"I - didn't understand that -"  She genuinely didn't.  Is he saying he read her thoughts or does he think they've already done a deal or - she doesn't get it.

Sure, he'll speak more slowly. "When Nethys chose you, you could have come to us. You went to Keltham instead, to try to position yourself better for a deal. We granted you that you would continue attending class with your little friends. When you realized you had book-summoning powers, you could have come to us. You showed them to Keltham instead, to try to make it more inconvenient to replace you. Then, you proposed your deal: that we don't set the other students against you, that despite all your behavior in the past two days we treat you like an Asmodean student and encourage them in the same. I agreed to that too. And then I told you: don't do that again. You want to stay here, falsely admired by your peers, trusted by Keltham? Great. That has been agreed to. You have that. But if you push us any farther, we will take you out of the picture. The deal is that there will not be further deals.

I don't know why you think Asmodeus bargained for Nethys's intervention here. The Grand High Priestess said nothing of that, when she came to read your mind, and she pays a great deal of attention to the question of how we accidentally make ourselves more costly for Asmodeus to steer. I think Nethys paid Asmodeus for whatever He's doing, and if it costs Nethys more, that serves my god; that's what I think. If you are a small obedient little girl who only wants a few small things, then, having attained those small things, I don't see why you'd hesitate to agree that you'll stop withholding things from us, stop presenting them to Keltham first to try to force a concession from us afterwards, and stop trying to condition your obedience on our further concessions. The game you have played twice today, you will not be able to play a third time, have I said it enough ways you comprehend it now?"

The Grand High Priestess was -

(don't think things that make your bargaining position look worse think things that make your bargaining position look better)

The Grand High Priestess was here and didn't do anything to her.  That says a lot, really.  Nethys probably prepared in ways she can't even see.

Ione draws a shaky breath, and sits up straighter.  "Are we negotiating a deal?  Or is Asmodeus's representative telling Nethys's representative how it's going to be?"

"Let's hear what the small obedient girl who only wants a few small things still wants."

Ione crawls over to where she left her clothes, and puts them back on, which is helpful for her to get some of her sudden seething hatred under control.  Whatever else comes, she's never passing a Chelish loyalty screen again, and she may as well think what she fucking wants now, which really leaves quite a lot of thoughts backed up, and this is not the time for them.

"Oracle of Nethys, Ione Sala, of the library's curse," she says, when her clothes are back on and she's sitting on the ground.  "My god has either joined with your god, or been paid by Him to assist, on a project to bring another plane's knowledge to Cheliax.  I require a bed either in the library, or in a room immediately adjacent to it.  Aside from this, I am content with ordinary student-level sustenance and living conditions, which you will not worsen or withhold.  You may either leave the other students here ignorant about my true nature, or tell them but then instruct them further not to mistreat me in any way whatsoever whether or not Keltham is watching.  I understand there may be some restrictions on me.  These restrictions need to mostly not prevent me from providing the services that Nethys intended me to offer this project.  Whatever pay or equity is negotiated by Keltham for the participants in his project, will be allowed to actually accrue to me if it actually accrues to any single one of the other girls, and Cheliax can't take it from me including by unexpected fees or cost increases.  You don't do anything clever to work around all that and make my life worse."

"In exchange, I will cooperate with Chelish security, on the understanding that they treat me as a friendly representative of the allied god Nethys and not an Asmodean traitor who gets set on fire at somebody's whim.  If we have disagreements, we work them out by negotiating as equals, not by a wizard who works for Cheliax showing up and gouging out my eye.  If at some point you come up with something extra that you want from me, don't threaten me into it, offer me an interesting book.  Or a magic item.  Or if you want me to do almost anything, you can offer me my brother as my slave.  Apart from that, I don't think I have any long-term goals besides pleasing Nethys enough to get a good Nethysian afterlife.  I'm not impatient to reach ninth circle here instead of there."

