That was not the response Asmodia was expecting at all.

"Copying spell diagrams, had a bad time at first even though it was very light torment for Hell," Asmodia replies.  She fails to remember why Sevar might be asking her that, namely to see if she's more motivated now to cut deals; Asmodia's thoughts are too occupied with neither revealing the Secret nor outright lying to CARISSA SEVAR.  "I... thought maybe the devil was destroyed for having the temerity to try to pester you, is that not a thing that was true."

Oh, she's wearing Keltham's shirt.  Well, apparently Keltham is still considered worthy of her.

WHAT

"Maybe he was, but not by me; I was busy." Also there's something sickening at the thought of killing a devil; if you do that, they're gone. It's not like killing a person. "Project restarts tomorrow; are you ready?" Am I right, that Hell's punishments don't damage people the way Cheliax's do -

"I expect so," Asmodia says levelly.  She keeps wishing she could be back in the gardens; after having her neck carved up and being scared a few times it is hard to remember the thought that led her to consent to being Resurrected.  Well, it's not as if Asmodia couldn't go back, just that she shouldn't; she is choosing not to for now, but it is her choice.  "I am mostly recovered from how bad the early parts were, I think."

"Were the later parts - more useful?"

Shitshitshit that's directly about the secret thing, is it time to just lie - wait does Sevar know - "Useful?  Can you be specific?  Copying spell diagrams is useful to Hell."

"Useful to you, for getting better at thinking, which is the thing I want from you."

Yes in this very rare case, Asmodia now knows something is true that needs to be true for her to be whole, and that's probably going to help her think better.  Why is Sevar asking that does she know is she trying to figure out whether Asmodia received a gift she sent -

"When I got to Hell," Asmodia replies, trying to keep her voice neutral, "one of the first things my then-owner said was that, since they'd probably raise me, there wouldn't be time to do any training.  I was set to copying spell diagrams instead, as quickly as possible, with painful potions to drink if I lost focus or fell behind.  I imagine, if they wanted me to be better at thinking, they should've given me time to think, or maybe told me something surprising and worth thinking about, but how likely would that be in Hell?"

Carissa doesn't know what to make of that.

Or, she can sort of think of something, but it's -

"I'll see you tomorrow, then," she says, and lets the door swing closed, and stares at it for a little while. 

What if we're doing this wrong. Not Hell, Hell isn't doing this wrong, but what if Cheliax in its effort to imitate Hell is, what if they're as far off Asmodeus's vision as Osirion is off Abadar's - because the latter is easy to see from the outside, easy to see how the prejudices of the people who started the project shaped what they were capable of understanding when their god said it.

She walks back towards the temple. 

The worst case scenario, unless she offends the Queen, is just that she'll be tortured a lot and that doesn't seem as helpful as it's supposed to be but it also doesn't exactly damage her, it can't even get her lack of feelings about Keltham to stick.

Did she... screw that up somehow?  Was Sevar the one who saved her and she, gave the wrong responses, somehow, and now at the end of 100 years she'll -

Asmodia takes some deep breaths.  Sevar doesn't talk like a Power of Hell, Asmodia has some idea about that, now that she's met one.  She acted more like - she maybe doesn't know why her contract devil would think she's more interesting than anything else in Keltham's project?

Asmodia is not sure what to do about this, but, for now, nobody is hurting her, and she has a refuge to run to if she truly needs it, and in Golarion a nice room -

Wait.  She's been assigned a personal private room of her very own in the Imperial Palace, even with Pilar right next door, and her own room is obviously large enough for four people if they share the bed.

And when she came back, the whole room was full of invisible people.  And there was a message from the CROWN asking if she had any superpowers, she should probably have focused a bit more on that part, it seems possibly important.

"I have no idea what's going on right now," Asmodia says out loud.  "I don't suppose anybody in Security is there and listening and would like to hear my report about a whole lot of people acting very strange?"

(There's no answer.  Very few people in palace Security are authorized to spy on Project Lawful girls.)

People continue to treat Sevar with wary deference as she passes by.  It's probably the shirt.  Anyone would show wary deference to somebody sexily wearing a shirt as strange and wondrous as Keltham's.

She'll order dinner. And watch Maillol's desk waiting for the contract copy to arrive. 

And think.

Asmodia does seem better off. There's evidently infinite subtext there she's not getting but that's - promising, and a path away from the most dangerous category of thoughts. Hell is good for people. It's just Cheliax that is imperfect at being good for people.

