"Probably the smartest person alive is Nefreti Clepati, the seventh circle wizard and ninth circle cleric of Nethys who heads the church of Nethys in Sothis. She's - Nethys-touched, so by all accounts sort of insane - and probably has, like, a 26 for both intelligence and wisdom, though I don't know for sure, I haven't met her. There is also a Detect Wisdom spell, and wisdom is a tiny bit higher than average for wizard-tracked students but not that much higher, maybe 12. ...wisdom increases over the course of your life, though, unlike Intelligence, so it'd be higher if you were looking at those same people at age 25."

"Anything else on the same level as Intelligence and Wisdom that Nefreti also has a 26 in?"

"Not that I've heard advertised, but again, I haven't met her, and one of the few stories I know about her are that she caused a massive explosion that flattened the temple of Nethys in Sothis, and Nethys gave her several more cleric levels for it."

"Sounds like a kinda cool god, frankly.  That said I'm never praying to him."

In Keltham's mind, a hypothesis is taking shape, a mental model.

To a Chelish eavesdropper, it would look like rather a lot of ~~~~.  Seeing the idea as a dath ilani sees it, compactly and at a glance, requires a grasp of underlying math.  If Keltham wanted to say it to Carissa, he would need to spell out rather a lot of things and also use a whiteboard.

Keltham's thought revolves around a standard dath ilani concept that Taldane has no word for.  'Intelligence' translated into this word in Baseline; but Keltham is starting to suspect that this reflects a mistake that Carissa and other language donors are making, not a translation accurate in the world.  For translation purposes, one must then fix a new term.

Call this one 'thinkoomph'.

'Thinkoomph' is optimization-as-done-by-humans.  Its figure-of-merit is correct prediction, choice of action leading to desired outcomes, the power of inner thoughts over the outer world, the power of cognition to apprehend and effectuate reality.  Of course, humans do this in a weird idiosyncratic way, and a random possible simple optimizer that was about as powerful as an average dath ilani would not understand and manipulate reality in the same way as an average dath ilani.  But if everyone involved is a human, then to speak of 'thinkoomph' as a thing-humans-do whose figure-of-merit is optimization, is not too unsensible a concept.

Keltham does not need to think about this part right now, he has already chunked the notion of 'thinkoomph' long ago.  'Thinkoomph' is a view into the processes that humans do to produce optimization, viewed from the standpoint where its purpose is optimization, and where the information-theoretic goal of the viewpoint you're taking is to make it easy to describe those usual variations among humans that contribute to the variations in their optimization power.

Thinkoomph then is not a single number but a structure with some internals.  But it happens to be empirically the case that a lot of usefully-discussable smartness-components map not-too-terribly onto a unidimensional line, such that, holding the rest of a mind constant, you get more optimization power as you move up along the line.

For ease of visualization, then, consider thinkoomph as a seven-dimensional thing, because it happens that there's a useful component analysis like that in dath ilan which gives you seven dimensions.

Or consider thinkoomph as a machine with seven gears each of varying size, if you don't want to visualize seven-dimensional objects for some weird reason.

Suppose Detect Intelligence gives you an imperfect partial view of thinkoomph that's made up of, say, (1) speed/clarity of information retrieval plus (2) how much information you can maintain in short-term memory.  Detect Wisdom gives you an imperfect partial view of (3) the piece of thinkoomph that's perceptual clarity, which critically has a subpiece (3a) that is clarity and detail and accuracy of introspection.  Which is to say - shifting viewpoints from the machinery to the result that machinery produces - that Detect Wisdom imperfectly measures the machinery that grinds to produce reflection.

In dath ilan the proverb-poem goes:  'Beware lest what you can measure easily becomes all that you measure; beware lest it become all that you optimize; beware lest it become all that you ever think of.'

The people of Golarion know how to Detect Intelligence and Detect Wisdom, and that's it.  So they think there are two components of thinkoomph.  They invent two spells to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects and the thing-that-Detect-Wisdom-detects.

They invent headbands to boost the thing-that-Detect-Intelligence-detects.  The amount the headband sells for depends on how large of a shift it produces in that handy spell Detect Intelligence, which, as everyone in Golarion knows, detects Intelligence.  If the Detect Intelligence spell says that a headband produces a +3 to Intelligence, it's worth less money than if Detect Intelligence says that the headband produces +4 to intelligence.

