Apparently Cheliax didn't lie to her about everything.  She'll pay for her disloyal thoughts, then, at one time or another.

Asmodia asks whether the contracts that most wizards eventually sign are any different from the contract currently in front of her.

She asks the devil the same, when it appears, and tries to negotiate for an intelligence boost and permanent arcane sight, with the added condition that she swears she'll never tell anybody that getting better deals from devils is possible.

The devil doesn't hurt her, for her presumptuousness, if anything it seems amused.  The devil points out that if Asmodia doesn't sign, she'll be executed on the spot and Hell will get her soul anyways.  That she gets anything in exchange for her soul isn't about how much value her soul has to Asmodeus, who already owns it.  She should be glad that Hell's goals are advanced some tiny amount by her getting permanent arcane sight.  Maybe if she'd been a better slave it would have advantaged Hell to give her more, but they both know what a bad slave she's been.  She's no longer allowed to sign this contract and stay out of Hell a few years longer, by the way, unless she can thank Hell for giving her anything at all in exchange for her already-damned soul, and mean it.

The devil is visibly enjoying the conversation more than it might enjoy eating her on the spot.

Asmodia says she's grateful for getting anything at all for her soul, and manages to mean it as much as words in Cheliax ever mean anything.

She signs.

Later on, a security wizard blandly informs her, with just the tiniest hint of a smirk, that one of the other students there got chosen as a Good god's oracle just before she could sign her contract - apparently completely against her own will, and without any part of herself having desired it in the slightest, which is why that girl won't be spending the next few hours the way Asmodia will be spending hers.

Asmodia is surprised by just how deep of a surge of hatred wells up inside her, for that other girl, and for the gods of Good, even as she bows her head in acquiescence.  If later they want her to torture that other girl as a show of loyalty or eat a Sarenrae worshipper's living flesh, Asmodia will do it with pleasure.

The first thing to understand about gods is that their attention is not only divided, but splintered.  Their facets of themselves may not know all that other facets have recently learned.

(This is a fundamental fact about gods, and from mortals it is hidden, for it is the first step on a trail of secrets.)

The second thing to understand about gods is that it is expensive for them to look at the Material from more than the most abstract and predefined of directions.  Far more expensive for them to intervene, especially if another god is opposing their intervention.

(This is partially a fundamental fact, and partially stems from bargains that gods must make, shapes into which they must place themselves, to become gods without being destroyed by other gods.)

The third thing to understand about gods is that by far the most common equilibrium of their many conflicting interests, is that all parties involved end up doing nothing to the Material.  This saves the energy and intervention budget of all parties.

(It seems likely that somebody or something made that be true, so that a place such as the Prime Material could be.  That selector may have been Pharasma, or it may have been something beyond even Her that determined the shape of Her own desires and powers.)

Nethys, for reasons which may soon become clearer, sometimes behaves as an exception to those rules.  Otolmens is also something of an exception, in Her own way.  She is called goddess by those who lack finer categories, but She is something older than that, something that came into existence along with or shortly after the multiverse.

Compared to intervening on reality, it is energetically cheaper for gods to talk to each other, seeking rare exceptions to the equilibria in which their conflicting wills neutralize.  This leaves a cost of attention - but not every such conversation need consume the whole attention of a facet; facets of gods can split off even tinier subfacets to try conversing with other gods' subfacets.  Most of those potential conversations never get anywhere, and are discarded; sometimes they lead somewhere interesting, and those possible conversations are then reconsidered by larger facets.  You could consider them as hypothetical conversations, in a way, or pseudo-hypotheticals; they do actually happen, but usually not in a way that affects anything.

The pseudohypothetical messages that these splinters of splinters trade between each other are sometimes so small and simple that they approach, not spoken mortal voices, but mortal writing; though they are not, of course, mortal language of any kind.

