely to attack."
"That's 'priors', you fool, she asked for 'evidence'." "If they can't fit their whole army in one pass, dividing their army is more likely."
"Also fucking priors!" "A lot of this depends on the quality of your reconnaissance; do you have Lesser Planar Ally'd imps for recon? Or other invisible teleporting summons with good senses?"
"That's a factor that affects which evidence you get, it's not something that you look for! Am I the only person who understood the question here?"
Carissa Sevar: (Carissa is testing a new theory about humans: that they bullshit themselves and everyone around them slightly less when the topic is winning a battle that will happen tomorrow. The Worldwound was better than Cheliax, and she thinks the real concrete consequences were why; there's only so much you can play Who's The Evillest, if you will all die of not doing your jobs. Were there rapists and thugs and bullies at the Worldwound, yes absolutely, were there people who put inordinate effort into elaborately entrapping people or addressing slights to their honor or doing the Evillest thing they could think of, no. The demons did Cheliax a favor and ate those.)
"There's some good ideas there. Now, an ilani, listing off all of those, asks how much evidence are they? How much more likely are we to hear a spy report they're going north, if they're going north? How trustworthy are our spy reports, how hard would it be for them to have sent us lies, compared to how likely it is that if they're truly marching north, we'll hear it? For any bit of evidence, you can think of reason it's conclusive, or think of reason it's a feint, but what you want to do is ask which world it's more consistent with, and by how much. Does anyone want to try venturing, for some of the evidence they came up with, how strong it is, as evidence."
Ex-Criminal Wizard Student Who Received His Wish To Have His Criminality Beaten Out Of Him: "So for something like - what kinds of wagons they're requisitioning - I think it's maybe like, almost even, if somebody comes and tries to sell you a report like that, because they could just be trying to plant information. But if you had a lot of different things like that you could check, from different sources, and you got to pick one at random, instead of there being only one obvious thing for your spies to try to learn from one obvious source, then I think it'd be much stronger, like... four to one?"
"Or even more than that, because realistically war involves not that many faked spy reports. I've never heard of a case where an enemy tried to fake somebody out completely by adjusting a hundred little things like that."
Pilar : Pilar storms into the classroom, bearing artifact headbands. Pilar has never really been all that comfortable with correcting other students in class -
- until now. Now everything is fine, for real and not like she was pretending to herself before, because Pilar knows these people can take it. Pilar hates that she works like that but she does.
The new ilani will be better.
"All right, you muddled incoherent pieces of slime, sudden new plan for the day. One of you at a time gets intensively tutored by Carissa Sevar while wearing a +6/+6/+4 headband for an hour, then by Meritxell while wearing a +4/+6/+6 headband for an hour, and then you get a +6 Intelligence headband for an hour to go think about it by yourself. You can hang around and listen to other people learning, if you want, but don't fucking interrupt them. This is how Asmodia got her Probability-Sight, more or less, and we're hoping the same happens with you."
"That kind of boosting has caused other people out of Cheliax to go traitor. You, theoretically, are supposed to be better than that, if my curse worked correctly. If that 'theoretically' is wrong, speak the fuck up about it. If you're afraid of being punished even though you're not supposed to be afraid, say that. Carissa Sevar will decide what do about that, using options that potentially include not punishing you for it so that you retroactively won't have been afraid to speak out."
"Bad thoughts can be corrected easily. Being afraid to think is much harder to correct. If you're finding yourself afraid to think, something is going wrong with our lesson plan and we will do whatever it fucking takes to correct that, with options that potentially include running Detect Thoughts on you and hurting you until you start to think again, or fucking not hurting you at all if predictably hurting you would've caused you to never admit to yourself in the first place that something was wrong."
"Raise your hand if you fucking understood that."
Classroom: About a third of the hands go up.
Pilar : "Fun. Well, maybe you'll understand it once you're wearing a fucking artifact headband."
