"A relatively trivial matter first.  Authorize this message to Keltham, deny it, or correct it.  It is my own best estimate that this event would occur in the alter-Cheliax we are constructing, but the effects on Keltham are not easy for me to guess, nor whether those serve us."

Rugatonn takes a paper memo from her desk and hands it over.

Dear Keltham:

As you may perhaps have already realized by now, your etiquette instructor did not give you wordings meant to preserve the Queen's pride, but to make you look as gloriously dominant as possible in front of Carissa Sevar.  That occurred via my own intervention.  Some of this, I admit, is an old woman's humorous meddling in young love.  I would not have done it even so, did I not think it serve Cheliax better, that Sevar love you a little more, than that the Queen's pride be a little more preserved.

I was not aware at the time of your agreement with the Queen to owe her an informal favor about her lost pride.  I have informed the Queen that any such favor should be considered to be partially owed by myself, rather than you, to the extent she lost any more pride than she otherwise would have done, in that particular moment.  My apologies for that element of it, if not others.

Have fun with your adoring new possession.  The first one only happens once.

-- Aspexia Rugatonn, Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus, called also 'Aspie' among her friends.

Carissa reads through it somewhat incredulously. Gives herself a moment to think. Keltham will probably be incredibly confused, but he's already treating etiquette as a fairly absurd social game, and he's not wrong to.  She...thinks he'll just buy that the Grand High Priestess was meddling out of appreciation for young love, and it'll fit his impression of senior Chelish leadership as excessively Good people with excessively powerful headbands, which - is convenient until cracks start showing... and possibly safer to attribute to Isidre than to the Grand High Priestess. 

"I don't think he did realize at all," she says. "I think this succeeds at getting him to categorize you, mentally, with Isidre, rather than with Contessa Lrilatha, and I'm unsure which of those categorizations I prefer and might like keeping the option value open."

"Are you able to mostly prevent my opinions from unduly influencing yours, if I share them further?  It seems best that final policy be routed through one person, that her policy be a coherent whole.  That person cannot be myself."

"Yes, Most High. I'll weight your opinions highly but knowing that my actual job here is to succeed with Keltham and that I might have insights I can't convey."

"I doubt Keltham will categorize myself with Lrilatha no matter what.  He considers Lawful beings to be a species apart within Golarion.  He is correct, and this is a true and deep fact about Golarion, and all else he sees will tend to accord with it.  Without constantly referring to a devil's advice, I would not be able to pretend to be like Lrilatha to Keltham."

"My primary concern generating this note was that Keltham will realize later that his etiquette instruction was off, and then will wonder why this event, which should have occurred in alter-Cheliax, did not occur in his reality."

"The final decision is yours, and does not need to be taken immediately - at least, not in my own estimation.  Aspie could plausibly find out about Keltham's prior bargain with Abrogail at any time over the next few days."

"If the true consequences of my act inside alter-Cheliax, as they would impinge on Keltham, are less beneficial to our purposes than I believed, then I have made a mistake.  Not for any wise and excellent reason, either, but as part of a game with Abrogail, and an indulgence however much pent-up.  I tell you this so that you understand, and it is a very important understanding, that Aspexia Rugatonn is not only theoretically capable of error but actually commits those on a daily basis.  Do not assume her infallible any more than you would assume Hell or Asmodeus to be infallible."

- it is strange to have someone assert as if it's a routine fact about the world that Asmodeus is fallible. Even though once she chases the thought down - yes, obviously, Asmodeus isn't omniscient - and she has no idea whether He ever makes mistakes given what he knows but the important thing from the perspective of his servants is that He might not intend the effects of things He does, or might be missing key information -

- right, okay -

- she's absolutely not going to have opinions on the game played between the Grand High Priestess and Abrogail. Some things she does not need opinions about. 

"Yes, Most High," she says. "I think it should be sent tomorrow afternoon, and will countermand that if I change my mind, which I might."

"If you're saying that to give yourself a measured time to think, I will send it in two days unless I hear otherwise from you by then.  You have not realized how much busier you are than you think yourself to be."

