And maintain plausible deniability they did! This started at birth with his name (a misspelled attempt at an Infernal form which might be charitably translated “favored servant of Moloch,”) and continued for the next decade. But despite the open beatings and secret encouragements they gave him, from an early age it seemed he would make a hopeless Asmodean. Oh, he could whip a halfling slave exactly as much as would save him from being whipped himself, he could speak in half truths and attempt to make unfair deals, he could even (his parents noted with secret relief) exhibit appropriate flashes of pride, or at least disdain for anyone he considered his intellectual inferior, but he just lacked the— for lack of a more precise term— killer instinct that separates the pieces from the players.

His comparative lack of wisdom and splendor certainly didn't help matters, but really, it was something deeper than that, Molochio just wasn't dangerous, and no matter how many clever plots he could theoretically dream up to destroy his enemies, it was clear that he lacked the will to put them into action. 

By the time he was of an age to attend wizard school, it was abundantly clear that letting him attend would be a death sentence, for all his early proclivity to mathematics. A lesser family might not have had any options, but for those of wealth and influence within Cheliax it is— sometimes— possible to steer your children away from the most brutal careers.

Even ignoring laundry wizards and counting only casters of the second circle or higher, Cheliax still has more than 10 wizards to every alchemist. This is for several reasons. First, wizards are more versatile than alchemists, and can fit into more organizational niches. Second, knowledge of the arts of wizardry is more widespread, and thus both easier to learn and more socially acceptable as a career choice. Thus, for those with high int and an aptitude for spellcraft, wizardry is something of a default course, whether you are in Cheliax, Lastwall, or Taldor. 

But Cheliax, of course, has made boosting its wizards per capita something of a national paranoia. It is clear why this might be: wizard training is scalable, for one, and unlike those spells granted to clerics, arcane magic doesn’t cost hell’s intervention budget on a per spell basis. Witches and druids have obvious loyalty issues, and while Cheliax has made use of them it certainly can’t scale them, and the arts of sorcery and theurgy, while encouraged when circumstances permitt, are too rare to serve as the scalable foundation for a properly growing tyranny. 

Even so, casters such as rangers, alchemists, and bards are all scalable casters, don’t overtax infernal resources, and don’t pose insurmountable loyalty challenges. So why doesn’t Cheliax invest more resources in training these casters? Some of this is cultural: even a relatively educated Chelish subject know little of any casters besides wizards and clerics, and while academicians can give you detailed taxonomies of all known types of caster, these are less helpful than may appear, as there are nigh as many competing taxonomies as there are academicians. Bardic magic is not known to be teachable in Cheliax, (it is still a live topic of debate within the magic schools of Avistan whether bards are even a thing, or if they are just a weird type of song sorcerer) and while there is a minority of Chelish scholars who believe it can be taught at scale, there is nothing to separate their hypothesis from the thousands of other contrarian opinions regarding magic, and so efforts to fund research into scalable bardic magic have gone nowhere. 

But there is another, more fundament, reason for the supremacy of wizardry in Cheliax, for a system set up like the Chelish one, legibility to your superiors, and ultimately to hell, is paramount. Were Chelish citizens allowed to pursue whatever type of arcane magic struck their fancy, Cheliax might have a greater level and diversity of casters, but these casters would be less legible to the state, and therefore less controllable. No, far better to force all arcane spellcasters in the nation to attend the same schools, do the same tours of duty, and practice the same arts. One Chelish arcane caster thus ends up much like another, which makes them both more legible and expendable, weakening them relative to the Chelish governing apparatus. 

Well, most of them.

Because if you are a ranger fastidiously loyal enough that you pass your detect thoughts checks, or a bard lucky enough to have developed your talents despite the lack of formal training, or any other sort of unusual caster who can convince the Chelish state that you are not too much of a defection risk.

Then sometimes you can have a bit of breathing space. 