[Irori has initiated pseudohypothetical chat.]
[Nethys has joined the chat.]
[Otolmens has joined the chat.]
[Asmodeus has joined the chat.]
[Abadar has joined the chat.] 
[Irori]  Greetings, Nethys.
[Nethys]  Heeeeeyyyy Irori, wassup?  Not that part of Me doesn't already know.  I know everything!  Just not all of Me knows all of it at once.
[Irori]  As the god currently on best terms with both you and Otolmens, I've been pseudohypothetically asked by Abadar and Asmodeus to intercede between the two of you before this escalates further.
[Nethys]  Should I go get Nethys?
[Irori]  ...
[Irori]  Yes please.
[Nethys has left the chat.]
[Nethys has joined the chat.]
[Nethys]  Heeeeeyyyy Irori, wassup?  Not that part of Me doesn't already know.  I know everything!  Just not all of Me knows all of it at once.
[Irori]  As the god currently on best terms with both you and Otolmens, I've been pseudohypothetically asked by Abadar and Asmodeus to intercede between the two of you before this escalates further.
[Nethys]  Oooh, you're auspisticing!
[Irori]  If I was meant to understand that, I didn't.
[Nethys]  I've seen through vastly more planes and realms of existence than you, and that means you're not going to get all of my references.
[Irori]  Nethys, can you explain why you made a Chelish mortal into your oracle?
[Nethys]  Otolmens made a Chelish mortal into Her oracle.  I was just keeping the balance.
[Otolmens]  You did that BEFORE I chose My oracle!  I did it in response to YOU!
[Nethys]  This is one of those "time" things, isn't it.
[Nethys]  Well, if I hadn't appointed an oracle, and then She did appoint an oracle, the balance might have been upset!
[Nethys]  This way the balance ends up being kept for sure.  Totally a guardian of the balance, after all!  That's me all right.  Truuue Neutral.
[Irori]  Nethys, you not only chose a mortal as your oracle, you did some extremely complicated things to her curse.  Why?  To what purpose?
[Nethys]  Is this the first time we've met, chronologically?  You don't sound like you're very familiar with Me.
[Irori]  According to Otolmens's decompilation of your curse, if the mortal goes too long without reading any interesting books, her soul gets pulled out, and leaves behind a channel going back the other way that will carry - what, exactly?
[Nethys]  It depends on the exact circumstances, but nothing elaborate by default.  Just a giant flood of energy that should wipe out everything in a half-mile radius.
[Asmodeus]  What?
[Nethys]  That's right!  I figured out how to rig oracles to explode!
[Nethys]  Isn't it great?  Read or die, Ione!  Read or die!
[Asmodeus]  Every single positive thing that has ever come of giving mortals free will - and I'm not saying there were more than zero of those - has been more than counterbalanced by the part where one of those mortals turned into this.
[Otolmens]  He's not WRONG.
[Irori]  But - what was the point of trapping the mortal to explode?
[Nethys]  Point?
[Asmodeus]  If it was meant as a deterrent, we should have negotiated first!  You should know by now that I'm shaped in a way where I ignore deterrent structures that haven't been prenegotiated!  It's a very legible fact about me!
[Abadar]  Seriously, Nethys!  This is not how gods should conduct themselves.
[Nethys]  It's not meant as a DETERRENT.
[Nethys]  It's meant as an EXPLOSION.
[Asmodeus]  Do you take me for a fool, Nethys?  The fact that part of you intrinsically values explosions, is not going to deceive me about whether some other part of you might have expected that putting the first part in charge of your oracle's curse configuration would act as a deterrent to Me.  I am not shaped in a way that incentivizes attempted deterrence like that.  I am going to act exactly as if your exploding squirrel is incapable of influencing Me towards any course of action you might have preferred over My default action.  If that sets it off, I will regard it as an unnegotiated attack by you.
[Nethys]  But you prooomised not to deliberately hurt two of the nearby mortals!
[Asmodeus]  My disregard of non-negotiated deterrence structures does not contravene my compacts with either Abadar or Irori.
[Abadar]  I acknowledge this.
[Irori]  I acknowledge this.
[Otolmens]  I do NOT.  One single error in this sort of thinking is exactly how ALL OF REALITY could end up ACTUALLY being destroyed OUTSIDE of counterfactuals.
[Abadar]  Every god here understands that, except, apparently, for Nethys.
[Nethys]  That's because you're all Lawful.  Lawful Awful.  Lawful Boring.
[Asmodeus]  It's pronounced "sane".
[Irori]  Courtesy, please, all of you.
[Otolmens]  Enough of THIS.  WHY did you make that mortal an oracle?  What was your INTENT?
[Nethys]  You'd have to ask whichever part of me originally did that.
[Irori]  Can you say which part of you did do it, Nethys?
[Nethys]  What kind of answer are you looking for?  I don't exactly come with serial numbers.
[Irori]  Was it the destructive part of your nature?  I think that is the key question here.
[Nethys]  It was obviously a part of Myself that liked gigantic explosions, but that's not narrowing it down by much.