(Is she being a heretic? The answer to that is almost always 'yes', if you're thinking original thoughts, but she doesn't think she's motivated by an un-Asmodean impulse, in fretting about people breaking her game pieces that she is in the middle of using for an important project.)

The palace refectory nearest the outer palace temple is quite a lot nicer than the canteen in Project Lawful's old villa site, with a variety of high-quality-food smells on par with the nicest restaurant in Corentyn that her father deigned to take her to once per year, to show her what wealth could buy for her in the way of pride if she ever lived up to her promise.  The Continual Lights that illuminate it are warm enough to see the food, but aside from that the decor is definitely a great deal more doompunk than the Corentyn restaurant aspired to be.

It's mostly priests here up to third-circle, a scattering of nobles, nobody who obviously looks like a Security.

They don't exactly all hush as she enters like Abrogail Thrune walked into the room, because what actually has to happen is a rapid propagation of people whispering "Carissa Sevar" to people who don't know that, who then stop whatever they're saying and glance in her direction before hurriedly turning back to resume their conversation in quieter tones.

So there isn't a sudden silence, just a conversation that enters a slowly troughing lull as more and more people glance at her, falling silent, and then start speaking again but quieter.  Afterwards there are a lot more faces at tables that happen to be turned in Carissa Sevar's direction coincidentally.  And others that are very determinedly looking down at their food and definitely not looking straight at her.

It sure is one heck of a shirt.

That's not the shirt.

Which means probably the earlier stuff wasn't the shirt either. 

Something's up and she needs to understand it. 

She burns a Fox's Cunning. She's aware that she's using practically all her spell slots for intelligence enhancement these days, and that she's doing it despite having a headband that makes Fox's Cunning not even as good. She feels fine with this. It feels correct, about a Carissa Sevar capable of pulling this off, that she spends practically all her time tugging her brain into smarter configurations. Maybe some of the habits will stick. 

- an incidental solution to a different problem occurs to her. She should have a collar commissioned for herself, as a present to Keltham, that stops her from refusing him. Since, after all, he told her not to. If she presents it to him with enough genuine delight and pride she doesn't think he'll have the nerve to say that actually he wants her to be capable of refusing him and actively choosing not to do it. He seems to know he shouldn't say that to her. ...there's some details to work out but it's a promising general approach.

These people know who she is, and think she's important and dangerous. That's - well, first of all, that's not ideal, since the project is supposed to be a secret. Probably the fact that she's on a very secret project has spread, somehow - maybe also the fact that the Queen wants her -

Asmodia said she had a message to Carissa from a devil who was now dead -

- the devil she tried to sell her soul to knew her name. He had instructions about Carissa Sevar. It wouldn't have been left up to chance whether a summoned devil knew her name, not for something that important. So all the contract devils in Cheliax knew to do something different than their usual, if presented with Carissa Sevar. Maybe that's how people here know about her; they're in regular communication with Hell, and in Hell people know who she is. Almost no one ever comes to Asmodeus's direct attention, the devil told her. Why didn't she take that more seriously? She only half believed it, but even so. 

(Idea: stop half-believing things. You're either right or wrong, and either one has implications. Keltham doesn't half-believe a thing.)

(Further idea: eat. That's what you came here for.)

She shouldn't really have needed a Fox's Cunning for that last idea. She approaches the food line like she didn't overthink this at all.

As Carissa approaches the food line, the handful of priests and nobles awaiting their turns calmly and dignifiedly step out of her way to let her through.  The sole exception is one man about her age, who's wearing clothing that identifies him as a cadet of House Thrune as well as being a third-circle priest of Asmodeus, handsome the way you'd expect a royal scion to be perfected.  The man doesn't step aside like the others, but smiles amusedly and walks up with Carissa Sevar to the suddenly cleared small buffet table.

"Shall we find an empty spot and sit together?" he says.  "I doubt you'll have much conversation of these terrified wretches otherwise.  Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune."

Carissa is continuing to be surprised, which is bad, it's the mistake Keltham observed himself to be making when Golarion kept undershooting his expectations. Shouldn't be surprised in the same direction repeatedly. 

What would it be, to be surprised in the opposite direction. 

"An empty spot?" she asks, taking food. "Are you sure I couldn't just glare people out of a table they're seated at?"

"So it was a recent empowerment, then," he says, though this much more quietly, and with a slight smile.  "You can always tell that first flush of pride.  I won't accompany you, if you do; it would be fun, but not wise."

Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune takes his own foods, that would be rather expensive in Corentyn, with the boredom of someone who finds them proletarian but acceptable.

Hah, succeeded at overshooting, unless he's lying; she wouldn't be able to tell. He's doing a very convincing 'I'm your ally who'll help you make sense of this world you'll find yourself in', but that is exactly zero information and she's not about to forget it. The one thing he's definitely not lying about is the 'Thrune'. That you're not allowed to lie about.

She takes her own food, smiles at him encouragingly, heads to an empty table. 

Alexite Gellius Rutilus Thrune sits next to her.  He sets down his food, then reaches into his priestly robes and fiddles with something.

Sounds from the room around them vanish.

"Silent Table, ten minutes," he says.  "I've got another charge left but would prefer not to burn it."

"So, is everything they say about Project Lawful true?  Or, for that matter, anything?"

It's said in the tones of somebody who expects that nobody ever opens a conversation with Carissa Sevar in any other way.  Having thus asked his obligatory question, he begins to eat, efficiently; this is not a man planning to linger long over his food but one who does have other duties.

What the fuck do they say about Project Lawful?

It seems bad that they say anything about Project Lawful!

....surely the palace has its reasons for whatever security measures are standard here; maybe it's good for important nobles to know some of what's going on, in case they think of something relevant, and there are precautions to ensure that it doesn't leak beyond them. 

"To answer the first question I'd have to know everything they say about Project Lawful, which sounds like a tall order," she says, taking a bite of her own food. "The answer to the second question is of course 'yes'." Someone has said something true about Project Lawful at some point.

He finishes chewing and swallowing before replying, putting him several steps up on table manners among Worldwound adventurers.

"A storm-giant of a tall order, yes.  I suspect that a true fact got out somewhere in there, and nobody had any better ideas than to bury it under a flood of untrue ones spread as fast as possible by Securities all attesting to what they saw with their own eyes."

"My best attempt to filter through the lot and reconstruct something that could have plausibly happened:  An ordinary weapons enchanter, stationed at the Worldwound, received a vision from Asmodeus directing them to find some manner of mini-Starstone, which empowers people in several ways.  One of those includes bypassing Forbiddances in order to move about cake slices, books, and, in a much more important case, diamonds.  You need to give the cake to somebody who'll eat it, or give the book to somebody who'll read it, the ability can't be used that freely.  The mini-Starstone bestows powerful auras that may not match true alignments, but are sufficient to change afterlife destinations.  It may grant minor cleric spells and magical detection.  I do not, presently, buy the claim that seeing the future is included among bestowed powers, since if that were possible at all, the gods would still have it.  The initial group of subjects exposed to it were graduating students at Ostenso's wizard academy."

"The mini-Starstone either fails to empower men who touch it, or turns them into women.  It makes people more physically ideal and perfected, over time; which is why you, as the first person to touch it, are now the prettiest of this very noticeably pretty group; and, according to at least one rumor, have become visibly prettier over the last few days."

"I admit, I'd given less credence to the turns-into-women theory, and probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all, if you weren't wearing an obviously-magical-looking man's shirt that no longer fits you.  Not that I'd hold that against you, if you're not exclusive with Abrogail."  He smiles in a way that makes it very clear that this is supposed to be a complete joke, or at least, deniable as such.  "Oh, and your project manager is a complete fuckup but I don't think anyone has actually deduced what the details were."

"What a fascinating theory," says Carissa. He's presumably not expecting her to answer him but thinks he can learn interesting things from her facial expressions; he probably can, but precisely for this reason she stopped tracking the specifics of the things he was saying about five seconds in. She'll mentally review them later. "It raises the question of why Asmodeus would have charged me, in particular, with this, out of all the loyal Chelish soldiers at the Worldwound."

Slight smile.  "With prophecy broken, the gods see and plan less completely than the common mud would attribute to them.  They are greater than us, yes, but that greatness is manifest in how they plan around the severe limitations to which they are now subject.  My first guess would be that you went out on a walk, and happened to come close enough to the treasure to suit Asmodeus's purposes there.  Not all of His plans need to be subtle and hidden; sometimes, I expect, they are straightforward plans that just work."

"Or perhaps I'm entirely wrong and you are the Princess of Hell that rumors proclaim, with every devil in Hell knowing your name, and taking it too much in vain being punishable by final execution.  If that's the case, I beg of you not to hurt me too much in my lesson, for I am Asmodeus's loyal possession and strive only to be useful to Him."

Okay, there's a lot to unpack there, but -