"We'll start with... you. Monserrat. This is a +6/+6/+4 headband. Put it on and don't fucking argue."
Rosal Monserrat: "Yes, sir."
...she wasn't really planning to argue? But she's not going to argue that, either.
Rosal Monserrat: Oh.
Rosal Monserrat: "This is going to be a bitch to take off again, isn't it," she says.
One of the nicest things about being Evil is that she can swear at people all she wants, now.
Carissa Sevar: Twenty hours later Carissa is prepared to declare - no, she's not declaring anything. That's how the tropes get you.
It went well, though. Pilar's selectees are smart, and motivated, and they in fact have better habits of thought than people who grew up in Cheliax, which is awkward for whoever designed the present Chelish educational system but Carissa doesn't care much about that person.
The headbands are useful for - well, they're concretely useful for grasping concepts more quickly and noticing muddles more quickly and connecting ideas more quickly, and they're less-concretely useful for making people feel like the kind of person who can do mystical things from an alien planet.
Carissa increasingly suspects that an essential ingredient, with Keltham, was that he wasn't just delivering the lectures, he was delivering the treasured lore of a powerful impossibly distant civilization, he was delivering a story in which they would master a new Art, and - as a fact about humans, maybe also a fact about devils - that's more motivating, more powerful, it makes it feel possible to achieve anything and it makes it actually possible to achieve more.
Putting on an artifact headband delivered directly from Hell serves the same purpose, anyway. The kids -
(some of them are older than she is)
- the kids are doing well. At this rate in a few days she'll be able to explain her work on corrigibility and one of them will have a useful insight and she'll have something to show off to Aspexia Rugatonn while she makes a fuss about how the Church should let her say, truthfully, that you might come to Carissa Sevar in Hell if you cry out for her.
Carissa Sevar: She was going to think about Cayden Cailean and Keltham, and maybe have one last spirited go at hanging a fifth-circle spell, but she's asleep the instant her head hits her pillow. Knowing you're on the right track is great for that.
Pilar : Pilar goes to sleep shortly after, reminding herself that it's acceptable for an Asmodean to feel proud. Even if all of this is a long game by Snack Service to crack her open after deceiving her in Elysium about how difficult she was to crack, even if the +4/+6/+6 headband is for herself and it turns her into a traitor like Asmodia, even if Lord Dispater sealing off her mind from simple Detection was just part of Snack Service's plan -
- Cheliax will survive. Hell will triumph. These new candidates are not as flawed as Pilar, unless everything about her curse including the magical feedback sensations are lies. Asmodeus will have His ilani and His Keepers no matter what.
Carissa Sevar: The next morning, Security may be concerned to hear from Carissa Sevar's quarters a
Carissa Sevar: WHOOP OF UTTERLY UNDIGNIFIED GLEE!!!!!!!!!!!
Carissa Sevar: WAS IT THE BEST USE OF FOUR HOURS OF HER PRECIOUS TIME ABSOLUTELY NOT
Carissa Sevar: IS IT IMPORTANT AT ALL IN AN OBJECTIVE SENSE NOT REALLY
Carissa Sevar: BUT
Carissa Sevar: CARISSA SEVAR
Carissa Sevar: HUNG A TELEPORT!!!!!!!!!!
Carissa Sevar: Technically many places don't count you as fifth circle until you can prepare a full slate of spells including a fifth circle one, which she cannot, this scaffold is a goddamned mess and the Teleport messily drooped on it is the only thing she'll have prepped today, BUT
Carissa Sevar: - right. She's got her students waiting. The plan for today was a morning lecture about how Keltham broke the Conspiracy, as a useful object lesson Carissa happens to have particularly in-depth information on, and then an afternoon spent preparing the Plan For If Duties Call Carissa Elsewhere so it's less of a shitshow than it was last time.
....she can still fit it all in, more or less.
