Perhaps Pilar will in due time come to understand that this giant ballroom is only a pale substitute for the things that would make for a truly great party.

Perhaps Pilar will check whether this curse follows her into Hell.

Oh my!  It looks like that person over there doesn't think his country will accept him back, now that his cover has been blown so embarrassingly, and the Chelish Security talking to him is having a hard time being appropriately sympathetic.

Pilar needs to go over and make it clear that when Cheliax sends him home, it doesn't have to be his old house that he goes to, if that place isn't home anymore.

Pilar's curse is very fucking lucky that it has greatly served Lord Asmodeus's purposes - this had all better actually serve Asmodeus's purposes - and also lucky that it doesn't have a face to punch.

Pilar.  In advance of a full review of the day's events, you may be graded as generally well done.

That is good to hear, Grand High Priestess.

Any brief questions?

There is something that she wants, but Pilar is not sure if it's an inappropriate desire to be rewarded, or if it is the case that for her to have this thing would serve Lord Asmodeus's interests.

Speak, child.

Pilar would like someone to hurt her enough to require a Regenerate spell afterwards.  Other uses of her appreciated but optional.  And maybe a Nap Stack so she doesn't sleep too far in, after staying up that late.

This might serve Lord Asmodeus if it causes her to be in better condition for her real work tomorrow, after literally the most stressful day of her entire life, or it might be just -

High Priestess Jacint Subirachs shall be waiting for you as soon as you get to your proper dwellings, child.  Lord Asmodeus does not desire that his servants never receive what they might possibly see as rewards.  The Grand High Priestess's robes would not be so fine and expensive, if that was how Asmodeanism worked.  It is simply that such are arbitrary or useful gifts from above, and never earned or deserved from below.

PL-timeline marker:  Day 4 / End.

Cayden. 

What are you doing?

Just to check, is this about the oracle Nethys had me appoint?  Nethys suggested you'd be likely to ping me about that a few days later.

Nethys must have anticipated that your oracle would go around destroying My intelligence apparatus in Cheliax. Did you anticipate this also.

Cayden Cailean shows Her a flash of memory; it is legible that this flash is true as this facet of Cayden remembers it.

: Nethys pings Cayden Cailean.
: Cayden Cailean responds; connection established.
: Nethys offers to pay the energy cost though not the intervention cost of bestowing four oracle levels on a Chelish girl who's otherwise about to sell her soul, and also, to help out with some of the fine programming on the oracle's curse that will result.
: Cayden Cailean says WHAT.
: Nethys renders legible that this fragment of Nethys believes this intervention will be, on net, at least this [exact quantity censored] beneficial to Cayden's interests, after taking into account the intervention-payment.  Though Cayden has hardly used any of His intervention budget over the last hundred years, anyways.
: Cayden Cailean says that's not what Cayden Cailean was asking.  Also how does any Chelish oracle of Cayden Cailean end up that beneficial to His interests.  What's this Chelish mortal going to do, throw huge parties that get everyone in Cheliax too drunk to be evil?
: Nethys could explain how, but then Cayden would have to promise not to explain any of that information to any other gods.  Like Iomedae, for example.

(Fragment ends.)

Well here is Iomedae's estimate of how much damage to Her interests has been caused by Cayden's oracle in the last day alone. Here's some supporting detail. Maybe Cayden should pay Iomedae for that, and if later it turns out that this served Her interests She will pay him back.

Has Iomedae noticed the part where Cayden Cailean is now fairly exhausted from, among other things, fighting Zon-Kuthon.  Who coincidentally got sealed recently, into a vault of which Iomedae holds the key.  In an incident where Cayden Cailean's Nethys-targeted oracle was, at the very least, on-site.

Sure, one of the circumstances under which She'd pay Him back is if it turns out His oracle had something to do with Zon-Kuthon getting locked away, and that this is worth the costs of whatever the fuck the oracle is successfully doing to damage the interests of Good in Cheliax. 

Iomedae does not think Nethys is serving Good, here, and Iomedae does not think Cayden Cailean is very smart.

Perhaps Nethys does not think Iomedae is very well-informed.

And evidently Nethys doesn't think that for Iomedae to be better-informed would well serve whatever Nethys is currently doing, which on net has been promised to be beneficial to the interests of Cayden Cailean, whose aforesaid interests do, in fact, include Good.

Perhaps Cayden Cailean's notion of Good is not always the same concept of Good as Iomedae's.  But that concept does, in fact, take into account matters like starving peasants and children trained to hurt other children and good people Maledicted into a Hell that even the bad people don't deserve.  Cayden Cailean in his mortal life may not have thought about it much, but when he thought about it, he would have nodded that, yes, that is probably bad; and that was before He became a god of, among other things, Good.

