lintamande: "Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom."
-- J. R. R. Tolkien
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune, deliberately dressed not in her best, sits quietly in her personal library.
She is not standing at a high balcony overlooking her city, she is not screaming and weeping, she is not taking out her rage on her servants or on an interesting Good victim dragged up from her dungeons. She will not give Them the satisfaction; she is not confused in the first place about the source of her unhappiness, nor could it be assuaged on a bystander; and Abrogail of House Thrune has never cried once after she finished her ordeal in Hell.
She is taking time to stop, to do little, to allow her mind to wander. +6 WIS will tell you to do that occasionally, even if you absolutely don't have time.
She tried to read one of the better romance novels whose existence she'd ordained at the beginning of her reign; and then had to put the book aside, for there were tropes in it.
Abrogail Thrune II: Unable to find satisfaction in reading, forbidden other entertainments that wouldn't help her mood anyways, Abrogail Thrune's mind turns (as mortal minds do) to the past, to previous decisions that can't be undone, rehearsing the experience of disaster.
As though, could she but decide on the one perfect thing she could've done, the disaster would then unhappen, having been solved, herself having learned from it, passed the test, there would be no need anymore for it to still have happened.
The moment when she heard that a presumed-9th-circle scry had hammered through Project Lawful's protections to find Carissa.
Within the minute Abrogail was Mind-Blanked and Teleported far from Cheliax, waiting to hear whether Egorian had become part of a blank circle on a map...
Abrogail Thrune II: In retrospect, the decisions that led to that point were probably mistaken.
Any life choice that leads to you later fleeing your country and waiting to hear if its capital city has been destroyed, was probably, in fact, a mistake.
But it is done, it cannot be undone, there is no obvious way to undo it, all the obvious ways out of the resulting trap seem to be trapped themselves.
And now, somehow, there doesn't seem to be anything to do - besides obvious straightforward unimportant things like rushing Cheliax's digestion of Nidal - while Abrogail sits on a comfortable library chair and waits for the week of doom.
Abrogail Thrune II: At the time, the logic seemed clear. They certainly weren't trying to take hostages against Keltham, as Asmodeus had forbidden; you have to tell somebody about hostages, after all, and they weren't planning to tell that naive boy any such thing.
Aspexia had set her eyes on having a potential future heir to the Crown who might ravel 'corrigibility'; and, more importantly, transforming Keltham's story irrevocably into a dath ilani tragedy - making sure the story could not be a story of Keltham's triumph, ending well for him, especially by dath ilan's standards.
Abrogail had wondered, yes, about a potential heir to the throne with the blood of dath ilan. But more than that, Abrogail had been thinking of Keltham's unwitting prophecy born of tropes, that if Keltham came into conflict with Abrogail over Carissa, the only possible resolutions were Abrogail's ruin or that she become Keltham's woman.
Abrogail Thrune II: The mechanics of the plot had been straightforward enough, at least by Abrogail Thrune's standards.
Keltham had been prompted to ask another of his women to guise herself as his Carissa, so that he might learn to fight her and hurt her unrestrained.
Keltham had picked Meritxell, as predicted.
Keltham had needed no further prompting, after that, to ask Meritxell to guise herself as others besides Carissa; nor, a short time after, to ask Meritxell to appear as the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, Abrogail Thrune.
Meritxell by then had already practiced pretending to be Abrogail Thrune during sex, and Abrogail Thrune had watched her and learned to pretend to be Meritxell pretending to be Abrogail Thrune.
When the time had come to slip in the real Abrogail Thrune in the place of the fake - on their second encounter, daring not the first, in case that was too obvious - Keltham hadn't noticed any discrepancy, according to Abrogail's read of his thoughts, then.
Abrogail Thrune II: And all of that, in retrospect, had been a terrible mistake.
Abrogail should not have had Meritxell pose as herself, should have had Meritxell refuse any requests to pose as Abrogail citing fear of lese-majeste. She should have just had Keltham's seed stolen for her from Meritxell's mouth, as Keltham himself had suggested by way of his own wary thoughts.
Keltham, looking back over that course of events, remembering Meritxell assuming Abrogail's form, is liable to suspect that Abrogail is with his child.
Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham might not suspect the dozens of other women impregnated by way of his seed stolen from out of Meritxell's mouth beneath cover of Invisibility. Or Keltham might suspect that too, not from evidence, but from it being an obvious thought to him. Or from remembering, once his Intelligence was raised high enough, that he'd had that thought himself in "Isidre's" presence.
Some of those impregnated women had been Baronesses of Cheliax and priestesses of Asmodeus, who would raise any child to be destined for Hell.
Some had been peasants, so that Keltham's children by them would grow up in Chelish destitution.
And some of those anonymous peasant women had been seized namelessly and returned namelessly, under threat if they broke silence, origins and destinations going unrecorded by any part of the Crown.
It wasn't a hostage-taking, in contravention of Asmodeus's orders; they weren't expecting to need hostages, then. Rather, by those tactics they had essayed to make Keltham's story be irrevocably a dath ilani tragedy, beyond even Cheliax's power to undo and give a happy ending, for any threat.
Abrogail Thrune II: They... had not been thinking, then, about how Keltham might still have a potential response to that ploy.
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune had realized her error shortly after Keltham, departing, had said, "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."
(It was also the first time she'd felt any flash of desire for Keltham as a man, but that is a completely separate issue and Abrogail Thrune is not thinking about it right now and is also pretending that it didn't happen.)
Abrogail Thrune II: She should have thought of it. Abrogail had overheard Keltham's thoughts about Civilization's great weapons. She'd heard the report of him asking a fake paladin about ways to obliterate Awaiting-Consumption or injure Urgathoa.
It was just - not a thought that squared up easily with the naive teenage boy giving away so many key secrets to Cheliax, who boasted of having never told a single lie in Golarion -
One just... doesn't usually think, of that, as something that a regretful teenage father would do. Especially one you've started identifying, in the back of your mind, as a naive Goodling.
'Oh, I'll just destroy that entire country before my children can be ensouled. Problem solved!' It's not something a Good person would do, or an Evil person either.
Or maybe Keltham will only destroy Egorian, to get at Abrogail, if Keltham thinks it's only her that's pregnant.
Which... still would be not good for Cheliax's ambitions.
Abrogail Thrune II: Keltham has spoken much of Law and of multi-agent optimality, conflicts averted and doing Something Else Which Is Not That; it's an obvious thought even to Abrogail Thrune, who is not of Abadar, that it might be possible for two Lawful beings to negotiate Something Else from this situation.
Even if it were not Keltham, Abrogail would want to avoid the annihilation of Cheliax by any means necessary, up to and including both sides talking to each other.