Carissa Sevar: Gather around, little ilani, and hear the tale of Project Lawful's greatest success and greatest failure, as they are, after all, the same tale. It's a very dramatic one. You'll want to take lots of notes. Some details are elided for confidentiality reasons but not all that many of them; everything Ione knows and everything Keltham knows is known by Cheliax's enemies already, after all.
Carissa Sevar: She skips lunch. She's riding a wave of glee and anyway no longer needs to eat. She spends two hours patiently writing an org structure and plans for various contingencies poking her Teleport on the scaffold and watching it jiggle -
Carissa Sevar: - and then two hours writing up an org structure and contingencies, because it is, actually, important. Pilar is her second-in-command on the ilani project, and should also make judgement calls related to tropes or conduct towards researchers generally. Meritxell is on the ilani project after Pilar; she actually did pick up a fair bit from Keltham's Keeper training, doesn't seem to have broken about it, and is reasonably able to pass it forwards. Carissa's glad they didn't send her after Keltham, though slightly confused about how that call was made. ...possibly there's something more to Meritxell than she's been assuming. Put it on the list of things to think about once she has some time.
Carissa Sevar: About halfway into writing this document she realizes that the obvious person to assist her in this task is Maillol. And the reason she hasn't called him in for it is that she doesn't want to face the fact she damaged him and now he's worse.
Well, the nice thing about being a coward is that once you notice you can just stop. She orders Maillol sent in.
Maillol's Remains: The effects of torture, as Carissa Sevar did once observe, are not linear. Maillol has been tortured by Gorthoklek, but under conditions where he knew Gorthoklek was an expert and would not break him and Maillol only needed to... not endure, he broke immediately, but just, hang around hurting and broken and screaming and not trying to do anything else.
When Carissa Sevar tortured him, it went on and on, and she was not an expert and visibly did not know how to be careful even if she wanted to, and Maillol did not know what she wanted from him, or how long it would go on. If the Chelish system was throwing him away now, if he was being just broken now as an example the way he'd broken others, not important any more not useful not in the inner ring just one of the little people who get made examples of, if it would end in anything but Hell.
Pain alone can break people, and leave them never what they were; pain and fear will do it a lot faster.
Something walks into Carissa's office, wearing Maillol's face. It's holding itself together better than the last thing Carissa saw wearing Maillol's face. It can probably be useful at administrative tasks so long as it doesn't need to show initiative.
It is very terrified of Carissa Sevar. It spent a long time being terrified of her.
Carissa Sevar: "- please sit down. I'm not going to hurt you."
Maillol's Remains: It will obey, of course. If anyone asks it whether Carissa Sevar will hurt it, it now knows that the answer to be given is 'No.'
Carissa Sevar: "I'm working on better writeups of - the Project, who's in charge of what, who should be in charge of what if they are indisposed or called away or turn traitor or vanish mysteriously in the dead of night. I - realized that you're the best person for this, you're the one who's been keeping track of it already."
Maillol's Remains: "Yes, Chosen," it says automatically.
Carissa Sevar: Abrogail's notes on torture had suggestions, about this, but mostly they were to only do it in the first place if you didn't really like the person and weren't going to want them to be useful afterwards.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm not going to hurt you. Not today, not tomorrow, not even if you fuck up at something again, I'm not going to put you in a position where you might."
Maillol's Remains: "Yes, Chosen." A flicker of trust in Carissa Sevar, that once was -
- but that wasn't real, was it? She was a thing-that-hurts-you after all.
The thought dies before it can form much of a connected chain.
Possibly if this person were not hurt, a few times sequentially, when he otherwise expected strongly to be hurt, he would start to be able to hear promises again?
Carissa Sevar: "I'm sorry."
Maillol's Remains: "Chosen?" he says. The parts of him that detect heresy light up, they did not get much use in torment or shattering by it; but very quickly the sequelae run into the horror that is everything about or relating to Carissa Sevar, and that thought goes nowhere.
