Character Name: Carissa Sevar      Alignment: Lawful Evil.         Character Level: 7*       Deity: Asmodeus        Homeland: Cheliax         Class: Wizard*          School: Universalist (subschool: Arcane Crafter)    Languages: Chelish Taldane (native), Infernal (not fluent)

STR 8
CON 10
DEX 10
INT 22 (18)
WIS 14
CHA 15

Magic Items:

Armillary amulet, headband of vast intelligence +4

Skills:

Spellcraft +23, +27 when producing magic arms and armor, further +5 from armillary amulet, Bluff +16, Knowledge(Arcana) +16, Appraise +13, Sense Motive +12, Knowledge(Religion) +12, Knowledge(nobility) +11, Knowledge(local) +11, Knowledge(planes) +11, Knowledge(geography) +10, Diplomacy +9, Knowledge(history) lol 

Feats:

magical aptitude
eschew materials
craft wondrous items
craft magic arms and armor
skill focus: spellcraft
skill focus: bluff

Arcane Discovery:

Arcane Builder

Traits:

theoretical magician
convincing liar
suspicious
empty mask

(*)  Stealth Cleric:  Your character has somehow ended up the cleric of some god, without knowing this about theirself, and their god is laying low.  They do not receive cleric spells or orisons or domains and cannot channel, until either their god wills it so, or your character discovers their nature and succeeds in using it.  Effects on alignment auras are halved.

PL-log:  Subevent 1 of PL-incident Even She Doesn't Know It

Time:  Day 4 / midday

See also:  Subevent 12 of PL-incident Wrong Genre Savvy Is Contagious Via Mindreading

Notes:  PL-subject #1 is outside Otolmens Containment Zone while event occurs

Epistemic status:  Reconstructed by back-inference from cumulative later observation Nethys is still here, Nethys is still everywhere, Nethys is just not together enough to socialize with other gods

Irori, in His godhood as in his mortality, is not the kind of martial artist who goes around cleaning up others' messes; he is the kind who cleans up his own.  He is Lawful Neutral, not Lawful Good.

This is how Irori was in life:

A starving beggar girl is not his own doing, and he may walk on past her without qualm.

If the starving girl begs a gold coin from him, and perchance he gives it to her, and later she is beaten and killed for it, that is also not his concern; she made her own choice to ask.  She was too young to know what she did?  What of it?  All mortals are too young in the end.

If the starving girl begs a copper from him, and instead he foolishly gives her a ruby he feels he has not himself properly earned, thinking mainly of the consequences to himself but not to her, and this starts a chain of events in which the girl is kidnapped by a criminal king and interrogated to find where the ruby came from - then there will be one less criminal king in that city before the next day's dawn.  Even if he is young enough, back then, for that to be a dangerous fight, he goes to it without hesitation.  It is not that he is protective; it is that he is responsible.

In godhood Irori cannot afford to be so strict with Himself.  His actions affect too much for too many.  But Irori is still the god who grew out of that mortal - not by being ascended, but by doing it all the hard way.

A soul that Irori marked for His attention is now calling out to Him, in her hour of trouble and despair.

It is very rare for Irori to intervene, in a case like that.  He would not often do so even if He could do it costlessly.  To protect mortals from trials is not Irori's Way.

And yet Irori does notice, and investigates, and not only because of the Otolmens connection.  For any mortal otherwise strong enough to interest Him, it ought to take extreme conditions to drive her into a state of such utter frantic determination.

This mortal did not ask for Him to meddle in her life, whether by bargaining with Asmodeus or otherwise.  Has she come to some greatly ill fate that is His own doing?

Even if so, as a god facing a god's choices, Irori probably cannot afford to do anything about it.  Probably all He can do is contemplate His own failure and consider how to do better next time.

But it is impossible that He would not want to know.

Irori cannot easily see much of the mortal realm, aside from the contents of certain determinations and aspirations among those sufficiently already aligned to His ways.  He is looking at minds facing in His own direction.  Flesh and stone are shadows.  Blurry shadows, not legible ones.  He can tell the mortal is in the Imperial palace in Egorian in Cheliax; little more.

The mortal in whose life He meddled thinks that she is facing total extinction, it is the one thing she fears above everything else, and to think one more thought is all of her desire.  She is striving with all all all that is inside her, to avoid that one fate, to continue.  She is in pain.  Another is about her, though Irori cannot well see that one, a being of powerful magic.

That's statistically improbable, to be something that would have happened to the mortal regardless, if Irori's meddling had any effect on her life at all.

...and it is a little extreme as an ill fate of His own doing, to make no effort at all to clean up.

Of what is she afraid, more specifically?  Most mortal fears are hard for Irori to see, but this fear drives her so, drives her even to try to change herself and her way of thinking.

The mortal is afraid of being a statue with runes carved on her, buried where no one will ever find her, trapped until the ultimate destruction of the world.

All right then.  He can take responsibility for this mess of His making, without too much cost.

If this mortal becomes His cleric, Irori will be able to find her again in time.  Eventually He will get around to questing some powerful caster pledged to Him, to bring her forth.  When?  Whenever that becomes convenient to Him.  It may be a hundred years, five hundred, it matters not to a statue.  If the mortal then must leave all she knew behind her, and begin again, well, one must overcome such challenges along the Way.

But Irori should not make her His knowing cleric.  She is near something more than powerful enough to read her mind, and see the knowledge in her if she knows; or maybe just notice by normal means, if she stops being so afraid.  And then this other being will, say, planeshift the mortal into Abaddon instead; or attempt to torment her into giving up Irori.  He does not wish to make the mortal's situation worse again; this would indicate His failure to learn from experience.

The conditions for forming a stealth cleric are rare, both intrinsically and by compact.  Gods cannot go about stealth-clericing whomsoever they please.

By compact, to make any cleric, they must have called out to You, or to a predicate that includes You not too broadly.  The natures of god and mortal must be sufficiently aligned, as always for clerics; the only possible exception is your oracle, if you are foolish enough to have one of those, rather than zero.

And improbably:  The pressure of a god upon a mortal's soul, impressing clerichood into it, is usually very detectable to mortals even if you try to be slow and gentle about it.  Even if it is not a revelation in glory, it's there, and the mortal might be suspicious of what had just occurred.  Especially if they'd just prayed for aid.

To create a stealth cleric, she must be extremely distracted while that is happening.

But these strange conditions are met.  And so, like trying to kiss a kitten's forehead softly enough not to wake it, Irori presses himself into Carissa Sevar but gently, not opening yet the new channels whose outlines are traced into her, only forging the connection leading back to Him.

So now Carissa Sevar is, as most other gods would see it, something of Irori's, though she knows it not.

The thought does not occur to Irori at all, to message Asmodeus claiming victory in a contest that Asmodeus might conceive to Himself to have begun.  The Way is to succeed at what you set your hand to, to win, not to have others acknowledge that you have won.

Carissa Sevar's progress along her Way is all that is meaningful.  Whether she calls Asmodeus Lord for a time is not relevant, except insofar as how that changes her Way, or speeds her progress on it.  If there were any victory to be won here, it would belong to the mortal and not to Irori; for her Way is not the Way of Irori but the Way of Carissa Sevar.

And also if there were any such contest, it would not yet be over, for Carissa Sevar's existence will not end this day.

Then Irori goes upon His way, for many other matters call Him, and He does not have time to wait around watching a statue be levitated and floated away.

...to, as it turns out, an aftercare chamber.

One really can't blame Irori for not especially guessing that this would be the case.  He was not, in mortal life, the kind of martial artist who gets way into that sort of thing.

Irori definitely isn't expecting the incredibly annoyed call that He gets from Otolmens a few hours later.

 Osirion's highest ranking spy in Cheliax is not a very flappable person, as one might imagine from the job description, but he looks nervous at present.

       "Do you think the world is going to end?" Prince Merenre, sixth circle cleric of Abadar and heir presumptive to the pharaoh, asks him tiredly, looking up from the report. 

"....in truth, your highness, in cases like this, I don't deal in what's actually going to happen, just what people are saying."

      "Ah huh. Do you have plans to spend the next couple of months in Aktun."

"....yes, I do, your highness. Though that's partially because of possibilities less serious than the destruction of the world, and - obviously if my duties require me -"

      "I'm not sure I can afford to pay you enough to stay," Merenre says. "Though do give me time to put an offer together, before you abscond, it will be generous."

"You're not - upset about the report, your highness?"

       "I'm incredibly upset about the report! Almost nothing in it can possibly be true! Half of it contradicts itself! And I will pay you something like half the gems in Osirion for another report of similar quality."

The spy considers it, for a moment. "I'm honored, your highness, by the offer, but - well. Would you take it."

       "- I mean, I'm well past the point where there's vanishing marginal personal utility to money, I'd probably just be weighing how much I want to prevent the destruction of the world."

"Do you ever think, your highness, that maybe the world has it coming?"

        "....no," says Merenre, completely truthfully and a little coldly. 

" - okay, do you ever think that maybe Cheliax has it coming."

