It seems possible that Carissa having feelings for Keltham is actually relevant as a qualification to pull this off. Because Carissa, unlike literally every other person in this operation, doesn't underestimate him. 

She doesn't know which specific thoughts in the last little bit have merited punishment but she has this feeling it's not going to be half an hour, one way or another.

Doesn't matter. Hell is forever and she can endure that, too.

All right.  Abrogail thinks she is going to have to proceed under the assumption that the 'tropes' are real, and govern here.

Her reasoning is not complicated; why, Sevar herself might see it if Sevar had the requisite +6 headband of all mental attributes.

Keltham thinks he's describing a future event that he has to arrange in accordance with 'tropes'.  That event has already happened, without Keltham knowing it.  He has been fighting the true Queen this entire time, in front of Carissa, and, apparently to Carissa for now, won.

In dath ilan's rhythm of prediction, success, credibility, that is a victory he has won.

Abrogail has worked out by now a wordless sort of apprehension as to what sort of things 'tropes' are, namely, things out of stories, except that they're not the 'tropes' of Cheliax or Golarion, they're the 'tropes' of dath ilan.  But if dath ilan has, per transcript, girls who dream of becoming Dark Unilateral Rulers, then dath ilan surely also has a 'trope' for appearing to have won when you haven't, because the person you're fighting is smarter than you and you never knew how many of your plans were known to her from the beginning.

More the fool Keltham, if that thought hasn't occurred to him; and more the fool Carissa, if, knowing the true place of the Queen of Cheliax in all of this, it hasn't occurred to her to wonder the same.

...or she could just not decide to do any of that, and then her life wouldn't be a 'trope'.

Possibly then there wouldn't be any 'tropes' around at all, she's not sure how that works.

Ice and fire alternate, in an unoccupied room nearby.  Cycling between the two prevents the floors and walls from melting; it's not Abrogail's first time venting emotion where her adversaries will not see that and be warned.

In the end, the logic behind Abrogail's last decision here is simple.

She doesn't actually want to spend the rest of her life like this.

She'd rather not be a 'trope'.

In fact, she now deeply desires that there be no 'tropes' anywhere near Cheliax.  Ever.

And while she's not quite sure that this is how any of this works, she's going to do her part there.

"Well, then," Isidre says, and sighs.  "I suppose you should go back and talk to Carissa and determine how she feels about being rented to the Queen, and I should see if you can meet the Queen at least briefly.  And then maybe move directly to the confrontation with her and her advisors in sight of Carissa, then or very soon after.  If everyone is sane, which I do expect them to be, Keltham, it should actually get done quite quickly - or I certainly hope so, because these are all very busy people.  But time today is no more time than time tomorrow, and if possible we may as well get this done while we can do it without burning Teleports."

"You know, now that I'm thinking about actually doing this, I'm worried I may be about to make my life way more complicated than it actually needed to be."

Asmodeus Himself is literally the only being who could possibly have ordained that Keltham not be a pile of ash in this moment.

"Keltham, I'm sorry, but my time really is up now," Isidre says.  "I do think I'd recommend going ahead with this course of action, over leaving things as they are; because I do still believe, in the end, that sanity will triumph.  I have no time to do more planning than this, with you, not now, I fear.  Talk to Carissa and let me know whether to move forward on meeting, and then confronting, the Queen."

"All right.  Sorry for having taken this much of your time; I'll let you know my decision."

Isidre nods to him, still very graciously, and rises to go.

Can she get away with having Lrilatha and Gorthoklek done by illusion?  No, damn her to Abaddon, because Keltham knows that Lrilatha is one of her advisors, and may try to talk to Lrilatha, and without the actual Lrilatha no illusionist is going to successfully fake whatever Law Keltham finds recognizable in Lawful Evil outsiders.  Lrilatha is absofuckinglutely going to tell Rugatonn and Gorthoklek to actually show up for this.

This isn't going to be fun.  At least, not for her.

...and one way or another, in due time, she will have her fun.

