“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"I need an urgent Teleport to Egorian and also, if there's anyone who has been spying on my room, if there's some kind of remote surveillance setup, you don't need to tell me about it but someone with knowledge of it needs to come with me on the urgent trip to Egorian, the Most High is going to have questions for them."
There isn't that he knows about, but that's irrelevant; this gets routed to the new 7th-circle commander via Telepathic Bond, stat.
Carissa Sevar will be out of the Forbiddance and on her way to Egorian before 2 minutes have elapsed.
She will spend them staring at her own handwriting and wishing she had gotten some sleep before the next Project Lawful thing had to happen.
One might find it satisfying to imagine that Aspexia Rugatonn had thought that Sevar was developing so nicely, that Project Lawful was going back under a firm hand, that everything was going normal and fine on Project Lawful, and then this happened.
She obviously didn't think that. Aspexia Rugatonn wouldn't have let herself think that even before she'd heard of 'tropes'.
Among the many dark unspeakable facts you learn as the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is that projects which have had drama in the past, will probably continue to have drama in the future.
Aspexia Rugatonn gave herself 24 hours in the Palace, catching up on administrative matters, promotions and demotions, rewards and punishments, before returning to the front. 24 hours, starting from when Carissa Sevar returned to Project Lawful.
24 hours later, as she departed for Nidal, having heard only good things out of Project Lawful, Aspexia made a private wager with herself about the chances of her being called back by some Project Lawful emergency within another 24 hours, once she was no longer conveniently at the Palace and interruptible. Has she won or lost this wager? It doesn't really matter; whoever won, Aspexia Rugatonn loses.
"I'm pulling all of the current Modify Memory items from Project Lawful as soon as I've dealt with whatever madness this is," Rugatonn states in tones of even, calm impending murder. "The utility to the ilani project, in retrospect, is not worth the massive vulnerability to the tropes created by having them around as potential plot devices. In the future, Project Lawful will have on staff one person who can use Modify Memory of the 4th-circle spellform, as will be detectable by Detect Magic and reversible by Break Enchantment. How long has it been since you slept, Sevar?"
"I slept - before my debrief and departure from Egorian, Most High. That would have been about two days ago."
"You look it. If we are truly fortunate, this packet only contains your mad ravings after you snapped due to sleep deprivation. What's the last event you allowed yourself to remember?"
"I wasn't succeeding at falling asleep so I decided to cast Owl's Wisdom and get some more work done on thinking about corrigibility."
Now there's the sort of topic somebody might choose if they were trying to distract Aspexia Rugatonn about something. Fortunately, Project Lawful's current Modify Memory items are not at least the sort that alter memories.
"You are certain you remember that actually happening? You did not leave yourself a further note saying that it was what happened?"
"No, Most High. I thought to myself I should try to make some progress on it, for its own sake and because it'd be a way of seeing if any of Pilar's new ilani can set themselves apart, but only if I've made progress myself to judge theirs against. And then - nothing."
"Lovely. Shut up while I think."
Aspexia Rugatonn weighs the packet in her hands. She's no ilani, but she's read every Project Lawful transcript and is very, very Wise.
The temptation to tear open the packet and read it immediately is strong. But there's an obvious thought, here, which is that Sevar went traitor, knew she couldn't pass Detect Thoughts past that point; and that this past Sevar is essaying some gambit intended to get her less-enhanced self out of Cheliax and to Keltham.
This past Sevar has INT 24, which is noticeably more Cunning than Rugatonn, even if that Sevar remains much less Wise than herself.
Then it may be wiser for Aspexia to do her own thinking at least briefly, before she opens the packet and allows it to poison her interpretations. Aspexia will make her predictions in advance, decide in advance which theories imply what, as Keltham always emphasized that an ilani should.
If Sevar turned traitor the first time she augmented herself with +6 intelligence and +4 Wisdom - the packet will aim to steer her still-loyal mindwiped self in a way that will reproduce her traitorous realization under conditions where she can escape Cheliax and reach Keltham as soon as she has that realization. The packet will argue that Sevar mustn't be allowed to have +4 Wisdom again, until she is in some strange unusual situation that places her out of Cheliax's reach, or within Keltham's.
