"I want to make sure this gets put down exactly accurately.

We matter far, far more right now than we will in Hell. If Asmodeus could in destroying all our future potential for Him make us better servants of Him right here and right now, I think He obviously would; in Hell there are millions of souls like us, but here and now we are the only people who can do the most important thing that there is to be done. I am not interested in our long-term spiritual improvement. I have not adopted some kind of heretical belief that punishment is bad for us, in the long run; it is good for us, in the long run, which isn't our priority at all. I have not adopted some kind of heretical belief that it is bad for people to suffer unless they grow from it; if this directive works better paired with some directive to round up a bunch of orphans and torture them, I'll do that, or delegate it if that's allowed because I am kind of busy. 

I have a theory, which is that punishment is in the short term particularly bad for the kind of acuity needed to succeed at this project, and I need this project to succeed, so I want everyone to stop torturing my project members without reason to think it will make the project likelier to succeed.

Exception for myself, because I don't think any justification short of Asmodeus personally saying so would protect me now, and I don't want there to be any question of whether I conveniently developed this conviction when facing down something I know I can't handle. Exception for Pilar, because as noted, she likes it. Exception for one random girl at the villa because everything is an eye, and if the girl who still gets punished normally is performing well then we'll go back on this. It's how Evil dath ilan would do it. 

I don't care about any of you, but I need to be able to use you if I'm going to win. You need to be better than Cheliax knows how to make people. And it needs to happen fast. So we try this."

She is getting very close to insubordination here.  Well, no, she's past it, and now he'll have to figure out what to do about that.

"My frank assessment of this idea is that it may pass as Lawful Evil, you're the expert on whether it's dath ilani, but Zon-Kuthon is also Lawful Evil and this proposal is not very Asmodean at all."

It's like one of those dreams where you can Fly but the spell runs out the instant you look down. 

"You're misunderstanding me," she says coldly. "It's not very Asmodean, not to torture Keltham, but it's what Asmodeus told us to do. It's not very Asmodean, to promise to let him go, but it's what Asmodeus told us to do, too. Asmodeus wants us to win. This is your new project directive."

He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, over the last day, that this was probably coming.

He probably should have thought it out earlier.  If he wanted to win this, he is far worse off trying to win this fight starting now, than if he'd set up his pieces for this conflict starting after the first moment he'd tried giving Sevar a taste of power.

Can he take her, if he contests her control of the project right now?  It's not at all clear that he can.  Yesterday he could've, at the villa where he was running everything and had all the reports.  Today he's in the Palace, where he's that pathetic guy who got tortured by Gorthoklek, and Sevar has now met the Queen and her advisers.  Paper lines of power count for a lot in a tyranny, but not for everything, not among the Inner Ring.  It's not entirely clear that the Security would obey him if Ferrer Maillol ordered Sevar cut down on the spot.  This Security isn't one of the older Security from the villa; this Security knows Carissa Sevar only as a Power at least on Ferrer Maillol's level, who always has been such.

Does he want to take down Sevar, does he want to fight back at all, would he rather just let her have it?  Maybe that question should've come first, but if he can't take her, it's a moot one.

He misses the Worldwound.

He misses the Worldwound because he knew how his mission worked, and what needed to be done to accomplish it; and what was needed was keeping a pack of nearly-adventurers in line with fire and lash so that they didn't run out on him and the demons didn't overrun them all; and he, whose concern among Asmodeus's domains was tyranny, was good at that job.

He never asked to be reassigned from the Worldwound to the Imperial Palace in Egorian, where the real games of power were played.  Pride never was the part of this he was best at.

Now all he is, is a fifth-circle priest with two relevant visions from Asmodeus and a job he doesn't understand.  And because of those visions, he's not getting away back to the Worldwound.  He's stuck with Project Lawful no matter what.

He doesn't have to be stuck at the top of it, though.  Does he want to be the one responsible for Project Lawful when whatever happens, happens, on Day #4?