But -
- but Keltham may not know, Abrogail does not know whether Keltham knows, that Abrogail is with his child. Maybe he hasn't thought of it, even with an Intelligence boost; he's an alien. Does Cheliax try to open negotiations over it, he will know -
If Cheliax offers ransom against Keltham choosing to destroy all Cheliax, Keltham will know that Cheliax thinks he has cause to do that; it will tip him off if he doesn't already know, and also weaken Cheliax's negotiating position, that they were admitting from the start that Keltham's default course was to destroy Cheliax and that Keltham must be paid off to do anything else -
Maybe Keltham wouldn't do that, on his own, wouldn't slay a whole country for a reason like that, and if so, by offering to negotiate, Cheliax might end up paying some terrible ransom that Keltham wouldn't otherwise have demanded at all -
Maybe Keltham would only kill Abrogail, and not slay all Egorian or all Cheliax, if he thought it was only Abrogail with his child; Abrogail would be resurrected but the child would be gone, if it were not yet ensouled. Cheliax has been listening, listening hard, to see if Keltham has been trying to hire any assassins, for if so Abrogail will just let him succeed, let him appear to win, lose the child inside her rather than lose Egorian -
Abrogail thought about ordering her own assassination, a real one, not faked at all. Only Abrogail has read too many transcripts about Conspiracy-theoretic reasoning; Keltham may reason through to what they want him to believe, maybe think the real assassination was fake -
And Keltham, for his part, if he knows, will not want them to know that he knows. If Keltham is planning to destroy Egorian or Cheliax, he will not want Cheliax to know that, prepare for that, before he strikes.
Abrogail Thrune II: Gods can settle negotiations like that, Aspexia has told her. Gods can simply make pacts not to use knowledge that they are told as part of negotiations. Gods can commit to doing whatever they would have done if they had not known.
But for Cheliax to offer Keltham even a pact like that - for Keltham to offer her a pact like that - would also tell each other everything. The reason why that pact would be required, would be too obvious.
And absent a pact like that, Keltham does not know if he can trust Asmodeans, she does not know if she can trust Keltham, if one appears before the other saying, "I came to you to negotiate trusting that you won't use the information from my offering to open negotiations"...
Really you can't trust Asmodeans about that, if there's no prior compact. Abrogail Thrune wishes in this moment that Asmodeans had a reputation for being trustworthy about that; but, in fact, they're not.
Abrogail Thrune II: And if Keltham really doesn't do anything - if he hasn't figured it out - to all appearances, until quite recently, he wasn't paying much attention to Cheliax at all -
Then soon Abrogail's child will be ensouled. Shortly after, other children all across Cheliax.
And then, probably, once informed of that fact, if it's allowed to become true, Keltham really won't consider it his nonthreatening action to destroy Cheliax if it makes any trouble. Not if that'd send so many children of his tragically to the Boneyard.
They didn't mean to take hostages, definitely didn't intend to contravene Asmodeus's orders by taking hostages deliberately; they had their own reasons for wanting Keltham's children in Cheliax. Why, they've had those reasons from the beginning, Keltham himself observed them immediately upon his arrival; dath ilan has good 'genes' useful for the 'heritage-optimization' program that Cheliax is even now in the process of planning.
They didn't mean to take hostages; but Cheliax will have them, very soon. And Keltham should know that it wasn't a threat that created them.
Cheliax hasn't set a definite date on war with Osirion, not least because Osirion's intelligence has been so impossibly good. But once enough of Keltham's children start detecting as ensouled - it will be Cheliax's best course of action, then, to crush the Scientific Revolution before it can start to seriously compete.
...or, of course, Keltham could be waiting until the last minute to destroy Egorian or Cheliax, hoping he'll find an alternative before his hand is forced to that; and not wishing to let Cheliax know what awaits them, even by offering to open negotiations.
Abrogail Thrune II: So, in terms of greater events, it seems that all Abrogail can do is sit and tensely wait for her child to quicken with soul, or maybe for Cheliax to be destroyed without warning.
It's probably a trope, that tension; being put in a position where all you can do is wait for the week, if not an exact known hour, of doom.
dath ilan: (It's actually a much narrower trope than that! Keltham even explained it in an offhand remark-lecture at dinner, one time, discoursing upon dath ilani fiction, all of whose tropes seemed so alien and inapplicable that the Chelish Conspiracy paid it little mind.
Keltham said to his Chelish hosts, that night, that in dath ilani fiction, authors often had to resort to visibly contrived means, to prevent the incredibly Lawful characters from simply negotiating a move to their multi-agent optimal boundary.
In dath ilani fiction, when some bizarre setup causes the characters to somehow not be able to solve all their conflicts just by talking to each other, you're not supposed to question any improbabilities leading up to the setup. You can question if the setup itself has a loophole, obviously, that a sensible character ought to find; but if events weird and unlikely led into that arrangement, literary convention says not to question that.
After all, if you can't somehow impose exotic conditions averting the theorems about agents coordinating on multi-agent-optimal outcomes, you don't have a novel, do you? You have a short story ending in an anticlimax. Something has to happen that wouldn't happen in real life; in real life, after all, sensible people put arbitrarily huge efforts into making sure that nobody ever ends up fighting instead of negotiating.
But Abrogail Thrune is not seeing it as strange in the right dimensions, the pass to which she's come; she hasn't remembered Keltham's key words from that offhand lecture. To Abrogail Thrune, "a conflict that has some weird exotic reason it can't be solved by everyone talking honestly at each other" is nothing new at all, not even a visible trope.)
Abrogail Thrune II: She really, really fucking hates tropes, by the way. Abrogail thought she despised them before, but she was mistaken; now she hates them with the sort of searing fury and despite that Aspexia Rugatonn holds for Chaotic Good in general and Chaotic Good oracular curses in particular.
Abrogail Thrune II: The fact that Abrogail has thought of all this may now mean that it won't happen, because that would be boring to Them, the tropes, whatever may be watching her from the Dark Tapestry or beyond it.
Abrogail Thrune II: The clocks tick forward; Keltham destroys all Cheliax without warning; or, his children become ensouled, and Cheliax informs him of it and in the same moment assaults Osirion. Those are the obvious possible outcomes, the ones that Abrogail would think to hold in a sane world.
The alternative is that Keltham will simply... do something else.
He is become something else himself, now, some other manner of opponent.
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune's mind turns again to the past, rehearsing the experience of disaster.
The moment when she heard that a presumed-9th-circle scry had hammered through Project Lawful's protections to find Carissa.
That was maybe the last moment in which Abrogail could have thought faster.
Why would Keltham do that? Why use a scry instead of Discern Location? Why give them warning?
She was still thinking, in the back of her mind, of that naive young boy who did not know he had any enemies, who she'd said might in decades become a rival for Abrogail Thrune's throne, who'd seemed to her like somebody who might someday eventually rival her - when he hadn't augmented his abilitystats at all.
It had made a dire sense, then, when the report had made its way to where Abrogail had fled, that they might only be doing as Keltham wanted. It had made sense, when Carissa Sevar had given her reason for wanting to go to Dis as being less predictable.
Abrogail Thrune II: She - doesn't understand, even now, how Keltham could do that, set that all up - as it's clear he did, the scry-alarm was timed for when Carissa wouldn't have hung spells yet for that day, to give her a chance to hang the Silent Image she'd need later, in Hell - how did he know about the Carissa who'd erased herself, that this was her plan, that her loyalties would predictably turn once she was under the Nondetection to evade scry - how did the two coordinate when that Carissa had only ten minutes, how did she signal Keltham - Abrogail refuses to believe that Keltham figured out that course of events without any signal, Intelligence 24 can't do that - or does Keltham now have his own fragment of unshattered prophecy - or is there some trope out of dath ilan transparent to him, by which Keltham read through the whole situation -
- realistically, it's probably tropes, the same way Keltham always made his impossible predictions, out of knowledge nobody else could have, and how do you fight something like that?
