Carissa has the most ROMANTIC boyfriend he does things like request the Queen's personal erinyes write a contract guaranteeing his right to force her to terminate a pregnancy how is he so WONDERFUL damnit that's a feelings-deadening duration of, like, three hours, maybe this is why Hell takes a thousand years to get anywhere with mortal souls

What delightful progress, especially since abortion is Evil past twelve weeks and 'half' is farther than that!

"I affirm what Sevar told you, and would be willing, as only a small informal favor, to write such for you."

Hug of Carissa.  "Please do; and then, if it doesn't take more than informally 2% of the informal credit I already have with Cheliax as an upper bound rather than the price per se, I would have you sign the agreement on behalf of Cheliax, if that is something you can do without other authorization."

"I mostly do not expect that Chelish Governance will ever end up needing to enforce any part of this, to be clear, given that the fallback exists in the first place; and so the expected actual cost to you is, I hope, quite low."

"I expect so," Contessa Lrilatha agrees. "So you are aware, in Cheliax in the context of a relationship such as yours with Sevar, the decision to terminate a pregnancy would typically be yours up to the moment of birth; I am going to write in the contract that this agreement should not be interpreted so as to abrogate rights you would otherwise have."

"Thank you for so informing me, and so writing."

"Oh, and please afterwards assure me that there are meant to be no unexpected unpleasant consequences for myself or for the other parties, as seen from our respective individual perspectives.  I mean, I probably didn't have to say that, but why trust what you can verify."

"Of course." And she passes him the contract and says, "I do not expect any of the terms of this contract to have any unexpected unpleasant consequences for yourself, and I do not expect it to have any unexpected unpleasant consequences for Sevar. You should be aware, if you are not, that abortion is under most circumstances judged as an Evil act by the goddess who judges such things, Pharasma. She has Her own convictions about whether it is a moral good to a person to bring them into existence; as She created this whole system, you might predict She is broadly in favor, and tends not to find it credible that an abortion is an act for the benefit of the person thereby prevented from being, and also tends to weight it as an act of high consequence. So expect, if you do it a lot, to count as Evil eventually; I don't think that's an unpleasant consequence, but now it's also not unexpected."

"I've been expecting Keltham to get tagged Good sooner or later just with all the building Civilization," says Carissa before Keltham can parse that all out and see if he objects to any of it. "- for most people an abortion ends up being one of the more consequential person-affecting decisions they make but, well, not for Keltham."

Contessa Lrilatha shrugs her wings, spectacularly. "Pharasma's heart is known to none. The Queen has built a lot of schools and remains as Evil as the day she claimed her office."

"I... am confused by many things but should not waste your own valuable time with that.  Does any term in this agreement strike you as being liable to be an unpleasant surprise for future women who sign it with me, if not for Sevar?"

"No term in this agreement strikes me as liable to be an unpleasant surprise for any Chelish woman, I can't speak to women elsewhere. A Chelish woman who has never terminated a pregnancy before might find herself unexpectedly sad about it."

Makes sense.  Glad she's actually being cautious.

Keltham reads, then signs.

He considers ordering Carissa to sign, but decides against it; he is not sure how it affects legal contractual capacity and Carissa's own sense of which agreements she should honor, doesn't want to slow down to ask.  And also it continues to matter to him that Carissa chooses him.

He hands the contract to Carissa instead, wordlessly.

Carissa beams at him. 

...and looks at the contract, somewhat unhappily. It's just incredibly stupid, on principle, to sign something a devil wrote for you, after an amount of review that can plausibly happen now without destroying the mood. The fact she can't see anything wrong with it doesn't mean that much and the fact that there's the clause about no unpleasant surprises means - more, but not enough. However, they don't want to get Keltham the impression that one should treat Lrilatha's contracts as even potentially adversarial.

Well, what's going to happen to her is already only bounded by Asmodeus's unknowable will and the fact that apparently being tortured enough makes her short-term worse at her job.

She signs without any visible hesitation, after a respectable amount of time reading it which nonetheless would not be enough to catch a clever trap.

Contessa Lrilatha takes the contract back from her and signs it herself.

"Thank you very much for all your time, Contessa Lrilatha.  If there is nothing else from your own agenda, I would depart, with my Carissa, now."

"Enjoy."

He's feeling in something of a hurry to get back to their mutual bedroom, now.  How about if he and Carissa go there.

What a fantastic idea.

(Telling Keltham you are sad about something is apparently a very powerful weapon to be deployed only sparingly.)
 

A man's pride is his ability to successfully solve his woman's Problems, if they're extreme enough that she has to bring them to him at all, knowing full well the consequences if she does.

