"...do most people in Golarion just not - have the idea - that things you say are supposed to be things you believe and that things you believe are supposed to be true.  Why would words go on meaning things?  Why wouldn't people just walk off cliffs?"

"Not for rumors they don't have that! For rumors you say them because they're funny or because you want to make other people look better or worse. ...I'm honestly not sure whether they have the idea in general. Wizards do have the idea in general and still indulge in rumors.... they don't walk off cliffs because they know what's actually true about some things, things they need to succeed at to keep eating. Or to not fall off cliffs."

"So, I can feel the shape of the piece of knowledge I'm missing, and it's something about - how the local equilibrium is able to look like one person lying and the other person not knowing whether this is a lying situation, and that equilibrium holds up over time and doesn't collapse into every occasion being either a known lying occasion where communication is impossible or a known truth occasion, and this will turn out to require that people not be ideal-agents in some key way and I don't know where and what exactly that key way is."

"Maybe I'm just being lazy, here, because it's frankly gone late; but I feel like this is maybe a lecturing-to-the-class situation, and then you or somebody will know how to speak my language about this, and can tell me the exact thing I need to know about Golarion?"

"That sounds like a good lecture to the class. I don't know, now, what the missing piece is, unless it's something obvious like that lying is a skill and so is noticing lies so it's not worth lying if people will notice and it's worth getting good at noticing and getting good at lying. But that doesn't actually explain rumors, which are a sort of game, really. - I'll think on it."

Keltham yawns; he's had a busy day, and unlike some other people, no nap.  "If you need me to give you permission to go, by the way, you have it, to be explicit about that.  I'll probably sleep soon.  No weird spells this time."

"Oh, uh, if you're stealing my shirt, please tell them to send me in a small meal for dinner, since I'd rather not go out without a shirt and I don't have any other clothing."  The thought of borrowing one of Carissa's shirts doesn't particularly occur to him, not so much because of gendertropes but because why would that, like, work, he's still a bit mystified about her wanting to wear a Keltham-shaped shirt.

"I'll tell them." And she puts on his shirt - which doesn't fit perfectly, of course, but the ways in which it fails to fit are precisely the desired ones, the cut that isn't meant for breasts rather drawing attention to them, and she beams at Keltham and heads out.

He'll read more of the weird history books and await his dinner.

She orders his dinner sent and then trots over to where she last saw Maillol for a checkin. 

People are looking at her with an unusual amount of - respect?  Fear?  Or if they're powerful enough themselves, like a sixth-circle priest of Asmodeus, maybe curiosity or wariness instead of fear?  It's not easy to tell because Cheliax.  Nobody's giving her looks that are not-respectful, though, that difference is definitely noticeable.

It's a very good shirt, but that's more of an effect than she'd have expected from it. 

She looks for Maillol.

He's here.  He wishes he wasn't.  But he's a professional about that.  Not every day in Asmodeus's tyranny is a good one, even in the Inner Ring, and if you can't be professional about that you'll soon be very low on the ladder indeed.

(would it actually be that terrible if the new fortress got a sixth-circle priest in charge and Maillol was their subordinate and only was Responsible about vision things)

"I'd like to see the contract I signed earlier. I don't suppose there are any procedures for signing things in character in a way that doesn't, you know, maybe ruin a couple million years of my eternity."

"Contract?  If this is a sufficiently recent event I will not have worked my way to it in the stack."

He's not as completely on top of things as he was a day ago before the Nidal attack.

(He does manage to notice she's wearing Keltham's shirt.  This is not relevant to anything except to give her minus two points for unprofessionalism, which he doesn't have the energy to comment out loud.)

- that's weird. "Contessa Lrilatha wrote, for Keltham, a contract obliging Cheliax to force me to have an abortion, if he gets me pregnant and I'm being difficult. A major step forward, which I'm very proud of, and which involved me signing whatever she wrote with about forty five seconds of reading, and I'm curious if I've also sold off my firstborn."

Maillol experiences a rare bit of theological uncertainty, which he'd maybe be able to resolve faster if his mind were working faster; he's not sure if that's supposed to be contemptible of Sevar, for not figuring some way out, or if that makes her a true and heroic servant of Asmodeus who knew the sacrifice she had to make.

"I'll file a request to get you a copy," he says wearily.  He can't actually afford to offend Sevar, she picked up some of his own backlog earlier.  "You can also write the request and I'll sign it, if you want it to go out earlier."

This is Inner-Ring-speak for I acknowledge you did some of my work earlier, you get to exercise some of my power, under my supervision of course, to encourage you to go on doing it.  Dangerous sort of thing to indicate, in the Inner Ring; but it would, in fact, at least for now, be helpful to make more use of Sevar.  If she can decode the message at all.

She gets that there's something she's being asked to get. Which is dangerous, if you aren't precisely sure you've translated it correctly. But it's - not a hostile move, because it was an offer - "I'll write it," she says coolly, her face neutral. "I'd like it to come in before I return to Keltham."