Carissa Sevar: "Not very sorry. I'm allowed to do this to people. Hell does this to people. You and Subirachs set me up to come back, and do this, and you were pleased enough, when I was doing it to one of the thugs on Security.
But you didn't, in fact, have occasion to do it to me, and what you did do for me was - your best, mostly, accounting for how humans are terrible at everything - did you know it is heretical to say that Carissa Sevar will show any soul mercy -" and she's making this about herself, saying what she wants to talk about instead of what she thinks might actually help Maillol, who she does, actually, want to help.
"I am sorry because I hurt you out of ignorance of how to get what I wanted. I wish I hadn't."
Maillol's Remains: Something inside him hurts. He shuts it down out of a vague sense that letting this thing hurt will lead to other hurtings. It seems like something that might scream at Carissa Sevar if it were allowed a voice, so it's dangerous.
He doesn't know if 'Yes, Chosen' is an allowable thing to say here. If this is real, silence would be allowed; if it's fake... what does he say how to get out of hurting if it's fake...
"I owe you obedience, sir. You owe me nothing."
Carissa Sevar: "I owe it to every soul I own to make them stronger, and better, and make them into the greatest devils they can be, the greatest devils in all of Hell."
Maillol's Remains: If he says 'Yes, Chosen' that's heresy. If he says it's heresy, that seems like it might lead to hurting.
He doesn't know what to say, no options, fear rising -
From somewhere, maybe, a last real remnant of Ferrer Maillol manages to say, and it's strange how it comes out, "If you want him to be useful you should order him to just start working."
Carissa Sevar: "....I do want that but I also want a bunch of other things. Humans. Muddled. You know. We've - had that conversation, once or twice."
Maillol's Remains: His mind reaches for memory, it's a memory of arguing with Carissa Sevar, flinches back as if burned.
The fragment of the real Ferrer Maillol that spoke, its attempt at advice ignored, sees that it's not being listened-to here and retreats back. Possibly for good.
Carissa Sevar: "Is there some promise that, if you had it, would make it - easier - to do your job."
Maillol's Remains: Not to be hurt again. He doesn't say it; it's too obviously a thing-you-don't-say-in-Cheliax, if you don't trust the person you're talking to a lot, when you say it. If Carissa Sevar has Detect Thoughts running, she'll see it, but not otherwise.
"I don't know, Chosen."
Lots of wants rise up, get shut down before they can even turn into words, because he obviously cannot have those things might hurt to think them will definitely hurt to say them.
Carissa Sevar: She's absolutely having his mind read. How else do you understand people.
"I am not going to hurt you again." She already said that, but apparently it didn't sink in.
Maillol's Remains: Obviously not! It's just words! There was once a man who knew a Carissa Sevar and thought her words meant something, but then it turned out she was just made of Cheliax, so now her words are Cheliax words.
"Yes, Chosen."
Carissa Sevar: "Would you like a week off to - rest, not be around me, not be around Project Lawful -"
Maillol's Remains: Yes? says his mind. It's not a very loud yes. He has no idea if that helps somebody like him.
No, Chosen, say his verbal reflexes, and something else inside him shuts it down because if he actually says that then a week of not-rest will happen to him.
Oh, wait. She didn't say that he could have it, just to ask if he wanted it. So she'll laugh at him if he says yes and then say he can't have it. That makes a sort of sense, if she wants him to hurt that way, he should give his hurting to her, and not make her go looking for it. It seems like a safe way to be hurt, even if it leads into more hurting it's probably "ha ha go do this paperwork instead" hurting and not, actual hurting.
"Sounds nice," he says, after a long delay to compute all that.
Cheliax: If, hypothetically, there were such a thing as Evil Dath Ilan, it would have invented the concept of "post-torture therapist" for reasons of sheer economic loss prevention.
Cheliax is not Evil Dath Ilan, a fact which has both upsides and downsides.
Nobody in this conversation will have the thought occur to them that there's any available remedy for Maillol but rest, and in fact, there isn't.