Imagine now that nobody has invented Detect Wisdom yet, just Detect Intelligence.  Imagine that somebody with a vision of broader thinkoomph builds a new headband that would, if you could also run Detect Wisdom, show to produce a +3 to Intelligence and a +3 to Wisdom.  This headband is probably more expensive to build than the one that produces +4 to Intelligence, probably by a lot, and the Detect Intelligence spell says that it produces an inferior result than the +4 headband.  So nobody builds a headband like that, if they don't have Detect Wisdom.

Does either Intelligence or Wisdom incorporate creativity, outside-the-box solutions, outside-the-box hypotheses?  Maybe when Keltham dares to try on an intelligence headband, if he ever so dares, it'll be immediately apparent to him that this headband boosts every part of cognition that Owl's Wisdom didn't boost.  But Keltham is guessing that this will prove to not be the case.

Consider, then, the world in which Golarion has a Detect Intelligence spell and a Detect Wisdom spell, but these are only 3 out of 7 components of cognition.

It's not the kids with highest thinkoomph who get tracked to be wizards.  It's the kids with the highest Detected Intelligence.

It is of course famously true that in humans (and describing humans is what the concept of 'thinkoomph' is all about), most things you can measure about thinkoomph's components or outputs will all correlate with each other quite a lot.  The kids with Intelligence 14, which Keltham thinks was supposed to be the wizard-tracking threshold, do tend to have Wisdom 12 rather than Wisdom 10.  But if you were looking not-at-random at somebody with Intelligence 14, selected on high Intelligence, and asking 'what are the rest of their thinkoomph components like', then the rest are probably more like what their Wisdom score happened to be.

When you select on kids with high Detected Intelligence, you're not just selecting for kids with high general thinkoomph levels that produce high Intelligence along the way, you're selecting for kids whose Intelligence is unusually high compared to the rest of their thinkoomph.  That's why the Wisdom comes out as 12 instead of 14.

Dath ilan has heritage-optimized itself over generations in full awareness of how all these measurement and optimization gotchas work.  They are doing their best to measure real-world results broadly, and doing genetics and statistics to them.  Dath ilan does not want to end up testing some weird projection of thinkoomph that originally started out correlated with thinkoomph, optimizing over this weird projection, and ending up with optimized things that have much more of the weird projected quality than they have thinkoomph.  Dath ilan wants actual thinkoomph and is explicitly not pursuing it the stupid way.

So you've got your kid with Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 14 and they get wizard-tracked and get a +6 intelligence headband or maybe, if they become spectacularly successful, a relic with +6 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom, and if they're incredibly insanely successful, they get 2 or 3 layered Wish spells on top of that.  They end up, say, with 27 Intelligence and 21 Wisdom; in dath ilani terms, those subcomponents of thinkoomph would now be at +4.5sd and +1.5sd respectively.

But their other 4 out of 7 thinkoomph characteristics are still around 14; or in dath ilani terms, if the scales match, -2sd.  Golarionites don't know how to easily measure these other components; they don't try to boost them; they don't think about them.

This sounds a lot more like a model consistent with Golarion, than the model where anyone with +6 thinkoomph has literally ever existed here.  You don't need training to be a Keeper at +6 thinkoomph, you just are one.

Inside Keltham's mind this is all a much shorter and better-chunked thing to think; what he thinks, roughly, is 'Hey maybe they got Goodhart's Cursed on Intelligence and Wisdom metrics'.

Only Keltham's actual thought is that thinkoomph is the underlying true value; Intelligence and Wisdom are imperfect proxy measures of thinkoomph; optimization over Intelligence and Wisdom will select not just on thinkoomph but on upward divergence of measured Intelligence and Wisdom scores from underlying thinkoomph scores; that this applies both to selecting students for wizard-tracking and for boosting them with Intelligence headbands later; and that this will of course produce people who may detect as +4 Intelligence and +4 Wisdom but who started with something like -2 or -1 underlying general abstracted-correlation-of-thinkoomph-components, and now have something more like +1 final-optimization-power as a result of all that Intelligence and Wisdom boosting.

Nobody with +6 thinkoomph has ever walked through this place.  They'd shred it around themselves like tissue paper.

"Putting a pin in something to follow up on later," Keltham says, after the few seconds it takes for him to think the compact version of the thought.  "Detect my Wisdom, if it's 20 that's very bad news for your heritage optimization project and makes my heritage substantially more valuable.  If my Wisdom is 14 that's much better news for you.  Underlying reasoning behind that statement is gonna take a drawing-wall though."