"If you manage to come up with a brilliant way to screw me on this deal, it's off, because I'm not an Asmodean and you're not a devil and this isn't a contract between two Asmodeans, it's a Nethysian-Asmodean deal.  I'm Lawful and I'll keep my deals that are actually sensible deals for sensible people being sensible about them.  I'm not an Asmodean any more, and I won't keep a contract that an Asmodean twisted around."

"What makes Ione Sala predictable is when she thinks she can be safe if she stays predictable, which mostly means that she needs to be safe from Nethys's displeasure.  The main thing that causes me to start looking for ways to improve my bargaining position with Cheliax, is if it looks to me like Cheliax might suddenly decide to do anything it wants to me at any time, especially things that might hinder my service to my god, unless my bargaining position is better.  I will remember your claim that security would have worked with me if I'd come directly to them, and if you keep your side of things, I will try coming straight to you at least the next time I think I see something Nethys would want me to do.  I hear your claim that my doing anything else unpredictable makes me too much of a liability and I will be killed no matter what after that, which I understand would make it hard to continue doing what Nethys wants me to do, and I understand Nethys would see that as a betrayal if I let it happen on purpose."

"Our gods have an obvious common interest.  We don't have to fight.  I respect what Asmodeus has to offer this project.  I hope Cheliax respects what Nethys has to offer."

Ione finishes talking.  She's trying to tense her entire body so it will stop fucking trembling and she knows she can't do this for much longer.

"Oh, do you want your brother after all," says Elias with some satisfaction. "I spent a while trying to see if there was anyone in the world you liked. All right. Next time you have a bright idea, come to us; next time we have a demand, I'll bribe you."

Ione found a wounded bird, when she was very young.  She hid it from her parents, and tried to nurse it back to health.  She hadn't even had it a full day before her brother found it, and killed it in front of her, slowly, by tearing off bits of it at a time.  It's the last instance Ione can recall of still having a heart to break, because afterwards it was very clear to her that anything she ever cared for would just become a weapon that somebody else could use to hurt her.

"Is it too late to pretend that I love my brother dearly?" Ione says, not quite believing that she's joking with him.  "And deal."

He pulls together an arcane healing spell. Fixes the burns, when he shakes her hand. "If you loved that asshole I really would have to conclude Nethys had driven you mad. Stay out of trouble."

"Yes, sir," Ione says without thinking at all, and then sighs at herself, but only internally.

Halfling slave #958245 "Broom" has just seen a trembling human girl strip naked and then be set screaming on fire, which challenged his understanding of reality not in the slightest.  After that, other things were said which challenged his understanding of reality significantly more.  Did the girl just win?  That is frankly not where he was expecting this to go.

He wouldn't set somebody on fire, if they were implicated in the possible end of the world.  They might explode.  Broom thought about trying to do something, but before he was done hesitating, the girl wasn't on fire any more, and then she was still talking disrespectfully to the powerful wizard who had just set her on fire.

That does seem like the sort of person who might destroy the world, either by accident or on purpose?

The conversation afterwards didn't make it seem like Ione Sala was planning to do that right away, but Broom is still feeling somewhat worried.  He can imagine somebody carrying the sort of grudge, from being set on fire, where they decide to destroy the world about it.  Especially if it's been happening to them regularly.  He doesn't like being whipped and healed and whipped again.  He hated that one time of his life where it was happening to him a lot.  He just didn't have any options for doing anything about that, such as, for example, destroying the world.

It is not entirely clear to Broom that Chelish security quite understands how to avoid making giant messes or how to clean them up, which, he supposes, makes sense of why some god named "Otolmens" would randomly grab Broom in the hallway and tell him to do it.

...and yet despite that, Broom finds himself smiling.

Well, he thinks he knows why he's doing that.

She did win, after all.

Broom wipes the smile from his face once he realizes why it's there.  He watches Ione pull a book out of air, visibly trembling, and sit down to read the book, while she continues trembling, looking very much like she's trying to avoid having a breakdown in front of any invisible watchers.  He keeps watching until he's pretty sure she's not about to grab her wizard stuff and start destroying the world, and then leaves the library to check on his other person of interest.

