There is no longer any staff on the premises doing laundry.  All the usual slaves have been removed for now, they'd be infosec hazards to Keltham in any case.  Cooking, janitorial, and other ops are being performed by a few first-circle priests of Asmodeus with appropriate civilian proficiencies.

Maillol is afraid that anyone here without a claimed soul is going to get oracled.

"Hi again, Carissa.  I'm about to start winding down my workday, but before I switch to nonwork mode, I should try my cleric spells."

"Could just do it with Security, if you didn't want to be there."

"I'm in." But a touch reluctant, mildly traumatized by what happened yesterday, so hopefully he won't think anything of the rest of the girls being somewhere far away where their anxieties and desires cannot be detected.

Carissa may still be a little undercalibrated on how much Keltham can sight-read Chelish expressions; he can't see anything meant to be subtle.

To a secure workroom then.

First up is a first-circle Abjuration.

"Protection." from Evil, but they've already strategically modified the relevant sources.  "It creates a defensive magical barrier and makes it impossible for summoned creatures to come into contact with you. It's commonly used at the Worldwound as a cheap shield."

"That's... not easy to understand, if it's either a message, or an actual contingency.  Things shouldn't be summonable inside the Forbiddance, right?  Or is somebody going to come in with an army of summoned creatures from the outside?"

"Correct," Security confirms. 

"Could mean, uh, your protections still aren't adequate? Or that there's a summoned entity already here...."

"Actually.  Third-circle unidentified conjuration - that's the thing that does summoning?  Maybe it's meant to be used before I use that?  How long does Protection last and can somebody tap me with a new one if this one runs out?"

"Yes, though also if it's a summoning you're going to have to leave the Forbiddance to do it.'

"Lasts two minutes per caster circle."

"Any way to tell by looking at the spell structure, if somebody wants to show me an illusion of something?"

Security shows the spell structure for Planar Inquiry and then for Summon Monster III and then for Infernal Challenger.

"Summon Monster III.  Okay, I don't get it, what is that and why do I have it."  Unless the message is simply leave the Forbiddance.

"It summons an extraplanar creature. You can get a minor outsider with it, or an animal. If you want to use it we'll have to leave the Forbiddance, but that could probably be done safely if it's done briefly and not telegraphed in advance - so probably now, if you want to do it."

"Literally right now?  If so, start walking and I'll follow while I ask my additional questions."

"By 'not telegraphed in advance', you mean we have to leave right now before any intelligence leak could tell an adversary to prepare an assault?"

"This room is very shielded, but I would want to depart it intending to head straight there. To be clear, we have no reason to believe this facility is being observed by any adversary. But your gods' communications are consistent with there being some threat, and with sufficiently powerful magic it would be possible to surpass our precautions. Or there could be a spy."

"...huh.  I wish I had a much better idea of exactly how well my god can see my situation and exactly how intricately predictive their plans are likely to be."

"Let's run through the other spells first and then you can tap me with another Protection and we can run outside and cast that one."

Next up is an unfamiliar second-circle divination, the one that doesn't go by touch - he's planning to save the Early Judgment for last, or now second-to-last, in case a vision of his or his god's afterlife ends up being awful news of some kind.

"Augury. Gives advice from your god about whether a course of action - like 'should I step outside the Forbiddance', I guess -- will have immediately good or bad effects. Was an incredibly powerful spell when prophecy wasn't broken and now it can only go off information that's already observable just not to you, so it's fine for, like, warning you of ambushes but lousy for anything more complicated. Even for ambushes it now has a depressingly high false positive and false negative rate - I want to say one in four readings is just nonsensical and not from your god at all?"

It doesn't quite make sense that his god would give him two Auguries only to have one of them tell him not to go outside - but Keltham can sense that he needs to supply this question basically like now, so he says, out loud, "Effect of going outside the Forbiddance."

(Probably he's got two so that he can actually think of the correct question on #2.)

The god of knowledge would prefer that this Augury fail, thank you very much.

"I... think it failed entirely, actually.  Or at least I didn't get any information off it.  Possibly waiting that long to ask the question didn't help."  Keltham had two Auguries, but it's not obvious he should tell them that.

Next:  Unfamiliar third-circle divination, there's two of them that look pretty similar.

Abadar is incredibly fucking done with everyone messing with his cleric. Does Abadar go tax the temple of Nethys in Sothis into ruin, because he likes money, no!!!


The thing about Augury is that it's such a noisy broken channel, now, with prophecy broken, no message can get through with Nethys opposing it.

But He can be MAD ABOUT IT. 

This spell gives him a - sense of Carissa and Security and a sense that there aren't other minds, in the room, and a sense he can see a new angle of them -

"Detect Desires. - considered kind of invasive, for what it's worth, and spellcasters will automatically try to fight it off, though I'm trying to not because we're trying to build trust here -"