"Do Wishes by any chance need to be spoken in a strange inhuman language?"  Wreaking total havoc if you state things the least bit incorrectly seems obviously reminiscent of bare-metal systems programming.

"A couple of the known safe wordings are Taldane. The others are other things but other human languages, I think."

"Can you invent an artificial language and say a Wish in that?"

"...probably but you'd be starting without any known safe wordings so -

- look, I am sure dath ilan has an equivalent to this, uh, a thing where smart people immediately start thinking of a clever way to do it that will get around all the things they've been told might go wrong, but the clever way will also go wrong, and - maybe we'll eventually be able to use Wishes to do stuff but I think you are lacking the background of how everyone always tries to come up with a clever way to use Wishes to solve their problems and they sound like they'll work fine and then they don't and it's a disaster, which you'd have if you were from Golarion. And it's not that I don't want to rewrite the fabric of reality just by speaking aloud, I'd love to."

"Carissa, I wasn't considering doing that on any remotely near-term timescale, I'm not completely shitpooping insane, I was just curious if anybody had maybe already tried the thing that a dath ilani thinks of in half a second," namely casting Wishes with a real actual proper specification language.

Or maybe that's overkill and all you need is Baseline instead of flaming Taldane!  Keltham isn't betting on it, he's not going to try it, but he sure is thinking it.

"Okay. Just, we have, uh, maybe a trope, about people going 'oh, I thought of a clever way to do safe Wishes no one tried before' shortly before there's a smoking crater a Teleport distance across. Asking questions is fine. I don't know anyone to have tried that."

"Don't do anything that would make Broom give me a sad look, got it."

...though this smoking-crater business, again, sounds like a result you would absolutely get if what you needed was a programming language for bare-metal systems programming and what you used was spoken colloquial Taldane.

To be fair, if that's true, it's a puzzle why any Wish works, let alone asking for an Intelligence boost.

Maybe he'll look into known safe wordings and unsafe wordings and check if there's anything really, really obvious going on there if the person reading it is a computer programmer.

...maybe he is being a typical dath ilani male in a certain way and he should stop doing that.  "I think I should maybe focus on the massage for a bit, relax again, and think about Isidre's other sexuality-requiring cognitive challenge posed to me.  So far I've done one of two."

"All right." She was kind of hoping that Keltham would be annoyed, about her being argumentative at him, but either he wasn't or it just didn't occur to him that if you're annoyed at your girlfriend who belongs to you you can hit her about it. Oh well.

Massage in silence it is.

After a bit of silence, relaxing again, mentally leaning into the massage, and yes, very briefly poking some internal curiosity about what exactly it is that is Pilar's obligate fetish precisely speaking, Keltham returns to contemplating more sexual questions.

How does he feel about renting Carissa out?

...mostly he's still getting a WHAT from his brain.

Can he evaluate it concretely rather than abstractly?

Not without having actually met the Queen of Cheliax at all.

Okay, but, Keltham does know some people.  He even knows some female people, in case this is a polarized gendertrope with respect to the renting individual.  How does Keltham feel about renting Carissa to his max-mutual-wordcount coauthor from his fic-circle back in dath ilan, who happens to possess the requisite parts?

...sad about never writing anything with her again, also, she's proooobably not a sadist like at all(??), also, maybe it actually is not a terribly good idea to think right now about people who believe he's Truly Dead.

Keltham knows some female people inside a totally different universe that is not that universe.  He doesn't know them very well but he can ask himself the concrete question anyways.  What if he were to rent Carissa to, say, Tonia Barrero, in repayment of the debt he owes her for an unexpected, un-volunteered-in-advance, at-best-semi-consensual truthspelling?

...

Still file not found, here, he doesn't know Tonia well enough.

Keltham knows what to do in this cognitive situation!  For purposes of testing this function, keep supplying imaginary values to the Tonia structure until he can complete the function call!  If at any point he gets a negative result he can then tweak values to see if there's any value that produces a positive result instead, and then he'll also know what properties he's looking for!

Let Tonia be a sadist, but, like, a young sadist who's only slightly more experienced there than Keltham, and in no danger of providing Carissa with an unforgettable experience less forgettable than other experiences she's already had, thereby causing Carissa to leave him for Tonia who is the superior sadist...