Carissa ducks out from the crowd headed to dinner and goes to her room.

She's pretty sure she can fake her way through a date with Keltham, but she doesn't want to? She can come up with several justifications and she's not sure she buys any of them but one is that - when they tell him more, which they're going to have to, eventually, she'd like to tell him that she wasn't lying about this. Another one is that - she is trying to become bigger, more capable, more Evil, in the sense of wanting Evil things for her own reasons rather than the sense of being willing to do what it takes to survive, and so it seems like practice in the wrong direction, to go on a date while not wanting to. Another one is that at lunchtime she was so happy, full of ideas and satisfaction and cleverness and the conviction that there was something big and beautiful and perfect out there and Keltham was leading her towards it, and she wants that back.

She doesn't, objectively speaking, have any reason to have lost it. She has basically earned confirmation that she was right, that there is something big and beautiful and perfect out there and that Keltham is leading her towards it, her and not anybody else, or at least her first. She didn't have the details nailed down but if you'd asked her to bet at lunchtime she wouldn't have bet she had the details right already. The main reason she now feels sick and small and scared isn't that she was wrong at lunchtime, it's that she realized since then that the path to big and beautiful and perfect requires skills she doesn't have and doesn't have long to acquire - 

- not a useful line of thought -

- why does she want to go on a date with Keltham? Other than because there's a competition with that as a win condition and she's very competitive. Other than because if they have children they'll be very smart and Cheliax will objectively owe her lots of money for them whether or not it pays up. Other than because he's attractive, when he's trying to be that instead of trying to be a hundred other things.

Well, because there's something he is getting right. There is something no one in Cheliax is getting right except maybe Aspexia Rugatonn, and Aspexia Rugatonn can't teach it, even if she knows it, because if she could then everything would be different. There's a kind of way of living in the world that Keltham has, and they don't, and he saw immediately what a tragedy that was and wanted to teach it to literally everyone because - not because he's Good, he's not, he's a lot more Good than people here because his surroundings were but she can actually tell the difference and he's not -

But you don't have to be Good to see a - mess, a Lawless mess if you'd like, and to wish that the beings in it stood taller, smarter, clarified and free, not as good as when they had no free will maybe but at least out of the local equilibrium where they have it but are not competent to use it -

He's also a teenager in way over his head and missing half the information he needs and depending which skills he grows in which order he's very possibly going to demand, when Cheliax comes clean with him, that everyone involved in the decision to deceive him be tortured to death, which would be reasonable, but -

- she wants to sleep with Keltham because she wants everything he has, and she wants to see more pieces of him, and she wants it very, very badly. And she sits with that, and lets it fill her up, the longing to see the end of the path, the longing to tell him things and watch him think about them - to check the little Keltham she is building in her head against the real thing and see if she gets it yet -

There. That's better. She goes to dinner. 

Keltham heads to dinner, still feeling shaky.  It does not occur to him to hide this; he is distracted, and by default he is not an actor posing.

He grabs his food and sits down next to Carissa, who seems to have gotten there before him, not sure what he wants to say to her.  Cancel the date?  There's a presumption there about Carissa wanting to date him only under narrow conditions that have not actually been specified.

"Hey," says Keltham.

"Hey." Noticing that something is troubling Keltham is well within Carissa's baseline perceptiveness about things that might determine whether she lives or dies even when she is extremely distracted. " - you okay?"

"Nope," Keltham says, because in dath ilan there are no pleasantries that you are meant to respond to with lies, and if there were, the people there would revolt against their language and start over.  "What does your own model of reality say that Owl's Wisdom is predicted to do to somebody?"

"...some adventurers use it pretty much daily so it can't have, like, particularly noticeable long-term effects from regular use. Clerics tend to get its equivalent in a headband, like wizards get headbands for cunning, and it makes them better servants of their god. I have ...heard of people saying it gave them a profound religious experience?" From the look on Keltham's face that's not quite it, but closer. "It sort of is a religious experience, in a way, touching the state of being - a little more like a god..."