"I neither have the power to put you in direct command of Project Lawful, nor would I want the responsibility of making that decision if I had," Maillol says coldly, and with as much dignity as he can manage.  "Get an order from my superiors saying you're in charge of and responsible for the overall direction of Project Lawful, and I'll work under you to manage logistics and personnel, as professionally as you worked for me."

"Unless and until that order arrives, I'm still the one who gets held responsible for your project directives and I will not be responsible for this one."

"If you need an order saying you have urgent business to discuss with Aspexia Rugatonn tonight, write it for me and I'll sign it.  I'll even throw in a free note saying that I do not have a very solid vision for this project myself, and cannot judge the solidity of yours."

"If you can't get anyone to put you in charge, you're not in charge and I will not expect this manner of insubordination in the future."

"Deal?"

"Understood," she says.

She sits down. 

Writes to the Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn that she has a time-sensitive inquiry regarding the project.

Passes it along to Maillol, silently. 

don'tlookdowndon'tlookdowndon'tlookdown

He signs it and hands it back, along with his note saying that he doesn't have a solid vision for Project Lawful and cannot assess Sevar's latest vision.  He doesn't include any remarks about how he is unlikely to be able to judge any future visions either.  That is perilously close to asking to be relieved of your command, and pleading like that is not at all a good look in an Asmodean tyranny.

He can't quite bring himself to wish her good luck.

Carissa Sevar who is not definitely not a Princess of Hell walks through the hallways to deliver her note to Aspexia Rugatonn's secretary.

What's the worst case scenario? Being tortured a lot! Which is good for you! Not good for the project, which is the entire reason she's trying to cut down on it, but good for her personally!

You are customer #14 in line.  The current wait time is:  43 minutes.

Long enough she'll have to return the shirt first. She heads back to Keltham's. 

Keltham sleeps the peaceful sleep of somebody who, to the extent he has offended his conscience during the day, has managed to get far out enough ahead of it that it hasn't caught up to him yet.

Perfect. She folds the shirt up next to him on his bedside table, Prestidigitates it clean, and tells Security to notify her if he wakes.

Asmodia is sitting in her peaceful, lovely bedroom in the Imperial palace at Egorian.  It is not the gardens of Erecura, and the main thing that makes it different is not that the gardens are nicer-looking or the air is fresher, it is that the gardens are, so far as she can tell, safe, whereas the Imperial palace at Egorian is not safe.  It can have the quality of not hurting you right now; it cannot have the quality of being guaranteed to still not be hurting you a few minutes later.

But she knows where to find safety, for a time, if she needs it.  Maybe somebody would be nice to her again 100 years later, maybe not; but what comes after 100 years hardly feels like it would still be real, still be this Asmodia who makes the choice...

She keeps on reviewing what she knows.  Maybe if she knew all that Keltham knew, as well as her own knowledge, she'd be able to figure it out; but she can't.  The shadows got her, she was revived in the Imperial Palace, she's next to Pilar so the project is probably still active.

The gardens were peaceful except for two events.  First, the disorienting sensation that, she was informed, not by Erecura this time, had been the sensation of her contract devil being destroyed and her soul being passed to whoever inherited it from him.  She'd figured, at the time, that he'd either asked too many questions about the Keltham project, or it was the Carissa Sevar thing.

Later, she'd been called closer to the center of Erecura's gardens, closer to Erecura Herself in the fullest place of Her power within Her home plane, and the seal on her thoughts had been placed in full.  Asmodia can't remember it well; she probably didn't originally experience it well, never mind memory.

When she'd woken - it apparently being possible to fall unconscious in Hell under sufficiently extreme circumstances - she'd known the rules.  How to put thoughts about the existence of the seal, but not the contents of the seal, temporarily outside of the seal and readable.  That if she needed to report defiance of the seal, she should go to the most senior outsider under Asmodeus, but not any archdevil or other being reporting directly to Him; and that she was forbidden, by Asmodeus's own Law, to pray to Asmodeus or turn her thoughts too much in His direction, while the seal lasted.

(No, she is not allowed to ask Aspexia Rugatonn what happened.  Not that she would, but it doesn't matter, it's not allowed.)