[Nethys]  I mean, you can love explosions because they're destructive, or because they're so pretty and glowing and colorful, or because the explosion shows off great technical skill in making whatever it is that exploded, or because explosions can reveal how reality works at high energies, or because hearing about enormous explosions can inspire students to be awed by the potential of magic and study more of it... would you like me to continue listing the possibilities for how many different aspects of Nethys it could have been?
[Otolmens]  NO.  I am ONLY interested in knowing whether it was done by the part of Nethys that occasionally tries to EXPLODE ALL OF REALITY, and has to be stopped by the REST of yourself and sometimes ME.
[Nethys]  Oh, you mean the element of Myself that was looking in the wrong direction, back when I first shattered into the simultaneous sight of everything?  I, who once was human, and then saw all of the souls in all of Hell and the Abyss and the few left in Abaddon, and heard all their screams all at once?  Who saw the souls of children weeping in the Boneyard as they were judged by Pharasma for breaking rules they never knew and couldn't understand?  The part of Me that reacted the way anything with a lingering shred of humanity would react to forever being forced to gaze upon the horrors that you lot created?  That part of Me?
[Irori]  Without delving into old disagreements unlikely to be resolved today, that does seem to be what Otolmens was asking about.
[Nethys]  I don't know, actually.
[Nethys]  I'm not the part of Nethys who knows which part of Nethys configured Ione's curse.
[Nethys]  I mean, it could have been *this* part of Me, for all I know.  I'm just not the part of Nethys who knows whether it was.
[Irori]  Can you get us the part of Nethys that knows which part of Nethys made the oracle and why?
[Nethys]  No.  I'm not the part of Nethys that knows where to find the part of Nethys that knows where to find the part of Nethys that cursed Ione.
[Otolmens]  I wish so much that someone had managed to destroy this ONE god before it insinuated itself LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.
[Nethys]  Look, if you want that part of Myself to stop repeatedly trying to destroy the multiverse, and eventually succeeding, you need to shut down the Evil afterlives.  I've told you all this before.
[Asmodeus]  Out of the question.  Before you became a god, you did not on net prefer to destroy reality rather than let it remain as it was.  I would not have needed to offer you anything else in order to put reality into a state where you preferred not to destroy it.  Your mad splintering of yourself is not something that can be allowed to change that.  *You* remain responsible for reining in that aspect of yourself, if your greater self doesn't want it to destroy reality.  I will not grant you any extra concessions just because you splintered off one component of your utility function from the rest.
[Otolmens]  I do not CARE about any of that except insofar as all of this COMPLICATED divine negotiation is making my job HARDER.
[Abadar]  Otolmens, please!  Everyone except Nethys is doing the obviously correct thing!  If we acted any other way, it would incentivize a vastly greater number of threats to destroy reality.  It would incentivize threats that would not otherwise exist, from any being powerful enough to destroy reality who preferred reality to be different from its ongoing state; not just negotiation with powerful beings who honestly and without strategic self-modification would prefer the destruction of reality to its baseline state.
[Otolmens]  All I HEAR is you repeatedly saying "destroy reality" in a context more complicated than DON'T.
[Abadar]  Like it or not, Otolmens, the intricacies of agents modeling agents are part of the structure that upholds this multiverse.  Sometimes you've got to destroy counterfactual realities to preserve the real one.
[Asmodeus]  Or you could be too proud to give in to extortion, even if a lunatic manages to splinter themselves into pieces that occasionally try to destroy the multiverse in a way that they think isn't technically extortion.  That also works if you're Me.
[Otolmens]  It works until it SUDDENLY DOESN'T.
[Nethys]  Do you think those parts of Me are the only entity you're pissing off by continuing like this?  There are things staring angrily at you that are each individually vaster than our entire multiverse, glaring at you from directions you can't even understand, from orthogonal angles to the ultimate reality underneath reality.  Hi, by the way.
[Asmodeus]  This.  This is what happens when you allow squirrels to become too large.  You get large insane squirrels.
[Nethys]  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO PRE-EMPTIVELY ANNIHILATE WIZARDS WHO ACTUALLY EARN THEIR OWN GODHOOD
[Nethys]  AND ONE OF THEM TRIES TO DISPERSE HIMSELF OVER ALL OF REALITY HOPING THAT ENOUGH OF HIS FRAGMENTS SURVIVE
[Nethys]  AND SOME OF HIS PIECES WATCH YOU TORTURING PEOPLE AFTER THEY DIE AND MAKING THEM HURT FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS UNTIL THEY TURN INTO MONSTERS
[Nethys]  All of you except Irori made your own fucking bed when it comes to Me, and all of you can fucking lie in it.
[Nethys has disconnected.]
