Was that a threat?  It doesn't seem like that should be a threat?  If it's not a threat Maillol does not quite know what it is.

"Sorry for asking, but, I don't suppose we're done here?  For now."

"Done for now.  I'll go back and talk to my researchers and send you a message when requested salaries finalize."

Carissa leaves with him. She looks as disconcerted as alter-Carissa would be. "The Worldwound isn't run like that! There's a very clear command structure!"

"I'm mostly guessing that reflects a decision to allocate more competent people to the Worldwound, thereby leaving fewer to run the rest of Cheliax, and not that people actually become more competent managers when fighting demons.  But it's an important question because it determines whether the rest of Cheliax would get saner or crazier if we closed the Worldwound."

"Somebody should talk to me about whether hitting that place really hard, the way Civilization could hit it, would actually help or hurt anything.  Since I last thought of that question, the new thought occurs to me that since there's apparently known Wish phrasings that definitely do create giant flaming craters, that it hasn't been considered to set one of those on a timer and get everyone away?  Should I actually be talking to Ione about that sort of thing?"

"Wouldn't solve the problem at all. Or, it'd kill the demons that are currently there, but as long as the rift is open, more will come through, and we don't know how to close it."

"Guess it's the sort of thing that I probably can't solve easily, but I should talk about it with a more experienced wizard anyways.  Just in case I'm like 'well have you tried observing the rift's resonating frequency so you can try driving it to collapse using a simple oscillator' and they're like 'what'."

"It seems worth a shot, and I actually do expect Civilization will close the Worldwound, just by - being able to have lots of smart people think about it full time and being richer so we can move the wardstones in a bit at a time, give ourselves a smaller perimeter to defend, figuring out other clever stuff. But my bet is there's not a single clever solution. Partially because Iomedae is notably absent from this here god pileup."

"You act like we know we have the complete god list."

"I don't quite see that reasoning squaring up, actually.  Unless Iomedae has an impossibly high discount rate for a god, she should care similarly regardless of whether we close the Worldwound in fifty years or five, unless it's otherwise due to close anyways.  I'd guess that, if she doesn't like Asmodeus, she's not happy enough to help with this project even if it ends up closing the Worldwound later..."

"I'd be more nervous about the conspicuous apparent absence of Lawful Good if Cayden Cailean wasn't in.  Not that I understand what that implies, but, it's less of an unambiguous warning sign than all the altruists staying out of your project."

Snort. "Agreed. But as it stands we've got - your god, Nethys, Cayden Cailean, Asmodeus - pretty much the whole god-spectrum."

"Not counting Broom's god?  I guess the catastrophe-prevention god posting an observer doesn't exactly count as an endorsement per se."

"My brain's still bugging me about the four who I decided didn't make the cut.  Until Maillol gets back to me with their options, I don't feel like I can actually have that horribly unpleasant interview that's looming ever larger in my imagination, but it also feels increasingly awful that I haven't, like, let them know.  Not a problem you're supposed to solve for me, the person who makes the decision is supposed to bear the unpleasant-interview consequences of it."

"Waiting until you know their options makes sense to me. I bet they'll be much less freaked out if you can lay out exactly what happens next. Though, also, you don't have to feel bad, and I think I wouldn't feel bad, so maybe hiring is more my kind of task."

"If we get to the point where you're working with me to decide who to hire, and making your own calls about who to let go, you can handle that part, yeah.  I suppose for this occasion I could have asked you who to keep and see if your judgment matched mine, and if it did, I could tell you to handle the exit interview on the grounds that you apparently knew the full reasons for why they weren't staying."

"They're weaker students? But I am not a fourth-rank keeper and can't say I'd have picked those four, not when I hadn't in fact picked them out in advance. 

Should I let you go off on your date?"

"Give me a long hug and then you can go."

Carissa gives him a hug, and contemplates the exit interviews that she's in fact going to have to give, tonight, once they've figured out what to do next with the girls. 

She is kind of dreading it, which is pathetic. Hurting and terrorizing people is fun and necessary and she hasn't been doing it enough lately.

PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Night

Keltham enters into his date with Meritxell with only a slight sense of trepidation.

He's mostly worried about strange things his own brain might do to him.  He's only a little worried about whether Meritxell will suddenly decide that she should stop seducing him and let herself be the one seduced during the rest of the date.  Thereby revealing the true illusoriness of his apparently promised rise out of the ranks of the median male mate-value; which is not high enough to get much seduction-work put into you, compared to the amount expected by, say, a woman.

But primarily he is in fact expecting this date to go fine, and if not, he'll deal.

How's Meritxell dressed?  Anything interesting, or does she not, per se, have anything except her uniform?

She does not have anything except her uniform, though at her new salary that should change pretty fast.  She has not apparently decided she should stop seducing Keltham now that she has him, though she's not actually entirely sure how seducing people works. 

The important thing is that she's trying, making any sort of visible effort.  The new gendertrope in him seems like it would be sad, if she wasn't.

He'll ask if anyone has mentioned to Meritxell a certain contract that she'd have to sign if she wanted to preserve her options for the evening getting sufficiently interesting; signing this contract doesn't decide anything, to be clear, it just preserves possibilities in that undecided future.

Yep, Carissa told her and showed her Carissa's, and if it's the same she's willing to sign it.

This does leave the puzzling question of what they could possibly find to talk about during their date, a search that Keltham himself has always dreaded (he says).  They haven't read any of the same books, written fanfictions set in the same universe, aren't obviously on opposite sides of any shared debate; and all of their previous life experiences are probably far too similar for their random childhood anecdotes to have any interest whatsoever for each other.

So, all those men far less worthy than Keltham, who proved unable to wear her in her true shirt-form - what sort of sex has she been having with them instead?

"Some of these redactions are because we're not allowed to know that, but I think most of them are actually because what he was thinking was untranslatable. But I think the approximate picture is that the forces that put Keltham on top of me did that for a reason, and might have been the reason for subsequent interventions to make things more like a dath ilani romance. And we want Keltham to believe that's not true, but it probably is," Carissa concludes the briefing for Asmodia. "Questions."

Who is Sevar a hidden cleric of, then, Asmodia does not ask, because Sevar is apparently managing not to know this.

"I want so much for there to be some way to extract more information about dath ilani romance novels from Keltham, we need that information, it's just, so much not a priority in the Tropeless World where we don't actually care -"

"Wait.  Paxti.  We could brief her on the parts that Keltham knows we know, tell her on full Bluff that we absolutely don't believe it and think Keltham is right not to believe it either, and Paxti would absolutely fly off to pester Keltham about it given permission.  That happens in the Tropeless World if Paxti gets briefed."

"But Keltham might not believe that - is it a disaster if he doesn't - yes it is because then he concludes not just that he's in the Trope World but also in the Conspiracy World because we hid the tropes from him and tried to conceal our inquiry about it -"

"Could Ione just be openly curious, she's visibly different from the rest of us -"

"I'll think about it."

"One thing does seem clear to me, the tropes are things of Probability.  Understanding Keltham's Law of Probability is going to be just as much key to mastering them as knowing the particulars of dath ilani romance novels.  If I had to guess, that's what the not-understandable terms were about."