Just as soon as she can figure out how to do it without that being a 'trope'.

Carissa is waiting in the next room. Kneeling. It seems wisest. She wonders if she is supposed to declare herself Security-screened and go back to Keltham or do her punishment first. She has no other opinions at all. If you were only reading her thoughts now it wouldn't be obvious she's previously had any other opinions.

"Enough of this self-willed stupidity," Abrogail says, not bothering to leash her temper from her words backed by full Splendour.  "You are performing important work of Asmodeus that I, personally, delegated to you.  Thoughts are required of you to accomplish your function, slave of Asmodeus.  You will now start having thoughts or I will hurt you until you do."

- fine. 

"You'll hurt me either way."

"I'll hurt you more if you don't obey.  That's always been the way of Hell."

"Do you know who else in Cheliax, besides Keltham, does not think only what he thinks other people around him want him to think?  Me.  You want your Lawful Evil dath ilanism?  That much of it stands before you."

"Enough of your lies to yourself, to your thoughts, you have taken things far past the point where even you can pretend to yourself that nothing is wrong, and I will not permit you to pretend to yourself to be nothing."

"Do you love Keltham."

" - what?"

"I was reading your mind, what little of it you permitted to exist.  He won the contest for you against the Queen of Cheliax, he earned himself the key to your soul, I saw your triumph when he did.  You will not be made a statue for your answer one way or another, but the Crown now orders you to answer and in truth.  What are you to Keltham, now?  Are you his mistress?  His slave?  Has he stepped before Asmodeus in your heart and become your god?"

" - no," she says, because that much at least is clear, "uh. To the last one. He doesn't have my soul, he doesn't have - real power over me that isn't the game we all play with this first life. Asmodeus owns me, Asmodeus has always owned me, Keltham would have to rule Hell to be my god, or take me somewhere else and you know perfectly well I don't belong somewhere else, and they wouldn't let me in."

Truth, if Sevar's thoughts to herself are not complete lies.  "You love Keltham, and if you don't like it put that way, feel free to say what he is to you instead.  Will you, then, obediently continue lying to him, working against his best interests, and tempting him from Axis into Hell?"

"Yes, because human emotions are a terrible guide to decisionmaking and being unfortunate enough to occasionally suffer them does not make me beholden to them."

Abrogail laughs then, cold and clear and dark like midnight high upon some mountaintop.  "Fair enough, little Lawful Evil dath ilani.  I suppose it's what I told you to become.  Love him, use your love to seduce him, choose without emotion to betray, is that the path you would now walk?"

"I've gotten somewhat wary of predicting how this is going to go. But for as long as no one can figure out how to safely lie to him, we're going to have to give him people who almost aren't lying. And then, obviously, make sure they don't have a shadow of an opening to actually choose him; but I don't. You would hunt me down if we fled to Lastwall; you would hunt me down if we fled to Sothis; you would hunt me down if we fled to Heaven, and, again, I do actually hate them and they wouldn't let me in."

Trustworthy for now, perhaps, as long as she doesn't begin to believe that Keltham - her perfect, shining Keltham, who won her from the Queen of Cheliax - might also come to have the power to stay Hell and to defeat Asmodeus Himself.  Abrogail forbears to point this out; it will become a note in Sevar's file.

"I assign you no further tortures, Sevar.  Do not mistake this for mercy, but only me taking care not to tread on my senior partner's games.  Rugatonn it will be who decides whether all this heresy you are thinking and the emotions in your heart constitute a matter that we would, not proactively at all, correct with pain and torment in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law."

"Let us pray that Asmodeus did foresee that I would visit your bedroom, that everything now within your heart is only another piece of His own grand design, that we all remain on a pathway He has laid out for us, because Hell help us all if we have left it."

"Go then to your lover, foolish and pathetic child, and learn from him to become something greater than this."

"Oh, and good luck convincing him to rent you out.  I honestly had no idea at the time why that was something you wanted in the first place, and in retrospect I wonder if I should have had somebody ask you that instead of jumping on the opportunity."