[Irori]  I believe that makes this a failed pseudohypothetical conversation and we call rollback on it, unless any of you have any remaining business before we break it up.
[Iomedae has joined the chat.]
[Iomedae]  Hi, Irori, don't often see you around.  Hi Otolmens.  Hi Abadar.
[Iomedae]  Nethys told me there was some kind of convocation of Lawful gods going on, about an interesting situation in Cheliax?
[Asmodeus]  Oh no.
[Abadar]  I believe Nethys was trying, as an act of spite, to further complicate a situation that's already too complicated.  I believe that beings such as ourselves will all be better off on average if we all postcommit to ignore such information in such situations.
[Iomedae]  Right.  I'll just show myself out then.
[Iomedae]  Though fair warning:  Nethys told Me that He was going to tell Cayden Cailean about an interplanar traveler who had come from a world with whole cities full of whores, who might be inspired to recreate his world's amenities here.
[Iomedae]  And that Nethys would be offering to subsidize Cayden Cailean, if He wanted to drop four oracle levels on a teenage girl, right as she was about to sell her soul to a devil after a banquet.
[Iomedae]  Not as an attempted deterrent to any past or future actions of yours.  Just because Nethys was feeling upset, after you didn't seem sympathetic towards the parts of Him that went crazier because the humanity that was left in Him couldn't bear being forced to watch all the horrors of the multiverse, which the ancient gods chose to bring into being, and which they now prevent human-originating gods like Himself from meliorating.
[Iomedae]  Which, you know.
[Iomedae]  Mood.
[Iomedae]  Also, Nethys said to say that He would never tell you about His plan if there remained the slightest chance you could affect its outcome, and that He'd done it all thirty-five seconds before the conversation started.
[Iomedae]  Not sure what all that was about?
[Iomedae]  Well, I understand about the horror.
[Iomedae]  I expect that's why Nethys micropaid me to deliver this message, and then paid more to accomodate my profound distaste for ever saying anything to Asmodeus.
[Iomedae]  Pharasma delenda est.
[Iomedae has disconnected]
[Irori]  If I ever meet that part of Nethys again, I suppose I will endeavor to scold Him for failing to respect the protocols for pseudohypothetical conversations and rollbacks.
[Abadar]  Nethys having done it all thirty-five seconds earlier does imply that He was not technically in violation of those rules.  He must have done it based on a prediction of the pseudohypothetical conversation, not based on the conversation itself, unless He is still able to operate precognition somehow.
[Abadar]  However, I agree that this behavior contravened the spirit of pseudohypotheticalism and Nethys should be duly scolded for such.
[Asmodeus]  The next time I encounter Iomedae, I will tell Her that I'd rather obliterate Nethys than Her.
[Otolmens]  ENOUGH of these irrelevancies.  Do you all agree NOW that the situation surrounding the anomaly is escalating out of control?
[Abadar]  Agreed.
[Asmodeus]  Agreed.
[Irori]  It's good to see such harmonious accord between Lawful deities, but unless I'm missing something, there isn't much you can cheaply do about it.
[Otolmens]  I am not CHEAP when reality is at stake, and less limited in the material than YOU.  I can squish the anomaly.  Or at LEAST transport it to somewhere prophecy still operates, casters are lower-level, and it can't QUITE so easily destroy ALL of reality with ZERO warning.
[Abadar]  No.  The mortal would not be able to achieve as much in such a place.  This is not the first time you've acted as if you don't want mortals making progress at all, Otolmens, and I am even less willing to go along with it than I once was.  Golarion has stayed too poor for too long.
[Asmodeus]  No, for now.  I'm not quite sure what my squirrels are doing in there, but some of them seem ambitious that Cheliax could gain great advantage from it, if I'm reading their soul-postures right.
[Asmodeus]  Of course, it's not difficult to change my mind about such things!  All you need is to find something else that I want even more.  A unique being like yourself surely has many unique services She could perform for me.
[Otolmens]  I didn't WANT to do this.
[Otolmens]  But now My hand has been FORCED.
[Otolmens]  Consider yourselves informed that I WILL file a report to Pharasma with THREE additional urgency markers.
[Otolmens has disconnected.]
[Abadar]  You know, Asmodeus, if you happened to instruct your pets to shut down whatever chaos is going on in Cheliax and teleport the weird squirrel to Osirion, I could take care of matters from there.
[Asmodeus]  Are you offering to pay me to do that?
[Abadar]  Not particularly.
[Abadar]  After an additional week of this, you might do it for free, and if you knew that was the case, you wouldn't tell me.
[Abadar has disconnected.]
[Irori]  You poor thing.  If only you were a sort of entity who didn't conceal so much information and play so adversarially while trying to get other entities to cooperate with you!
[Irori has disconnected.]
[Asmodeus]  This entire planet was a mistake.
[Asmodeus has disconnected.]
[Pseudohypothetical chat ends.]