...actually Keltham is not sure he really needs this part of the spec, Carissa's current attraction to him is not because Keltham is a supersadist, and therefore it is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable that you can't steal Carissa from him by being a better supersadist.  Alas, that which is Perfectly Pseudo-Reasonable is not always Perfectly Reasonable.  Anyways, fix the current values at favorable ones to see if this function returns 'false' even under quite favorable circumstances.

Tonia can hurt Carissa slightly more than Keltham, but not threateningly so; she can't give Carissa an orgasm due to Carissa's eroLARP character arc posing a sex problem, so Tonia's not threateningly better than him there.  And if Tonia was, Keltham could always just tell Carissa she's not allowed... okay something reacted to that inside him, that didn't react to hearing about the magical-item Belt of No Touch.  Possibly because in this case there was any reason for it, and that made the scenario more real.

Or say mostly, in this scenario, Carissa is being rented to Tonia in order to provide Tonia with not-necessarily-reciprocated pleasure just like if Tonia had bought a sex worker in dath ilan.  Suppose Carissa doesn't hate it - Keltham's Carissamodel is now complaining that he is not supposed to check this and that offends her dignity of being harder to hurt than that, well, sorry, Carissamodel, that is not what Keltham is optimizing right now.  Carissa even manages to have a moderately fun time because Tonia hurts her some and reacts in a way that makes Carissa feel pride in her own sexual skills and it... actually matters to her that Keltham told her to do it?  Postulating this part feels hard; Keltham is not himself a Carissa and he is not sure what it is like on the inside to be a Carissa.

Keltham thinks he is at least not obviously not-okay with this whole sort of thing?  It feels a lot like asking, in an ordinary relationship, how you would feel about your partner going out for a night with somebody else who'd been like 'yeah screw flirting what's your monetary price'.  He wouldn't have objected to that back in dath ilan, he wasn't that monogamous with anyone.

...that these feel like similar questions, probably reflects Keltham failing to get to grips with the actual gendertrope here.  Isidre seemed to think this should not feel like the same gendertrope as sex work, even if it had similar gender ratios.

For one thing, Keltham was aromantic back in dath ilan because he is a romantically obligate sadist, or at least the very first masochist he ran into was the first person he ever started feeling at all like he needed something from her that was about it being from her and didn't funge with things he could possibly get from somewhere else.

How would Keltham feel about Carissa trading herself to somebody for - one unskilled-labor-week is, like 1.2gp or so?  Let's say 2gp, Carissa is hot.

Parts of Keltham are not happy with this.  Because Carissa is his?  Because Keltham is insecure about whether that would mean Carissa still liked him more than she likes anybody else?  Because Keltham is supposed to give permission first?  Keltham doesn't know.

But if Keltham orders Carissa to do it?  For whatever reason?

- then that's okay.  Possibly.  At least if all the other call values are set to Imaginary Tonia settings.

And with likely settings on the Queen of Cheliax, rather than favorable settings on Tonia?  If, in exchange for an ultimately insignificant symbolic amount of money, and with at least some pressure on the side to deny a trope and perhaps the entire theory of tropism, Carissa is rented to Abrosomething Thrune?  Older than Carissa, with the same de facto ability to chain her for real if she really wanted (assuming that Keltham did not object, which he would), probably a much much more experienced sadist than Keltham, with access to far more powerful sex toys that are the equivalent of overpowered vibrators with biofeedback functions and, yes, the ability to make Carissa come.

...it's not quite an obvious 'no'.  It basically depends, Keltham is pretty sure, on whether Keltham is afraid that Carissa can be taken away from him by somebody being a better sadist to her, than he can be for a while yet.  If somebody is the more skillful manipulator of masochism, of, what did Isidre call it, submission, can they steal away Carissa's feelings from him?  The threat of giving Carissa an orgasm, the threat of also having potential absolute-power over her, seem less real than that.

Keltham's hindbrain, which may, of course, be entirely factually wrong about everything, intuits that it is basically not possible to steal Carissa by giving her a good-enough orgasm.  Hurting her, maybe, understanding the deep keys to her sexuality that Keltham is still struggling with; but not with humanly reasonable amounts of pleasure short of dangerous drugs.

And as for the absolute-power threat, in part, it doesn't feel as real because Keltham has not internalized a model of whatever it is that Carissa has inside her.  But also, it's impossible for two people to both have potential absolute-power over someone.  If they came into conflict, after all, only one of them could get their way.  So long as that person would be Keltham, rather than the Queen of Cheliax, everything would be fine, right?  It just has to be clear to Carissa that if Keltham and the Queen fought over her, Keltham would be the one to end up with her; if that's true, the keys to her sexuality would be safe.