       "Cheliax has something coming. I really just wish I knew what it is."

"Project Lawful was started because of a direct divine vision from Asmodeus Himself."

"Sounds right, if Project Lawful is the study of our captive cleric, We bargained with Asmodeus for a divine revelation."

"Do you know the wording -"

"No except that it apparently was not adequate to get him safely out of Cheliax and to here. We can't - put what We bargained for into words well anyway, and don't know how Asmodeus would have tried to."

Merenre shifts a bunch of tokens around on the desk in front of him. "Okay. I'm saying, probably Project Lawful is the study of our captive outsider, that one is probably true. 'Asmodeus and Erecura are collaborating on Project Lawful.'"

"We don't know anything about that."

"I assume same for Asmodeus and Nethys, Asmodeus and Cayden Cailean - I'm going to say maybe 50 percent for Asmodeus and Nethys, because it'd explain how upset Otolmens is, and, uh, 1 percent for Cayden Cailean. The report author apologized for including it. ....'The library of Project Lawful looks tiny but apparently has as many books available as a major academy library, if someone asks the Project Lawful girl serving as a librarian to 'go look for them in another room', not that there's a Forbiddance in place or anything.'"

"If our captured cleric is someone who - figured out, somehow, how to borrow books from the First Vault -"

"....wouldn't you have noticed?"

" - We might not be allowed to say, if We had noticed, because if there's a way to do that disseminating it is definitely prohibited by godagreements."

"Right. Well, it's possible, but also mind the possibility that this is abject nonsense, which I think will become more obvious as I read through more of these. -  every devil in Hell has heard of Carissa Sevar by name, I will give you whatever fucking odds you want against that. Project Lawful has been instrumental in all of Cheliax's military victories over Nidal - we did check if they were using any new tactics, and they're not - less than five percent on that - Project Lawful is intensively studying the history of Taldor in order to launch a team of operatives into Taldor's past which will convert Taldor to worship of Asmodeus in the present - less than one percent on that -"

"Are they intensively studying the history of Taldor, though. If you have access to the First Vault is Taldor a place whose history you'd want to study intensively -"

"I mean, I'm sure they've got ancient magical secrets, but not a particular concentration thereof - I'd go for Azlant, anyone would, and if you're constraining the places you'd go for to ones where learning you're studying it doesn't suggest any supernatural abilities, I'd study ancient Osirion - and then there's 'Even Barons of Hell can't afford to buy the souls of Project Lawful girls in Dis's markets.'"

"Very funny."

"No that's, uh, just true."

"Right. Okay. So I take it we have a full list of all the Project Lawful girls based on price spikes in Hell, then? Is there some kind of unifying feature -"

"We have a list, I don't know if it's a full list, it doesn't have Carissa Sevar on it and it seems pretty well attested that she's an involved party and maybe there are some more who didn't sell their souls or whose having sold their souls isn't widely known in Hell. The names are all girl wizard students of the most recent graduating class in Ostenso."

" - that raises several questions. One, can we help any of their families defect or something. Two, what share of girl wizard students in the graduating class does that represent, do we know any wizarding students in that class not to be on the project, distinguishing features? Three, Ostenso's where the interdiction is so I guess that confirms what's up with that. 

Four, why girls."

"One obvious hypothesis is that our stolen cleric is able to get books from the First Vault - or whatever he does - through a sorcerous bloodline and they're trying to breed it. That's the first thing everyone comes up with, because otherwise why girls, but - I don't know, it's still sort of unsatisfying? It wouldn't make their souls all that valuable, that'd have to be something transferrable to them directly, owning a soul doesn't give you a claim on its offspring. ...also I flatter You that any cleric of Yours would think to demand to be permitted a Sending to the head of Your church before having a bunch of children in Cheliax."

"They might've lied about who that is. They're, you know, Cheliax, I'm not actually sure that not-lying is something they know how to do. What other theories have you got, though."

Merenre looks back down at the paper. "If an event worth celebrating happens to you, one of the girls on Project Lawful will already be standing behind you and will offer you cake.  It's good cake and eating it seems to be completely safe as far as anyone can tell.  Nobody knows what happens if you refuse to eat it."

"Okay, that has got to be false. They've been inside a Forbiddance for the last four days."

"Almost certainly. But if it's not false, uh, I do wonder what the range is."

" - you know what? Sure. Find someone whose wife is very close to giving birth, send them out with high-level escorts to an inn a couple of blocks from the capital in Egorian - completely licit travelling adventuring party - Sending them when the baby is born, and if we get a cake girl, remand her to Osirion in order to investigate her role in the imprisonment in Cheliax of Our cleric."

"If she can teleport like that -"

"- fair enough, remand her to a demiplane."

"Not to Aktun?"

"We've had enough godwars to last a century, all told, and that seems likelier to spark one. We can move her there later if it seems like a good idea. - this is almost definitely not going to work."

"Yes, I put it in the less than five percent category. Which is to say, if it does work -" Despairing gesture at the beads on his desk. 

"What else is at more than five percent."

"One of the girls on Project Lawful who died during the Nidal attack got sorted to Elysium' - seems pretty likely. 'And then came back -' almost certainly not, but maybe they substituted a replacement in order to not have an embarrassing incident, or maybe they were holding her family hostage, or capable of threatening her even in Elysium.

'One of the Project Lawful girls used 5 different cantrips in a day' - fits with my going theory, but I want to hear yours first -"

"My theory is that our priest figured out something really important and Cheliax is throwing an absurd number of distractions at him to prevent him from realizing how important it is or telling anyone else about it, and the distractions are causing all these absurd rumors."

"Possible. Mine is that the thing our priest figured out is something like a way to give sorcery to people who aren't born with it. INT-based sorcery, presumably, or why have a bunch of wizard students as test subjects. With some special abilities that are really, stunningly valuable, and expected to carry over on death, thus the rise in prices in Hell. And something that produces the reports of - the girls also being clerics, the girls having too many cantrips, the girls doing things that shouldn't be possible -"

"If you can do that at all - maybe you test it first on wizard students from Ostenso but then you start empowering everyone -"

"Well, maybe they planned to, and Otolmens put Her foot down. Or maybe they want to wait more than five days to see if it has side effects. It's not totally satisfactory, though, it gives no explanation at all for the question of why girls."

"Some bloodlines are only expressed in girls."

" - how sure are we that our priest is a 'he'. Did You directly observe that."

"We can't see that kind of thing."

"New theory," says Merenre, moving beads. "Our priest is a woman. Whatever her powers, only women can have them."

"Well. That's not my favorite theory ever. Goddamn it, if that's true Cheliax actually is a better place for her to start than here."

"I mean, they do still have all the lying. And the torture. And only the stupid soul-based prediction market. But yes, we'll need to rethink things. If that's true. And need to rethink different things, if the class of theories where the priest is borrowing books from the First Vault are true, and rethink yet more things, if the public Project Lawful is a distraction to cover for something much more effectively kept secret..."

"Such as the possible diamond-stealing thing."

"It's the obvious candidate. We have confirmation that Nidal's not raising their dead. Or, I mean, they're raising them as undead, but -"

"I took your meaning. 

If Cheliax can do that whenever they want -"

"Where are our diamonds presently."

"Tried a lot of different stuff since we don't know how they did it. Some of them are permanently but dismissibly transformed into chunks of granite. Some are permanently but dismissibly transformed into rags that were dipped in a highly reactive alchemical reagent which will cause a massive explosion if exposed to oxygen, and are now in glass jars in a room without any. Some are in a demiplane, some are in a bank in Aktun, some are in Ismat's workshop so we'll know if ones in a very standard and knowable location got taken. I don't think they have the ability to do that at will. You'd expect to see a fall in the value of Chelish souls with decades more expected lifespan."

"We hope you're right."

"It might be useful for more of You to think about this."

"We're trying. We're trying really hard. Do you know what We've got with any reasonable confidence."

"Do tell."

"This morning, someone gave our priest - priestess - 600gp for a service worth far more than that to them, though they did not achieve that by lying.

That's the kind of thing We get when We look really hard."

"Have you ever considered, just, waltzing over to Absalom, and checking if this would be any easier if you were two gods."

"Dismissed, Merenre, go update those prediction markets. And, uh, send your wife Our highest regards."

"Because we're going to need her if the most powerful magic in the world turns out to be woman-only?"

"Also because We hold her in high regard! At least five percent because We hold her in high regard!"

PL-log timestamp:  Day 4 / morning

Aspexia Rugatonn makes her greetings to Keltham.  She wishes she could check this with Sevar, but thought of it too late; this, too, is an interaction that should occur in the alter-Cheliax.  She will try to keep it brief.

If Keltham learns or deduces anything about how Forbiddances might work, including by reference to other protective spells that depend on caster circle, Keltham might deduce that perhaps Forbiddances also ought to be cast by the most powerful cleric available, and that Aspexia Rugatonn should therefore have been on-site right after the Forbiddance went up.  And then wouldn't it be strange if she didn't hang around while Keltham was teleported in, just in case Nidal attacked; and then wouldn't it be strange if she didn't greet Keltham at all?  She didn't for the last Forbiddance; but Keltham now believes, correctly, that Cheliax considers him more of an important person after the Nidal attack on him and resulting godwar.