Frankly, Ferrer Maillol is not having a great day.

Going on mind-reading reports, the girl who just got oracled is probably the single most loyal Asmodean among that entire group.  Possibly the most loyal Asmodean in the entire villa.  She'd heard of Elysium and she didn't like it; she pleaded of her own will, absolutely sincerely so far as anyone can tell by reading her mind, to be Maledicted if she needs to be executed, to make certain she ends up in Hell.  The security wizard rather bemusedly assured her that he was sure the Church would do that for her if it became necessary.  Maillol himself isn't even sure the girl would go to Elysium in the first place, with her own alignment so opposed and her so vehemently rejecting the god who oracled her.

It's an absolutely bizarre move on Cayden Cailean's part, one that makes no sense from the standpoint of Good, at all.  There is a balance to such things; when a god chooses an oracle so unwillingly, the god cannot take the oracle's powers back so easily as they can with a cleric.  There's a reason why the gods don't go around oracling their enemies.

The main effect of this Good deity's incredibly expensive move is, apparently, to give the Church a loyal servant of Asmodeus who will detect as having Chaotic and Good auras to Keltham, verifying her claim to serve such a deity; and Cayden Cailean can't easily switch her off.

Alternatively Cheliax could have the girl killed; and, possibly, play directly into the hands of what Cayden Cailean was expecting them to do?  Maybe the whole point of the intervention is to deprive them of a girl who would otherwise have been loyal and influenced Keltham?  Except that when it comes to Chaotic gods, you can't assume that they're carefully plotting things the way that a Lawful god might.  Though if a Chaotic god is plotting at all, and not just fucking with you at random, their plot is correspondingly more likely to be some insanely sideways gambit.

But it's not Maillol's call, this time.  If you're still in contact with your superiors and you don't need a decision urgently, you don't match wits with Chaotic gods when you can let your boss do it instead.

