"Great!"

If there's an Asmodean subdomain for obsession with intelligence headband obtainment verging on suicidal lemminghood, Sevar is truly His prophet already.  Ferrer Maillol keeps this observation to himself.

He stands up.  "Follow me, Sevar, and we'll have that conversation.  Asmodeus help us all."

All Carissa's slaves are going to get intelligence headbands. It will make them more useful. 

She follows.

Security for an operation like this is typically within an extradimensional space, so they can't be affected by spells targetting the installation; the Forbiddance makes that impossible, so they're doing their best with having draped a parlor in lead, which blocks most spells, and having a miserable captive air elemental providing ventilation. There's one bed, since even though there's ten of them they only need two hour sleep shifts. 

Rodez Balaguerre is on duty handling emergency requests right now. He looks tired.

Ferrer Maillol doesn't even slightly care.  "Call in whichever wizard or wizards would be most likely able to handle a question about Keltham's psychology and our strategy for what to reveal to him when."

The fact that Maillol doesn't already know who that is, that there isn't someone already known to be in charge of decisions like that, with individual judgments instead being rendered by individual Security officers, is a very bad sign now that Maillol thinks on it explicitly.  That needs to end now, one way or another.

That's Elias Abarco, who shows up a couple of minutes later. He looks tired too. 

Ferrer Maillol doesn't care about that either, since Elias Abarco hasn't yet been added to the worryingly rapidly expanding list of people that he's no longer allowed to set on fire.  "Abarco.  There's a judgment call about what to reveal to Keltham and which lies to tell him.  Sevar.  Ask Abarco what you asked me."

Deep breath. 

She's going to try to explain it better this time in case maybe Maillol would understand it if she explained better. 

"Keltham noticed that no one indicates how they feel during classes by looking distressed when they don't understand what's going on. That is not what happens in dath ilan. He inferred from this that no one would indicate how they felt during sex by looking distressed if they did not like what was being done to them. He - automatically assumed that we wouldn't want that, and concluded instead that we must have some more complicated way of communicating that information. I was uncertain whether to make one up or to try to explain to him that normally people just don't worry very much if their sex partners are invisibly distressed. The problem with trying to lie to him is that which facts about the world are inferrable from which other ones is completely sideways for him, and I don't think I could accurately track all the inferences he'd make from something I made up. 

I'd rather as much as possible tell him the truth because of the sideways inferences problem but I need guidance on which things it's most important to keep secret even at some cost in our overall plausibility and coherence as he experiences it. And I need to solve this right away because I think if I just sleep with him and then later explain the thing where some people solve the inference problem by simply not caring how the other party is doing he won't endorse having slept with me without knowing that."

"The problem," Abarco says to Maillol, "is that Keltham is insane and predicting how he'll take anything is, as she points out, next to impossible. The library's not filtered for pretending rape doesn't exist -"

"I've told him that rape exists! He knows that! He just thinks that since I have assented to be there in the first place we're executing a procedure where I should also be having a nice time the whole time and it'd be a problem if he failed to notice a Chelish signal that I wasn't!"

" ...she's describing him mostly accurately as far as I can tell," Abarco says.

Maillol raises his eyebrows, not approvingly.  Hell doesn't refer to someone as a teacher if they're just insane.  "Do you have an analysis for me, Abarco?  Do you have a strategy for handling this?"

"I think there's no point in trying to conceal anything on this plane except the internal workings of the Church and government from Keltham; he'll expect those to be concealed, dath ilan keeps its secrets. I think we don't have the resources to convince him that Cheliax is the kind of place in which he won't encounter adversarial conduct, we just don't know how to pretend at that and it's already too late, so we mostly just want him thinking that this place needs lots of fixing up, which he currently believes. Sevar can explain how sex works to him though she should mind her tendency towards female-victimization-flavored heresies."

Hey. - no, no, he's right, she should mind that.

Elias Abarco has brought up additional points that Sevar didn't bring up, which complicates this already-painful decision.  And Abarco didn't bring up the critical point about only telling Keltham the sad little facts that are true in other countries, not just in Cheliax, which means he wouldn't have done well leaving the whole decision to Abarco.

Ferrer Maillol would, if he were alone, massage his forehead.

The Asmodean style of tyranny is not about spreading around responsibility so nobody seems to be at fault for making bad decisions.  Those are weak tyrannies.  There must be a single decision-maker on point, as is both efficient and Asmodean.  That designated person must be Abarco, Sevar, or Maillol himself, and any of those three people screwing up gets Maillol equally blamed for it, which leaves the pure and simple question of which of the three is least likely to fuck up.  Maillol is pretty sure that's not himself, which brings it down to two.

In the end, what decides him is simply that Abarco called Keltham 'insane'.  It's not a judgment conducive to making the kind of detailed predictions necessary for the actual moment-to-moment decisions.

"Asmodeus help you and me, Sevar, I'm making it your call.  Your goal directives are as follows: prioritize the amount of time we get before this falls down and Keltham breaks with us.  Secondary priority, if possible, try to make Keltham think that he should take you or some other loyal woman with him if he leaves us.  Do not bother worrying about Keltham's opinion of Cheliax after the whole thing blows up.  He won't be happy, ship sailed.  Just make sure we get as much as we can from him before then."

"Abarco.  Advise Sevar well on this and all related matters, and report to me if you think she's fucking it up.  If this project fails early and it looks like it was even slightly your fault for sabotaging her, I will make damned sure you die before I do."