And she's been assigned her own room at the Palace, with a bed large enough to sleep four.  There was a Crown order on checking her for new or exotic special abilities, which has now been returned with a false answer that she has none.  There were way too many invisible people watching her when she came back.  Sevar was acting weird, asking weird questions that were almost like she knew the secret but didn't quite, and in other ways acting like she doesn't know what's going on around her any more than Asmodia does.

Around the only thing in the universe that still remains stable and true is that Abarco is a giant fucking asshole.

The main thing Asmodia is currently worried about is whether Abarco is right and her devil was destroyed to keep the Secret.  She found out that the devil was destroyed, before she found out there was a Secret, so all the explanations she thought up, had nothing to do with what happened to her being Secret.  But in retrospect maybe there was always going to be a Secret and she just found out about it later.  She shouldn't have mentioned the devil being destroyed.  Too late now.  Not that she'll ever tell Abarco he was right about anything, and he won't see it in her thoughts, either.

Asmodia knows what she has to do next, to figure things out, it's all too obvious, she just wanted to keep to her peace for as long as she could before...

Pilar is now returning from having found herself on yet another cake delivery mission, with no particular memory of how she got there.  The thought is occurring to Pilar that maybe dying and reviving has reset some kind of accumulated satiation of her curse down to zero, and she needs to throw a really big surprise party for somebody in order to placate her curse enough that she is not constantly delivering cake.

She gets to her room just as she spots Asmodia turn away from knocking on her door.  "Hi" "Asmodia," Pilar says.

Why is Pilar suddenly behind her, instead of in her room where she should be, Asmodia does not know.  Pilar didn't do this in Ostenso.  "Hey," says Asmodia.  "Can we talk?"

Pilar has never been quite as wary as some of the people around her.  It's not that she's stupid, or even fearless, as many people seem to think, it's that Cheliax is where she belongs at least during her mortal life.  "Sure," Pilar says, not brightly and cheerfully however.

Pilar's room looks a lot like Asmodia's, with just enough distinction in decoration that you couldn't accuse them of being overly duplicated.

"So, Pilar," Asmodia says.  She did take the chance to play out this conversation in her head, before she got here.  "If you're in the Palace same as me, does that mean you also died in the attack and got raised or resurrected?"

"Yeah.  Took a sword for Keltham."

"Not bad," Asmodia says neutrally.  More heroic than her own death, lovely.  "I know you've always said you were looking forwards to Hell.  Anything interesting happen there?"

Pilar hesitates.  She knows Asmodia did not want to sell her soul; a favor-offering Security warned her that Asmodia seemed like the sort who might be upset and spiteful that Pilar hadn't been forced to sell her soul, when Asmodia had been.  She should, probably, mock Asmodia for that; but...

Pilar doesn't feel like it.  Maybe she'll assign herself a punishment for that later.

"My first journey to the afterlife wasn't all I'd hoped, no," Pilar says truthfully.

Asmodia probably really really does not need to hear either that Pilar went to Elysium, or that Pilar came back from it.

If it was anybody but Pilar that might have been a sufficient answer to what Asmodia really wanted to know there.

It's - not quite absolutely obvious, but it is one Abyss of an obvious guess, that Asmodia would not be in the gardens of Erecura if not for something somehow somewhere that is related to the project around Keltham.

Did it happen to Pilar, too?

"Because it hurt too much, or not enough?" Asmodia returns.

"Okay, if you're going to be that way about it, fine, I went to Elysium because of my oracle's curse and told them to fuck off and came back when I was Raised and Aspexia Rugatonn personally told me good job and I was allowed to feel proud about it, I wasn't going to shove it in your face but if you are going to insist about it then fine."

Asmodia would definitely have been a lot more angry about that before the gardens of Erecura.  Should she fake it?  She's not sure she can, somehow.

"It's okay," Asmodia says.  "I'd have sent you to Hell in my place, if I could.  Well, not to my contract devil, he wouldn't have been best for you, but maybe a nice erinyes or some such."