If Sevar is a good Asmodean - then there is here some thought Sevar could not bear, and she honestly wishes herself defended from it. Perhaps she has actually done the equivalent of seeing through to the Dark Tapestry and the packet will contain a further seal instructing Aspexia to show the contents only to Gorthoklek. Perhaps it is some more ordinary disloyal thought and Sevar did not wish to die a traitor's death, or lose her place in Cheliax; and her packet will advise as to how her unwitting self is to be reshaped in some ordinary way that prevents a recurrence, in a plan that brings her no closer to Osirion.
At INT 24, Aspexia's own thoughts here will not be beyond a traitorous Sevar's attempted grasp. Many in Cheliax have tried to think like Aspexia Rugatonn, correctly knowing this for a path to power and fortune if she recognizes them as even beginning to grasp it. - but this thinking Aspexia has just done, does not draw on that which makes her a 9th-circle of Asmodeus.
A traitorous and clever Sevar, then, will be trying to obscure the distinction between those two cases, and all complication is a sign of her disloyalty. One who grasps this thought has indeed begun to ravel Aspexia Rugatonn - which may not be beyond Sevar's grasp, it wasn't beyond Asmodia's.
It would be more certain reasoning, if not for tropes.
Aspexia opens the packet, and reads the first page there.
Most High -
The base action she has to improve on is fleeing to Osirion and trying to change Keltham's mind even though interacting with her at all has so far made his life only worse and she has no way to fix that, and if that fails reporting him to Otolmens.
It's a pretty bad base action and not trope-satisfying at all so it feels like she ought to be able to improve on it.
Carissa-as-of-ten-minutes-ago could plausibly have demanded Peranza's soul and gotten it. The problem isn't that it's an expensive ask, it's that she's a heretic and a traitor. Carissa as of ten minutes ago could plausibly have demanded the souls of everyone on Project Lawful -
- also all of the Security, the tropes and Keltham seem to care more about the girls than about Security or Maillol but Carissa doesn't, actually, and if she's going to do it she should do it her way, not just make sure that no one who knew Keltham is worse off for having known him but also that no one who worked under her is worse off for that.
If Carissa of ten minutes ago could have had that, then Carissa of ten minutes ago is your starting point; she does possess items of Modify Memory, after all.
The problem is that Aspexia Rugatonn isn't an idiot. She's not as smart as Carissa, she's never seen Carissa at Carissa's smartest, she might underestimate her. But weighing against that is that she'll be on the lookout for something exactly like this, it'll be her first thought when she hears what happened, and Carissa can do only the steering that fits in a letter.
It should be enough. You can put a lot of steering into a letter, sort of an absurd amount; words are dangerous things.
And she's very, very good at building a world that's not the one she lives in.
Her biggest advantage is that she didn't have any unAsmodean thoughts until she was confident she wasn't being mindread; if you try to reproduce this, you'll get interesting results, but not a break like the one she really had.
Her second-biggest advantage is the price of her soul in Dis. She can potentially command vast and unusual resources for her plan, which is good, since she'll need them. Devils, she suspects, have something like unimaginable Sense Motive for efforts to get one over on them while selling your soul; that's why this Carissa can't try it, even with her pin of Glibness, even with a better one. But a sincere, Asmodean Carissa....
Probably a lot of traitors with access to memory modification would try some memory gambit. She has a couple reasons to think it'll go better for her. The first is that she is not, in fact, asking to be sent to Keltham.
She is asking to be sent to Hell.
Indeed. It is obvious that among the potential reasons to erase your own thoughts is that you turned traitor, and then, used your +6 headband to try to steer your future self along a pathway that ends with you fleeing to Keltham in Osirion. Even if you don't seem Atonable, maybe you've outgrown your previous nightmares, and are now ready for someone to statue you until Civilization brings Hell to terms, if need be.