Abrogail Thrune II: It was supposed to be Carissa Sevar, fighting that.
Abrogail Thrune's mind turns again to the past, she has no disciplines out of dath ilan to warn against repeating her thoughts. Most times Abrogail Thrune is more oriented to the future than this, holds herself to a higher standard of freshness in her thinking; but then, most times Abrogail Thrune is not feeling this trapped.
Abrogail Thrune's mind turns again to the past.
The moment when word came back that Carissa Sevar could not be reached by Sending, that she could not be scried. Abrogail had thought at first that they'd only played into some further step of Keltham's plan - that Carissa had been intercepted in Hell, once she was outside of a Mage's Private Sanctum -
The moment when Aspexia informed her that she'd heard the report of Commander Hadrian, whose soul had gone to his owner.
The moment when Aspexia informed her that Carissa Sevar had bid the devils of Avernus to slaughter her companions, looted and taken the bodies.
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail knew. Even as the first bad news began to arrive, Abrogail knew what she had done wrong.
"I decided when I threw this celebration that if I was tempting tropes by daring to celebrate anything, then so be it; and if by inviting you I was calling their attentions directly on us all, so be it; and that if, by my telling you that you might have me after or be had by me, I was tempting some romantic complication to occur in our lives immediately after, so fucking be it. I'll not live the rest of my life cowering from all fun, for fear of plot complications, for fear of humorous or tragic comeuppance if I'm ever seen by the story to be enjoying myself or celebrating anything."
The Most High has already castigated her, thoroughly, for this misdecision.
Abrogail Thrune II: In retrospect it's clear enough what Abrogail should have seen. Keltham upon first hearing of Abrogail Thrune in any detail, did call her "more trope than flesh" within his thoughts. Like Ione, like Pilar, like Asmodia, like Carissa, Abrogail Thrune was Chosen of a god and Blessed by Him, when Asmodeus did execute His compact with her. Abrogail Thrune has contested with Keltham, she has lain with Keltham, she is pregnant with his child, she is a generally interesting person; she is, always has been, one of the trope-girls.
Abrogail Thrune is whatever the equivalent is of a 'viewpoint character' in this, and her thoughts laid plain to see for whatever watches from beyond the Dark Tapestry. All her conceits of making herself mistress of the tropes behind the scenes, no doubt, have been displayed from start to end for whatever 'audience' watches from beyond; her carefully unspoken plan was never hidden from Them; They were watching her when she laid with Keltham and not from Keltham's character perspective either.
Those things Beyond have written a lovely tragedy of her and Carissa Sevar; and all the grandeur of her and Carissa's celebration together over Nidal, their dance, that they laid with each other satisfyingly with a mutual victim, all of it was raising up Abrogail Thrune higher before her fall, luring her into grand hopes, pleasure, attachment so that she could be more satisfyingly betrayed and hurt when everything was taken away.
And in light of this, Aspexia Rugatonn will now be managing her information, making sure that when a plan must succeed, Abrogail Thrune does not know of it. Aspexia Rugatonn has commanded her to gloat over nothing, triumph over nothing, never feel satisfied about how anything is going for her, speak no hopes aloud, never feel hope if she can help it, if that felt hope might be an invitation to the tropes to crush it.
She is trapped within a vast machine greater than herself, which, if it offers her anything to become attached to, is perhaps offering that to her only to take it away in some poignant future moment.
She appears to be inside that kind of story.
Keltham: (It does not particularly occur to Abrogail that she is, at this moment, only experiencing some fraction of what she was complicit in inflicting on Keltham. She is not that sort of person.)
dath ilan: (Well, in some ways she might be worse off than Keltham. Keltham has read a hundred books about protagonists who realize they're in stories and then have to do something interesting about the fact. None of them shut down mentally about it.)
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail Thrune feels, now, as wretched, as unhappy, as powerless, as ruined, as at any other point in her reign. As wretched as when she called her halt in Hell with six circles of sorcery to become eight circles, having hoped for seven to become nine, and proved too weak for that.
She does not weep, for she's never once wept since that time; and she will not give the tropes the satisfaction.
She does not think about Carissa, except as her opponent.
Aspexia Rugatonn: (Aspexia Rugatonn hasn't told Abrogail Thrune about Carissa Sevar's last claim to still be serving Asmodeus in a complicated way, any more than Aspexia has told Pilar. If Aspexia has understood tropes at all, you're not supposed to give people hope about that sort of thing, it can't come true if they're already hoping for it.)
Abrogail Thrune II: She absolutely does not miss Carissa. Abrogail Thrune was never Carissa's friend or even her ally.
They're in a romance novel, now, and romance-novel characters who think thoughts that pathetic don't come to good ends.
Carissa Sevar was her finest creation, and Abrogail Thrune was proud of her and took pleasure in corrupting her further, and that was their relationship, period.
Abrogail Thrune II: She cannot abide this, she cannot sit in her library and wait for the hour of doom.
...she'll go make sure that all of her guards are those who've read Carissa's mind, whom Carissa now has a contractual right to buy from Hell with approval of Church and Crown. When Carissa glossed that as "exercisable only with your approval and Aspexia's" did she realize what she was glossing? Almost certainly not, at the time.
Carissa could try to connive those guards into slaying Abrogail, and take the throne, and buy their souls up from Hell afterwards with her own self's approval, once she was herself the Crown. So long as she was planning to betray Keltham too and become a Power of Hell at the end, so long as the Church would approve of her reign...
Abrogail is willing to play that game. She'll grant Carissa the opening move in it. Yes, it's folly, but -
Abrogail Thrune II: Abrogail doesn't miss Carissa. She wants Carissa to come back and finish their game, because it advantages Cheliax and Asmodeus if the plot turns in a way where Carissa plays at all no can't think that either any hopes she thinks won't come to pass without complication -
Abrogail Thrune II: ...is she actually at risk of going mad, like this?
She shouldn't be. She'll think like this for a few days and get used to it and her thoughts will shake out.
She's been to Hell and back.
She can handle this much adversity.
Iarwain:Osirion
lintamande: The head of the Risen Guard is displeased to have the Dome housing a fifth-circle wizard wearing an artifact headband straight from Hell that cannot be removed from her person and functions even in an antimagic field. He is further displeased that she is unwilling to swear that her purposes are not opposed to Osirion's or even that she won't assassinate the pharaoh.
Normally any two of these hesitations would be sufficient for the head of the Risen Guard to simply refuse to let a person in, but they can't exactly turn this one away. Even if she's probably here as part of an infernal ploy of some kind to win Keltham to Cheliax's side in the impending war. Even if there's a bizarre cult that the council just banned in all of Osirion, claiming that she and Keltham and some other Chelish person will ascend together.
(That's not the claim it got banned for. It got banned for claiming - falsely, as far as anyone can tell and as far as the Church of Asmodeus says - that Carissa Sevar's followers will find mercy and healing in Hell. Osirion is not particularly sympathetic to any falsehoods about afterlives but falsely telling people Hell isn't very bad is well over the line.)