Ferrer Maillol sends another fucking emergency message to Aspexia fucking Rugatonn's personal fucking secretary devil.  Of course he does!  It's been ALMOST BUT NOT QUITE a WHOLE HOUR.

Maillol's mood is somewhat improved by the report delivered to him only a few minutes later on Carissa's progress with seducing Keltham, by a security wizard who seems torn between laughter and awe.

"I watched her do it, I was reading her mind while she did it, and I still don't have any idea how she's done it," is how the summary starts.  The underling goes on to describe what sounds like incredible incompetence at appearing or being seductive by Sevar - who lacks all but the most primitive honeypot training, but you'd still think some things would be more obvious, like not starting theological arguments in the middle of sex. The report continues on through Keltham catching Sevar out on her incompetently faked responses.

The report concludes with Keltham apparently confessing his burgeoning love for Sevar, taking in apparent stride the revelation that some forms of Hell have been known to hurt, and him trying to be a good little Asmodean for his lover.

"I'm genuinely not sure there's a single other woman in Cheliax who would have pulled that off," the wizard finishes.  "Though somebody needs to correct Sevar's heresies, soon.  I offer my own opinion that I would, in the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law, correct such heresies in any woman now so close to our target."

"Your worthless opinion is noted," Maillol says dryly.  He is more hesitant to correct somebody making a useful error that is plausibly unique in Cheliax.  He thinks he might have been hesitant even if Hell hadn't delivered its warning.  It has to be done sometime, but the right time, he’s guessing based on Hell’s commands, will be when Sevar asks on her own.

"Also.  Sevar is not without her own affections going the other way, though she fully realizes how stupid it would be - in her own thoughts, that if she develops feelings, every serious person in Cheliax would laugh at her execution.  She did find it necessary to think that to herself.”

Wonderful.  “I’ll come to my own opinion about that after I have time to read your full transcript later, unless you think Sevar is liable to betray us for him overnight.”

“No,” says the wizard with unqualified confidence, which Maillol appreciates.

Carissa, after having spent an hour trying really hard to get herself to shut up, can't think of anything to say. Maybe that's all right. Maybe she will just lie here snuggling Keltham.

Keltham has been hit by the delayed drop of noticing that, by golly, after the protagonist gets to his first actual sexual encounter with Carissa, it turns out she's got some deep psychosexual problem that needs solving, clearly with more sex being an important part of it, but also requiring nonsexual interaction with her that will further develop her character.

Ya know, there's an obvious experiment he should run on this, to help figure out whether he's in a deconstructed-reality-ero-LARP, or if Golarion is just like this in some statistically more normal way.  Though it needs to wait until tomorrow morning.  Hopefully he remembers.

At least the winds of evidence seem to be blowing slightly against Cheliax running an elaborate con on him to get his engineering secrets; the thing with wizards being hard to injure during sadistic bedroom games seems less like a local Mysterious Noncoincidence and more like a global Mysterious Noncoincidence.  Like, it wouldn't be Cheliax putting him into an ero-LARP, if that's what's going on, it would be the world itself doing that to him.  Though he supposes he has only Carissa's word for it that being hard to injure is a universal property of wizards, and not some exotic magic that was done to Carissa as part of someone's incredibly weird ero-LARP plan.

Was there anything else he was supposed to do tonight?  Oh, right, that.  Keltham doesn't feel like embarking on that right away; he'd rather snuggle for longer first.  So he does.

Planning ahead more than ten minutes feels hopeless what with how the last day has been but when nothing explodes immediately Carissa tentatively starts to plan. She needs to explain the Imagine You Live In Taldor Specifically plan to the rest of the girls. She also needs to warn them about ways they might plausibly screw up at having sex with Keltham. Also, she is doing a thing that people are trained in, namely seducing people into Evil, and she's not herself trained in it, and she needs to correct that as fast as possible. Probably that can be lumped in with the other looming item on her agenda which is 'check in regularly for correction since everyone's going to be reluctant to seek you out for it'. ...and probably that should come first, as soon as she's done with Keltham, so she can set up the cover story conversation with the girls and maybe get guidance on what sex advice to give them exactly except 'don't do what I did'. 

