"Is it telling the truth."

"Yes!"

"And the cheapest way to get the bird to go away is to cure its Fireball sneezing."

"Indeed!"

"I make the bird a loan it can pay off by being a ship's wizard for a year or two, sneeze Fireballs at all the pirates."

"The bird isn't that patient. You can either pay it to get cured, or you can kill it, and until you do one or the other it's just going to sit there sneezing."

"If there's no threat involved then the department of ....bird handling... solves it in the cheapest available way, which I suppose is curing the bird."

"But why didn't they do that with the first bird?"

"Nefreti...."

"You're not very good at answering questions!"

"We don't give in to threats because if we predictably give in to threats, everyone will threaten us. We occasionally spend money to solve problems that look like threats, if they're not threats and we have some way to verify that they're not threats. If the bird genuinely isn't here to get money from us - just landed here randomly - and isn't staying because it thinks it can extort us - then maybe we pay it to go away, because that doesn't get the city swarmed by hundreds of copycat birds."

"And what if - this is a tricky one - the bird is sincere and not threatening you, but the reason it happens to be in Osirion rather than somewhere else is that Cheliax put it there, wanting the bird cured, and thinking we'd do it to make all our buildings stop being on fire."

"Kill the bird. Can't let people make threats at one remove, either."

"Well, there you go, I explained the whole thing."

"Have a good day!" 

And she leaves.

That was fucking nerve-wracking.

And who was she even talking to?  Nefreti Clepati was distinctly not looking in the direction of Cayden Cailean's hidden presence when she turned around to look at that angle.

Why isn't Otolmens freaking out about her, Cayden Cailean doesn't know.

Asmodia consults with Paxti and the others about their alterCheliax reactions to being fired, often interrupting Sevar with further questions about how alterCheliax needs to look to appeal to Keltham, but still taking slightly less Carissa Sevar time than if Carissa Sevar had needed to be present for the whole thing.

Neither Asmodia nor Sevar are actually getting any downtime tonight, realistically speaking, but Cheliax expects that of its upper management, even more than do fast-paced dath ilani startups.

What are they doing about Asmodia reporting to Sevar on solving Keltham's problems 1-7 and having comprehended the game between dath ilani?  Asmodia wants a report on her awesomeness moving quickly to the Grand High Priestess so she can get a headband again soon.

If possible, Sevar should at least appear to make her own run on the Law, it'd be alterCheliax-weird for her not to do that, given what Asmodia has seen of Sevar anyways.  How far Sevar gets with her +4 headband will be a good proxy for how far Asmodia could have gotten on Fox's Cunnings.  Asmodia should not show up tomorrow being visibly no-longer-entirely-not-a-dath-ilani, that did not happen in alterCheliax.

Then, Asmodia proposes, once Sevar has taken her own run, Asmodia can show Sevar how much more progress Asmodia made with +4 INT, +6 WIS, and +4 CHA.  And Sevar can report to the Grand High Priestess that Asmodia actually needs more than just +4 Wisdom in a headband, even if they have to send somebody to Hell temporarily or turn them into a statue temporarily, so that Asmodia can have their headband.  It's super important to Project Lawful.  The fate of Cheliax and maybe Hell itself depends on it.  Whoever has the third most powerful headband in Cheliax after the Most High probably isn't doing anything that important.

Carissa doesn't actually feel like she needs downtime. She does feel like she's playing to her weaknesses, rather than her strengths - the thing she's good at is understanding Keltham, and going off even very good gut intuition for that isn't going to stand up against him, so they need the whole tapestry and she can't be the whole tapestry. Project management is not a strength. 

Also apparently after two days of project management you start to pick up on its attitude of 'ugh, wizards'. Which she doesn't endorse at all, because Asmodia is completely justified in wanting to be smarter, in a sense it's the only want that's justified at all. "I'll give the problems a try, but even if I am persuaded that you on a headband is a massive asset to the project, I'm not going to make that request and if I did it'd be denied. Wizards make that request whether it's actually necessary or not, see, and you have absolutely no idea what whoever has the third most powerful headband in Cheliax is doing but it might be 'winning the war with Nidal'. And your loyalties are questionable."

Asmodia doesn't regret asking.  You want to keep pushing until you get a 'no'.

Maybe she can figure out who in other countries would probably have a very powerful headband and could most easily be killed by a half-dath-ilani.

Also, Asmodia's loyalties are not questionable.  The Grand High Priestess personally declared that Asmodia was not loyal to Lord Asmodeus.  This settles the issue; to question the judgment of the Grand High Priestess is heresy.  Hahaha.

Peranza's current thought processes would make fascinating reading from a dath ilani perspective, once the dath ilani stopped screaming, which would take a while.

She now works on an important secret project where her thoughts are being read a lot compared to Ostenso wizard academy.  In principle, that's not a huge difference because, even when you're mind-read less frequently, they can just ask you if you've had any bad thoughts since your last review.  Still, Peranza is very aware that somebody could be reading all her thoughts literally right now, and probably is.

One might consider that there is an obvious way to look at things where Sevar just told her that everyone's Asmodeanism is based on lies, and Keltham is going to tell them the truth, and then they'll all be executed as heretics for believing him and go to Hell and be hurt very badly.  Not eventually, this week.

Peranza is not looking there.