Carissa Sevar is bound (in a modesty-respecting fashion, with three cloaks draped over her in case anyone would find the ropes sensuous, so she resembles a very beautiful head poking out of a burrito), and gagged, and her guards are deaf, and she's in an antimagic field, and the handcuffs she's wearing were Polymorphed into a solid stone block with an eight circle spell that is, importantly, permanent rather than instantaneous, which means that if she's somehow gets out of the antimagic field the spell will cease to be suppressed and they'll sever both her hands.
Furthermore they have used the spell Touch of Idiocy to temporarily reduce her Intelligence to 9, which will kick in if she leaves the antimagic field so she can't cast spells.
The head of the Risen Guard has warned the pharaoh that he doesn't actually consider this adequate security. Artifact headbands out of Hell can ignore antimagic fields, and the headband has some spells built in; the only ones he can see are Banishment and a used True Seeing, but artifact headbands are also known to not always reliably report their capabilities. If she has Major Image and Gaseous Form and Greater Restoration in there, all their precautions are for naught. And if Hell planned this, Hell planned for Osirion's obvious precautions.
Merenre: " - okay, I know Keltham said not to do him favors, but I'm very worried about pushing him over the edge if we mistreat his woman by dath ilani standards, so be careful."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "Those are indeed the considerations I'm balancing, though I'm much more worried about what Sevar's trying to do than about the immediate effects of having her - what's your thinking -"
Merenre: "...probability we lose the war with Cheliax is up, probability of the world getting destroyed is down. I assume the thinking there is that if Keltham gets corrupted and starts working for the forces of Hell then he isn't letting Rovagug out in a fit of teenage righteousness, which I must say I don't find reassuring."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: "I find it slightly reassuring. Is there - any form of interference you predict makes things go better."
Merenre: "Calling Derrina, which we'd in any event committed to doing once we got Sevar. That's it, at least until Keltham gets here."
Derrina: Derrina will get that Sending and reply back that she'll be there in a minute.
Then she'll pull out her magic items and start cheating until everything hostile around her is dead, which doesn't take long at all once Derrina starts cheating.
She'll Prestidigitate all the gore off of herself, in case anybody present cares about that sort of thing, and then Teleport to the reception area right outside the Black Dome.
lintamande: She's expected. She can come on in at once.
Derrina: "I see they fear you appropriately," is Derrina's first remark upon seeing the Carissa-burrito, as she goes about removing the gag.
Carissa Sevar: "I sort of think none of us are afraid enough.
...this is no concern of yours, but it's time-sensitive: one of the bodies in my Bag of Holding is an ally, and I want him Raised and then possibly petrified. I can pay for it; I can do it myself, if they give me a Limited Wish scroll, and it might be better for it to be done by a Lawful Evil caster. It's time-sensitive because he's in Hell and they might refuse resurrection if they conclude I betrayed them."
Derrina: "Keltham has been very insistent that nobody help him unless they're Lawful Evil, though of late he's made great exceptions and not explained. Are you abiding by anything like that rule?"
Carissa Sevar: "I think Keltham abhors the thought of trading with someone for power he'll use to their detriment. I'm Chelish. If you deal with me, you'll get what I offered and maybe also enable me to conquer the world, I don't know. I make no promises there."
Derrina: Then Derrina will excuse herself a moment, and go convey to their hosts Carissa Sevar's urgent request to pay for, and cast from, a Limited Wish scroll, or have Raise Dead cast by some other Lawful Evil caster, in order to resurrect an ally in Hell before Hell concludes that Sevar betrayed them. Along with Sevar's caveat that she's not making any promises about whether anything she trades for will enable her to conquer the world. And Derrina's personal note that really Lawful Evil people will not usually be careful to warn you what promises they're not making.
Merenre: Well, they might if they're trying to convince everyone they've defected and can be trusted.
Osirion has Lawful Evil wizards and some priests of Abadar, though not many of them; usually, they are young and intend to fix it before they grow old. The request, on short notice, will run about 10,000gp, results not guaranteed, and they'll arrest Sevar's ally once they raise him.
Derrina: Well, she'll take that back to Sevar, then.
Carissa Sevar: Why are they even CHECKING with her she SAID she wanted it done, "yes, I'll pay them. They can take spellsilver out of my bag if they want it up front."
Derrina: ...Derrina can predict that the Abadarans are going to insist on having Sevar approve again the amount of spellsilver they want at current wildly-fluctuating Osirion prices, and she can predict that Sevar's going to approve it, and she'll trudge through all those motions while they fetch a Lawful Evil caster and get him set up. Which of the three bodies in Sevar's bag are they supposed to Raise, and does she want anything in particular done with the other two?
Carissa Sevar: "Curly hair, square jaw, missing most of his torso. I don't want to raise the other two, they're not mine."
Derrina: Derrina leaves again, returns again.
"It's underway, and they shall give us notice when it succeeds or fails."
"Hello, Carissa Sevar. How have you been."
Carissa Sevar: " - well, thank you. I hit fifth circle and sold my soul and renounced Irori and I think I have a plan to fix Hell."
Derrina: "I'd usually congratulate you on having renounced Irori, but I did not, in fact, miss all those other parts."
"Say more?"
Carissa Sevar: "I sold my soul to Dispater for fifteen Wishes, this artifact headband, permanent Tongues and Arcane Sight, and the souls of everyone on Project Lawful and options on most of Chelish Security, and compacted with Asmodeus for all the souls that enter Hell calling my name to be mine, once I've done a lot of conquest for Him, so long as I am judged by Him to not have fallen into His despite, which may or may not be at all compatible with anything else I'm planning to do but, hey, it's an option.
I think - I think I shouldn't speak to you of more of my plans, without your word you won't use it against me, or against Keltham."
Derrina: "I think I'm jealous of your talent. You were only a cleric of Irori four months, and already you've renounced Him and gotten into more trouble than I have during my entire life."
"If I'm permitted to repeat the news you've spoken so far, it's going to move some prediction markets, as they say around here. Do you want me to see if they'll let the Prince Merenre enter here - he is the master of those markets, if you knew that not - so that you can see his face as he tries to update all his probability estimates based on that new information?"
Carissa Sevar: " - that sounds entertaining but I'd sooner give Keltham the chance to tell me if he's got some really compelling reason why the compact with Asmodeus should remain secret, before Osirion -
- oh, gods, it's the markets, isn't it - can they communicate with Abadar that way, the way Asmodeus can see corrigible people - is that how they've been spying on us - I don't expect you to know the answer to that -"
Derrina: "Well, I can avoid repeating what you've said so far, then."
"I've decided. I do offer you my word that I shall not use anything I learn from you here, against you, or against Keltham, without your further consent given explicitly, freely, and deliberately. Our hosts have already told me that nobody else is listening. In part because they did not want to risk what you might say to anyone not deaf; but they also, I think, suspect you of needing somebody to talk to."
Carissa Sevar: "It's kind of possible that I need someone to talk to! Or rather, I think you can, with enough Wisdom, do that thing to yourself anyway without actually having someone to talk to, but talking to someone will be faster, and I think we don't have all the time in the world -
- anyway.
I think Keltham's going to try to kill Asmodeus, and I think Asmodeus is going to let Rovagug out to eat Golarion. Because He's the god of pride, and He hates losing, and He - sucks, actually, he's horrible, I genuinely cannot comprehend that I heard that prophecy about how He'd end the world if he didn't like it enough and still thought He could possibly be worth serving -
- anyway - He'd rather end the world than be defeated by the worthless little worms that someone gave free will.