"That particular move in the throne room is one I'd almost never play, even if I was making an indulgent move against Abrogail, if circumstances had become less strange than they have now become.  Under circumstances less strange than these, I would be very unlikely to do something because it was cruelly funny, in a situation otherwise of interest to Asmodeus.  Cruel in other ways, certainly, but not cruelly funny.  Has your mastery of Keltham's teachings of Law reached the point where you can already guess why?"

"I don't think so." And she haaaaaaaates not passing tests, but better to know what she doesn't know.

"Asmodeus knows what mortal humor is.  Asmodeus has seen many, many cases of mortal humor.  It is still relatively harder for Him to predict.  Humor is one of the things that mortals do which is least like anything done by gods who were never mortal, and there is too wide a variety of ways for something to seem surprising and funny to a mortal bent on that."

"The most fundamental fact about all of our lives as Asmodeus's servants, now, is that we are living in a world of shattered prophecy.  It now actually matters to our Lord whether we are being cruelly humorous or just cruel at key moments."

"So the thing you did in the throne room is costlier for Him to anticipate than everybody staying in line and doing what they're ordered to do."

"The entire affair in the throne room was already so far beyond Asmodeus's plausible ability to have predicted, or at least, predicted using only His own powers, that it didn't matter at that point whether I started being funny."

"In a closely related matter, the Queen has noted to me that you are, as they say in the lands beyond our Lord's correction, 'in love' with Keltham.  As she told you that she would, the Queen referred your correction, if any, to myself.  How would you go about deciding whether or not to do anything about that, were you the Grand High Priestess?"

Oh, she knows the answer to this one! "Asmodeus said not to be proactive in my correction beyond the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law. It's obviously not ordinary to correct people for having stupid feelings; it's self-correcting, really, under ordinary circumstances. I don't know if it's ordinary to correct people who are on important espionage missions who develop feelings about their targets, but whatever's ordinary, I'd do that, were I the Grand High Priestess."

"Somebody on an ordinary important espionage mission would certainly be corrected in that.  By advice and warning while they were on their mission, if perhaps it was not both possible and prudent to send them to a torture chamber just then.  By more severe correction upon their return, assuming their souls sufficiently bought that this would not disincentivize their return."

"By the time we get to you and Keltham, we are so far outside the ordinary that there simply isn't any answer by reference to what we usually do.  There is still a clear meaning of 'ordinary' Law, however, in that case; it means then, not to do what we usually do, but to do what we'd have done without a message from Hell singling out Carissa Sevar."

"Even absent that message, however, Carissa Sevar ends up in this office hearing essentially what I am telling you now, only except without any parts about a message from Hell to be ignored.  Which is why we are having this conversation in the first place."

"This other Carissa Sevar is then asked to say what she would do about Carissa Sevar's love for Keltham if she were the Grand High Priestess."

"Obviously it would be good for my soul to be corrected, as severely as necessary for it to actually stick this time. I...suspect it would not be good for the success of the project. I could be wrong about that, if in the experience of more experienced people I'm closer to betraying Cheliax than it internally feels like I am."

"That's a plausible reason for Ferrer Maillol to make that decision.  It is, according to his reports, mostly what he decided and why."

"When you end up in the Grand High Priestess's chamber, it means that matters have gone beyond the mortal and are dealing in the plans and interventions of gods.  Such as, for example, the intervention of Asmodeus that started up this project."

"Do you believe that the feelings of love between you and Keltham are part of a plan that Asmodeus made?"