Carissa Sevar: Well that's....pro....gress?
"All right. I am putting you on leave for a week. I am going to tell someone to teleport you somewhere peaceful and quiet with extremely boring slaves and no responsibilities. I'll figure this org plan out myself."
Maillol's Remains: Huh?
"Acknowledged."
He doesn't get it.
Is he supposed to go back to his bedroom now?
Carissa Sevar: "I'll - send someone for the Teleport once I've set it up."
Maillol's Remains: "Acknowledged."
Is she annoyed that he's still here? Will she be more annoyed if he tries to leave without being ordered to go? That sounded like a dismissal and if he was dismissed he can be not around Carissa Sevar any more... no, can't risk it, she'll tell him to go if he's supposed to go. You can't get away from the Carissa Sevar; she can leave, but you can't make her go away. Maillol tried to wish her away a lot before, and that didn't work.
Carissa Sevar: "You can go."
Maillol's Remains: He walks out faster than he walked in.
Carissa Sevar: If Asmodeus doesn't think she did anything wrong there, if Asmodeus thinks that's fine -
- that's not a good line of thought. How about, instead, she does her job and gets this report done.
....and figures out someone to be project administration.
Shit.
Carissa Sevar: After a while of wallowing pointlessly because all the Wisdom in the world can't fix being human and contemptible and stupid, she ends up writing Alexite Thrune, entirely on the grounds that he is not as far as she knows completely incompetent and isn't Abrogail or Aspexia. She wants a recommendation for a project administrator, does he know anyone? She also wants a recommendation for a nice quiet retreat somewhere with absolutely no important people, does he have a recommendation for that?
It'll go out in the evening Teleport.
She informs the other Project administration/logistics staff that Maillol is on medical leave because she broke him maybe-irretrievably and is now seeing if it's retrievable. She wants to have some more appealing explanation than that but - well, if she wanted to be able to tell people something better she'd have had to do something better.
She spends most of the evening on Project administration and then much of the night on refining her headband-assembly-line to reflect peoples' idiocy actual use, and then she gets a Deep Slumber cast when she still can't sleep after that.
Iarwain: Somewhere else is a person now wearing a +6 Intelligence headband, with an Owl's Wisdom and Eagle's Splendour cast on him beside.
He is, in Golarion terms, +7sd Intelligence, if not quite +7sd thinkoomph. Out of dath ilan he'd be +5sd Intelligence: he started out +0.8sd for his world in thinkoomph, and his Intelligence score if measured there would be a bit above that; and then taking him up +6 Intelligence points locally, boosts his Intelligence as such by around +4sd in dath ilani terms. The standard-deviations are narrower, in dath ilan, what with all the selection they've been doing on their existing variance, and many environmental causes of variable negative effects having been optimized away.
There are aspects of thinkoomph not accounted for by Intelligence and Wisdom and Splendour. That person doesn't match a dath ilani genius on those dimensions, but in them he's also well above a Golarion person selected for equivalent pre-augmentation abilitystats. A Golarion person selected to match his Golarion abilitystats is an outlier on those abilitystats, and has probably regressed towards the mean on unmeasured aspects of cognition. This person comes from a world that tried hard to select on actual thinkoomph; his base abilitystats in Golarion are only the side effect, modulo slightly higher Intelligence and significantly lower Wisdom than would be considered average in his world.
He's been issued with a cognitive toolkit that can use much more Intelligence than the standard cognitive toolkit out of Golarion can absorb. His toolkit includes adequate base knowledge for him to somewhat adapt that cognitive toolkit to having more Intelligence available.
On occasions when he has time to think and strategize and his thoughts span over time and accumulate, the resulting viewpoint may no longer be described in a way understandable to the average person out of Golarion or even an above-average wizard... or maybe you could describe it, if you were willing to go on at sufficiently great length and do a lot of translation, but it would not be fun to hear about. He is now actually doing things like considering the top twelve possibilities and putting numerical probabilities on them.