...not that Keltham is thinking that he can, like, wield more political power inside Cheliax than its own Nearly Unilateral Chief Executive.  But the Queen of Cheliax has to be sensible and consider things like political capital with the Church of Asmodeus, while Keltham can be much less sensible and walk out on Cheliax if the Queen steals his girl from him.  It shouldn't be about power alone, Keltham doesn't think; differential willingness to use power should be an acceptable coin to Carissa's sexuality.  It controls who would actually end up with her, if it came to that.

Keltham's not willing, not today, to bargain a probabilistic or absolute walkout on Cheliax, in order to tell the government of Cheliax to hand Carissa over to him in-legal-reality, to say that he considers her a necessary part of his gains-from-trade.

Telling Cheliax that he considers Carissa a necessary part of his gains-from-trade and he'll walk out if the Queen steals her, either by kidnapping her, or by renting her from Keltham but then giving her an experience that shifts her romantic focus away from Keltham to the Queen?  She's Keltham's, the Queen can't have her except temporarily?

Sure!  That, he feels totally willing to do.

Carissa would... probably find that hot?  Keltham's Carissamodel confidently finds it very hot if Keltham actually wins at it, but Keltham is not entirely confident in his Carissamodel.

Well, at least Keltham should definitely win?  He can't really see any functional Chief Executive being like 'lol no I'm gonna take Carissa and watch you walk out on Cheliax', and even if the Queen wanted to, her advisors would stop her.  She's an overly-Good person in an overly-Good government that has to be stopped by Asmodeus from resorting to outright mind control when it looks like that might be for the greater good of the country.  Keltham isn't pure Evil, sure, but he's not that Good, which means he should win this particular contest.

Of course, that's only if people are running on sanity.  If the Queen is running on tropes, she'll try to steal Carissa no matter how bad it would be for Cheliax if she succeeded... but then if those events are running on tropes, it's impossible to win Carissa's true love-sexuality without winning a fight for real power over her, the Queen should ultimately fail to do that after making worrying progress, and then end up kicked up out of Cheliax and/or harem-recruited.

Anyways, he's got enough of an answer that his next step is to ask Isidre to meet again and check his model of how all this works.  Or ask Carissa?  He kind of wants to ask Isidre first, before he tries to talk with Carissa; Isidre is more willing to be legible, and nothing blows up if he says the wrong thing in front of her.

Carissa has thought up a reasonable amount of opinions about contraception and magnetism despite being distracted every few seconds by contemplating the fact that Keltham is probably contemplating Isidre's offer.

The Queen -

- there's not actually much point contemplating what having sex with the Queen of Cheliax would be like, and not just because that definitely counts as flirting with her. It will probably be awful. Carissa is a grown adult and is going to go to Hell someday and can handle awful. It'll probably be - so, being hurt isn't upsetting, being hurt can be fun and even when it's more than she can take, like the cursed bag, it's not upsetting, it's bad but it's a specific kind of bad that's all right. There are things that are actually upsetting, and - 

- thinking about them is just asking for it -

- no, she'll just think about how to orchestrate a convincing demonstration of Suggestion to Keltham instead.

Pending questions resolved into a state of quiescence, Keltham relaxes more into the massage.  It's nice.  Does he want to command some non-reciprocated sexual service from Carissa, at the end of this?

The idea of ordering her to do it - seems more comfortable now, possibly it has something to do with having heard that she has any coherently imaginable endgame, maybe it's just a shock having had time to sink in and for Keltham to adjust.

But then his libido might go offline for a while.  He shouldn't expend his newly refilled ero reservoir if he needs to have another conversation with Isidre today... it's not clear how urgent this whole thing is, exactly?

"Carissa," Keltham says out loud, his voice coming out sounding as relaxed as he is, "I'm too relaxed right now to really want to move, so can I ask you to have them return my reply to Isidre that I'm interested in further discussing her second suggested course of action, though I'm not yet on a definite yes.  And can I possibly get a yes-no in the next ten minutes about whether or not Isidre wants to meet me again today."