Or at least, that's how that particular masculine gendertrope goes.  There are obviously others, but it's one you'd worry by default might be lurking, if you were a woman and hadn't been otherwise advised of a different gendertrope.

Decades before Civilization took its current form, this is how Seasonal Affective Disorder got cured in dath ilan.

Right, bedroom, good.  Carissa, out of your clothes, wrists into chains.

She cooperates with this. "You're unbelievable. I mean that. Unbelievable. I mostly can't believe it. I keep trying to figure out how it could be an elaborate prank but you wouldn't in a million years have guessed how throne rooms look, so -"
 

Even in an authoritarian country answering to Hell, it's not easy to prevent rumors, at their tech level and social level.  There are too many people, especially in the Imperial Palace, with enough self-considered impunity that they'd whisper a few words among each other, or ask questions of another.  Security may stamp out rumors elsewhere, but they've got to be able to exchange whispered rumors among themselves to do their job correctly; or at least, that's what Security wizards sure seem to think.  Or Asmodean nobles.  Or priests of Asmodeus.  They're members of the Inner Ring, and privileged to be the ones who trade rumors if they want, while stamping down hard on all loose talk among the Outers who don't need to think, just be told.

And Cheliax doesn't think about informational security the same way dath ilan does.  They don't have an explicit concept of information theory and probabilistic entanglement and improbable observations narrowing down probable worlds.  If a top-secret Civilization project requests two hundred mice, and most other projects don't do that, then the mouse order is also obviously top secret, period, your job isn't to figure out what an adversary could deduce from a piece of unusual information but to deny your adversaries as much information as possible.  Even if you're at +3sd they may perhaps be at +5sd, and you won't see all the connections that they'll see.

Dath ilani children's fiction is replete with cautionary tales of fools who assumed that some fact could not possibly be deduced from the scanty, unreliable information that some slightly less foolish person possessed.  Adults, of course, read about more sophisticated and plausible errors than that.

Not that every dath ilani has the deep information-theoretic security mindset either, to be clear.  Any real information-theoretic-security expert of dath ilan - as opposed to some random punk kid on an airplane - would've told Keltham, during the Nidal attack on the villa, that as soon as his life was no longer in immediate danger, he needed to get the shit out of those Obviously Strange Clothes before he went into the villa and anyone project-uncleared got a close or extended look at him.  No, not because an ideal agent could use a mere glance at the zipper to deduce precise manufacturing technology not currently known to Golarion.  Because the clothes are incredibly abnormal and therefore a highly improbable rare signal and therefore represent a potentially massive update for any adversary who is smarter than you and making unknown deductions; seriously what the shit is Keltham thinking.

A dath ilani proverb runs, "The most important part of any secret is the meta-secret that the secret exists."  (Not literally always true, of course, e.g., consider public-key cryptography.)  Cheliax has this concept deeply and instinctively for private interactions, hiding the very existence of secrets from adversaries who'd want to pry them out of you.  It doesn't think in quite the same way about most secret government projects, unless there's a specific and obvious reason why a secret also needs to be meta-secret.  Tyrannies are not based on a deep respect and worry for what your lessers could do with the information they have, if they were secretly master criminals opposed to you.  In an Asmodean tyranny, if you order someone not to think about something or ask any further questions, they don't ask any further questions and make a sincere try not to think about it.  That, and not hiding the very existence of the secret itself from anyone, is the first line of defense around secret government projects in Cheliax.

So if a top-secret Chelish project asks for a budget estimate on two hundred mice, the project manager will think about whether they believe anything top-secret seems obviously deducible from the mouse request; and if there's an obvious way to deduce something genuinely ultra-top-secret, they'll mark the mouse order as being also genuinely ultra-top-secret.  Otherwise, it will soon be widely rumored within the Inner Ring - this being something that would make dath ilani informational security experts spit out their drinks - that a top-secret Chelish project ordered two hundred mice, no, nobody's allowed to ask for what.  When Abrogail Thrune issues an order, it's put forth under Crown authority so everybody knows how important it is and what happens to them if they fuck up; rather than being issued anonymously with a quantitative priority that isn't any higher than it has to be to get that job done, rounded up to make the exact quantity less revealing.

Even Hell thinks that it's fine for random contract devils in Dis to know everything their owned souls know; they won't repeat it, right, who cares if their behavior changes in externally observable ways given their knowledge.  Hell is playing their informational security game against mortals in Golarion, not gods or dath ilani.

Small stones can start an avalanche, a single added uranium brick can put a pile over criticality.