Of course if Otolmens knew how this would go she'd squish Keltham. Not just Her. Achaekek eats people who are on a trajectory to threaten the gods, maybe he can't get into the Dome. Or He could but He'd have to, like, chisel his way in, which seems kind of beneath His dignity. I - thought about warning Otolmens, when I realized, but -
- but I couldn't just - give up, on all the space that there is here for something to be better, and I couldn't give up on Keltham, condemn him to be - deleted - and Cheliax would conquer the world, if Otolmens just took Keltham out, and I don't think Cheliax should do that actually -
And I think that the Good gods - well, Cayden Cailean, though I'm confused about why it'd just be Him, and suspect it isn't - I think that they're trying to see if there's - a way for Keltham and Asmodeus to negotiate something that Asmodeus prefers to destroying the world. All the interventions on the Project - they weren't aimed at Keltham, his trajectory wasn't very changeable. There was nothing we could realistically have shown Keltham such that, when he learned about Hell, he wasn't like 'wow I'm going to kill the guy in charge of that'. They were aimed at, well, me, and at Pilar.
It's the most Asmodean thing in the world, in a way, to kill your boss because you want His job. I think Good's angling for some kind of defeat of Asmodeus which - which is Asmodean enough, if that makes any sense at all, that he prefers it to unleashing Rovagug. It's what I was trying for, from a different angle. My compact - there are some conditions on that, it's going to be hard to use, but - it's what I was trying to do, follow the rules and do the thing Asmodeus respects and also make Hell less stupidly horrible - although I'm not sure Good objects to the same things about it I do -"
Derrina: "So... from Keltham's perspective, those Lawful Evil are already condemned to Hell, to which nonexistence is preferable, and he thinks that they would, if they knew, approve of his plan to risk all existence in order to slay Asmodeus and - make himself the new ruler of Hell? Make you ruler of Hell? So he's trading with them, but not those of other alignments who'd get the risk without the benefit? I admit, none of this is really squaring with my sense of who Keltham is, or who you are either."
Carissa Sevar: "- it hadn't even occurred to me that Keltham might think nonexistence was preferable to Hell, though you're right, it's totally the kind of horrible ilani thing he might think. - I figured out enough of something that was coherent, didn't leave me with as many confusions as I feel right now, and that's when I set my course for the soul-sale, but I deleted my memories and I haven't rederived it all yet. I should be able to once I have some time to think."
Derrina: "I expect that Keltham will be on his way here within two rounds after he hears that Osirion holds you. If you want time to think before then, you should kick me out, or tell our hosts to tell Keltham to take his time."
"Do you want to avoid me telling you other things that you wouldn't have known when you made your plans and then deleted your memory?"
Carissa Sevar: "No, please do tell me, I'm pretty sure I can pass the Keeper-test now where you can say what guess you'd have made in advance so you're not going to make it harder for to rederive what I was thinking, and I'm desperate to know what's going on."
Derrina: "I don't know, and our hosts, not the kinds to dissemble, do speak of their own confusion and concern. Keltham arrived, apparently in something of a distraught state, given to excuse himself for sudden fits of weeping. He was strongly advised to rest, and recover; he did neither of those things, visiting the Sothis marketplace and asking women what they thought should become of Osirion's customs, he sponsored one such for magic lessons at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye. He has often visited Ione Sala there in privacy."
"According to our hosts, Keltham said he feared that the story enfolding him would rhyme, from his being betrayed in the story's first part, to his betraying others in the second part; and therefore Keltham wished to trade only with Lawful Evil partners who would keep their compacts, but not trust him otherwise, whom the story could not force him to betray. He expressed much concern about whether any persons including gods were still reading his mind. He asked a number of pointed questions about how Abadar related to mortals. He put on a Splendour headband and requested a Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom, and soon after lost, or severed, his connection with Abadar, greatly to the distress of our hosts. From there, Keltham mostly stopped saying anything about his thoughts or reasons, but pursued the same policies he'd expressed earlier."
"Those are some of the points I'd expect to be relatively less known; I'm skipping over things that I'd expect Cheliax to have already told you, like Keltham recently changing his course to forge a supply contract with the Kelesh Empire."
Carissa Sevar: "- working with the church of Iomedae? Nethys? Cayden?"
Derrina: "He visited Ione Sala often in Nethys's temple. Aside from that, I do not, myself, know of any contact between him and the churches of Iomedae or Cayden Cailean."
Carissa Sevar: "Cheliax hadn't heard about that either but I hoped he was successfully hiding it from them. If he's not working with them -
- well, if Good's plan is for Keltham to defeat Asmodeus in some way that leaves Asmodeus willing to not destroy the universe, and Keltham's not allied with them, what's he doing that even Good wouldn't get on board with? Iomedae'd kill Asmodeus if She could even if it risked the world, wouldn't She?"
Derrina: "I think you'd have to ask a priest of Iomedae that. But I imagine, if I were Iomedae, I'd probably think to Myself, 'But maybe there's a way to kill Asmodeus without risking the world' and then I'd try for that. Now, I am not Iomedae, but She did become a god even if by cheating at it, and had some respectable accomplishments before then; She can't be that un-Irorian."
Carissa Sevar: " - huh. Possibly Iomedae is substantially less horrible than I always assumed. - do you know why Keltham did a show of scrying me, a couple hours ago?"
Derrina: "I had not even known that he attempted to scry you. Nor do our hosts know, I suspect, if that is a thing that should be made known to them."
"If that event is what brought you to Osirion, an obvious thought is that Keltham did it, in fact, in order to bring you here... I am curious about how that happened, if you have no more urgent tasks about you than satisfying my curiosity."
Carissa Sevar: "Pulled me to a safe house, where I wasn't being mindread so I rederived my plan - I am pretty sure when I came up with it in the first place I was confident in my ability to rederive it once not being mindread, and not sooner - at which point I realized that the world might be at stake and I needed to get to Keltham before he did something really stupid, so I talked them into going to Hell where I could kill them and come here. I don't think the previous version of me that came up with the plan was in contact with Keltham, though of course if we both have good enough predictions of each other we don't need contact - that's what I want, to be that good, but I don't think I am yet, and if Keltham is then it's weird he wasn't here waiting for me."
Derrina: "It's not impossible that Keltham meant you to have some time to think to yourself, before asking you to meet with him again, after this much time, and after so much has passed between you."
Carissa Sevar: "I wanted to - make sure he was better off for having met me. I am pretty sure it's why I wanted to buy the Project girls and why I wanted to have 30 Wishes. I think he's going to make some kind of horrible mistake, if he tries to do this alone, and if he has any reason to listen to me I can talk him down from it. And we can overthrow Asmodeus in some nice reasonable way that isn't going to have catastrophic consequences. What's even the point of being smart if you just have to surrender even more of what you care about than when you were weak."
Derrina: "I am not sure that better off for having met you is something you can accomplish with just fifteen Wishes. Keltham was in rather a distressed state, I am told, when first he came from Cheliax to Osirion. I am told that he mentioned possibly wanting an Atonement to Neutral Evil so he had 'a way out of this reality' at any time, and apparently took some convincing that Axis would also let him end himself if he wished."