"Greetings again, Keltham," says Aspexia, looking as warm and grandmotherly as before.  She is not, on reflection, 'Aspie'; she has, on reflection, started to side with Sevar about the importance of the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus seeming relatively more Lawful.  Isidre can take credit for Aspexia's little prank, if it requires crediting at all.  "I'm afraid I have a great deal of work to do today, and this is not a good time for us to talk," with Sevar out of the loop, "but be advised I will be doing that work on-site, so don't be too surprised if you see me eating lunch by myself later in the day, or some such."

"Staying on-site because..."

Keltham's thoughts are mostly on what he can do today that will be productive while he's missing Carissa, Ione, Pilar, and Asmodia.  The remainder, mostly on constantly telling part of himself to shut up Carissa will be fine.

"We were instructed to rush you here as soon as the most basic defenses were in place for you; it is apparently significantly safer for you here, than in the Imperial palace in Egorian.  Other defenses are still being emplaced, and while they are, the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus may as well happen to do her day's paperwork from here."

"I would not have expected the leadership position for Asmodeus's Church to be determined by who has the greatest military power."

"In this case it occurs the other way around.  Asmodeus empowers more those who attain a deeper understanding of Him."

"All right then.  Good to hear."

"We have, for what it's worth, now screened everyone previously in the villa for being secretly a cleric - though we had to consult with Hell to determine that was even possible, and how it could be tested - and it is all negative."

"Also good to hear, but do keep in mind that if that 'trope' governs at all you have somehow missed her anyways.  I agree that it probably doesn't govern, and I hope that nobody was too much inconvenienced by the screening."

"Perhaps I should not ask, but if you'd pardon me one question..."  Aspexia waits for the nod.  "And also, if you can, please answer this quickly rather than thinking about it for long.  If 'tropes' govern, who is the ultimate antagonist and what is their plan?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm really not comfortable answering that, under these circumstances.  I cannot just point an accusing finger at somebody especially if the cleric thing turned out to be wrong, Asmodia has no superpowers, and there was no significant conflict with the Queen.”

Keltham immediately thought 'Isidre'.  Isidre plans to convert the world to Lawful Goodness.  She is carrying out this plan via a program of illegal emotion-reading and mind-control, which has penetrated Chelish Governance to a far greater degree than the Grand High Priestess or the Queen would think even possible.

"I am sorry for having asked, then, and see your point."

"Should you change your mind regarding the wisdom of answering, keep in mind that I am, in principle, the member of government who would be most responsible for dealing with 'tropes' if they existed."

Aspexia gives him a polite nod and departs.

Ione, Pilar, and Asmodia are also away from the site, in queue for additional Security screening supposedly.

Keltham might want to make inquiries, upon seeing them again, regarding prophecies, or excursions outside the old Forbiddance, or trips to Hell.

So somehow those three will only manage to get to the new site after Sevar is back, and functioning sufficiently to authorize any necessary lies.

And as for why all this visit is happening, really?

When Aspexia read Abrogail's proposed outline of what she intended to do to Sevar, it occurred to Aspexia that perhaps, if Sevar is out of communication with the Project Lawful site for an extended period, maybe somebody who can read Keltham's mind should be on the Project Lawful site as a substitute for Sevar.  Just in case Keltham picks this particular morning to suddenly go closet himself and think for three hours.

It seems like prudent policy even before considering how much that could plausibly be a 'trope'.

So... study magic, learn more about Cheliax and Golarion, see if they can teleport in a metallurgy expert so Keltham can hear about the current state of art in mining and refinement of metals, maybe ask Governance to send him the politically convenient version of the gains-splitting bargain to see how loudly Keltham screams about it...?  Keltham isn't currently thinking of anything else he can do with everyone missing.

Carissa is going to be okay though, right oh my ass brain, would you stop that, I decided this was a good idea it has all kinds of safeguards and you won't find out what the results were until Carissa gets back so right now these are not productive thoughts to be having at me.

PL-log timestamp:  Day 4, late afternoon
PL-log placestamp:  Egorian

And now once again Pilar has found herself somewhere holding a cake, and this place doesn't even seem to be inside the Palace!

Instead it's a private room in a classy inn; from the window, the palace grounds are visible across the street. The room is presently empty except for an unaccompanied Unseen Servant, which is sweeping.

Pilar has a sense of what her curse wants to do (sigh) and she's not going to fight it without a reason, so she lets herself leave the room, go down a hall, go down a set of stairs, still holding the cake.  It's one of the nicer and larger ones she's delivered, now that she looks at it, very formal.

The first floor of the inn is a busy restaurant, presently in the middle of serving lunch. It's clearly an upscale adventurers' inn, not one for nobles or rich merchants. You can tell by the decor, which is awfully cosmopolitan for Cheliax, and by the security, who look like they mean business potentially against very dangerous adversaries, and by how quickly the waitress takes it in stride to have a very conspicuous girl come down stairs she definitely at no point went up. "Can I help you?"

Pilar hands her the cake, and lowers her voice about as far as it can go.  "This cake is for the party of Osirian adventurers who'll be arriving shortly.  Please wait until two minutes and forty-five seconds past the early-hour bell, then give this cake to them with compliments of the cake girl."

WAIT WHAT

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

The woman blinks at her.

"That'll be - five silver for a special timed delivery on short notice," she says, "and no guarantees about what happens to the cake if they fail to show and you don't return to claim it in the next hour."

Pilar seems to be holding five silver.  Somehow this surprises her, even though, if her curse can do all these cakes, there's no reason it couldn't do small amounts of money.

Pilar hands the money over more or less on automatic, thinking furiously.

Pilar has by now worked out that, whenever she appears for somebody without her having chosen that, they have at least heard of her.  Maybe they know her as Pilar and not the cake girl, back in the villa when this first happened; or they've heard a rumor about the cake girl, in the Imperial palace, but not the name Pilar.

But she has never suddenly found herself with a cake for somebody, who has no idea of who she is or why she'd be there.  And that goes by the final recipient, not by anybody who hands the cake over on instructions.

Pilar does not, in fact, know any Osirian adventuring parties, or anybody who'd plausibly be on one.

Which leaves the question of how an Osirian adventuring party knows either Pilar Pineda, or the cake girl.

The waitress pockets the money, takes the cake, and walks it over to a heavily built man by the door who squints at it and then shrugs. She takes it off to the kitchen.

Pilar starts to turn back to the main room, with the intent to talk to that impressive-looking inn security about where Pilar can find the highest possible level of Church or Crown security, on very short notice and very near by.

...her curse really really doesn't want her to do that.

Because the Osirians will be captured.  And probably tortured.  And that's not nice, not at all.

Pilar directs a furious thought at her curse about how these people are not street orphans, they are here to kidnap and torture her and would eventually figure out a way to do that in a way she finds genuinely unpleasant.  Furthermore, in case it has escaped her curse's notice, she is Lawful Evil, operative word Evil, and an extremely loyal servant of Lord Asmodeus and His interests.  She doesn't think her curse can actually stop her if she tries, or at least, Pilar is very willing to fight and find out.

Pilar is Lawful Evil, operative word Lawful.

Her curse trusted her with this.  She can well serve Lord Asmodeus's interests here, but she has to not do horrible things from the perspective of Chaotic Good, using her curse's power and knowledge, in the course of that.

Her curse wouldn't have steered her into the trap, obviously.  That wouldn't have been nice either.  But her curse could have just let the whole thing fly by without Pilar noticing.

It's really fucking creepy how Pilar's brain just thinks this crap like it's her own fucking thoughts.

Her curse probably feels sorry about that, too, because it is very Stupid Good, but this is important.

What the fuck is up with this whole 'you're Lawful and therefore you have to keep to this agreement you didn't actually make at any point', huh?

It's how god-agreements can work, sometimes.

Pilar is not a god.

Hasn't she learned anything from Keltham?  Dath ilani aren't gods, but they can sometimes decide to behave like them.

And if Pilar doesn't choose to act like a god, well, her curse probably won't be trying to do things like this again in the future.

Pilar doesn't scream, but it takes an effort.  She is, no doubt, nowhere near the level of sheer seething hatred that the Grand High Priestess must have accumulated for Chaotic Good, but Pilar sure isn't dawdling along that road.

She thinks.

She decides.

Pilar walks over to the most impressive-looking inn security, and uses Message this time.  "I have a Crown security issue that needs to be escalated as quickly as possible.  Point me or escort me to the nearest state Security who can escalate me further immediately.  Do not talk about this afterwards."

The man raises his eyes, then grabs her arm and Dimension Doors. 

They're at a palace security checkpoint, now, just outside the Forbiddance.

"FREEZE, DON'T RESIST", someone instructs them instantly, and casts Hold Person; the man makes a face as though it's taking him a lot of effort to let the spell touch him, but he does permit it. 

