Did she ACTUALLY invent the +2 and +4 headband assembly lines while also running the Conspiracy while also making geas earrings while also being Keltham's second on science research while also being Keltham's girlfriend?

"Well, he didn't know we had Rings of Sustenance, and he had a lot of girlfriends. But yes."

"Can I read your soul contract? There's not a lot of attested non-standard Infernal contracts out there."

"...sure. Why not."

What's IONE SALA like?  She knows Ione Sala, right?  Is she as cool as all the stories say?

"Honestly she was kind of a bitter, traumatized teenage girl."

Besides the thing with using spellsilver from six feet away, what's the coolest feat of Spellcraft she's ever pulled off in her own opinion?

This interaction is profoundly disconcerting for reasons Carissa really really cannot put a name to at all. "I.... made the geas earrings while I was directing the Conspiracy in Absalom and while they were in my pocket, without looking at them; they'd been narrower, but I'd realized that'd look suspicious. I guess most people would've had to look."

Is there some subject Carissa Sevar would actually prefer to talk about by way of letting her brain cool down before she goes to Hell?

"You could tell me about yourselves."

There's a sharp divide between the people Keltham brought on board before, and after, he started worrying about whether being in his presence or being important to the story might cause people to have more realityfluid.  People from after that tend to be cheerfuller, happier, and to be headed towards afterlives they're comfortable with.  The earlier hires have grimmer stories, which they can't tell Carissa Sevar about, because once Keltham realized what he might be doing wrong, he ordered everybody present to not talk about any bad things that had happened to them in the past so those bad events wouldn't get more realityfluid retroactively.  This is known as the No Tragic Backstories Rule.

This person wearing the holy symbol of Nethys has led a peaceful life for a Nethysian.  He's in the pro-doom faction.  He's only a first-circle cleric, and only uses his divine spells for harm reduction even so, in case doing otherwise would risk Pharasma looking through him to see Nethys.  He's on the Project because he has an incredibly encyclopedic knowledge about spells, items, monsters, all the magical details of the world; and since that isn't Nethys's power he can use that wholeheartedly to assist Keltham.

Okay actually the reminder Keltham thinks he's in a story is just really upsetting.

She wants to YELL AT HIM that JUST IN CASE this is NOT A STORY doing anything that INCREASES THE ODDS OF THIS GOING BADLY BY ONE IN A MILLION IS KIDNAPPING LOTS OF PEOPLE STRAIGHT FROM AXIS TO FEED TO DAEMONS AND THE STAFF HERE BEING SAD CANNOT POSSIBLY MEASURE UP TO THAT AND HE SHOULD FUCKING HIRE FOR COMPETENCE

- but it will just make him declare that she hasn't read enough books about this, and also maybe if he hires really incompetently that actually makes him less likely to stumble across any way of destroying the universe in the first place.

She will just smile and nod at Keltham's prisoners and cultists, then. This is such a relaxing break. She can't wait to go to Hell where people aren't horrible.

"It's been observed to me that you smiling and nodding under your actual present circumstances may perhaps indicate that you are not, at the moment, having fun."

"Shall we go to Hell together?"

"Let's."

Onward and out of the Forbiddances, then; he'll audibly repeat the Forbiddance passwords for each area, naming them as he goes.  Time-dilation Forbiddance is part of full-clearance aka 'core', you obviously don't tell the password for it to anybody; he is only saying it out loud (relatively quietly) because it's quite bad if Carissa forgets or gets it wrong.

People inside this Forbiddance, the 'inner' Forbiddance, don't know what this place is about; they cook and so on.  The 'inner' Forbiddance has the rec room and library because uncleared people need a rec room too.  People in 'inner' don't know that people in 'core' know what he's up to - they don't know 'core' folk share his secrets.

This 'outer' Forbiddance is for dealing with people who don't know what the project is about and don't live here either, like Ri-Dul.

Occasionally one of the doomist women here will deliberately wander into the outer Forbiddance area where Ri-Dul can see her, wearing relatively less, with correspondingly false implications about what goes on inside the inner areas.  This is to prevent Ri-Dul from ever desiring to sneak inside.

To be clear, he is not expecting Carissa to do that, and Ri-Dul would probably be suspicious of it anyways.

"Geas seems to think I can't even look kind of scared because I'd be doing it in the hope someone asked themself 'what makes Carissa Sevar scared?'."

"If the geas forces you to hold yourself to your own terrifyingly high standards we may have a problem, yeah.  Is this part manageable?"

"I am not noticing substantial impairment."

They pass an invisible guard at the outer Forbiddance, and are into the un-Forbidden (but still Mage's Private Sanctumed) area.

He activates his glibness pin on himself and then passes it to Carissa.  He swaps out his headband for Intelligence to boost scroll-casting, casts from scrolls, swaps to Splendour headband.

She'll take a Glibness too. 

And then she'll close her eyes and look inside her own mind and open a Gate to Hell.

It really says something about her mental state that her reaction to the blast of hot sulfurous air and the distant screams is in fact 'oh, it's good to be back'. Once they're done with everything time sensitive she needs to - take a break and reflect, or something, figure out which parts of her are running mostly on spite and the yearning-to-be-hurt and run them on something better.

For now she needs to go to Hell. She steps through the Gate. 

He also steps through the Gate.  How's the pressure of Hell on his soul doing through the Mind Blank and Protection from Evil?