Asmodia smiles pleasantly and only slightly murderously.

Thief?  But a master criminal would be picking somebody else to impersonate - somebody rich, from context?  Charming rich person?  Oh, interesting his thoughts are moving faster on this subject too.

"My, you undersell your wares, I think.  This is a fine mud golem!  Look at its smile!  What about this one here?"  Keltham gestures towards Pilar, and then, as soon as Ione's eyes shift in that direction, Keltham takes several lightning glances around the room before moving his gaze back to Ione, wow that's interesting he thinks his expression somehow did this thing where even if somebody was watching him that would have looked more natural and casual than it was.

"Oh, that one is far more worthy of you, sir," the more he takes out on Pilar, the less he'll take out on Ione, if Keltham happens to be a sadist.  "An Alak-Kuata original, that one is, from Osirion!  Have you ever had the pleasure of owning any golems of Sothis's making?"

"Not yet, I must say!  A recent shipment?"

"Fresh as the sparkling morning dew, sir.  If it's not too forward of me, can I ask what kind of golems you have in your current collection?"

"Well, that is a bit forward, I'm afraid.  We've hardly even met and here you're asking me about my previous golem history?"  Keltham slides an inch forward, leans slightly, and smiles flirtatiously at Ione.  It seems like a good idea to practice this particular skill at all, before the spell wears off.

Ione smiles back.  "It does tend to help in providing a man with an additional golem perfectly to his taste," she says solemnly.

Everyone seems incredibly entertained. Of course, Carissa herself seems incredibly entertained, while in reality this is occupying a tiny fraction of her attention, and who is she to say, really, that that isn't true of everyone else. Ione, who presumably isn't stupid enough to have told everyone she's a oracle of Nethys, is pretending - what, exactly? Something's up with an invisible assassin halfling who might or might not be watching this, and that sure is some distracting information to have. ...for that matter, maybe every single person here - except Keltham, who couldn't hide it - is having a day as interesting as Carissa's. The devil didn't promise the same offer wasn't being extended to everyone in the room. Here she's been thinking she did something special but maybe this is actually just the default outcome in a situation of as much interest to the gods as this one.

While Ione and Keltham are flirting she checks for illusions, which would be suggestive of whether anyone has been arrested and is being impersonated already. No one...seems to be? A promising sign, if they've all made it through the first day alive.

Carissa hopes she is not called on for Improv With Innueno and relatedly is not at all in the mood to go on a date tonight. An hour ago she was all delighted about it but now she does not want to beat Keltham at a challenge of sexual cleverness, she wants...what does she want.... to burn in the purified flames of Hell and emerge perfected. Well. That's kind of kinky.

Keltham's very weirdly augmented social-presentation skills are telling him that he's screwing up, faster than they're telling him how to fix it; the problem isn't in his body's execution of the orders his mind is sending, it's that his mind is sending bad orders.  Ione may be acting interested for the sake of this skit, but in real life, well, he's not sure because everybody here is sort of hard to read, but in real life, Ione probably wouldn't be interested in the Roguish Gentleman Template he picked up from some of his own previous larping?  Even if that Roguish Gentleman Template was being perfectly executed, and even if it didn't come across as a weird dath ilani trope that may not even exist here?  Even if he's learning, he's probably learning the wrong thing right now.

Keltham is used to this feeling.  He knows that learning a new art often feels like screwing up, or even meta-screwing-up the process of learning.  It doesn't occur to him to be embarrassed about that happening in public, he clearly said that he was going into a learning and practice mode; like, how would people here even know how to read if they'd never learned and practiced anything in the presence of another human being.

He tries another couple of flirting exchanges, makes no headway on the problem of getting Ione to admit when she's getting off work and leaving her workshop open to robbery, and then gives up.

"This scenario isn't working for me, can we switch again?" Keltham says, with more calm and confidence than that statement even warranted.

"I'm trying to hire some adventurers to clean the rats out of my garden," Asmodia says, "and you're all desperate to impress me with your qualifications."

"I fought a dragon once," says Carissa instantly, "Well, I was there while some people fought a dragon - pseudoddragon, but still. They're really rats with wings, they are, and after that regular rats don't seem so frightening. Unless they've got the plague. Which would still be fine, I fought the plague once. Well, I was there while some people fought the plague -"

"I once slew three dozen rats in single combat, when I was a gladiator slave in Katapesh," says Tonia. 

"I once did that barehanded," says Gregoria. "I used the corpse of the first rat to kill all the others."

Reliable salesman, go.  "I've solved over five thousand garden rat problems exactly like yours over just the past 10 days," Keltham says.

(Gladiator slave in Kata-something sounds unpleasant and like one of those things that's hard to translate into Baseline, but you hear a lot of things like that when you're a dath ilani in Golarion; Keltham decides not to put it on his priority list of things to ask about after an instant of internally sighing hesitation.)

"Five thousand?" says Asmodia. "How do you find the time?"

"Subcontractors," Keltham says instantly.

"And you can cut out the middleman and just hire the subcontractors - I'm one of them," says Pilar. "He's the guy you need if you need to hire a lot of contractors, but not if you need to kill a lot of rats."

"Someone with that big of a rat-killing business has a lot of incentive to be going around releasing rats in everyone's gardens. How much do you trust him?"

"I have solved a million rat problems just like yours in the last ten days," Meritxell says. "I battled the rat god  Lao Shu Po in Tian Xia, and by injuring her grievously decreased global rat problems by 1 percent. If I even walk near your garden, the rats will run scared."

Good comprehension of perverse incentives, Carissa!  Keltham wasn't quite sure how much of that kind of knowledge would exist in a place like Cheliax.

"As a full-service company we also offer post-action reports on the root cause of your rat problems," Keltham says smoothly, sounding like a much more reliable and businesslike salesperson than all his wild-eyed competitors.  "If you're concerned about our ethics, we can offer full-service ethical investigations of rat-related companies.  Buy all three of our services and get 20% off."

"For half his price," Carissa says, "I'll fight your rats, find whoever's spreading rats everywhere, and feed them to the rats."

"What if it's the rats that are spreading rats everywhere?" Asmodia asks skeptically.

"Well, I'll feed the rats to the other rats in a rat pit of cannibalistic death, and sell tickets, and split the profits with you."

"My competitors talk a good game but have you considered that they might actually be rats wearing clever disguises."

"For a rat extermination job, you want to hire a rat. We know how rats think. We know where rats live. And we know what rats fear more than death."

"For a rat problem, you want the best experts on rats.  Most rats are too close to rats to see rats clearly.  Our highly trained rat experts -"

The Eagle's Splendour wears off.  Keltham decides in a split second to try to continue and see how much of a difference it makes and whether anyone says they've noticed.

"- live in distant, isolated microcities where they do nothing except think about rats and experiment on rats every day.  When rats have a rat question, they come to us."