Wherever your attempt to steer your future self ends up, such as with travel privileges, Rugatonn will ask if that was the point of the whole plan, no matter what cleverness you essay along the way.
She doesn't want to show her hand too much, how many escape plans she thought of; having carefully considered a dozen ways to escape Cheliax is also something traitors do more than people who aren't traitors.
But it'd be easy. If she kills herself Osirion will learn of it and raise her before she goes to trial. If she calls in Olegario and tells him she needs an urgent Teleport to Egorian, he'll take her, and once outside the nonintervention zone she can send him home and pray to Iomedae, or Irori, or Abadar, or use a scroll of Sending. With the aid of some Suggestions she could probably get him to go along with defecting outright, or ask him to put on her Geas earrings.
If she sleeps and then spends the rest of the night desperately trying to figure out how to trim down Teleport into something she can hang, giving up on preparing any other spells, she has a feeling she might land it by morning - either by finding the right shortcut or because desperately trying for hours to hang a spell is the kind of thing that might let you claw your way to fifth circle if you're close enough - and then she could Teleport under her own power. And the Project is no longer staffed by some of the most senior wizards in all of Cheliax; she could probably just, Glibness pin up, ask for a Teleport scroll and get it, and then a junior Security could leave the project site with orders signed by Carissa Sevar, and read the scroll as soon as they were off-site.
She shouldn't say all those things to Aspexia Rugatonn, but one or two, maybe, at the end of the letter, so Aspexia Rugatonn can read it with growing suspicion and then notice her suspicion was unjustified. There's a mental technique, for un-learning properly, letting your mind relax to the level of suspicion it should be at and not less than that, but Carissa herself hasn't mastered it yet and she doubts Rugatonn has.
Rugatonn is old. Rugatonn is wise. Do not underestimate her. If this trick works at all, it will only be because Rugatonn decides to read through the letter at an ordinary high speed and not deliberately pause to think after each sentence before she gets to the next, only forming unconsidered reactions as she goes, and not considered ones...
...which it isn't implausible Rugatonn may do, she's always in a hurry. Rugatonn's casting stat is Wisdom; seeing manifold ways to escape Cheliax is more the work of Intelligence.
All right then, Rugatonn is perhaps forming an unconsidered theory of Sevar's escape-to-Keltham motives as she swiftly reads, to be spiked at the end of the letter. What's at the start?
Rugatonn obviously wants to know immediately why Sevar deleted her memories. Was it, perhaps, because she had a traitorous thought, and hatched some elaborate plan to fulfill her traitorous desires without those desires being readable?
It would be nice if she could claim that, instead, she had a dangerous thought, and shouldn't specify it even in the document.
Too dangerous even for the Most High to read?
It sounds like a blatant excuse, and just what a traitor would write. And yet, surprisingly plausible, given the mess with Peranza, tropes in play, and probably Rugatonn's own experience with a Thing or two out of the Dark Tapestry...
Sevar should write down this dangerous information, so that Rugatonn can very carefully and respectfully not read it herself and show it to Gorthoklek.
Yep, that's what she'd do too.
(Can she think of anything that would break Gorthoklek? It merits a little thought, at least, even though it's almost definitely impossible.)
If there's such things as thoughts that break powerful, coherent agents, they're probably not readily thought up by smaller, incoherent agents that don't have a model of the powerful agents in much more detail than them being powerful.
Fine.
What could she have run into, that is dangerous and visibly so, that would cause her to do what she's planning to ask to do, and would not cause her to decide to overthrow Asmodeus?
So, just to be clear here, Carissa Sevar wants a thought such that:
- It implies she should go to Hell and buy up the souls of previous Project Lawful employees. (If that's something you can even do, with Hell.)
- It doesn't imply she should overthrow Asmodeus.
- Carissa Sevar needed to erase this thought from her own mind and have it only be known to Aspexia Rugatonn.
- None of this is particularly what a traitor would try to do.
Well, this problem sure doesn't suffer from being underconstrained!