(It wouldn't occur to Keltham that Isidre might not imagine him to be capable of a quick reconsideration and answer.  One hour is a long time to think in dath ilan, and sure it may take longer to reconsider some major life questions, but there's no presumption that you can't do it in an hour.  It similarly wouldn't occur to Keltham that he ought not ask a Senior Governance Official for a yes-no answer in ten minutes; somebody like Isidre is surely interrupted often enough, and good enough at task-switching, that she's checking her tiny-task queue every eight minutes, in Isidre's computer-based and network-connected task management system; which will continue to go on existing in Keltham's imagination and his preprogrammed social reflexes unless and until he thinks explicitly about that question for literally half of a second.)

"I'll ask but she might not be interruptible that soon," says Carissa, who'd say that even if Isidre wasn't the Queen of Cheliax.

Keltham has further thoughts on renting Carissa to the Queen of Cheliax. That's terrifying, but definitely a success. Carissa is going to let herself enjoy her success without dwelling too much on its implications for whether she gets tortured which is ultimately not the thing that matters here.

(How would Carissa know that, if it was true?  But if it's info Carissa shouldn't have, from his perspective, on the gaslighting hypotheses he's always considering in the back of his mind, she wouldn't just blurt it out, would she?  If they were that bad at LARPing they'd have screwed up by now surely.)

((Of which it is said in dath ilan:  Being suspicious is easy, being suspicious of the correct 1 out of the 1000 pieces of information you received today is hard.))

"Make it so," Keltham says.  "And then continue the massage, if you're still okay with... rephrase, continue the massage and tell me if you're running out of easy energy for it."

So she steps outside, flags down some staff, and delivers Keltham's message for Isidre. "I told him that someone important probably couldn't get him an answer in the next ten minutes, but if she happens to be free," or reading my thought-transcripts full time anyway, hi Abrogail -

Abrogail does in fact have a country to run!  And either Otolmens suddenly really likes Cheliax, or She really dislikes somebody else!  Abrogail had not in fact realized before now how incredibly important it is to not piss off Otolmens in any way!  However she does realize it now and Aspexia can stop repeating it at her!

Carissa goes back in to give Keltham a massage. "They'll knock if they get an answer."

The massage continues to be nice.

Keltham doesn't... especially feel like massaging Carissa back, apparently, if he is honest with himself about that.  He would do it if they were trading pleasures, obviously, but he does not seem to really actually want to give massages.

He still feels grateful for it, and a need to do something nice for Carissa in return, no matter how much she says he doesn't have to; he wants to anyways.

Keltham doesn't feel like massaging her back.  But he does feel like... buying a massage for her, as soon as he's got any 'gold pieces'?  That seems like the blatantly obvious solution -

The thought of a stranger touching Carissa's naked body does not feel especially pleasant.

Keltham is not used to his brain working like this, and it's causing his self-model to stumble over itself repeatedly.

...he could pay one of the other girls to give Carissa a massage from him?

For that matter, if he doesn't have any gold yet, he could tell Ione to do it after she's recovered.

Is Keltham allowed to do that, does it count as something Ione offered him?

Well, Keltham doesn't have any massive anti-legibility issues with Ione, so he can just ask, which will make his life massively simpler.  Keltham's guess is that Ione's objection, if she has any, will be that Carissa might ask what got traded to Ione for the massage, and Ione doesn't want to mention the Nethys thing to Carissa.  But they could just tell Carissa it's a secret, so that doesn't seem like a problem?

Seems like a plan.

One of Ferrer Maillol's last coherent recent thoughts, as Contessa Lrilatha herself dragged him by the scruff of his neck into the temple torture chamber, was that he has now realized what kind of project disaster surpasses starting a god-war.  It's being told that one of your stupid oversights just managed to ruin a lot of hard work put in by Aspexia Rugatonn, Contessa Lrilatha, and Gorthoklek, all of whom are now personally pissed at you, and Gorthoklek will be visiting you during your stay.

Ferrer Maillol is currently driven into a rather extreme mental state, and begging Asmodeus to do something, anything, to deliver him.

Asmodeus does that very very rarely, as one might expect.

As it happens, though, Ferrer Maillol is currently in a state unusually apt to receive messages from Asmodeus, who has a message to deliver.  It conveniently concerns a matter on which Maillol has already been partially instructed.

And Asmodeus does need to do this often enough, if very very rarely, that people ever hear about that time Asmodeus did it once.  That way they'll go on sincerely pleading to Him in the extremity of their torture, which He enjoys.

Besides, it's amusing.  Have a vision, tiny squirrel!  Asmodeus in His finite mercy has given you a temporary reprieve from all the infinite torment that will someday be yours.

Eight minutes later there's a knock on Keltham's door.