The Hold Person is powerful enough Pilar couldn't really throw it off if she wanted to.

Well, Pilar won't say anything then, but she will think very loudly that, first of all, most people are not authorized to read her mind, and second, that she has an issue for immediate escalation to the Grand High Priestess, also somebody needs to note down which inn they just came from because Pilar doesn't know that.

Message repeats.

Palace Security dismisses the spell after a couple very fast exchanges. "Kid says she urgently needs to be escalated higher," the retired adventurer said. "You want me to keep escorting her, or do you have it from here."

"We have it from here. This is classified, don't speak of it to anyone."

"Yeah, yeah."

"What was the name of that inn?"

"Skymetal Sword. Am I allowed to head back, I'm on duty."

"No," Security says flatly.

Message:  Need to escalate to Grand High Priestess, time-sensitive.

"Right, come with me."

And they can hurry to the Grand High Priestess's office, where the Grand High Priestess is not, because she's in Ostenso.

"Do you recognize me as a person of interest," Pilar says to the Grand High Priestess's emotionless secretary who is widely believed to be actually a devil.

"Yes. The Grand High Priestess is not here."

"I either need personal control of a Crown intelligence issue, including the ability to consult Crown intelligence about actions that best serve Lord Asmodeus's interests and the ability to direct Security accordingly, or I need somebody to assume command of this issue whom the Grand High Priestess trusts to deal with deranged fucking god-agreements."

The secretary, at this, pulls out a mirror and contacts the Grand High Priestess.

"Talk," Aspexia Rugatonn says on recognizing Pilar.  Nothing need be said about 'I assume this is urgent'; it obviously is.

A surrounding silence has obviously already been cast at this point.

"Curse directed me to where I now expect an incoming Osirian adventuring party who's heard of the cake girl to try to kidnap me.  Curse doesn't want them hurt, curse said it trusted me, and appealed to my Lawfulness, and told me to act like a god, and said it won't do this again if I don't.  I can serve Lord Asmodeus's interests as much as I want so long as I don't do anything my curse hates, like getting the Osirians caught and tortured, which to be clear I would be incredibly comfortable with -"

"What do you request?"  Aspexa Rugatonn interrupts; she doesn't need to be told that Pilar is loyal.

Rugatonn can see what she'd do, but if Pilar hasn't also seen it independently, she cannot entrust Pilar with doing it independently.

"I need direction on whether to obey this bargain that I never actually made.  If no, I'll give the data to Security.  If yes, I either need somebody else who understands deranged Chaotic Good curses to assume command over me and this issue, or I need authorization to control it myself.  I prefer the former."

"And the scope of that authorization?"

...oh no.

"Authority over local Security, and ability to consult with Crown intelligence over which fun non-hurtful prank on the Osirians will most serve our Lord's interests."

Pilar isn't doing anything as unprofessional as making a face on purpose, but hopefully her control isn't perfect and therefore the Grand High Priestess can hear her face trying to shout 'NO' through the mirror.

That was the correct answer.  Well, a correct answer.  Including that suppressed horrified expression, if Pineda looked happy this wouldn't be a good idea at all.

"Try keeping the bargain this time so we can observe what happens."

"Everyone I trust to correctly handle god-agreements with Chaotic forces is outside the Palace, mostly at the front of the war."

"If you listen humbly to your elders and ignore anything they suggest about violating implied god-agreements, I believe you can handle this yourself.  If at some point it looks like I'm wrong and you start expecting it to not go well, I trust you to walk away from it without aggrieving your curse."

"My secretary will supply you with that authorization.  Do not explain why you have it or where the real constraints are coming from."

"Any else top urgent?"

"No."

"Rugatonn out."

"I hate my life."

Pilar gets handed her authorization and shown a meeting room to brief Security on whatever she wants them to do.

Actually, the first thing Pilar needs to do - after saying that the waiting Skymetal Sword guard can go back, since they want the place to look normal, also her curse doesn't want to inconvenience the guy too much - is to talk to Crown intelligence about what the Crown wants Osirion to end up believing.

Security isn't going to be preventing these people from returning home, Cheliax can't hold them to trade for something else.  Lord Asmodeus's interests can only be served here by giving them some form of false impression or false information, so far as Pilar can tell.

Her curse seems to believe that giving another country wildly misleading military intelligence is a happy fun prank!  Pilar is not actually preventing herself from thinking repeatedly about how incredibly stupid that is.  She has much less practice at controlling her own thoughts than most Chelish people of her status.  Her curse, thankfully, does not seem to care.

If they've already heard enough rumors to test whether there's a cake girl, with a reasonably well-designed test, then a) what a fucking disaster, it's presently unclear who's going down for it but someone's going to have to, and b) they're not going to be able to convince them that Project Lawful is nothing big.

This top Chelish expert on Osirion affairs just got emergency-teleported back from the front lines to the palace for this, just ran into the room, and has not actually heard about any of these rumors.

"Can somebody very quickly brief me on who the cake girl is, what Project Lawful is, and why it's a disaster that Osirion has already heard of her?" he says.

Everybody is now looking at Pilar because, obviously, who else in this room would a) be in charge and b) know what people here are allowed to know about what Project Lawful is and why it matters.

"Somebody else say which rumors about the cake girl Osirion is likely to have heard," Pilar says.  "I mainly know the true version, I have not been tracking exactly which rumors exist."

Somebody who actually has been in the palace the last few days, internally screaming forever after the manner of competent intelligence officers dealing with other people who are not competent intelligence officers, recites the basics:

If something nice happens to you that people in non-Chelish countries would throw some kind of fucking party for, a girl is already there and already has a cake to offer you.

It's actually pretty good cake.

Nobody knows what happens if you refuse to eat it.

The cake girl doesn't give a shit about Forbiddances or wards on the room.

Nobody has spotted her teleporting.

Oh, and also the cake girl is one of the Project Lawful girls etcetera etcetera so she presumably has arcane vision, casts both cleric and wizard spells, her soul's price in the markets of Dis is astronomically high, may possibly be Abrogail Thrune, got transformed prettier after she joined Project Lawful, etcetera etcetera.

That's the main line of the rumors, there's too many variant versions for anybody to keep track of.

"I have heard it rumored," someone else adds, very annoyed about it, "that some connection exists between the capabilities used by Cake Girl and the capabilities that deprived Nidal of diamonds - which Osirion might have noticed by now -"

"Ah," says the guy who just got back from the front lines.  That makes a lot more sense than panicking over Osirion believing a completely deranged -

- actually no it doesn't make sense.  "Without meaning to inquire as to anything I should not know, if that rumor's false, are we unhappy to have Osirion believe it?  Should we just be trying to confirm whatever it is they believe?  How did they end up believing it?"

"You," Pilar says to one of the Securities hanging out who's not an intelligence officer, but one cleared to gofer for intelligence work, "find somebody who knows about the diamond thing, which I have not previously been cleared for, and tell them they immediately need to be in this room advising me with respect to what we do or don't want Osirion believing about a connection between the diamond thing and Project Lawful via the cake girl.  Go."

Pilar turns back to the poor confused soul from the front lines.  "I would have thought that we didn't want more attention called to Project Lawful at all but maybe that ship has sailed."

"I have an opinion to offer regarding that," says somebody much older and far more powerful than herself.

"Speak, I have authority here for good reasons but know I am sorely lacking experience."

He nods.  "With all due disrespect to a number of people who should already be in Hell, that ship had in fact probably sailed after Nidal attacked your project site, we launched an emergency response with dozens of people with six seconds worth of intelligence clearance, and then a fucking god-war started immediately afterwards."

"That level of international scrutiny on an event with that many witnesses is simply not evadable.  It's not sufficient if the witnesses were all soul-sold and most are now on the Nidal front.  If you visibly block all information and all avenues of investigation about what started a god-war, some adversaries will start burning ninth-circle scrolls in order to kidnap targets or extract information from them."

"The explosion of rumors may be the better case than that scrutiny focusing narrowly on only things that actually happened."

"Can anybody tell me if there's a policy about that, who runs that policy, and where they are so they can be inside this room instead."

"The general policy for feeding spies misinformation is that it should be hard to immediately verify, leave them confident they weren't noticed, suggest further investigation within Cheliax, and contain things from a shortlist, per country, the Osirion expert will have theirs but it might be a bit out of date -"

"List had nothing about a Project Lawful on it last I heard," the Osirion expert says dryly.  "You want to know what we'd like Osirion to believe about our grain stores, I'm your guy."

"Who would know which rumors we're supposed to spread about Project Lawful?"

Your project director would be the obvious candidate...?

"I've been informed that individual is completely out of contact.  Can somebody tell me what our goals would obviously have been so that I can do more of whatever it was we were doing."

"- keep enough cruft in the water that no one can narrow down on what might be true," a senior person says instantly. "'Project Lawful is a bunch of girls with random novel powers', fine, let's have them be as random and as novel and as uninformative about what actually happened to the Project Lawful girls as possible."