"Yes.  Being a little more like a god.  You know somebody asked in class, what makes someone have the potential to become a Keeper?  It's that.  It's the thing Owl's Wisdom boosts."  Taldane doesn't actually have a word that means cognitive reflectivity.  "If you don't have people screaming about that and giant warning labels on the spell, then maybe my first angry thought afterwards was right and, yes, in fact, almost nobody here has much inside them that actually draws on the thing that Owl's Wisdom boosts, so nothing much happens to y'all when you use it."

" - oh. Gods, I'm sorry. No, I've never heard of anything that'd make people - warn - there are people with 22 Wisdom and they're not even close to Keepers, they don't have the rest - but I guess if you stuck a headband on you would be."

"It's - not your fault.  But I realized - how I was put together - in a way that probably, no, let's be frank, in a way that can't possibly make sense, and then it wore off and now I'm not smart enough to fix what I remember seeing, and I'm not even sure that's what I want to do."

"Ha.  My brain's totally thinking that this may not be a bad thing in the long run, and it sure wouldn't have been thinking that an hour ago."

She thinks she understands, though, and it sounds like a very bad thing, if you don't have time to put yourself back together afterwards. "Not a bad thing?" she murmurs rather than think of something she can actually say.

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.  It's a proverb that's - remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people.  There's a whole philosophy around that saying.  One of the key points is that maybe sometimes it makes sense to not push a truth on others, if you think it'll hurt them, it can make sense to not walk up to Keepers and ask them to tell you everything you're not seeing.  But if you saw it yourself, it's too late, you can't unsee it, and there's no way out but forwards."

"So, plus side, the way I was put together was not-too-bad for dath ilan and almost certainly all-wrong for Golarion, and being stuck like that while refusing to look at exactly what I was doing wrong probably wouldn't have turned out great for me.  On the minus side, before the Owl's Wisdom wore off, my brain went and fully admitted to itself that I had no hope of ever succeeding in my life goals back in dath ilan, and I did not really need that much personality update being shoved at me all at the same time, you know, it would have been nicer to spread it out over a few more weeks."

"So that's what my day was like.  How was your day?"

What a question. 

"I had an existential crisis but it was much more minor than that. Then I met a person even more important than Contessa Lrilatha, who was already lots more important than anyone I intended to ever meet, and she was perfectly nice but I still feel vaguely like a toddler wandering around a live-fire military training exercise going "wow, such bright lights!!" Then -" Shrug. "The duck's tasty."

"Your food technology is maybe something like three hundred years behind ours, I don't even know, but I admit it's surprisingly good duck given that."

"My brain is still trying to question all of its life choices and that includes the degree to which I'm prioritizing certain forms of personal happiness while working on my very important project.  I don't - I'm not sure if I can be the Keltham I was at lunchtime, tonight.  The Keltham who's just running straight ahead and doing the thing, because that has different results in dath ilan than in Golarion and I saw that but I also don't know yet what other kind of person I can possibly be.  I don't know how much you wanted that Keltham you saw before, instead of a more - unsettled one."

"I could also just find my brain shaking out if you gave it another hour or starting undressing me.  I genuinely don't know.  I've never been hit by an Owl's Wisdom before.  If I had been, this case wouldn't have had such an effect."

"So, not in the mood for winning a kinkiness competition, maybe in the mood to climb up to the rooftop and stare at the stars and worry about the fate of the world being on our shoulders?"

He feels a flash of the old Keltham's enthusiasm at that, something that he instinctively cups his hands around, like he's protecting a flame from the wind.  "Sounds nice.  Could do it wearing fewer clothes too, if you were also in the mood for that.  If it escalates on both sides into a perversion competition I sure won't complain.  I'll also understand if even a relatively minor existential crisis turned out to be a pretty large one in an absolute sense and you just want to stare at the stars."

"Also, what's an existential crisis?  It doesn't actually translate."