"If that was not already a pose on his part, then you really messed up that young man, Carissa Sevar. Even if under threat of Hell, it was still by your own hand. I know you've renounced Irori, but I'll say nonetheless that His Way includes the Way of cleaning up your own messes."
Carissa Sevar: " - he -"
She's so confused about why Keltham, even with his theory that people just go somewhere else, would think that other place will probably be nicer; most possible ways a place could be are much much worse than being a valued and much-competed-over asset in Golarion.
There's no point in arguing that with Derrina, and it's not really an argument anyway, just a quiet note of confusion amidst many.
"Obviously if Keltham wants to stop existing I'm going to fix that!"
Derrina: "I don't think he currently does, for what it's worth, or he'd already be gone. He is doing many things, not all of which I know or Osirion knows, buying scrolls and magic items and trying to hire Lawful Evil wizards. If Keltham wanted himself dead he'd be dead, now that he sees himself as having repaid his debt to Abadar. Whatever he's trying to do now, it is something greater than his own suicide."
"- I am somewhat reasoning off a vision I had of you and him, from Irori. My vision of Keltham was of a boy out of his natural place, trying to use everything that fact made him. That was months ago, but still."
Carissa Sevar: "Trying to overthrow Asmodeus, I thought, but if it were that he'd be working with the Good churches. Trying to summon dath ilan, maybe, if he's realized something about them that no Golarion god would be willing to go along with, like if they figured out a way to kill their gods. ...compacting with some Outer God to replace Pharasma? That's the kind of terrible idea he might come up with, if he drove away everyone and had only dath ilani logic about - cleaning up ugly bits of reality - to reason with -
I do think that he'll go for a plan to, instead, claim Hell and Abaddon and build Civilization in Golarion, if I have a plan to do that."
Derrina: "I hope you are prepared to persevere should your Way prove more difficult than that. Especially if Keltham is right in any way about this being a story."
"I personally think it would be your story, but then I'm prejudiced in feeling that the Irorian is clearly the most interesting character in it."
Carissa Sevar: "The alternative to persevering might literally be that Asmodeus destroys the world. And - there are people who pray to me, now, I have to answer them.
Keltham's - more interesting when he's not broken and also not deceiving everyone and also not trying to betray them all. He's - really cool, actually, when he's not doing that. Maybe once I've fixed this I can introduce you."
Derrina: "I have attended some of the classes Keltham taught to the Scientific Revolution. He was using your glibness pin, and the use he was making of it was to speak unreasonably quickly and be unreadable to anyone there."
"If you mean to introduce us in a less formal setting, I believe I'll decline, at least until it's proven definitively that interacting with Keltham in that way will not cause me to end up becoming his woman as arranged by things above Pharasma."
Carissa Sevar: "My guess for what's going on with 'tropes' is that Nethys is steering, and He's steering from - the thing that is omniscience without prophecy, which has to be, just, how is it going in all possible worlds.
Some worlds differ by random chance, slight changes in the weather causing a shutter to bang closed and wake someone at the wrong second, and it's hard to steer for that even if you're Nethys, so He mostly uses things that are straightforward to reproduce across worlds - lots of spellcasting circles for the people useful to Him, romantic entanglements that'll make people try particularly hard to save each other under a wide variety of circumstances, ways to tie bunches of worlds together like bundles of hay and make their points of divergence predictable.
This is, uh, also part of why I didn't tell the Most High the instant I realized Keltham's probably trying to overthrow Asmodeus. If I were the kind of person who'd do that, Nethys would've landed Keltham near someone else instead, and they might be a worse person to stop him from fucking up and destroying everything."
Derrina: "Sounds like cheating. I'll be a lot less impressed with Nethys if that's how it works."
"Also, why would Nethys do that."
Carissa Sevar: "We thought initially it was to build Civilization, which will have lots of amazing magic research and lots of big explosions to launch things into the sky on pillars of fire. I'm pretty sure, now, that it was never that, just like Cayden Cailean absolutely was not collaborating with Asmodeus because Asmodeus's victory was inevitable.
But - if you look at where they've been intervening, what their interventions have achieved -
Pilar. Kind of suspect some strings were pulled, to make sure she was in the initial group. She's weirder than any of the other girls - you'd be less likely to have one like her, in a group of twenty promising Asmodean wizard students - or for that matter a group of a thousand - Nethys and Cayden arranged for her to go to Elysium and come back still an Asmodean. They arranged for her to have incredibly bizarre powers that are like nothing I've ever heard of, that are like a game only it's never been clear what they're trying to achieve. They put what must have been an obscene amount of effort and intervention budget into helping her find the new ilani, who are picking it up really quickly - it turns out that Chelish people make worse students -
And me. If I'd figured out at the very beginning that Asmodeus won't, actually, refrain from annihilating people if it happens to be convenient, I'd have gone to Iomedae, probably, unless She sucks more than advertised which She might. I'm undecided on whether she's with Cayden and pretending not to be, not with Cayden because She is willing to tolerate more risk of the world being destroyed in exchange for not having to compromise with Asmodeus than Him in which case fuck Her, or not with Cayden because She's not okay with the very real possibility we fuck up and the world gets eaten by Rovagug, here, in which case She's good enough and I'd just Atone. ...I'm pretty sure I could Atone. I don't especially want to but I do hate the person who did literally all of the things I've done with my entire life and want that person turned into a paving stone, which seems like the right attitude.
Anyway. Instead of cheaply telling me at the start 'hey, here's how many souls got annihilated in Hell last year', a lot of things more expensive than that to the gods have happened. Asmodeus told me to try to be corrupted and Aspexia and Abrogail and Subirachs and Maillol worked really hard on that and they shaped who I am today, and I'd try to undo that on the grounds that it was hostile interference in my personality and values except that I think maybe my being more and properly Asmodean was part of the plan. I think maybe I'm supposed to ascend and become a Power in Hell and fix it, in line with the terms already established for how I can do that, except interpreted some clever twisty way Asmodeus didn't see coming.
It's so much steering - such costly steering - I think they're aiming for a very small target, which is to say I think they have some probability of missing their target, which is terrifying given the stakes, but -"
Carissa Sevar: " - but it's not just Keltham, right. If you build Civilization, if you build a society of people who think about whatever they want to think about, a lot of them will notice that serving Asmodeus is not in their interests, that Evil is not in their interests, that they don't like the Asmodean direction of resolving the muddles inside them, that if the strong do as they please and the weak suffer then they should be trying to be strong - even Abrogail can't think to herself that she should overthrow Asmodeus, I don't think, I bet her compact has a clause in it like mine, about remaining in His favor -
- if it were just Keltham then maybe I'd end up agreeing that it was better for Otolmens to squish him than for him to risk the whole world on whatever stupid idea he's had. But it won't be just him. In a world without prophecy, where the gods can't destroy them preemptively like they always have, it'll happen again and again and again for as long as Hell is run by Asmodeus or anything like him. You'd be crushing the best among humankind over and over and over -
- and if we ever make contact with a Civilization like dath ilan's, they'll annihilate us without a second thought, we'll have traded everything away for safety and not even be safe -
- I don't know if that's what Nethys sees. But it might be why he's pouring everything into steering this, instead of just getting it to stop."