While 'Project Pet Outsider' was called 'Project Pet Outsider', even the name of the project obviously-to-a-Chelish-person needed to be secret, since the fact that Cheliax had a pet outsider was explicitly secret.

A dath ilani would've never renamed it 'Project Lawful'; even Keltham would know better than that.  That means the name of the project is entangled with its contents in any way whatsoever!  If the name needs to be readable at all, call it Project Artichoke or something else generated true-randomly.  And then deploy single-use disposable pseudonyms whenever possible, if the person doesn't need to know the project name to enable a persistent conversational subject, which they usually don't.

From a Chelish standpoint?  You can't figure out what Project Lawful is really doing from hearing that it's called Project Lawful.  Why, it probably even gives Cheliax's enemies the wrong idea, if the name leaks somehow!  Nobody's going to figure out the existence of Keltham or deduce a prospect of revolutionary military advances from that.  So the name 'Project Lawful' is fine to tell to people who are not allowed to know what Project Lawful is about.

And let's face it, 'Project Lawful' is a really cool name.  'Lawful' is a powerful but standard concept that could potentially mean all sorts of specific things.  Very evocative, while also very mysterious.  Slightly ominous.  You could say it's a tease.

As for whether it is in fact a good idea to assign a top-secret project a really cool name, well, that is something of a separate issue.

When military teams responded to the Nidal attack, they had been very quickly informed that there was a Lawful-Neutral detecting boy there wearing strange clothing who must be (a) protected at all costs (b) not told or shown that Cheliax is evil; but they were also told that this instruction was never to be repeated to literally anyone or asked about further, and that is an instruction you follow in Cheliax.  If the boy in strange clothing then channels positive energy to heal some of the response teams (dath ilani actual security expert: AAAAAAAAAAIIIIEEEE), you're obviously likewise not supposed to ever ask anything about that, or repeat it as gossip.

But the response team also, for example, found a burned-out archduke's villa in which most of the Security were dead and a handful of pretty female wizard students had mostly survived.

They saw a literal actual godwar start shortly after this mysterious attack by Nidal.

They hear rumored, even - and again, here dath ilani informational-security experts spit out their drinks - that the attack had somehow been foretold a half-minute in advance.  Why wouldn't that be something you could gossip about, if you were a privileged member of the Inner Ring?  You haven't been told it's really seriously absolutely secret; and you haven't been told that because nobody sees how that information leaks the secret of Keltham.  There's no particular, known government secret of Cheliax that the prophetic warning reveals; why would it be absolutely classified?  Obviously, as a Security, you would not gossip about this with non-Security, unless it was really amusing somehow, because part of being in the Inner Ring is that you get to know and other people don't.  But it's not attached onto something classified ultra-secret by a visible secret-leaking line of reasoning, so it's not so secret that even Security isn't allowed to talk about it.

Originally, all of the Inner Ring people among the combat response teams who dared ask at all, were told, at the time, only that the villa was part of a top-secret project into which they couldn't inquire further.  And so they inquired no further.  On paper it was still called Project Pet Outsider, then, so they obviously couldn't be told the project's name.  It was clearly one of those things you're just supposed to not think about; and it was given no mental handle with which to persist it as a concept over time or compare it to other things known.

Now, however, a Security directive has been issued that, to avoid accidental leakage of info in case the project name gets overheard, the project is to be renamed to 'Project Lawful'.

And, as a result, it is also now known that the burned-out archduke's villa was being used by a 'Project Lawful', into which you are not to inquire further.  This fact itself is not forbidden to be gossiped about within the Inner Ring, to be clear, it's just that you're not allowed to inquire further.

That double handful of pretty female wizard students who survived inside a small villa library while most of the Security were dead?  They are part of 'Project Lawful'.  Do not inquire further.

They somehow got advance warning a half-minute before the attack?  Yeah, that's 'Project Lawful'.  Don't inquire further.

The unconscious young girl dressed like all the other supposedly wizard students, who shows to Aura Sight as projecting a Lawful Evil aura strong enough to go with a fourth-circle wizard?  Shut up.  Don't ask any further questions.  She's part of 'Project Lawful'.

A remarkable number of these apparently young girls who are supposedly unproven second-circle wizards seem to have acquired permanent arcane sight somehow, despite no illusions or shapechanges showing up on them?  It's 'Project Lawful', you don't ask why or what's really going on.

(The young man in strange clothes channeling positive energy?  Him you don't talk about period.  Not even a whisper to your best friend.  You don't ask if he's part of 'Project Lawful' or not; you don't think any more questions.)