Insofar as Cheliax does still need alchemists, it doesn’t need enough to justify a centralized pipeline and standardized curriculum like the one it has for wizardry. Rather, Chelish alchemists are taught in much the same way as they are taught in other countries— with a master taking an indentured apprentice, and teaching them the arts via practical instruction. These indentures last longer than a wizard's schooling, but a graduated alchemist has very little debt, and thus often can avoid the worldwound. If they wish to reach a higher circle, of course, they’ll probably go anyway, but the comparative scarcity of alchemists gives them a better pick of combat roles.

Of course, if your master is a good Asmodean, your life will often be even worse as an alchemist's apprentice than as a wizard student. But if you know where to look, if you are a scion of a wealthy and influential family which happens to have a not particularly devout alchemist as a family friend, you can get training in the arcane arts within Cheliax in an environment where maybe, just maybe, you can be weak and survive. 

There is a limit to how weak you can be however. Molochio’s four years as an alchemist’s apprentice pass slowly. While he takes to the work and does well enough as an alchemist, and by the end is not all that far from mastering second circle formulae, as an apprentice he is a complete failure. Every free moment, and in many moments when he ought to be working, he retreats to his attic and reads whatever he can get his hands on— not alchemical texts, mind you, or even proper Asmodean literature, but rather worthless trash tolerated by the state only because banning it would be too much work. At work he is shiftless, and does as little as possible to get by. He makes no effort to befriend anyone, and, on his rare days off, will most often go an entire day without speaking a word to anyone. His master’s formula slots are too valuable to frequently spend on detect thoughts, and his occasional scanning by Chelish security (mandatory for all registered arcane apprentices) show him to be an unpromising soul who is nonetheless too frightened and lazy to defect.

Until, one day, his master gave him yet another project which will require him to work through the night. Even had he been diligent, he likely would have failed to complete it, but sneaking off to grab a few hours of sleep (and a few precious moments at his latest book) meant that he was nowhere near where he ought to be when his master came to check on him shortly before dawn. And then, well, even a kindly master (by the standards of Cheliax) has a limit, and as he took his whip in hand to try yet again beat some sense into the idiot something in Molochio broke, and he threw a bomb, not at his master but at the alchemical project itself, which was already dangerously unstable and then;

OHHHHHHHHHH, pretty!!

And somehow he dives under the table and protects himself from much of the damage from the blast, and poison fills the air and settles towards the floor but he keeps conscious long enough to pull himself out of the noxious cloud, but it doesn’t matter because he is dying, bleeding out on the ground. He drinks his only mutagen to strengthen his constitution and buy himself a few more rounds of life, and then he remains on the floor, counting the moments to his death.

Well, he’s going to be counting for awhile then, because as of the first ray of dawn touching the roof of his worship, Molochio will find that he can channel positive energy.

There is little which need be said of the weeks between Molochio’s empowerment by Nethys and the four days war; of how he grabs his alchemical tools, and his master’s bag of holding filled with a little food and money and as many books as he can fit; of how he was presumed dead in the blast; of how he tried to sustain himself in the woods in the way his books had taught him, of how when that failed he made money secretly selling cleric spells to farming villages, of how he did this ineptly enough that he almost immediately came to the attention of the inquisition, of how he in desperation sold what few spells he could cast, thereby identifying himself; of how he was, after all, only first circle, and not worth a teleport or even a scry from Chelish security to capture; of how he at least had the sense to keep moving, such that it was another week before the local junior inquisitor could found out where he would be next; of how the four days war came along and made the whole point moot; of how a local village drowned its priest in a well; and how, when he first walked openly into said village square and channeled for the locals, Molochio began to suspect another life was possible.

Not that he acted on his suspicion. He had grabbed enough from his master’s study that he could continue his research, and if his progress was slower than it had been before, it wasn’t all that much slower. The money brought in by his channels were more than enough to sustain his lifestyle, meaning he spent the majority of his days doing what he liked, which turned out to be a lot of sleeping, reading, and staring out of his window, and maybe, if he was feeling particularly active, a bit of research. If his god had any teachings Molochio did not know them, and the villagers were much more interested in healing and water and the occasional alchemical brew than in theological instruction anyway, and so his life passed pleasantly enough until he is summoned to Westcrown…

…where someone had already booked him rooms in a niceish inn not too far from a library.

”Who?”

“I donno”

Where he awaits the start of the convention.