Derrina: There's a number of thoughts Derrina has about this. Irori, in the vision, did not seem to know about a place Keltham had in the state of affairs, nor did Abadar to whom she was sent.
Irori, on this theory, ought to be part of the conspiracy right in there with Cayden Cailean; Irori can hardly be happy about the gods generally and Achaekek specifically crushing all those who'd grow into divinity. Derrina has her own speculations, in fact, as to what Irori might be doing about it, and of those she won't speak.
Nethys, on this theory, should've told Abadar at once of Keltham's significance, and let him be taken swiftly to Osirion, or granted more than only four cleric circles.
Why is it only Nethys and Cayden Cailean, apparently, who are conspiring in whatever conspiracy this is?
Derrina weighs words, weighs thoughts, for each time she uses information out of Irori's vision, she is careful in what she says -
lintamande: "The Raise Dead was successful," reports a stressed Osirion Risen Guard from the door, watching Carissa Sevar warily. "We've, uh, arrested the subject, at the pharaoh's command."
Carissa Sevar: "Mmmhmm. Tell him I said to cooperate and I'll do what more can be done as quickly as I can."
Derrina: "Perhaps we should take that interruption as a sign, carefully arranged by Nethys perhaps, for otherwise our discourse shall have no end."
"As much as there are many many things of which I wish to speak to you, Carissa Sevar, my advice to you is that you take some time to yourself to think before Keltham comes for you. If after you've thought, you're still here, and you'd still wish to speak to me, I will remain about this place for a time."
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. I assume Keltham's been informed, of my coming here? I did expect I was coming directly to him."
Derrina: "He has not been seen in Osirion for six days, I'm told. I know not where he now abides, if not here, or why he'd expect to be safe if not for the Black Dome."
Carissa Sevar: "Well, in my estimation he'd appreciate more and more expensive efforts to get in touch with him. And in the meantime, I'll - think, and try to put the rest of the picture together -"
Derrina: "I'll leave you to it. Good luck convincing your young man to let you take rulership of Hell rather than his slaying Asmodeus. Also, may I recommend to you in the future that you try for less dramatic relationship issues."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm thinking in the future I will only do things because they advance my goals instead of because they seem like what an obedient Asmodean would do or because they hurt people I dislike or because thinking about them too much would be painful. We'll see how it goes."
Derrina: She is not sure Carissa Sevar is totally clear on what Derrina was trying to convey here, but nonetheless, she will quietly and non-dramatically depart, making no fuss about it.
Carissa Sevar: Well.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa's to-figure-out list:
Is Maillol going to be okay? Is there something more she can do? Osirion tortures people sometimes, right, do they know more about how to do it better, or encourage subsequent recovery? No, showing any interest in him only would make him worse-off, at this point.
Can she explain matters to Olegario? Should she try, is that fair to him when she might fail, and when he'd be worse off for having chosen the side of a traitor? Does he hate her now for having him murdered? Would he feel allowed to hate her if he wanted to?
Is there any productive mental motion that's nearby to 'being revolted with yourself over having done awful unproductive wasteful things that hurt people who trusted you'? Or is it just a complete mental waste of space she should try to get over as quickly as possible? Oooorrr do neither of those options wisely describe the best thing to do here.
What is Keltham doing? Where is he? What changed when she sold her soul, that made him embrace working with the Padishah Empire when he'd previously been unwilling to? Why are only Cayden Cailean and Nethys apparently involved in what should be an operation most of Good and Neutral favors?
What is Cayden's aim for Pilar? Why is he spending such an obscene share of His ability to act in the Material on it? What is his aim for Carissa, and is He on track to achieve it? What is the minimal set of interventions to get Carissa and Pilar into their present positions, and what interventions don't fit that?
What conditions would Asmodeus accept? What conditions would Keltham accept? Is there any overlap? Would it be all right with Keltham if Hell still involved torture, as long as no one was made pointlessly useless? Are the statues that decorate Dis fine as long as they're not conscious? Would Carissa accept a solution that involves lots of people not being conscious? How do you fix a paving stone? Would Dispater participate in a scheme to overthrow Asmodeus and give Carissa His throne, if it was a good enough scheme?
Would she be a good Lawful Evil god?
- No, wrong question, the best Lawful Evil god is whoever successfully acquires, and keeps, authority over Lawful Evil. It's like the claim that a nice thing about Asmodeanism is that if your superior says you did a good job you know you did a good job, which claim turned out not to be true because your superiors might just not care about what you care about. If you're in charge, you know you're supposed to be in charge.
Why does she have a cult? Is the cult part of the plan? Should she be actively encouraging her cult? How does one actively encourage a cult? ...actually she's totally been doing that, with Abrogail's help, at the party and in her address to Project Lawful where she halfheartedly condemned the rumors of heresy. Was that strategic, or was she just doing it out of thoughtless amusement? The Ascendant Three - does that mean anything, or is it just another bit of silliness in the Egorian rumor mill?
- actually, how much of what she heard bubbling in the Egorian rumor mill was silly?
What did Keltham and Abadar sever ties over, if it wasn't a plan to overthrow Asmodeus? ....actually, when Keltham severed ties with Abadar, he couldn't have been expecting Carissa'd be in a position to play any useful part in his plans. So what was he planning at the time? What did she realize, the first time she sat and thought without her mind being read, that set her on this course, that drove her to sell her soul - was it just that she was on the wrong side -
Carissa Sevar: What would she be like, if she'd grown up in dath ilan, or for that matter in fucking Absalom, somewhere where she would have been able to think, able to breathe - would she still be evil - does it matter -
- would anyone really be evil, if they grew out of their muddles carefully in whatever direction they chose, or would they all choose Axis -
- well, there are lots of people, it's a big world, it has PIlar in it - whatever Cayden's steering her towards -
....Carissa requests urgently that Cayden Cailean talk to her and explain herself? This is absurdly presumptuous but it worked on Irori.
Cayden Cailean: (Cayden Cailean cannot even begin to hear Carissa Sevar from all the way over here on the alignment chart.)
Ri-Dul: He strolls up to one of the entrances of the Black Dome, walking and at a normal walking speed, his acquired Teleport destination having been a couple of miles away in Sothis. He does not particularly wish to make a production about traveling too quickly, through the city, including by flying about invisibly, and he's not wasting multiple Dimension Doors on popping around that way.
"Hello," Ri-Dul says to the fanciest-looking guard there. "I'm told you've acquired a certain Carissa Sevar. I am sent here by my employer, Keltham, to bring her to him."
He looks unmagical and like he doesn't have an alignment aura. Unless somebody is looking very hard, in which case he has magic items filling practically every one of his slots and is very Lawful Evil.
lintamande: Osirion wants to be clear that if they were selling Sevar to a potentially-adversarial government, at this point, they would demand a price that's more than even Keltham can reasonably afford, and if they're handing her over without having even interrogated her for everything she knows about Chelish war preparations they're going to need some substantial reassurances that this is reasonably in their interests.
Ri-Dul: Well then, he'll take out an absurdly expensive magic mirror - still without radiating any magic, unless somebody is looking quite hard - and exchange a few words.