She puzzles the rest of it out while she writes. Non-hostile, and in fact very slightly generous; her getting something she wants and doesn't really strictly need, faster. Does he want to be owed a favor - no, she's owed one, for doing the project work earlier, even though she did that for the project not for him - well, obviously they're not doing anything out of generosity for each other, but she was a more useful project collaborator, and so, a minor benefit from it. Why tell her she can write it herself, rather than that he'll write it at the top of the queue for her? He can't be that tired. Maybe something in the genre of - the reward for a job well done is more of a job - you want to do some of my work, you may do it for your benefit - yep, that feels closer to right -

Contessa Lrilatha, addressed with appropriate courtesy, has a copy of a contract she wrote and to which Sevar has placed her signature in the course of Sevar's work on Project Lawful. Sevar requires it so that she knows to what she has bound herself. If she is expected to have difficulty noticing it, key bits could be underlined.

"I don't know if you got to this in your stack yet," she says, handing it to Maillol, "but I did not intend to make Contessa Lrilatha and Gorthoklek and the Grand High Priestess and Her Imperial Majestry all wait for me, understand my error, and if there's not a punishment code in there already will expect one from the Queen when Keltham hands me over. Other than that, the meeting went well."

Some of his spite for her not saving him his own errors dissipates, maybe, a little.  Yeah she also done fucked up and her life won't be pleasant.  It may plausibly be worse than his.  "No punishment code, I expect the Queen plans to take it out on you personally so long as you're there."

"That's what I assumed," says Carissa, aiming for - not cheerfulness, then they'd just think she was naive, but a sort of calm acceptance that she doesn't really feel.

Maillol, when he angered that same group of people, came back worse. There's not actually a way around that conclusion. He is worse. That's not how punishment is supposed to work but evidently it is in the range of mistakes that Cheliax is capable of making. And she can't afford to get worse; she needs to get stronger as quickly as possible. 

Maybe she can propose to the Queen that she be sent to Hell for however long it's going to need to be. Cheliax has a lot of diamonds, now. 

"I was told to expect Asmodia's return this evening. Is she back?"

He did make it that far.  "Should be.  They'd put her with Pilar Pineda, I expect, room 4-14, unless somebody's decided that all of Keltham's girls get their own individual guest rooms in the Imperial Palace."  He snorts, to make it clear that he doesn't particularly expect this to be the case.

She'd make a joke back but they're not, actually, friends. Instead she smiles at his to communicate that it wasn't out of line. "Understood." 

And off she goes.

When Asmodia's soul hears the call, she's sitting by a stream and letting the water just wash over her toes.  She hasn't eaten, she doesn't need to, and that fact itself seems worth enjoying in its own way.  She did try wandering the gardens to see if there was anybody interesting to talk to, but she can't - really hear, understand, the conversations here, they are not conversations permitted to be understood by those who might be fated to return.

Nothing much at all has happened to Asmodia in the last few hours, by Hell's standards; and of the two events that did happen to her, neither were awful.  Well, she doesn't know who owns her soul, anymore, that's a little unnerving.  But also - it shouldn't matter, right, if she can figure out what she needs to do to buy an eternity of this, and do it.  Or if whoever cares about her, goes on caring.

Asmodia feels stronger, now, knowing that good things can ever happen to her, and that someone somewhere might even care.  Maybe the 100 years aren't a threat, a week would be a threat.  100 years could just be a message:  Go back, you still have something to do, please, I lent you a hand, lend me one too.

She's not looking forwards to Cheliax, it's too much like Hell.  But she'll face it, for that, whether she's buying her eternal peace from a broker, or just paying back somebody who cares.

"I wish I could stay," Asmodia breathes, and does not stay, but lets herself go.

Elias Abarco is one of fairly few people authorized to read Asmodia's mind when she comes back. 

That's half the problem, right, all these people hear that they're not authorized to mindread the Project Lawful girls, or to punish them, or even to smack fucking Pilar in her fucking face when she offers then cake, so then things grow out of all proportion and they think the girls are something special.

People are sneakily lingering around where the resurrections are happening, hoping to get a glimpse of Asmodia. Haven't they got something better to do with their time than drool over a bunch of halfwitted wizard children that were meant to just be a nice welcoming present for Keltham, and which ideally would all be chained up in his room right now. 

Whatever. 

He tells them they can stay if they go invisible, because obviously he's not going to ask her any secret questions aloud, and if they want to gawk at this completely normal teenager and owe him a favor for it afterwards, why not. 

And a cleric Resurrects Asmodia.

And Asmodia opens her eyes in Cheliax.

Abarco.  Why did it have to be Abarco he's scary no, she can do this, she has a reason to go on.

"Asmodia reporting for duty," she says, she's not actually sure of what the protocol for coming back might be; she wasn't previously the sort of person who could expect to be brought back.

Wait, should she be faking being much more traumatized?  Bursting into tears of relief from not being in Hell anymore?  This whole thing is supposed to be a secret.  Oh well, too late now, should've thought it through earlier.

"Hope you had fun," he says dryly.

He casts Detect Thoughts and reads her mind. 

(A cleric taps her with Restoration.)

Asmodia's thoughts are touching upon the gardens of the goddess Erecura and her secret stay there.  Those thoughts cannot be read by the likes of Elias Abarco, nor, indeed, any mortal nor most immortals that walk the face of Golarion.

"Thank you for your good wishes, sir," Asmodia says evenly, she is not sure what response Abarco is looking for but that - could be something she would say if she was showing him that he'd hurt her, right, is that the right thing to say -