"- so the reason it comes with perks at all is because you get the perk from the specific devil who you are selling your soul to, in exchange for joining their organization on your death. And setting aside whether children ought to be allowed to promise that, a random child's soul isn't going to be - valuable enough they can get a powerful permanent magical boon from selling it. Mostly you actually wait until you're older than us and more powerful, at the perfect balance between how much you can get for your soul and how long you'll have to enjoy it, but."

"Sorry about that, then, if apologies are appropriate here.  It seems like the sort of thing for which you should get compensation, if there's a more powerful version of Arcane Sight you're locked out of, because you were working on a dangerous project.  Or do the contracts come with a buyback option?"

"Actually I also don't understand why this project is dangerous enough for that if, like, resurrections, also afterlives in the first place."

"Someone else might get to us first," Meritxell says flatly. "If you die normally, you go into the River of Souls, and you go all the way to the Boneyard, where you're judged and sorted, and then you go to Hell, and get magically dumped at a random location in Avernus, the first layer. And Hell has pretty good infrastructure for moving people from Avernus on, but still, you're going to be sort of cut off from comms for a while, potentially weeks. Potentially you get held up in the Boneyard because Pharasma doesn't like to hold trials for people who are obviously going to be resurrected. And while you're in that situation, if you get a raise, you take it, and you have no way of knowing for sure if it's Cheliax sending it. You can tell the alignment of the person offering to raise you, but..Zon-Kuthon's followers are also Lawful Evil. If you're in a known location in Hell, you're safe, your secrets are safe, Cheliax can call ahead and confirm the Raise being offered is ours..."

"Understood, thanks for explaining."

Probability that Carissa just cannot manage to make this arrangement for some weird reason or another... let's say... 20%?  It's just that, if everybody else in the harem has now verified their allegiance... he should check that assumption, though.

"Is there a Security process that makes sure, when someone does this, or says they've done it, that they've actually made a deal with Asmodeus's people and not Zon-Kuthon's?"

"....when we sell our souls?" Meritxell says. "Yes, it was done with Security supervision from a list of devils maintained by the Church of Asmodeus. I'm not even sure you can sell your soul to Zon-Kuthon, though, gods, that'd be awful."

"We didn't get worse Arcane Sight, we got the standard," Gregoria says. "The project didn't force us to sell our souls for less, they made our souls valuable enough for a standard sale a decade early."

"Oh, that's good to hear.  I'm glad that at least this part of the system is so, what's the word I'm looking for, functional.  I guess because of Asmodeus involvement."

So basically if there's a hidden cleric, it has to be Carissa.

"I think Hell is a lot better run than Cheliax," Carissa says dryly. "By the way, can I come when you go ask pointed questions of the site manager, it's not really any of my business but I think it'll be really funny and maybe inspire me to grow up and build Civilization."

"If you think that's safe career-wise."

He frankly did not need this as a Thing to Worry About.

...well, the same logic that says that any of this would be true in the first place, also says that Carissa is the First Girl, and therefore, out of all the girls here, the one who's guaranteed to have a pathway leading to a happy outcome for the two of them.  So if she's a Zon-Kuthon cleric unknown to even herself, it'll be a solvable problem.</optimistic rationalization>

"I don't think they'd have put someone super unprofessional on the project but I won't, like, make faces or anything, and if he has me disciplined for looking like I was having too much fun then we'd have some valuable information!"

"Let's run that experiment then."

"Carissa, what's your favorite spell you've cast, next up spell you're really looking forwards to?"

"I am told this makes me a tedious parody of myself but I really like Fox's Cunning, and I'd be incredibly excited for Dimension Door if I weren't in a Forbiddance. Since I am....Scrying's going to be fun."

Golarion sure does have a lot of spells that seem to have been invented by someone fundamentally opposed to and perhaps offended by the notion of privacy.  "Scrying?  How's that work?"

"It is a fourth circle spell that finds a person and shows you them and their surroundings, which you can also hear. Somewhat restricted - it won't be in your basic book of magic - because you can use it to spy on people, but it's also essential for most military operations, so it's not top secret like effective enchantments are." They considered hiding this one from Keltham but keeping him and them unscryable is a major constraint at this point and because of the one-hour casting time they can manage plenty of deception with it. "I am not gonna use it to creep on my ex, though it did occur to me I could use it to get a remote tour of the world, if we can pay someone to go teleport to and then walk through other countries and be scryable for us while they do it."

"Yeah, it hasn't escaped my notice that I made it to an incredible new world and have, you know, been moving around a number of tightly secured indoor rooms since then.  I mean, not that this is in any way the wrong decision, but if it drags on a few years I might start to feel slightly annoyed."

Keltham's brain, which has apparently been running a separate subthread this whole time, notes that Carissa sure seems to be a lot into pain, and that he currently has only Carissa's word for how normal of a sexuality that is in Cheliax.

Message to Carissa:  I notice you came back with a fancier headband, speaking of Fox's Cunning.  Is that a safe public topic?

Private loan from Aspexia Rugatonn. You can mention it but don't go on about it too much, everyone'll be madly jealous.

Okay, good, that seems very probably safe.

Mostly I was just checking because you said Fox's Cunning was your favorite spell, and I had suspected you might be beyond it now.

Indeed. (She's so happy about it.)

"Meritxell, sorry to interrupt this conversation, I was enjoying it, but my brain is nagging me about something and I need to go talk to High Priestess Jacint Subawhatever, or schedule a time to talk to her, and then hopefully my brain will stop bugging me about it."

"Of course," Meritxell says cheerily enough, but glares at Carissa a tiny bit for interrupting like that.

Keltham goes to have another awful conversation about tropes, which, at least this time, he is doing the virtuous thing and making advance predictions about.

The High Priestess was not especially expecting Suddenly Keltham but her poise is of course perfect.

She's in communication with Security and will be relaying all this to Carissa, of course.

Keltham shall open by inquiring roughly what fraction of attempted afterlife arrangements fail, like, just don't go through for some weird reason.  1 in 10?  1 in 1000?

This is an unpleasant surprise for Carissa too but she'll be on standby to consult.

Ah. Fuck.

....Keltham's going to conclude there's a Suspicious Reason she can't sell her soul. Probably best handling of that is for her to fake selling her soul as soon as possible, rather than for them to lie about how often it fails. (Or really sell it? The order from Asmodeus said 'not this day', maybe it's supposed to be this day instead for some reason.)

She'll answer honestly, then.

Perhaps 1 in 20?  1 in 50?  She is not especially in charge of those arrangements.

Next question.  Out of 100 random women in Cheliax, or random 18 Intelligence wizards if that's importantly different, how much would be into pain to roughly the same degree as Carissa or more?