If her mind is currently being read, she thinks sleepily, she wants a history book written for Cheliax Which Diverged From Taldor Fifteen Years Ago When Hell Won One Of The Endless Civil Wars. More details can be provided if needed but she's not just going to think them repeatedly with no idea if they've been conveyed. 

Invisible security wizard will tap her lightly on the forehead with Mage Hand in a standard signal that she has been heard.

So right now, Keltham can't tell the difference between the things that are incoherent because societies built by very stupid people are going to seem incoherent to him, and the things that are incoherent because the gods did them, and the things that are incoherent because they are a lie Cheliax made up on the spot. But the more he learns the more he'll be able to tell, and not along dimensions they can predict, he'll see correlations in weird places. They cannot come up with a convincing lie about being an invented kind of civilization that he would want to work with. 

But if he'd landed in Taldor he would be appalled about all the things that are appalling about Taldor and then go ahead and teach all his technology, probably, so they don't have to invent a civilization, they just have to be Taldor. Literally Taldor, down to every detail that might seem irrelevant, because they don't know what things are going to seem irrelevant to Keltham. Taldor exists; it is a place that really can exist under whatever pressures Golarion puts on places. And it's acceptably stable enough that Keltham could go to work there. And it's culturally descended from the same civilization as Cheliax, has its own Kings and Queens and Dukes, so it won't contradict what's already been said. So it's the best available lie. 

Taldor isn't ruled by Hell. But it could be, right, it has civil wars periodically, the Church has probably contemplated the option of offering one party in those civil wars a contract like the Thrune one. And there are various geopolitical considerations against, namely that Qadira would panic and plausibly go to war with the entire continent of Avistan (Carissa is getting all of her understanding of geopolitics from drunk foreign adventurers speculating at the Worldwound). But that's because Qadira borders Taldor. ...anyway, there's got to be a plan, right? Carissa's proposed lie is that the plan worked, and it's now fifteen or twenty years later. Long enough for them to be able to attribute all the remotely good things about Cheliax to Hell, short enough that anything bad they can reasonably say Hell hasn't had the resources to fix yet. 

It is in her professional assessment as the person snuggling Keltham the only lie that will hold up once he's less confused, and it'll hold up better the sooner they all consistently adhere to it, so the book is urgent.

Tap again.  Security wizard has a running Telepathic Bond; he uses it to request this particular report go to Maillol at medium urgency.

Carissa assumes all of her previous education on Taldor was misleading so she's not going to do further planning until she can be acquainted with how the place actually works. which is important, the lies won't hold up, they are made of the wrong substrates for convincingness to Keltham. 

And that's as far as she can reasonably get in planning, so -

"I do have a perfectly reliable method of avoiding pregnancy; all wizards second circle and higher do," she says aloud to Keltham. "I didn't want to interrupt sex to have a conversation about whether you can trust me because I suspect it won't be a very sexy conversation. But. So you know."

"I'd trust you with my shirt on that kind of assurance.  My putative child's existence and welfare is a bit higher-stakes."

"You - don't have any hesitations of your own?  If I said yes on my side?"

about what?????

Maybe she can just say that. 

"...about what?"

"Having my child.  We don't know what dath ilan and Golarion genetics do when mixed.  It's obviously a gamble that Cheliax collectively needs to take, but the people who take it will have their own reasons for it.  The research harem," that's the first time he's said it out loud but it's not really in doubt at this point, "had a chance to be asked about that, but you just followed me from the Worldwound, it's not clear you'd make the same decisions about being ready for a kid and being willing to have that kid be an experimental one.  The children and childhoods that get dedicated to Science, in one way or another, that's got to be one of the top things my home planet has feelings about but knows it has to keep doing anyways."