"So we want to show them exactly the cake girl they're expecting, is the idea here," says the guy who just got back from the front lines.

"Unfortunately there is a sufficiently large grain of truth in the cake-girl-specific rumors" namely fucking all of it "that this should not be our policy with respect to the cake girl."

What part of that could possibly... the part about Forbiddances, presumably.  "Can we show them just the part that isn't true?"

IF THERE WAS ANY SUCH PART, YES, THAT WOULD BE AN OPTION.

"Not from among the items listed.  We would need to generate new ones..."

...though actually, on reflection, the 'cake girl' is a weird intervention by Cayden Cailean which has never made any sense at all; and which seems almost absolutely unrelated to any of the things that are actually important about Project Lawful.

"General policy question," Pilar says.  "How do we feel about focusing attention on points that are true but really really fucking misleading?"

"If you know enough about what's up with Project Lawful to evaluate that, yes, that's what some of the best misinformation is."

NNOOOO NOO NO NO STOOOOP THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS THAT IS NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS 

"Okay, then I think we run with it looking to them like the cake girl is real, pending somebody with diamonds clearance saying if maybe that isn't such a good idea after all."

...wait, what, that list was in significant part true but 'really really fucking misleading', WHAT.

"No apparent teleporting," contributes someone with diamonds clearance who just walked in a minute ago. "We should just have someone walk the cake in."

Pilar is pretty sure she doesn't teleport, she's not sure what she does instead but teleportation doesn't feel right.  It's not weird teleportation, it's not-teleportation-at-all.

But, okay, if they don't want to focus attention on teleportation with respect to the diamonds, cool.

"Cake girl should be able to walk in visibly and without teleporting, at the correct time, if she tries.  Then what?  I'd expect her to be kidnapped and tortured for information, but how do they do that, exactly?  And is there a way to make sure she ends up in Hell shortly after" CORRECTLY THIS TIME "which doesn't make it clear that we knew all along what would happen and were prepared for it?  Assume the cake girl can maintain her will under torture for an extended period and is able to supply deliberate misinformation, but would like to be sure of dying in time to get Raised after dawn tomorrow."

"I don't think we should assume that of cake girl unless we've already done it to her. And even if she's ready to be Asmodeus's heroic servant, they'll have mindreading."

"The obvious way to make sure someone who is captured makes it to Hell is to give them a slow-acting, but not noticeable or easily treatable, poison; when noticed they generally won't assume she'd been poisoned before being captured."

Everyone looks to the Osirian expert for how Osirion does interrogations.

"Osirion doesn't consider itself bound not to employ torture, but does little of it by Chelish standards because it's not really very useful for their goals.  The pharaoh is known to have a Sense Motive of basically mindreading, but he doesn't involve himself in much directly.  They also have actual mindreading, obviously."

Pilar is confused by the concept of torture not being useful; she has always had the impression that people who aren't her will go to great lengths to avoid it.  She's also confused by the concept that nobody gets suspicious of prisoners who mysteriously die a few hours later, but this is less important.

"And I suppose that if somebody has a scroll of Mind Blank to tap cake girl so the Osirians do need to use torture, that does make it too obvious... well, maybe they'd think it was just Project Lawful bullshit?"

"I think that if the cake girl looks like a girl the Osirians are very unlikely to move to torture within the indicated timeframe."

Osirion.  Right.

"...do we have other ways of doing something very misleading with the cake girl, assuming that she does not get to use her in fact fairly impressive ability to withstand torture in order to deliver misinformation."

Is she actually the cake girl.

You don't work in intelligence for this long, and not notice when an inexperienced subject is possibly failing at a task of pretending not to be somebody.

"We could send some person who isn't the cake girl and doesn't know anything in with the cake, having gotten a Suggestion immediately before to bring the cake in, poisoned. All they learn from her is that she was inexplicably seized by the urge to bring this cake in, and we learn - once she shows up in Hell - what Osirion knew enough to ask her about."

"Constraint:  We'd need somebody who would afterwards feel really cheerful about that having happened to them.  Do we have anybody like that?"

Everyone stares at her incredulously. 

"We could....subsequently raise them? And commend them on their service to the Crown?"

"That works great on me and at least eleven other people in Cheliax, but unfortunately this is a hard constraint and it runs off how people will actually feel and not what they are supposed to feel."

Some new conclusions are quickly reached about how many girls are in Project Lawful and what makes them special.

It is, however, not added to the rumor mill, for fucking once, because these people are professionals specifically in the intelligence services, and furthermore have a good idea of who gets interrogated and possibly executed if there's a new rumor about there being exactly 12 girls in Project Lawful.

(...you could do something genuinely actually nice for them afterwards, her curse does not suggest.)

Message to Pilar from somebody in this room:  Is this a visible hard constraint where I can use it to find out whether someone is truly loyal to -

Reply:  No, unfortunately, and yes I know exactly how stupid that is.

"Someone who has been sentenced to, and is in the middle of, a slow execution, gets dragged out to deliver cake instead, dies more cleanly?"

"We do have to Raise them afterwards to get the info, right, but I guess I could use my authority to ensure that they were cleanly killed again, immediately after that..."

(Asmodeans.  Why.  Pilar's curse is not particularly Abadaran but even it wants to yell "HAVE YOU CONSIDERED OFFERING MONEY" at this point.)

"Could also track them down in Hell, which might be more inconvenient but doesn't run the risk of them refusing. I do think we should consider it possible that the Osirians will Soul Bind their captive to keep the secret, so this'd have to be worth that, to Asmodeus."

"Can anybody give me a completely different line on how to mislead the Osirians with the or a cake girl?  This line is looking increasingly less promising."

"We could go to the opposite extreme and try to make Project Lawful or cake girl look significantly more impressive than the reality - you'd know better than I would if that's realistically possible.  Seventh-circle wizard walks in looking like the real cake girl, with Mind Blank and Dimensional Anchoring and a few other things up, serves them some cake, chats with them, ignores anything they try to do to her, leaves."

"Are we okay with them knowing about the weird constraint that prevents us from arresting them?" somebody asks Pilar.  "Because if we're not, we should make it look like cake girl is not with Chelish services, and if we are, she should very clearly have the ability to turn them over to Security but not do it."

"I think the fact that we had to let them go probably falls under the incredibly fucking misleading category."

"We're running out of time here, I like this option best of anything so far, let's roll with it."

Eight hours after the Queen of Cheliax took her, Carissa Sevar gets a teleport to the fortress which is the new home of Project Lawful and goes to the temple to check in. The plan is for her to return to Keltham while still a little fragile - it's good for him to know what that looks like, and less costly than keeping her away from him for what might be the entire next day - but she really really wants a situation report first, so she can stop feeling like nothing is quite entirely real, and so she can get a precious rundown on what Keltham thought about in the Grand High Priestess's hearing. 

She just spent several hours napping, but she still looks fairly exhausted, and something a little deeper than 'exhausted'. She is carrying a dagger, because in hindsight she really should have one, and dressed like the heir to a county.

"How's my Keltham."

'My Keltham' what, what did the Queen do to her?  Brainwash her into Keltham's sex slave or mistress or Abyss-knows-what so long as she had an extra three minutes?

"Usual condition," Maillol replies.

Aspexia only has limited Detect Thoughts per day that use her caster level; she hasn't been constantly reading Keltham the way the Queen can.  No Keltham behaviors merited emergency checks.  Occasional spaced spot-checks didn't turn up much of interest, besides an advance read on everything obvious Keltham thought to try with metalworking.

If Carissa is trying to scan the full transcripts, she'll see that Keltham is thinking he should maybe try dating Meritxell next rather than any of the Complicated Girls, but isn't quite sure that his brain will actually do that if he's no longer aromantic; also the earliest morning transcript shows Keltham repeatedly reminding himself that Carissa will be all right and that he will not receive any new info about this until later.

"- I can work with that. My plan is to go find him and probably spend the afternoon with him, then authorize lies for Ione, Asmodia and Pilar; I want a Telepathic Bond with you, ideally tomorrow, so we can coordinate even when I'm occupied. Also, I am fourth circle now and would like the chance to copy some spells off Security."

You know what's really, really, really fucking annoying in Cheliax?  People who bear up much better than you under torture.  Also wizards in general.

"Copying spells will be arranged, Telepathic Bond arranged, I have noted your intended whereabouts.  I will not move ahead on returning our extra students until you tell me you're ready for project responsibility handoff, and either that looks accurate to me or I'm overruled by High Priestess Subirachs about your readiness to return to duty... please confirm that's acceptable."  It is not actually easy to remember that this is now his boss.

"That's acceptable. Ab- Her Imperial Majestrix thinks I lack common sense on this front and with that in mind I'll consult High Priestess Subirachs before I say I'm ready."

No shit.  "Acknowledged, and that's High Priestess Jacint Subirachs, seventh-circle," Maillol says, just in case somebody didn't actually mention that part to her.  He goes to a map temporarily pinned to a wall until everybody learns the fortress, and points out where they are, and the paths to Carissa's new supervisor, to her bedroom, and to Keltham's bedroom.  "I suggest that I have somebody else notify Keltham you're waiting for him in his bedroom or yours; he's presently in the library-study hall."