There is little that Cayden Cailean can usually do about those interests at all efficiently, given His actual domain, and so He usually doesn't like to think about it.  But He reminds Iomedae that those much of Her interests are also His.  If for once in His existence there's something that can be done about that by empowering a Chelish girl to throw better parties, Cayden Cailean is not going to turn away.

Perhaps in Iomedae's view Zon-Kuthon was an important long-term counterbalance to Asmodeus.  In Cayden's view, Nidal was a horror exceeding even that of Cheliax and one that had lasted far longer.  The two of Them may both acknowledge the points of the other, there, and yet attach different weights to them.  That the net effects of His appointed oracle probably had something to do with the downfall of Nidal may, indeed, mean that Cayden Cailean and Iomedae simply have different views of how much Nethys's intervention has already served Good, because they have different views of what was Good, there.

Iomedae expects that their values differences are real, but small, and still places more weight on the bulk of their disagreements being because Cayden Cailean is a moron (literally: because the actions Cayden Cailean is taking in pursuit of His values are suboptimal due to resource constraints Iomedae is less subject to).

Iomedae observes that, unlike Cayden Cailean, She is a Lawful god, which means, at the core, that legibility is cheaper to Her and that the way She splits Her cognition enables more complex commitments, at some expense in other exploratory abilities in Her architecture because nothing comes free. Iomedae observes that information beneficial to the interests of Cayden Cailean is probably information She would pay for, unless something is very strange.  Such as Nethys having figured out how to feed parts of him information that make them convinced of things the whole of Him does not believe, and how to let those parts make themselves legible to other gods, persuasively so. 

It could be something that sits in their very real values difference; something that Cayden Cailean is barely in favor of but which involves the total destruction of Iomedae and all Her followers and which therefore She is barely against. (If it were otherwise very good by Cayden's standards She, too, would favor it and work towards it; She doesn't think the values difference is very large.)

Right now, the state of affairs is that Iomedae is being treated adversarially - with Cayden expending resources to reduce her access to resources - in the service of a Nethys plan. This is plainly wasteful. For one example, they could just have Cayden tell Her 'hey, I would have acted as so to reduce Your resource access' and have Iomedae stop using those resources, conserving overall resources for Good, with the benefits thereby split. Maybe, Cayden could just stop that, and try not expending the resources of Good against fellow forces of Good, and get Himself together to think about what shape of commitment from Iomedae would enable that.

It all comes down to trust, doesn't it, now that prophecy has been shattered over even the shortest timescales.

Trust, or rather the lack of it, is the reason why the gods had to fight Zon-Kuthon to get Him to enter the vault - rather than Zon-Kuthon simply calculating that His interests would be better served by going quietly into imprisonment in exchange for a payment, as He did long ago when Abadar bribed Him to go into an exile that should have lasted longer than it did.

Zon-Kuthon in particular, being Void-touched and not something that other gods dare to look at too closely, could not simply have provided Them all with His estimate of how much damage He could do, and go legible around that estimate, and have that be believable.  And so They all had to fight it out, for a day, to learn how much damage Zon-Kuthon could really do, and show Zon-Kuthon how much damage They could really do to Him, before in the end, the vault door could be closed on Him.

Of course, Nethys could have told Them all fairly precisely how much damage Zon-Kuthon would actually be able to do, and told Zon-Kuthon the converse.

A pity, then, that so many gods see Nethys as scarcely any more trustworthy than Zon-Kuthon.  Especially, of course, those gods who never were human, whom Nethys has more than small reason to dislike.

Cayden Cailean actually thinks Nethys is a pretty cool god, personally.  This opinion hasn't really moved downwards since Nethys told Cayden Cailean to put an oracle somewhere and then Zon-Kuthon attacked her location and then Zon-Kuthon got sealed and now Nidal's endless horror is ending at last.

If one is to go around being very logical about such matters, and proving that there's never any point in playing out a conflict, how about if Iomedae updates Her trust in Nethys to match Cayden Cailean's, so that She and Cayden Cailean don't have a persistent disagreement about that?

Iomedae agrees that the persistent disagreement speaks to the poor reasoning ability of at least one of them.

Or, perhaps, different parties perceiving Nethys as having different incentives in what He reveals, incentives that would themselves shift as information becomes more widely shared instead of private.  Among the reasons why Cayden Cailean trusts the information He did receive from Nethys is that Cayden Cailean isn't allowed to show it to Iomedae, meaning that Nethys was not incentivized to distort that information in a way that would persuade Iomedae.

Not that They'd all have this problem if They all knew exactly how Nethys worked; rather than, as is actually the case, it being the other way around.

Iomedae predicts that a lot more people are going to go to Hell because of Cayden's tampering in Cheliax. She intends, for as long as Cayden continues wasting resources on opposing Her, to waste further resources figuring out some specific people this is true of and telling Him about them. Or they could both stop wasting resources! Either way works!