"Balaguerre.  Sevar gets transcripts of Keltham's words, and his thoughts on remaining occasions where we make the call to risk reading his thoughts.  Sevar gets consulted on Keltham analysis and policy if there's time.  Sevar takes initiative on answering him if she's inside the room.  Sevar gets reports on any other decisions that get made without her about what to tell him and why."

"And give Sevar her fucking intelligence headband if we have a spare on hand.  If we don't, give her a Fox's Cunning so she has something to work with for a few minutes while trying to make the call on Keltham.  Then message at the next regular report that I want an intelligence headband delivered soonest, and if it's not here inside twenty-four hours then I will go looking for it and nobody wants to be there when I come looking."  Maillol wishes he could just grab an intelligence headband from any of these fucking wizards who'll make less important use of it, but that is escalating way beyond just setting somebody on fire for a few hours, or at least wizards act that way.

This is an important responsibility and she should not look all smug about it. - or maybe she should, because that's exercising the vice of pride, which she is naturally inclined towards? She should look mildly smug about it. 

There is not a spare headband on site. There has been something of a run on Cheliax's spare headband supply what with the dozen emergencies so far today. It shouldn't be a problem to get one in six hours. A transcript of Keltham's words so far is available for her to review now.

"Get her a Ring of Sustenance as well," Maillol orders.  It'll take a week before they can get any extra hours of work out of Sevar that way, and Asmodeus knows if this project will still exist or if the combined weight of divine interventions on it will have collapsed Golarion; but if the project does still exist, he expects Sevar will have quite the lovely backlog of tasks by then.  "Stores if we have one, otherwise add it to the requisition."

"We have those." He hands one over.

"Keltham also wants a headband, and ones for his other girls, and ones with Owl's Wisdom as well. I don't think I'll be able to keep up with him if he's got a headband as good as mine, he's not smarter but he's got - more of a force-multiplier." They could give her intrinsic intelligence boosts with Wish and then the headband on top of that but she is pretty sure at some point if she keeps pushing for intelligence enhancement she's going to reach the edge of their deeply bizarre commitment to not lighting her on fire. "I think I could tell him that they've been commissioned and will arrive in a week or two and that we can have one to pass around in the meantime, if we can in fact have one to pass around in the meantime."

Maillol isn't even slightly fooled by her hidden agenda, but it's not a hidden agenda which is detrimental to him so it's not like he disapproves.  "Sevar, I don't care what Keltham wants, I care how much we get out of him.  You don't just tell me what he asked for, any more, you tell me what happens if I say yes.  What's your estimated effect on him if we supply him with one lesser intelligence headband and one lesser Wisdom headband to pass around?  And if you think that's a good idea or bad idea for other reasons, don't make me ask you for your opinion.  You're in the command structure now.  Grow up.  Grow up very quickly."

"I think supplying him with a headband probably means he sees through us faster but not supplying him with a headband looks increasingly suspicious or incompetent. I expect the lectures will be higher quality if he has enhancement, and more useful to the students if they do, until it falls apart which will probably be sooner. Though his god can give him Wisdom himself so we can't make plans that rely on his not having it, and the costs of him having more of it are probably small, a fourth-circle cleric could have an hour a day anyway if his god decides to indicate he ought to spend the day reflecting by giving him nothing but - actually, what do we know about what - it's Abadar, right - wants here -"

"We know almost nothing specifically.  As a matter of general theology, Abadar probably approves of the project even more than Asmodeus does, and wants Keltham's knowledge to spread beyond Cheliax eventually but doesn't feel strongly about whether Cheliax pulls ahead of Osirion for a while.  His not giving Keltham any particular visions seems suggestive of a bargain with our Lord, possibly, and if so Abadar won't try to wriggle around inside whatever bargain He's struck with Asmodeus until Asmodeus wriggles first, which our own Lord will probably do eventually.  Some of the spells we already know Keltham got from his open prayer are suggestive of Abadar not approving of the deception we're running on him, which is also theologically to be expected."

"A fact you may not know, Sevar - earlier thought-reading on Keltham showed him to be suspicious of externally supplied mind-affecting spells.  It will be in your transcripts.  Maybe we can play to that, find Keltham a book on the subject which mentions cursed forms of the item, or which claims that there's a higher-tier version of Fox's Cunning that you can use to make the recipient think they're smarter about particular subjects while actually not doing that.  We've got a Wondrous Items enchanter working on a rush project to create tools so we can do edits to books more easily, and meanwhile we can get a forger-printer to stamp out individual alternate pages to splice in.  Our wonderful new pet Nethys-worshipper does give us a way to send Keltham exactly the books we want him to have, and it explains why we're not just shipping him a dozen different ones."

"If that ploy fails, or if you think it's a bad idea to try, and Keltham does start wanting to wear his own headband - getting you a higher-tier intelligence headband is not something I can do in a day, Sevar.  But your request and the reason for it has been noted."

"By tomorrow you'll also need to devise an explanation to Keltham for why you got your own private headband weeks ahead of the other women, if you want to wear it around him.  If it's not a good enough explanation, you'll need to take it off around him.  Do not give me any wizard shit about that."  Maillol has very little sympathy for why wizards are under the impression that matters of intelligence headbands are an exception to the usual rules about shutting up and obeying orders, and Sevar is not high-circle enough for him to put up with it from her.

"I have eight years on them and have gotten generous hazard pay that whole time for my service to Cheliax at the Worldwound. My salary from just the first two days was enough for the rest of the way to a headband, which I've been saving up for anyway; they're not going to be able to afford it for a while, because this is their first job ever and they're being very generously paid but not a headband every two days generously paid."

"Keeping in mind that a wrong answer to this question will get both of us killed, does Keltham believe that?"