"I'll wait for him in his, and someone can tell him so now." So he doesn't wonder if he's not supposed to bother her or something.

She heads off, still looking mostly content if slightly haunted, down the indicated path.

Keltham will stride about as fast as he can without running as soon as anybody tells him.

He'll slow down before he gets to his bedroom; he's not to suddenly burst in, looking out of breath.

It has been impressed on Keltham with a few smiling but rather stern words from Aspexia Rugatonn that it is his place now to hug Carissa, not pester her about anything she doesn't seem to want to talk about, and in particular not to demand lots of reassurances about how fine she is or ask for lots of details on how she isn't, until she seems to be fully her previous self.  Yes, even if Carissa says otherwise and that he should do what he wants and pester her, Keltham is allowed to ignore her on this particular occasion though after that he should go back to believing her again.  No Aspexia is not going to explain what axioms derive those conclusions, she's busy, ask Carissa a day or two later.

Carissa is sitting on Keltham's floor near the fire, playing with her dagger. She hasn't decided how to enchant it yet but she's going to do something incredibly cool.

Sharp kitchen knives are in fact one of the most convenient ways to hurt yourself or somebody else, if you want to hurt somebody including yourself, and you are not in a good mental state to figure out any more optimal ways of causing damage.  'Stabbed with a kitchen knife' is very much an archetypal Worst-In-Category Thing such that it Actually Happened To One Person You Know Though Not Yourself Personally.

Keltham doesn't smile at her; that would be lying.

He's got healing, they've got resurrections, it wouldn't be an actual emergency.

"Carissa," he says, softly, instead of his usual 'Hey' of greeting.

- she sets it down, gently, and stands up. 

"Keltham," she says back, and then shakes her head. "I'm okay. ...I should qualify that. I feel okay. I feel really good. I don't feel normal, and, uh, Abrogail and the site manager both told me very sternly that I was not okay and possess no common sense, so I guess, I shouldn't say I'm okay with so much counterevidence. But I feel okay."

He does smile at that; it's what somebody should sound like if they had a Huge Thing happen to them which was not actually catastrophic; and it totally upset lots of their internal equilibria, but didn't trash them so hard that it trashed all the meta-level processes, so they can still consider things like what other people told them.  "Snuggles are available for those who seek them," Keltham says, and doesn't ask her at all about how her day went.

Snuggles are sought. "I want to tell you at some point but not right now. I think once you have independent interest in...two or three of the things that happened, and once I have been officially declared Okay by nosy busybodies in the government."

"That's fine," Keltham murmurs near her ear.  He's surprised, hearing those words from his mouth, and then more surprised when he realizes that he actually meant them and doesn't need to say 'wrongthought' and back up.  "I just need to know you're alive and will be okay, I don't need to know why that's so."  Want to, sure, need to, no.

"I am alive! I will be okay! That I feel incredibly confident about. I'm hoping for better than okay, really, I think I might - feel safer - and I'm fourth circle."

"That's a good thing and you get congratulations on it, right?"

NOT THAT PEOPLE LEVELING UP AND GAINING POWERS WHEN THEY HAVE SEX IS AN EROLARP TROPE OR ANYTHING

DOES SHE LITERALLY HAVE ERO-XP

"Yes, it's a good thing, it means I can cast more powerful spells! ...I am really tempted to say 'I am not going to shatter if you ask the one question you're clearly dying to' but I guess maybe I should consult a priest about that."

"It'll keep.  A lot of questions do, in fact, they're exactly the same question a day later as right now.  It's like food that never spoils."

"Okay. Anyway. I am very very glad it happened. I don't want it to happen again for a little while. I might....ever want something like that to happen to me again, but that doesn't mean you have to do it, or find a picky powerful person."

"I'm glad that you're glad."

"If you don't want it to happen again for a little while, we don't need to worry about any of that for a little while."

"Or I can go write it down somewhere to revisit in two weeks, if you're worried I'll otherwise forget about it completely, and your brain will otherwise keep nagging you to make sure it knows the issue won't get dropped."

"I'm not really worried about that. Should I be?"

"No," Keltham says, instead of his more usual cautious don't think so that he almost said.  "You won't forget about it if it's a thing that's important to you."

"Okay." She snuggles him quietly for a little while. "I really like you. Abrogail thinks I am in love with you. I haven't been in love with anyone before so I don't know how I would tell."

"Neither have I before.  Got a spell for that, Detect Love?"

"Don't think so. Don't think the gods know what love is either, probably."

That would explain some things about Golarion.

...he doesn't know how he knows this, but he knows he must not say that out loud, right now.

Okay, search complete, it's because Carissa doesn't need to go correct whatever he misunderstood about Golarion right now.  Maybe that's not all of what he knew, but it's a large-enough chunk to make sense.

"The first layer of advice out of dath ilan," Keltham murmurs, "would be that it doesn't matter whether you call it 'love' or not, it only matters what it is.  If you know what you're feeling and the question is just whether to call that 'love', there isn't really a question there at all, because you already know everything that the answer could have told you."

"The question is, when I tell you how I'm feeling, have I given you a better understanding, or a worse one. If I pick the wrong word then you'll have the wrong idea. So we need the same one, at least."

"The second layer.  Go down to the details that are smaller than the word, the things you saw that made you want to use the word, the perceptions that came before you tried to describe it to anyone else.  Describe those perceptions.  It will take much longer than using a word, but you'll have less of a problem of the same mouth-sound meaning different things to different people."

That feels like - mental work. Of the kind she's maybe been told not to do. And half of what she's performing here for Keltham is that she is competent enough her preferences can be trusted, so. 

"Mmmmm. I think I don't wanna try that right now. Maybe in the morning. Unless it's an order."

"It is not an order.  And that's fine.  I wasn't trying to give you a problem to solve, I was - being Keltham at you, being dath ilan at you, in case that was something that helped.  And so you'd know that whatever internal puzzles you have, there'll be a way to solve them, later, they won't just stick around being unanswerable.  In the rest of Golarion, maybe, but not in my bedroom."

"Love you."

"I sure feel something for you that I've never felt for anyone before, but I, too, don't feel like putting down all the mental work to describe it precisely, right now."

Kiss?

Symmetrical mouthdocking!

And a while after that - "I think I am up for sex and I think it might actually be - really nice and something special I can only get when I'm like this - but. Probably I should ask a priest. If that's even something you would want."

A potential MISSED OPPORTUNITY that is RARE?  This canNOT be permitted.

"Sure, let's ask.  Should I go have somebody run a message to someone?"

-giggle. "I guess so. The priestess in charge here is called High Priestess Subarachs. I haven't ...met her ....and might need to talk to her for her to decide....but that would require getting out of bed. I don't want to get out of bed! You are here! And it's so cozy."

"Well, I do need to be temporarily not-in-the-bed but it will be only temporary."

Keltham rises up, reshirts himself, opens door, calls for Security, please run a message to High Priestess Subasomething from Keltham, Carissa Sevar who just got back from her tryst with the Queen wants to talk to somebody about whether she's okay for sex, consider this to be Keltham asking for the favor of her coming all the way down to his bedroom to talk to Carissa without Carissa having to walk around excessively moving and thinking.

Carissa should feel incredibly embarrassed about that and very worried about the first impression she is leaving her new advisor in her descent into darkness but instead of this, she doesn't.

"You're very good.

- you know what you should do, if you don't mind, is, you should come up with a description of what's different between fragile Carissa and normal Carissa, in case mine isn't very satisfactory once I am recovered and try to come up with one."

"Are you also giving me a small adorable puzzle to keep my mind occupied and not talking to you, by any chance?"

"No! If you want to talk to me you can talk to me! Just, I said that, and then I thought, I think normally I wouldn't say that, and then I decided not to try to notice all the differences. But you could, if you wanted. I think the point of all this is that you get to figure out exactly how you like your Carissa and what to do to her to get that."

"I'll go take some notes, then."  In Baseline.

Keltham gets the scrapbook he's been using and brings it into bed.

Note 1:  Carissa seems a whole lot more capable of being happy, somehow, hopefully this is something that doesn't wear off completely or takes a while to do so.

Note 2:  Fragile Carissa knows that she is fragile and not constantly proclaiming her invincibility, which wouldn't be a good look on her all the time, but it is nice to know that she has an internal sensor for it and yes fine it's cute Keltham will write that.

Note 3:  She's like a tiny cute Pet Animal of some kind, which you wouldn't want to take care of always, but might want to take care of on correspondingly rare occasions like this one.

She is so curious but she won't peek! 

"You're allowed to know eventually, you just have to be in rough equilibrium before you see.  I'm not going to go overwrite your self-model while it's unusually fragile and maybe also changing, if I guessed anything on here wrong."

