"All right, then.  Obviously volunteers only, so, any volunteers?"

"Ooh!  Pick me!  - I mean, I volunteer."

(Time for everyone to roll their Will save to realize that there's no reason for Pilar to be there!  Pilar has four oracle levels, three wizard levels, and -)

(Never mind, Cayden Cailean seems to be expending energy on this particular occasion.  Everybody including Pilar herself fails their Will save!)

"You sure?"

It's something she's been worried about ever since she got oracled, so it would make perfect sense that if Keltham called for volunteers for this party game for this test, she'd volunteer for it.  Right?  Right.  Everything is fine.

"Yes," Pilar says, sounding very assured about it.

On the off-chance Keltham sees anything from the spell, better for him to see Elysium, she doesn't remember making that decision but it does make sense.

Spellboop on Pilar.

Pilar draws a sharp breath and then doesn't seem to breathe at all for half a minute.

Keltham isn't getting anything himself, and - people in Cheliax sure do control their facial expressions hard, he would not have been difficult to read while he was seeing wherever-that-was.

It ends.

"I'm done," she says, a short time later.

All right, if he didn't get any glimpse of her Early Judgment himself, then there's not any trust to be gained from questioning her, and she obviously doesn't want to talk about it.  Though, if it was just Hell, there'd be no reason for her to - never mind, figure out her character's route later.

"Okay, so now I think we should probably all go directly outside the Forbiddance?  If you're okay with that, Pilar, I think that opsec says you're not supposed to run off while we do that."

With some effort, Pilar refocuses on ongoing events.  She has no idea what Keltham is talking about, but she's obviously supposed to know and Security isn't acting like it's a bad idea, so clearly she's supposed to play along.  "Of course," she says in an Asmodean fake perky cheerful voice.

"Lead on, then," Keltham says to Security.  "Reminder, boop me with Protection first in case there was a reason for that."

Protection. (not From Evil, if there's trouble it probably won't be Evil trouble, from Good.) Also Invisibility, all around. 

And then off they go.

Well, it's not like Keltham knows exactly where the edge of the Forbiddance is, he's just along for this ride.  He'll go where taken.

They go out of the villa into the immediately surrounding forest; after a short while Security pauses and casts a barrage of detection spells. 

"All right, if you stand here the summons should work," he says. "If I were you I'd try to summon an archon - Lawful Good - or an azata - Chaotic Good - and ask what their disagreements with Cheliax are but I haven't actually the slightest guess what your god is aiming at, here, and if you have any guesses then you should go with those."

That makes sense and doesn't look on the surface like trapped advice, but - if the spell can take this input - Keltham would like, in preference order, whatever his god wants to send him, some entity that works for his god and that can answer questions, or an archon.

Cast.

He gets an archon. It's a - glowing sphere of light, apparently.

(Archon gets Silenced and enclosed in an auditory and visual hallucination.)

"Hello! Ooooh, this place is pretty! What can I help you with?"

It's not that unpretty itself!  He probably shouldn't say anything that gives away his own special status, if this is something not favorable to him as well as Hell, and that potentially goes back to wherever it came from afterwards.  Also it doesn't look like he has long on this spell so he'd better be brief.  "Do Asmodeus's representatives tend to negotiate fairly and honestly and keep their commitments?  What do you most dislike about Asmodeus and/or Cheliax?"

"Asmodeus's representatives are Lawful and keep their commitments and negotiate honestly. I dislike their efforts to build a society where everyone is Lawful Evil and goes to Hell because it is better for everyone to live in a society in which most people are Good. Asmodeus makes decisions based on what Asmodeus wants rather than what's best for all sentients, and while Asmodeus mostly wants desirable things like prosperity and invention and peace, Good often believes his decisions wrong from a perspective concerned with everybody. For example, He doesn't care enough about shutting down Abaddon or stopping Zon Kuthon."

(Carissa's proposed phrasings. She thinks they'll land but she feels nervous, hearing them actually said aloud.)

Nethys's options for conveying information to human beings are limited.  His use of standard divine channels will drive the message recipient irrevocably insane even in the afterlife, however light the touch.

But there was a purpose of oracles of old.  They cannot receive arbitrary messages from gods.  They can receive presentiments, under negotiated conditions meant to ensure that those presentiments help to bring about Prophecy rather than avert it.

Prophecy is shattered now, which is to say, depending on how you look at it -

- Nethys now knows more than anyone else about how the future is otherwise destined to go, so, if anybody was supposed to still go around sending presentiments to oracles, it would be His job, wouldn't it?

Nethys does have any options for conveying information to humans.  They're just difficult and expensive and not the sort of thing that parts of Nethys can do on a whim, there has to be more power and unity behind it than Nethys usually tries to muster.  Difficult, expensive, painful.  It's rare for that much of Nethys to agree on anything.

A number of girls are now back in the library, studying Taldorian history and customs again, which seems more urgent even than reviewing their math.

Hopefully this concentration of individuals is enough to warrant an invisible Security presence, because things are about to go badly for Cheliax if not.

Ione sees a brief and terrible flash of a man with skeletal forearms and white eyes, a Presence of Evil and Magic so strong that she can taste His name Takaral like a dead and slimy worm in her mouth, and she knows that this is one of the Heralds of Nethys that Nethys long ago empowered with scraps of His sanity and will, and knows also that -