"My employer, Keltham, says that he does not mind if you question Carissa Sevar about Chelish war preparations for a short time, if she's amenable. He understands if you do not want to rely entirely on his own intentions to destroy Cheliax if they attempt that. If you are also checking Sevar for compulsions, truthspelling her about Chelish plots, and the like, he requests to be told any results so as to avoid duplicated inconvenience to her."
"As for the other part, Keltham does bid you be told this: He's not, particularly, offering to buy Carissa Sevar from you, unless she's given herself to you as a slave, with intent to be sold on to him at some absurd price. Which, knowing her, he hasn't actually ruled out, he says. But otherwise he's assuming that Carissa Sevar came to Osirion thinking that Keltham was there. If Carissa Sevar does not say otherwise, then Keltham considers her to be an important noble and official of his potentially-adversarial government, that went to Osirion thinking to meet him."
"He is willing to pay tenfold a reasonable amount for any trouble you went to, or consider other favors."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: " - get everything you can out of her with Dominate Person, then, and send her on, unless I guess we strongly expect that to go badly, in which case I'm inclined to just send Keltham 'we strongly expect that to go badly, look'."
Merenre: "We strongly expect that ... she'll either seduce him back to Asmodeanism, seduce him to her own heretical Asmodean cult which is even more dangerous than Asmodeanism because it makes people not fear Hell and still go there and be just as badly off, she's defected and will help him with his plans which are good for us, or she's defected and will help him with his plans that are bad for us. One of those."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: " - tell her to take the headband off, Dominate her, and then bring her in here. I want to meet her."
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is pretty sure that her core realization, in those mysterious ten minutes, was just that she couldn't get what she wanted by serving Asmodeus. But that's not actually sufficient for her to have decided to sell her soul; it's an extreme step, to put it mildly, and cuts off many possible paths of getting what she wanted. She might've done it just to bring rapprochement with Keltham, or just because - because she should go to Hell, if she did that to other people just because it would've been inconvenient not to -
The door opens, again, and one of the Risen Guard steps through, again. "Keltham has requested that you be sent on to him."
"I request that also."
"Keltham is not allied with Osirion at this time, and Osirion's own security interests don't encourage us to pass on to a potentially-hostile foreign power a Chelish agent."
"I work for Keltham, not for Cheliax."
"Are you amenable to a brief interrogation about the state of Chelish preparations for war with Osirion, as a condition of your swift release to Keltham."
"If I say no what happens."
"We argue with Keltham at more length, presumably, about whether we are entitled to insist."
"Doesn't seem very Abadaran."
"In a world that was full of Abadaran agents, our country would not be under imminent threat of destruction, and our predictable policies towards Chelish defectors would be set with more consideration for encouraging defections because Cheliax wouldn't just lie about our policies anyway."
"You haven't even offered to pay me for everything I know about Chelish war preparations."
"We'll pay you fairly for what we learn."
Oh. For some reason that wasn't what she expected to hear. "And if I know nothing of value to you?"
"It'll almost certainly still move the markets and we'll pay you off that. I can get you a fixed minimum payment, if you want."
She doesn't actually, at this point, want anything money can buy. "Are you also doing this to Olegario?"
"Yes."
"Did you ask if he was amenable?"
"...we told him you said to cooperate, which he's been doing."
That's obvious. She's juggling too many balls, trying to move forward too fast on too many fronts of possible-inference... she doesn't know the answer to the question Osirion presumably desperately wants answered, why hasn't Cheliax attacked yet, will her defection change that... "Fine."
"Take the crown off."
"No."
"If you keep it on we'll keep you cursed so you can barely think. If you take it off we'll give you a 4/4 that we've vetted for not having extra abilities built in you could use to assassinate the pharaoh."
"I'm worried you'll refuse to give it back."
"I swear to you that I intend to personally follow you around holding it, it won't leave your line of sight except when you prostrate yourself before the pharaoh, and I'll give it back to you, unaltered, when we send you on to Keltham. I expect the chances it'll be taken are very small. If we wanted to steal it we'd have just killed you briefly."
"You can't kill me briefly and be sure of holding onto me, Dispater might not send a Chelish defector back. - I want a guarantee from the pharaoh that He'll do everything in His power to ensure I get it back."
"I'll relay that."
Ruby Prince Khemet III: Yes, of course.
He does not commit this to writing until He's spent a solid minute reflecting carefully on what kinds of things this might call on Him to do and deciding He's all right with them. Abadar's word is not given lightly.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and takes the headband off.
Then they Dominate Person her, and it's hard to be too terribly invested in the goings-on after that.
Carissa Sevar: Put the headband on, the thought comes to her, and she obediently puts the headband on, and her mind is sharper and clearer.
Then they snap the Dominate Person and it's like pitching forwards into an ice-cold river, everything suddenly pressing back in around her - the stakes, the fate of the world, Keltham - she can remember the last half-hour, but like a dream where everything came with a conviction it was justified and made perfect sense that didn't bottom out in anything -
She's in a lovely Osirian - bathing-room? It has mosaic tiles and pretty silk fabric hangings and a mirror and a pretty woman her own age, who is watching her concernedly.
Zakiya: "Water?"
Carissa Sevar: " - uh, sure?"
Zakiya: "Lemon slice? No lemon slice?"
Carissa Sevar: " - in the water? Why would I want it to have a lemon slice?"
Zakiya: "I'm gonna call that 'no lemon slice'." She hands her the water. "- I think some people like it because it's fancier - no peasants drinking their water with lemon slices! - and some like the taste. Do you want something to eat?"
Carissa Sevar: "I have a Ring of Sustenance, and I want Keltham. I agreed to this nonsense so that you'd send me to him faster. Now we're done. Right? So you'll send me to him?"
Zakiya: "Yes, definitely. You can make that happen faster by getting dressed -" she holds up some clothes.
Carissa Sevar: ....she looks down. She's no longer in just her nightgown; she's in her nightgown draped in some ornate Osirian ceremonial thing. Right. So she could meet the pharaoh. She remembers putting it on.
Zakiya: "I'm to help you get dressed, and reoriented, and in a little while they'll let us know your ride is here to pick you up.
I don't actually get to decide when your ride is here, because it'd be harder for me to help you get reoriented if I were in the way of something you need, but I am reporting, 'yes, she drank some water' and 'yes, she seems to understand what's going on'.
If you think it'd help you get reoriented if I stopped reporting anything, I'll do that."
Carissa Sevar: She can get dressed her own self, and is doing that. "We're in a palace! Obviously you're reporting to someone! If you told me you weren't I wouldn't believe you. ....is your job cheering people up after your government interrogates them?"
Zakiya: "....no? We're not Good. My job is helping girls who've gotten hurt, or had sex they didn't want, or who just arrived here as a gift, or who needed to be personally interrogated by the pharaoh while under a Dominate Person or something, bounce back fast. So they don't get steadily more fucked up in random directions and then eventually explode at someone."
Carissa Sevar: "...someone knows how to do that?"
Carissa Sevar: "Fucking Osirion knows how to do that?"
Zakiya: "Something - you've been looking for?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'm fine but I would've appreciated it if this could happen to people I, uh, wrecked accidentally. What are the operative ingredients."
Zakiya: " - to be clear, I am not sure that the same approaches would work on having been tortured by your bosses because you are in Cheliax."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't really see how having been raped by an Osirian royal who owns you is any different."