"Yeah, that makes sense and sounds right." It's not what Abrogail did, at all, but then Abrogail was trying to build Carissa a new way on purpose; Keltham doesn't know what he's doing and might build her a worse way accidentally, and is being appropriately cautious, given that.

Maybe they can kiss some more until the priest gets here.

Knock knock, quite gently.

Answer answer.

Keltham is trying to ignore the very strong eroLARP character warning signals he is getting from how hot this priestess is, and that would be easier if Carissa hadn't just leveled from sex.

Yes, Carissa is over there in the bed.  You can tell which object Keltham is pointing to, it's the adorable one.

This is probably more of a two-person talk than a three-person talk.

Understood.  Please note that Carissa is not to have sex without his approval.

Does she really give off that vibe?

Why trust what you can just as easily verify?

Keltham departs.

Carissa will stop being quite so flopped. "High Priestess."

"Chosen of Asmodeus.  You have permission to fall back down into the bed."

- okay, well, she'll take that. Flop.

"I have been advised that I am not able to judge my readiness for duty right now. By several people. I want to encourage Keltham to have sex with me and I want to check whether that would be a bad idea. Or if there's some other reason to tell him it's a bad idea, I guess."

Carissa Sevar is, to an experienced eye, even more fragile than she looks to Keltham.  To an Asmodean eye it would be contemptible, if you didn't know that this is what she is like only a few hours after finishing up a date with Abrogail Thrune that took her to fourth circle.

In fact, the Queen's brief said that the part that put Carissa up to fourth circle was just the foreplay, and Carissa's alignment aura is now noticeably slightly stronger than when that foreplay completed.  And here she is using words and everything!

So, her readiness for sexual operations?  To Jacint's eye, Carissa is being very honest, very vulnerable, looks very relaxed and happy, obviously has no reserves left to deal with anything going even slightly wrong, and is unlikely to be able to run much in the way of deceptions on Keltham.  Jacint could probably break Carissa with a few words, right now, or simply by ceasing to guard her own words much... if Jacint felt like simultaneously pissing off Abrogail Thrune for ruining her latest masterpiece while it was recovering into its new shape, and also pissing off Aspexia Rugatonn, and also pissing off Asmodeus.

If Carissa were at all considering having normal sex with a normal person, the answer would clearly be no.

And then Carissa would need to be given something else to occupy herself, to prevent her from becoming bored and then trying to put herself back together faster or in interesting new ways.

"I estimate it will probably be safe for you with Keltham," Jacint says, "and safe for him spiritually, if I instruct him to back off or stop if you seem to be in increasing distress, and make it clear that he is to consider that advice from myself that he should indeed follow, rather than being a request from you that he is to refer back to only his own desires.  You will not be able to deceive him about much, if anything, but he has already been instructed not to pester you with questions and to back off there as well."

"Yes. He's been good about that and I will tell him I'm not ready - and probably burst into tears - if he starts being pushy." She makes a little bit of a face about her own patheticness. 

"It would be a lovely thing to see, but he is not ready and this is not the time for it either."

- nod. "Thank you. I'll come see you tomorrow, probably, to discuss more."

"As Asmodeus wills.  Literally and specifically wills, in this case, since that was your decision."

Jacint departs.

"Upshot?"

"Yes, but back off if Carissa seems to be in increasing distress.  That's not a request from Carissa that you should refer back to your own will and wants, that's advice from me.  Which you should ignore only if you have decided to break your possession.  For which this would also be not a good time if you wanted that to have pleasing results later."

You could have just said... never mind.

"Understood."

"Pain, probably in very small amounts by her standards: good, neutral, bad?"

"Neutral, for her, in those very small amounts.  I suppose positive if you are enjoying yourself in it and she knows that."

Keltham is not quite sure what to feel about that 'neutral' thing, but thanks her and goes in to rejoin his Carissa.

"Hey. Did she say yes? She said she was going to say yes."

"She did."

Keltham is currently more curious than aroused, but this is not hard for somebody as pretty and vulnerable-looking as Carissa to fix, if she is being proactive.  Is she being proactive?

She'll pause a bit to see if he's going to be, but if not, then, yes, she will. She will drape herself on him and pet him and make small delighted noises about absolutely everything.

That'll get him revved in short order.  He didn't know that level of Sexy Adorable was even possible.  Everything about Carissa is brighter, somehow, than she seems usually was before, rather, hopefully.

Very small amount of pain to see what happens, at some point when he feels like that?

Gets a much stronger reaction than normal, but not necessarily in a bad way. She clings, and looks up at him as if she feels totally powerless in his arms.

...oh.  He didn't know he needed that, so much, he hopes that there's still some way to get this reaction tomorrow.

He'll try letting himself go a little, now, to do those things he feels like doing, himself, and see what comes of that.

He will not be unwatchful for distress and increasing distress.

Nope. She's okay. She wouldn't be okay, if he did any of a hundred normal things you do to a girl you're fucking and don't really care about, but he doesn't do any of those, because - 

- he doesn't feel like parsing out what love is precisely, but he feels something for her he's never felt for anyone before -

- and he doesn't even know to think she's pathetic, just to think she's his.

When they're done she does start crying, for completely mysterious reasons that don't correspond to her mood at all.

Recognizable substantial-base-rate gendertrope.  Keltham is fine with it.  He will pet her hair, unconscious of any particular new associations this might have for her; his hands, at least, don't feel much like Abrogail's.

(So, uh, Worldwound problem?  It's not necessary to have solved right now, not at all, Keltham learned that lesson rather early on; but you have to hand back your dath ilani boyfriend card if you don't at least wonder about any current outstanding Problems.)

He's very not like Abrogail. If she succeeds in making him into Abrogail, then - 

- well, then she'll have risen high in the esteem of Asmodeus, who can break and remake her on a scale Abrogail can only dream of, so. Nothing to do but keep winning.

(Worldwound problem has not mysteriously vanished. Maybe if Abrogail had been focusing on that.)

Dath ilan does ever try to shape people, Carissa Sevar, they just do it differently.  Not so differently that they never recognize petting somebody's hair as part of it.

"You're going to hate this."

"Guards? Take this bearer of bad news away and feed him to the crocodiles." There aren't guards; they're in his private study. 

"Cake girl showed up."

"     "

"      "

"Yeah. So, team shows up, gets a room, wards the room, baby's born, all of that goes totally smoothly. Four minutes after the baby's born, there's a knock on the door, and a Chelish wizard woman carrying a cake waltzes in and says, "congratulations!" Dimension Anchored, Mind Blanked, the team had as a precaution barely been briefed and correctly decided the thing to do was to get the fuck out as fast as possible, only she counterspells the Teleport and says, 'no! stay! celebrate!'"

"Aren't they actively in the middle of a war with Nidal, with virtually all their high level casters at the front."

"I mean, they've got some at the palace. One of whom saw fit to deliver cake. She insisted they eat it. It was not poisoned. It was reportedly delicious. ... I have a sample."

"It's not magical."

"It is not magical."

"And not poisoned."

"Not poisoned."

"If you put slices of it out on a dessert table with a bunch of other cakes, do people disproportionately take it, are the ones who take it any different from the ones who don't, are they any different an hour later -"

"I'm not bringing it anywhere near the palace but we'll see if we can test it in Alexandria, where the cake sample presently is. And I can ask Nefreti, though it might be wiser not to."

"Indeed. 

What could they have gotten off us - what did the team go in knowing -"

"Very large bounty from a reputable broker for an immediate trip to Cheliax, estimated 95% likely to be uneventful. Book a room, lock and ward the room, wait for a Sending about a newborn baby, wait two hours more, leave. If, and only if, a girl inexplicably appears in the room offering congratulations and cake, Plane Shift out instead of Teleporting, with the girl, to a demiplane the broker handed out the key for.

By far the primary thing they learned is that we know about cake girl. We didn't lose physical custody of the Plane Shift key, and it's a temporary demiplane anyway."

"And they didn't, you know, take them all down, learn that, send them to Hell, becauuuuse -"

"...because Cheliax is taking a new, cake-based angle on conquest. Or maybe because it was all done with scrolls and items and they were bluffing. Or maybe because Project Lawful powers can't be used against us. Or maybe because - look, do you realize how many things I now give substantial credence -"

"What things do you now give substantial credence."

"Queen Abrogail Thrune is one of the Project Lawful girls. Queen Abrogail Thrune is negotiating with Project Lawful for use of their girls. Everyone in the Chelish hierarchy waits on Carissa Sevar. Carissa Sevar won favor in the court by inventing a magic weapon that stole all Nidal's diamonds. Asmodeus is working with Irori. Asmodeus is working with Iomedae. Asmodeus is working with Cayden Cailean. Project Lawful turns you into a girl. Project Lawful makes you sexually attractive to Asmodeus's specific sensibilities and he prefers women."

"That is not how gods work."

"You're taking the under on that one? I have it at five percent."

He bites his lip. "...yes."