Iarwain: That person was leaving Cheliax mostly alone while he went about his other business.
Then Asmodia vanished and Carissa Sevar sold her soul.
Separating aside emotional responses, even on the larger gameboard it no longer seems particularly like he ought to leave Cheliax alone. Evidently, things will go on happening there even if he leaves it alone.
Subsequent reports of a nobles' gathering in Cheliax are not reassuring. Taking both reports and the observations within reports at face value, Carissa is becoming relatively less aligned. She has an artifact headband to become a cognitive power opposing him and also with some of the dath ilani toolkit. Ione can report of her pre-Nefreti knowledge that a soulsold Carissa probably now has at least 3 Wishes with which to enhance herself.
"Doing nothing and hoping nothing happens" was always a questionable option at best. He discards it now.
Carissa Sevar: The next morning she sets out bound and determined to hang a fifth circle spell and also everything else, or at least the utility spells she's accustomed to - Detect Thoughts, Unseen Servant.
Security: She'll get maybe a quarter-hour in before there's an emergency interrupt. Somebody, presumably a 9th-circle somebody or an 8th-circle who got very lucky, just hammered a scry past the Project wards and set off scry detection.
To be specific, the scry detection of a Security less than 40ft from Carissa Sevar's bedroom.
Security has standing hidden orders from Egorian about this situation, and they don't involve Carissa Sevar staying in her bedroom after that happens.
She has three rounds to collect magic items, valuables, or clothes if applicable and prioritized.
Carissa Sevar: Spellbook, Bag of Holding and sure, she'll grab a dress, so as not to potentially get kidnapped by Keltham in her nightclothes. Unless on reflection she thinks that's tropier - save that for later.
Security: The fortress's 7th-circle, Commander Hadrian, is here, and Elias Abarco and Olegario. Hadrian casts a heavily metamagiced Nondetection on her, and then those three hustle Carissa Sevar out of the fortress, to the edge of the Forbiddance, with scry detection up on full.
Carissa Sevar: She does not ask where they're going; she doesn't, actually, need to know.
Carissa Sevar: - unless they're not in fact acting in her interests, here, like if this is an assassination attempt from either Church or Crown. She....suspects not, though. If Abrogail wanted her dead she'd have done it last night and Aspexia would not kill off the Chosen of Asmodeus (for real now!) with no indication from Asmodeus He wanted that done.
Security: They Teleport immediately once they're out of the Forbiddance -
- arrive in what looks to be a Stoneshaped underground cavern, with (to arcane sight immediately visible even without any further analysis) an ongoing Permanent abjuration effect running over the whole visible cavern, and then they're moving forward, crossing another threshold of arcane-sight-visible Forbiddance, towards a heavy steel door that gets unlocked by inaudibly whispered magical password, and then they're inside a safehouse/cell with walls that look like iron and are no doubt at least 1 inch of iron. The wide-area Abjuration is running here too.
The steel door swings shut.
"At ease, Sevar," says Commander Hadrian.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa's heartbeat is going to take a while to believe him about that.
- well, this sure is ambiguous between being a safehouse and a prison more than most places are. Probably it gets used for both, as needed.
"I'd like regular situation updates," she says, and sits, so the fact her legs are shaking won't be visible, and calms herself by concentrating on identifying the wide-area abjuration that's not the Forbiddance - Mage's Private Sanctum. Extremely reasonable. It prevents all divinations aimed at those inside. Fifth circle, which means she can learn it now. The only reason they didn't have it blanketing the Project fortress is that it prevents Detect Thoughts.
Hadrian: "All apparently normal on the Project and I'll let you know the instant an anomaly is reported, we get orders relayed from above, or my Telepathic Bond breaks," says Commander Hadrian. "If you have analysis urgently to report to Egorian I can relay via the fortress."