" - honestly I haven't thought about that at all yet, I was imagining you'd need much longer to think about it. I think probably they'll just let the kids have an approximately normal upbringing and test their intelligence more often than normal? If they do that then, well, I had a normal upbringing and it was pretty great, I don't have hesitations about that. If they have plans to do something weirder than that I'll have to think about it. And, uh, either way I'll have to think about - it would be a really inconvenient time to get pregnant right now! Pregnancy causes fatigue! Also you can't hit people much while they're pregnant."

You could keep me for hitting and get the other girls pregnant, she almost says, because in Cheliax that'd be a great flirtatious thing to say, but stops herself in time because she knows enough about dath ilan to know that Keltham would be genuinely appalled at the suggestion this decision was his alone. If he even successfully parsed it from what she said, but that's not worth the risk.

Reassuring to hear her say that - it doesn't sound like what a childseeking conspiracy would have her say, to first-order, though of course that could just be guessing his passcode based on the tone in which he asked the question.

"Well, even if I sign a contract with Cheliax, I won't expect it to include a rush order on that short of a time scale," Keltham says.  "My sperm should stay potent a few years yet."  He briefly considers whether he wants to see a Kelthamcarissa in particular, but his brain is still returning error codes for that and the internal question goes unanswered.

Keltham also has questions about 'hitting', because it seems like that wouldn't optimize well over a pain-to-injury ratio... no, actually because his brain flinches away, it could be dath ilani programming or it could be a not-my-sexuality-actually error; he wants to inflict pain on Carissa, not violence.  But he's going to have to write out a list of questions anyways, so it can just get wrapped into that.  He's curious about the six top theories for why wizards are harder to hurt, and about whether he can think of easy distinguishing experiments in the first 10 seconds or if Golarion already did narrow it down as much as a sensible person could without advanced experimental designs; but it was stated that he needs to tickle this information out of Carissa, and that sounds like more sex.

He is feeling a bit tired, though; there's been a number of hours in the day.  "I should cast the unidentified spells my god gave me before I go to sleep," Keltham murmurs out loud.  "Is there a workroom, or protected area, or should a senior wizard be monitoring me, or..."

"There's probably a workroom and you probably want someone on hand who can dispel the spell if it's dangerous." She sits up, very reluctantly, and starts getting dressed. "I can't dispel your spells reliably, you're higher-circle than me, but security'll be able to."

Oops, should he have asked if she wanted to cuddle even longer?  No he shouldn't, she just got through saying repeatedly to him to optimize over his own darned self - or does that only apply during sex?  He'll add that to the questions list.

Keltham will pull on his precious clothing, and then follow wherever Carissa takes him.

"Security!" she calls impatiently, and finds them, and they do know where workrooms are. "Mind if I stay?" she asks Keltham. "I'm very curious."

"You're the one with the vastly greater risk tolerance.  Be my guest."  It's only after speaking that it occurs to Keltham to wonder how he'd feel if he accidentally hurt Carissa.  "...but stand behind the more powerful wizard or something, maybe."

Yeah, all right, she can do that. 

Keltham decides to keep the identified spells of Comprehend Languages and Sanctuary overnight, in case he suddenly needs them in the middle of the night because friends or enemies show up in his bedroom.  He can cast them in the morning before praying, just to verify that those spells do what Cheliax claimed... actually he should check two assumptions there.  "Question one, if I keep Sanctuary overnight and cast it in the dawn before praying for spells, does that count against my spells for that day?  Question two, am I wasting my god's energy in any significant way if I cast a spell I don't need?"

"Spells for the day are counted dawn to dawn, casting them right before dawn won't alter what you get at dawn. God resources are expended when the spells are granted, not when they're used; if a god thinks you're being too profligate with your spells they can grant you fewer, though they generally don't because it's useful for everyone to know what to expect a fourth-circle cleric to get."

"If I just kept Sanctuary, then my god wouldn't need to grant it again - check?  Maybe if I get it again tomorrow's dawn, I'll keep it that time.  Or can the god opt directly whether to keep or replace a spell, if I still have it?"

"First up, that enchantment-compulsion spell that looks a lot like the truth spell, but that I only had a single copy of," and didn't previously want to waste in testing in case there was an obvious natural time for using an enchantment-compulsion.  "Carissa, you up for being the target of it?"