Abrogail Thrune claps her hands and disappears, which is to say that some distance away, Abrogail Thrune dispels her illusion.  She does not actually have the time to stand around there and talk to Carissa Sevar.

Because it has as predicted been incredibly effective at getting Keltham to be possessive, and to think of himself as in a contest for ownership of his girlfriend, and to get him to feel jealous and insecure about the idea that someone else might own her more truly or hurt her more meaningfully, and to generally change modes to one where he's trying to prove himself within the Chelish system. 

She doesn't argue. 

She returns to Keltham's suite.

"Is your proposal here that we read in a couple hundred people on everything we know about the secret that may have started the godwar.... so that the betting markets resolve."

"Yes," the Prince Merenre says. "Precisely because something about the situation may have started a godwar. It's important, so we need to be competent to reason about it, so the betting markets need to be something more than a fancy layer of fuzziness on top of all my personal guesses."

             "I trust precisely thirty people with this," says the pharaoh of Osirion. "And all of them know better than to bet against you, ever, about anything where they don't have inside information."

"In principle we can fix that with more lopsided payoffs," says Merenre. "They can't be infinitely confident in my being better than them."

            "I predict their bets-against-you will cluster around yours, if they're allowed to know yours, and maybe even if they aren't. What I want here is people who'll think of something you haven't. And less of a spread - because come on,  this is ridiculous -"

"Where are the markets at right now?" a serious, stiff-robed priest asks.

             "Our eighty percent confidence interval spans 'totally useless except to Abadar and three mathematicians' to 'the destruction of the multiverse'".

"- how are they even resolving that -"

            "Oh, the usual. That's not the point, the point is, I can't govern like this."

"What if we get predictors from Axis," says the King-Consort. "They've got better participation than us, there's a convenient list of exactly who to ask-"

            "Can't afford them."

"If this project is as important as the 50th percentile projection, we can give them the Sphinx."

              "- there's a policy proposal, I guess, raffle off every archeological relic in the country, except our God in his wisdom has copies of all of them already -"

"Can you ask Him to pay to subsidize the prediction markets in Aktun?" says Merenre tiredly. This is technically a breach of protocol - they're not supposed to acknowledge, even in private, that the person of the pharaoh is not the person of Abadar Himself - but it's been a long two days since they first learned from Abadar of a complicated situation.       

              "We subsidize all the prediction markets in Aktun," says the pharaoh, who is not actually the person of Abadar Himself but is closer than most mortals come, and doesn't use the 'we' just as an affectation. "There's still the security question." There are reasons that sometimes when there are ongoing wars you don't just subsidize a bunch of public markets.

Fe-Anar, the Pharaoh's father, mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which no one who doesn't talk to proteans at least weekly, or have permanent Tongues, could hope to understand; it translates approximately to 'lol fuck the security question'. 

             The pharaoh has permanent Tongues, and also did not need it to know what his father was going to say there. "One thing We would pay a lot to resolve is 'odds that Osirion and Cheliax end up at war over this," he says sharply, "and I expect Hell would also observe that with fascination. And while We don't find the arguments for squishing anomalies before they change Golarion persuasive, obviously, and are appalled that that's been policy for so many millenia, obviously, We're trading with a lot of entities that do find those concerns persuasive. But really We'd make it all public in Axis, subject to some standard nondisclosure agreements, if it weren't obviously an avenue for interference by Hell."

"They've got to have their own predictions."

             "Only relevant market public in Hell is the one for the souls of some various adjacent parties, which, uh, keeps getting more expensive, I don't know how to interpret that exactly -"

Fe-Anar mutters a phrase in the fast-changing language of the Maelstrom which translates best to 'fuck Hell'. 

             "Amen," says everyone else, fervently; they keep on top of how the Maelstrom says that one. 

"Is there not," says Merenre, "some kind of ordinary Aktun market participation contract understood to be robust against Hell - really I'm astonished that all Aktun market participation contracts aren't understood to be robust against Hell -"

             "They're robust in the sense that if they're fucking around, We'll take their money, in the long run."