Carissa Sevar: "Not at this time. Do you have Plane Shift, or an item of it, or an open slot into which you could prepare it right now."
Hadrian: "Why do you ask."
Carissa Sevar: "If Keltham explodes Cheliax we go to Dis and regroup from there. Dispater has named me his favored possession, I can operate there unbothered at least for a little while, and Keltham can't Wish-kidnap me from the second layer of Hell. Further justification involves a secret I thought no one at all was cleared to know, but it's barely possible you might be, as you're on the Project in part to read my mind; do you know of what I'm speaking, or not."
Hadrian: "I've been informed of two major Church secrets involving two elements of your soulsale price. These two are not cleared to know about either secret."
"I don't have a tuning fork* for Avernus. This is an oversight and if you deem it urgent enough can be corrected by Teleport."
(*) A metaphorical usage of 'tuning fork' but a standard one in Golarion when speaking of Plane Shifts.
Carissa Sevar: "I'd say it's urgent, yes."
Hadrian: "Acknowleged," says the Commander. He pauses, no longer than a round or two. "ETA 1 minute from Egorian."
Carissa Sevar: If this was an attack by Keltham, Egorian won't be there in one minute. If it was something else - a feint, a routine spy operation that got noticed this time for some reason, a communication with someone, a test of their defenses -
(- a test - is it possible that this is, again, Abrogail, that she's in a Mindscape as she must have been last time she awoke to an unexpected catastrophe, that the Queen is checking whether Carissa Sevar, in fact, presented with the opportunity to claim the throne of Cheliax -
- if it is such a test, news will come soon that Abrogail is dead -
- Carissa's going to be so annoyed, if that's what's going on, she's busy, she has important work to do!)
Carissa Sevar: Did Greater Carissa arrange this? Is it part of the Keltham seduction plan? It seems, at least, a good time to urgently try to rederive it, along with whatever else she figured out about Keltham and what he was trying to do.
Hadrian: The steel door opens, the 7th-circle Security takes a Bag of Holding from the person on the other side, the steel door closes.
"We now have two scrolls of Plane Shift, tuning fork for Avernus, I already have a tuning fork for Prime Material," says Hadrian. "Update from Project Site, Lady Pineda can't find anybody there threatening her friends but warns that a Keltham kidnapping may not count as a threat to her curse."
Carissa Sevar: "Mmmhmm."
She wishes she'd gotten Maillol out and on his vacation before the next emergency. She's annoyed at Keltham, actually, for interrupting that, even though this is the stupidest possible emotion along any imaginable dimension since one, Keltham couldn't possibly have known that, two, if he did know there is no conceivable justification for him to care, three, Carissa could literally just have not tortured Maillol and then she wouldn't have this problem no matter what other people had chosen to do.
Also this could be a test. It'd be reasonable of Abrogail to test her, really, and this is the way that a test run by Abrogail would be.
....no, wait, that's important enough she should actually be ilani about it, at least briefly, and if the result of Abrogail's test is that Carissa is too ilani to test anymore, well, so be it. On the 'test' hypothesis, she predicts that Abrogail dies and she is faced with a choice about whether to track down her soul and get it back or take the throne and rule Cheliax. On the 'not a test' hypothesis, she predicts..... a Kelthamish sort of thing happening, from a completely unexpected direction, the sort of thing none of their planning accounted for because Keltham is an alien with alien patterns of thought and alien triggers for escalation and alien constraints on his being.
Well. She will prep her spells and wait and see which it is. "Abarco, have you prepared spells this morning."
lintamande: "Some of them, sir."
Carissa Sevar: "Open slots at each spell level?" It's pretty typical in security roles where your precise needs for the day might vary.
lintamande: "Yes, sir."
Carissa Sevar: "Put up a scaffold and put Teleport, Greater Invisibility, Fly, and Detect Thoughts on it. - I want to see if I can master fifth circle faster if I have Arcane Sight up and am mirroring someone while they do it."