"I don't know. Asmodeus - called him my teacher, and said I wasn't to be separated from him. That suggests to me that Asmodeus intends some consequence of me learning closely from Keltham, and the obvious one is that it makes me better at the project. I don't know whether feelings are like humor in being costly for Our Lord to predict. If Asmodeus chose where or when Keltham landed, and it seems He might have, or have been part of a coalition that decided that, He chose to land Keltham on me, and that must've been because of some feature of me that lent his plans a better chance of success, and it seems like a notable feature of me, that apparently I have feelings - uh, uncertainty, what share of approximately loyal Asmodeans would have this problem -"

"The way in which you and Keltham have matched, the speed with which you have seduced and corrupted a boy steeped in Lawful Good beyond all imagining, the speed with which he has seduced you, the twisting events that managed to bring it all about, are not only far beyond the reach of mortal coincidence, but also beyond Asmodeus's ability to make plans about individual mortals interacting, as I have ever seen those plans demonstrated before."

"With prophecy shattered, there are exactly two forces known to us, named to us, that could possibly still be responsible."

"First, 'tropes', which may or may not exist."

"Second, Nethys."

Well Carissa doesn't like either of those at all!!

"Your thoughts as to what the Grand High Priestess should do about that?"

So far, things have worked out well for Cheliax and Asmodeus. They have locked away Asmodeus's competitor; they are in the middle of conquering Nidal, the first meaningful territorial expansion of Asmodean Cheliax. They have all Nidal's diamonds, and will come out of the war richer than they started it, not to mention with most of their casters strengthened. Honestly in the Grand High Priestess's place she'd be tempted to declare they should stop while ahead and kill everyone, except Otolmens instructed that Keltham be contained, and probably there are all kinds of people chomping at the bit to raise him. 

What does Nethys want. Almost unanswerable. He did warn them of Nidal's attack. He likes magic and explosions. There'll be lots of explosions if Keltham teaches Cheliax the weaponry of his world. Maybe Nethys thinks Cheliax is competent to prevent Keltham from destroying the world while allowing him the chance to advance the field by thousands of years. Maybe Nethys is trying to explode Cheliax.

What do the tropes want. For Keltham to have an interesting sex life, Keltham thinks, for the holes that his Lawful Good society left in him to be filled, for him to realize his shape isn't an error. Maybe Keltham being seduced into Evil is satisfactory to the tropes. 

When Sevar has not spoken for a time - it is still not clear whether or not Rugatonn is reading her mind - Rugatonn speaks again.

"A further factor, one highly relevant to my decision whether or not to have your feelings corrected.  We have just received instructions from Hell that we are to cease that particular policy by which temple-instructed children seen to have fond feelings for other children are noted by their instructors for additional correction in the form of being forced to do Evil deeds that train those feelings out of them.  They will still receive universal training in Asmodeanism, but children who display fondness for others will not be singled out by the instructors for such further correction."

"That this would reflect any change in Asmodeus's doctrine is essentially unthinkable, so why is Hell telling us to do that?"

What.

"May I make myself smarter, Most High?"

"You may."

Fox's Cunning.

She should have noticed faster that she was confused by all Asmodeus's unAsmodean instructions. No, that's not quite fair to herself, she noticed it was weird, and drew conclusions - specifically it's how she concluded Asmodeus cared more about their succeeding than their being Asmodean. Backtrace, now. You don't know the reason why. Asmodeus is giving unAsmodean instructions. It's not because He has changed his mind. It's -

"He and Abadar - or He and Irori - have a deal? Most High?" It has not escaped Carissa that Irori might be involved in the effort to bring a more perfect person to Golarion and that this might be why she was warned not to think herself too like Irori.

"Not in that particular regard.  This is specifically and narrowly something that a Good god, alone, would request from Asmodeus, if they had delivered to our Lord something else that He wanted."

"Very likely, the bargain involves no net decrease in the number of souls Asmodeus receives in the end.  There is little that He will trade for souls, other than souls.  But Asmodeus is not fonder of kindly souls than cruel ones, once they are delivered to Him in Hell, whereas to Good gods that does make a difference in how much they whine."

"Some Good god has merchanted Him additional souls, somehow, and taken a few naive children in trade.  I would be amused to hear what Good's mortal followers might say of that, if they knew.  Dabbling in the soul trade is supposed to be very Evil, after all."

"One may further remark that the entire affair is rather more Chaotic Good than Lawful Good or Neutral Good."