"And that long run is measured in - transaction volume? What goes wrong if we just subsidize it."

                "That long run is measured in transaction volume and also in time for arbitration courts to make them eat penalty clauses that're still financial in nature -"

"So pay the courts to work inside a time-dilated demiplane. With all earned respect,  if this has a one in ten chance of being as important as it looks, you aren't spending enough money on it!"

               "I literally cannot afford to spend money on ten things like this, so I need some way to figure out which one is going to get me more than a math textbook!"

"The arbitration courts do already run at whatever speed is necessary for them to resolve in the contractually obligatory time. That's a month sidereal, for current events prediction markets," observes a sparkling ball of gears floating above one of the conference-table seats. 

"Do they promise they won't speed up and start settling everything overnight?"

"They do not," says the sparkling ball of gears, with what might be faint amusement.
 

"First prediction market," says the King-Consort. "Pay a hundred top performers in Axis with a share of future returns from the work of Abadar's new cleric, to get up to speed and then predict what'll go wrong if we make the betting open in Axis and try to beat Hell at what is, in the end, our game, more than theirs."

"The future returns from the project aren't ours."

"The cleric's ours -"

         "The cleric's - so it's not clear he is, is the thing, Abadar's tried to show me what He's looking at but I don't understand it, and I certainly don't know that he considers himself to have entered into a trade relationship with us where we can conditionally commit his resources according to our model of what he'll be willing to pay for later -"

"A share of future returns from the project conditional on the target agreeing that this market served his interests -"

"Not to harp on this too much, but, all of what was just proposed plus 'inside time-dilation', we're already later to this than I'd like because of the Zon-Kuthon war -"

               "Because of the Zon-Kuthon war We have fewer resources to run bits of Aktun in time-dilation than We'd like."

"Can you put numbers, when you say things like that, like, precisely how much time-dilation can we have at what multiplier on its usual cost."

               "I really can't."

"I mean, give me an order of magnitude -"

                "If Abadar were able to put orders of magnitude in His visions then We would have so many fewer problems!"

"Proposal: a communication to the target in Cheliax to the effect 'subsidizing prediction market in Aktun, evaluate policy questions relevant to you with promised share project returns, reply yes no"

"Cheliax is we believe committed to not murdering him if in their evaluation he starts to look dangerous to their interests but they're neither above nor prohibited from neglecting to prevent his capture by Nidal. Which isn't to say not to contact him, it might be worth it, it's just to say, I continue to want some way of evaluating these ideas before we try them other than gut instinct."

"Yeah, all right."

"Market now, contact him in the dead of night if the market thinks it's a good idea, ready to grab him if he decides to leave Cheliax -"

                   "Have you learned anything from the last two days," says the pharaoh. "We will make absolutely no plans with a twelve-hour time horizon. Who knows which gods will be at war by then."

Cayden Cailean has taken more of Himself out of Elysium than is wise.  He has gathered more of His attention (which is His self) into one place than is wise.  It is not easy for a god to truly spy on the mortal realm and it comes with a risk.

The more powerful Lawful Evil gods who would leap on Him and tear Him asunder if they saw Him so vulnerable, Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon, are respectively exhausted and sealed/wounded/maybe-dying.  There would be very little appetite for another godwar while the world is just recovering from a previous one that ended only hours ago; and Cayden Cailean would be more defended than Zon-Kuthon.  Even so it is not the sort of behavior pattern You adopt if You want to live forever, or even for another thousand years, statistically speaking.

But with Nethys also exhausted, now, they have few other options for knowing what they must know.

The meeting He is spying upon concludes, and Cayden Cailean sends a message.

Meeting in Osirion went mostly as Nethys's Scenario 2, but there were substantial divergences.  Spoke of Keltham as Abadar's cleric rather than the Otherworlder, prediction markets unsure of Keltham's impact rather than solidly on technological revolution of Golarion, substantial credence to the multiverse ending up destroyed.