"But you thought about it. Because if I say twenty things that ridiculous -"

"I'm not betting against any of the others. What else -"

"A girl on Project Lawful is the Neutral Evil herald of Nethys, Takaral. A girl on Project Lawful killed the Neutral Evil herald of Nethys, Takaral. Project Lawful caused the godwar. The librarian on Project Lawful is cursed to never leave her library."

"And that is not how curses work."

"Well, there's the Oracle of Oppara -"

"Yes, I'm sure Asmodeus oracled one of his Project Lawful girls with a curse that leaves them tied to their library. That seems like the sort of thing Asmodeus, notorious respecter of the sanctity of books and libraries, would do."

"I also have, uh, the ultimate aim of Project Lawful is to write a romance novel that will cause all women worldwide to fall in love with Asmodeus and convert for him."

"I'll take the under on that too. - why only the women."

"Men don't read romance novels."

"Huh, do they not?"

"I think in countries where a lot of women are literate it's a pronounced skew. Is this really important."

"I don't know. I have no idea what's important. Maybe the romance novels are the key to the whole thing. ...what are Chelish romance novels like?"

"They're state-issued, so not very good, centralization of entertainment media produces stories that people like to think lesser people read. I think, I haven't actually read any."

"Right.

Okay.

Thank you, Merenre. Let me know if anything else pops out when you shift all the numbers around."

"Your highness." And he stands, and takes his beads away, very tiredly.

...do they seriously mean to tell her that nobody thought of inviting her to that?

PL-log:  Subevent 3 of PL-incident Bargaining With Chaos

Time:  Day 4 / evening

Location:  Egorian, Imperial palace, food preparation area

Notes:  PL-subject #3 is outside Otolmens Containment Zone while event occurs

Paladins can't experience fear. 

Otherwise it'd be much harder to operate in Cheliax. 

It is, to be clear, generally not worth it. Paladins can't experience fear, but they can experience eternal torture, and Cheliax delights in sending them on to it; there are places where more good can be done at a lower cost. But in the end, Cheliax is going to need to be overthrown, and you have to be in Cheliax to see the fractures when they start and can be encouraged in spreading. Plus, sometimes something really unexpected happens and you need to have people who can act quickly. 

Andreu Bassols (not his birth name) has been living in Egorian for two years, having moved from a small farming village when his parents died and it didn't seem worth keeping up the farm alone. He loads and unloads river barges; he's a strong man, built for hard labor. He has, beneath the skin on his neck and separately beneath the skin on his thigh, two minor magic items, which conceal an aura that would otherwise radiate from him and betray him. Either would be sufficient, but it's a new experimental type of magic item, and either could fail, so it's better to have both.  

He reads as having seven intelligence; his thoughts, when read, are slow, and uninteresting. This is the greatest sacrifice, aside from the possible eternity of damnation; the effect could not be manufactured. It had to be induced for real. He can lift it, when he puts his healing to that purpose, but it's risky, so he does it rarely. 

He did it this morning; knelt in the cellar he sleeps in, the walls and ceiling too thick for Detect Thoughts, and healed himself, and read an encoded report delivered on a river barge, and broke down the plan into steps he would still, later, understand. 

It's afternoon, now, and he is pushing a wheelbarrow of potatoes into the kitchens of the palace in Egorian. 

Someone hands him a cookie.  "You did really well," the woman says gently.  "You worked really hard.  You deserve a cookie.  But now you need to get out of Cheliax.  It's okay, someone else will handle things from here."

why is her curse insisting that she act like this, fucking Abyss aaaaaahhhhhh

That wasn't in the plan! 

"I have a delivery," the man says, smiling at her in a friendly sort of way but proceeding in the same direction he was headed in.

Okay no, Pilar is not standing around cooing at this suicidal idiot, that's a step too far.

Message:  "You have a death sentence involving a Malediction, paladin.  Seriously, get out of here."

He turns around and squints at her. Blinks. "I'm sorry, lovely, did you say something? My hearing's going off."

There's too many people around.

You know, Pilar's just going to grab this guy by the hand and pull him someplace slightly more deserted.

He doesn't object to this. 

He touches his hand to his chest, when they're alone, and the look in his eyes - changes. 

"Who are you, and what do you want?"

"Aura Sight on me."

"You are Evil, child, but the impulsive guess of the gods is not their final judgment, and they see the future not at all." And then he keeps squinting, and frowns. "....you are also Good. .... and Lawful. And Chaotic. - what do you want."

"Lawful Evil's a disguise, Chaotic Good's the real one, it's stronger if you look closely, now that I'm not hiding it."

"I want you out of Cheliax."

"It is stronger," he agrees. "This is a dangerous place for a conversation; were you able to choose no other?"

"It's safer than it looks."

"Look.  Just go.  Get out of Cheliax.  I'm obviously on your side given that you're not dead and damned already."

"It is not obvious to me that you're on my side; it's not obvious what you think my side even is. I don't take revised orders from anyone who glows right. Has my cover been compromised?"

"One of the deadliest Project Lawful girls, Paxti, is making a sweep of the palace.  The girls you've heard of are the ones where not everyone who saw them is dead.  You would not have been able to evade Paxti like that and you still can't evade her now.  You don't have that long, go."

"How would she find me. Is it only the palace they're sweeping. Do you need a ride out of the country."

"Project Lawful bullshit that I doubt they actually understand any better than you do.  I don't know.  No because Milani bullshit."

"What do you know about Project Lawful."

"Something like a hundred and fifty things of which at most thirty can be true.  Strong guesses:  The archduke's villa that Nidal attacked was actually a decoy, one of the girls did in fact take a round trip to Elysium and back, the project is faking a move elsewhere but remains inside the Imperial palace where it's been from the beginning, whatever it is only works to empower women."

"If you're still here in one minute I'm walking away.  Milani bullshit or not, I cannot just hang around here next to you waiting for Project Lawful to catch up with you."

"If they're sweeping the palace and maybe surrounding areas, why tell me to leave the country?"

"Because Project Lawful is bullshit and the last person I told to just leave Egorian got executed and Maledicted.  But not right away.  They can see where you've been, maybe, but not follow fast -"

"Look, is this mission one that I can just complete, they can't find me but they can find you."

"Come with me to my wheelbarrow."

Sure thing!

Pilar Pineda has now met exactly one paladin in person and she already hates their entire species with a burning passion.  She is having to crush down a tiny thread of appreciation for how her curse is actually less Stupid Good than this.

"Who was the last one?" he asks while they walk.

"According to him, Iciar de Ossorio.  I doubt it was his real name, I thought I had no need to know since he was getting out, I didn't press him on it, and part of me is glad that now I don't have the ability and hence responsibility to tell his family how he died."

"Our families know how we'll die." He reaches the wheelbarrow, pulls out a canteen, hands it to her. "Spread it on the walls in a well-trafficked area, thin enough it'll dry fast, it's detectable while it's drying. I intended to do the kitchens, but if you have the run of the place, it should avoid detection anywhere that doesn't have anti-scrying wards. You won't know if it worked, but we will. I am grateful. Realize your aims."

And off he goes.

Her curse had better not expect her to actually do this.

Her curse is not that stupid.

Well good for it.  Is Pilar kindly allowed to hand this stuff in for analysis?

Eh, sure.

Pilar admits to being surprised.

Pilar has been nice to her curse and now her curse is being nice to her.

Guy with his wheelbarrow leaves the grounds. The wheelbarrow is still full of potatoes, which he's confused by - did he miss a step? No, he changed plans. He should get somewhere quiet and figure out what the plan is now.

Pilar hands the canteen in for analysis.  Whoever's in charge of putting out this kind of fake story, the canteen was taken off the body of an agent of Milani who looked like Pilar currently looks.  The Milani agent was surprised trying to use the canteen, and got interrogated, executed and Maled -

- was hunted by Paxti, but managed to suicide before being Maledicted.

Is her curse ever going to stop whining about every little thing.

Trying to make somebody believe that they got a friend Maledicted is mean.  If Pilar stops trying to use her curse to be mean, her curse will stop whining about it.

Being mean to paladins doesn't count.

It always counts, for everyone everywhere.  Paladins are, first and foremost, people, even if a lot of paladins forget that themselves.

Pilar knows this already and doesn't want her curse reminding her of it and that is why Pilar is angry and trying to go out of her way to be mean.

...actually, Pilar just had a really fucking disturbing thought, and she's ashamed of herself as an Asmodean for not thinking of it a lot earlier.

Her curse wouldn't, possibly, maybe, have just humorously tricked her into saving a paladin who was actually going to get caught and Maledicted.

Would it?

Pilar will not be used against her Lord, Asmodeus, to whom she is truly and incredibly-undeservedly loyal.

It has not escaped Pilar's notice that her curse has not answered her question.

From this it would then follow, for example, that if this paladin had hypothetically been due to get caught and maledicted, he would have first succeeded in his mission, and would have gone to Hell never saying what he'd done, leaving Chelish Security unaware of it.

If Iomedae wants that exchange to be made, Asmodeus presumably wants it not to be made.  And therefore in a case like that, hypothetically speaking, Pilar would have well served her Lord.