Meritxell is speechless.

She doesn't ask if Sevar knows the price on her own lost soul, in the markets of Dis.

Because Asmodia already knows.  She can guess by now that a dath ilani would figure that out immediately, and therefore she knows the answer even though she hasn't finished thinking through why.  That's why her first owner is dead.  You can't just kill a contract devil and take their souls, obviously, they go by testaments.  But with Asmodia's soul price running up past the Wish level - something happened to him, somebody challenged him over it, who knows what happens when prices get that high.

How strange.

How strange that she can still be this angry.

She's not planning to let them actually have and keep and use her soul.  In reality, it's worthless, and somebody will pay a vast sum for her soul and gain nothing, you'd think that should be vengeance enough.

And yet, somehow, Asmodia is still seethingly angry on a level where keeping her face passive is taking everything she has.

"...do you know if our own souls are being traded around for prices like that now," Peranza says.  She feels numb.

"Not prices that high; there's no direct divine intervention over you all. But I suspect a lot more than you were paid, yes. If I were you I'd be mad about it; it's not how Keltham would've done it, he'd have split the gains from trade. But it's also - still very possible to leverage for your own benefit, because -

- do you think you'd be worth any more to Hell than an ordinary soul after being put through the ordinary course of Hell?"

"I don't know - very much about Hell, at all," Peranza says.  "I mean, I'll get there when I get there."

Message to Sevar.  Asmodia doesn't try to keep the seething hatred out of her whisper, if it's the sort of thing you can hear in a whisper.

I suggest that new members of the project should be informed of this, before they sell their souls, and in exchange for tipping them off, we should get half of the spellsilver they get, and that spellsilver should be distributed among project members who have already sold their souls.

Acknowledged. I can't make Hell fair but I can and will make you rich, Asmodia.

"I think that Hell wants us badly, but wants us precisely for qualities that it doesn't know how to inculcate, probably because of some god-agreements that restrict what greater devils can tell lesser ones. Therefore, as long as we are succeeding we have affordance and leverage to figure out how the formation of evil dath ilanis ought to work in Hell. This is one of the things we're going to discuss tonight. You've spent your whole lives not allowed to think very hard about Hell, and now we find ourselves practically assigned to change it. You may think about that, this afternoon and evening, but if you notice yourself running into a blind wall of panic then wait for tonight, where I have some ideas for how we can approach this."

"Why did Asmodeus pick you to not sell your soul," says Meritxell stubbornly.

"No one knows that or has any way to find out! I'm hoping it's because He noticed that I'm the right amount of a heretic to stay loyal to Him while I figure out how to build space in it for dath ilanis and all the things they need and want."

They won't give you a fucking thing, Sevar, because you're not willing to go to Abaddon rather than let Hell fuck you over.

...she hadn't meant that as a message for Sevar.  It is of course up to Security whether they will choose to pass it on anyways.

"On a totally separate topic, if Keltham is looking to try romances with people who aren't Sevar, does Asmodia have possession, or Pilar, because if not I should do it and I imagine that Sevar wants to talk with me before then."

"Not yet on Pilar, we're holding her out until he manages to be slightly less into consent. Asmodia, do you want to pursue Keltham?"

"He hasn't indicated yet that he wants to pursue me and said he needed time to think it over."

Should she be briefing the others present about any other aspects of things?

"I want Keltham and am not a heretic," Meritxell says with a glare at Ione. 

"And I appreciate that about you, and it's possible that the outcome of the conversation with Ione is that I don't trust her enough, or that I think it'd be salutory for Keltham's next romantic interaction to be with someone who isn't faking anything. But if in alterCheliax Ione'd totally go after him then by default we do that. We have to adhere really closely to what we'd do in alterCheliax, if we're going to stand a chance."

"Does Keltham actually want girls who don't have incredibly interesting backgrounds, I mean, I assume that's why he asked the question?"

"I wasn't planning to not seduce Keltham ever at all," says Peranza.

"Keltham asked that question to verify his tropes theory, which will be discussed at briefing tonight. He does want other girls, or at least he might."

"Is there any reason that we shouldn't just have everyone who's currently interested competing to seduce him at dinner tonight," says Paxti, who feels that she was originally promised this scenario when she 'agreed' to work on Project Lawful.

"Take a step back and think very carefully if that is what would happen in alter Cheliax, and if it is, then yes, you may."

"I'm pretty sure that's exactly what would happen in alter Cheliax," says Meritxell. 

"I'm not.  We were originally recruited to do that for reasons having to do with the real Cheliax.  We have to figure this out step by step, what happened in the alter-Cheliax instead, when they recruited us here, what instructions we got in alter-Cheliax, and then we need to write it down so everybody is living in the same alter-Cheliax about it, and we have to put up a huge wall somewhere with all of this written down, Keltham asked me earlier what kind of screening questions we'd gotten before coming here and I had to make something up and that needs to be on there - I needed to make up an answer quickly, and I bet Security didn't copy everyone else as soon as I said it, which means that Keltham could have come up to Paxti and asked her to answer immediately what the screening questions were like and he could have caught us right there before Security had time to fill her in.  Don't you get it, we're playing this game against a real dath ilani!  The only reason we're not already out is that Keltham isn't oriented enough to start playing for real."

"- ask the Grand High Priestess now about Asmodia's headband," says Carissa. "and yes, that's the answer I was about to give. AlterCheliax has to be complete, it has to have every detail, for the same reasons it had to be based on Taldor in the first place. Figure out your experience of every day up to this point and then figure out if you'd flirt with Keltham."

"So, thinking back, I now suspect I significantly fucked up the original things I said to Keltham, back when I was trying to make sure Lord Nethys didn't destroy my soul for not even trying to carry out His mission.  I need to figure out what alterIone was thinking in alterCheliax when she said everything she did, and what that implies about whether alterIone wants to make another try at Keltham and when.  A Security transcript of that conversation might be helpful."

"Is Asmodia in charge of this now?"

"You know what, for the time being, yes."