It's not that she's safe if she doesn't look there.  It's not that she's better off if she doesn't look there.  She's just not looking there.  This is not a thinkable thought.  It cannot be processed.  It is detected by several early-firing bad-thought-detector pattern-recognizing heuristics, well trained by previous punishment, and shut down before it gets into her stream of consciousness and becomes a problem for her next Detect Thoughts review.

What Sevar said is causing a lot of early-bad-thought-detectors to fire simultaneously.

Peranza, then, consists of whatever is left.

It's proceeding in fits and starts and not uncommonly runs into all cognitive avenues being blocked simultaneously, whereupon Peranza's incipient wordless awareness that she's no longer convincing herself that she's trying to follow orders becomes stronger and stronger and more demanding until finally, in desperation, she thinks something anyways.

A more experienced member of the Inner Ring would not have put an Outer into this position, unless they wanted to cast Detect Thoughts and watch the Outer's verbal thoughts tie up in increasingly tight knots and circles of not having any available pathways for safe thinking and then, presumably, have some fun punishing them for doing their assigned task poorly.

Peranza is supposed to list out, not her own heresies for Sevar to correct, obviously, Peranza wouldn't be willingly thinking any heretical thoughts, obviously, she's supposed to look at other members of Project Lawful and determine places where incipient heresies might be (such as can be listed without damning herself).  Only she's also supposed to list out places where Peranza thinks she might be confused, and it's supposedly okay to admit you're confused, only Sevar called those lies, which means everything has to be screened for how bad it would be if whoever got this report jumped on Peranza and asked if her listing that thing meant she thought it was a lie. 

Not that Peranza is allowed to think any of that out loud, either.

The first item written on Peranza's report is that Ione Sala seems to think it's okay to worship Nethys which really seems very confused and definitely like the sort of thing where she might get even more confused listening to Keltham.

After this is not written that Sevar herself is also an enormous glowing heretic, but those thoughts are safe to think, you don't have to be a heretic yourself to notice that Sevar is a heretic.  So Peranza's calculations about how it would be stupid to list this item in a report that Sevar reads, and Peranza's thoughts about Sevar's particular heresies, are all allowed to be in the forefront of her mind and actually thought to herself.  Her mind spends quite some time there, where it's safe, before she is forced to move on by the increasing volume of the incipient-wordless-shriek of how she will no longer be able to pass a Detect Thoughts inspection on whether she successfully pretended to herself that she was trying to follow Sevar's orders.

She has to put down something.  Even if it makes her punishable.  She can't put down nothing, obviously you'd make the punishment for that be worse.  Even in Taldor you must still get tortured severely if you deliberately disobey orders.

Peranza writes down that somebody else might get confused about why Asmodeus permits so many opposing gods to continue to exist and oppose him when they're so much less mighty than Him.

It's obviously going to get her somebody staring at her and asking if she believes Asmodeus is weak and that the part about Him being mightier than other gods is a lie and all she'll be able to do is say that she was trying to follow Sevar's orders and guess what other people might get confused about and obviously Peranza has never thought for a moment that anything the Church said is false she is just trying to follow Sevar's orders and guess what other people might think.

Peranza writes down that somebody else might get confused about why people in other countries, especially wizards who can teleport, don't all flock to Cheliax given its clearly greater benefits.

This is safer; if Peranza is asked if she believes Cheliax isn't really a better place to be, she'll be able to say, no, obviously the people in other countries are weak and afraid of pain, this is just something somebody else might be confused about.

Now she has three things, and the first thing about Known Heretic Ione Sala is visibly not really trying, but Peranza doesn't dare cross it out or recopy because that is the sort of thing Security will report and it is a bad look.

She needs more things to write down.  She can't turn in this report to Sevar with only those things written on it.

Why do things have to be like this?  Why does she have to hurt like this?  Peranza is confused about that.

For a very brief moment, then, Peranza's mind remembers the silent image of Keltham's city of towering metal blocks, a teenaged boy's private apartment-mansion inside it, but an early-bad-thought-recognizer fires before she can think anything fatal in words.

(To be clear, this is not Peranza's worst day in the last month.  It's not a good day even in Cheliax, but not the worst day of the month in Cheliax either.  Nobody's breaking her bones or whipping strips of skin off her back right now.)

By the time two hours are up, Peranza has twenty items, and when she looks back and reviews them all at once she realizes in the back of her mind that she's going to die a heretic's death, if not right now then after following Sevar's next set of orders, but it's too late now and trying to burn the paper just means Security stops her after they see the intention and then things get worse.

Not that Peranza thinks any of that in words either.

She just picks up her completed report and gives it to Security to deliver to Sevar, with horrible nausea running through her that is no doubt the result of having spent so much time thinking about sickening possible heresies.

(The trouble with not thinking in words, the trouble with running entirely off pattern recognition to decide which next step is safe, without being able to calmly reflect on where the whole sequence of steps goes, is that sometimes you end up cornering yourself.

A better course of action given her beliefs would have been to fail at her task, and be tortured however much you get tortured when you tell them that you couldn't find it in yourself to obey orders because they were too heretical and you didn't want to become a heretic yourself, which is no doubt very painful, but not anywhere near as bad as going to Hell.  This, however, would have required deliberate planning.  The mind-without-words doesn't learn heuristics that steer you into that much immediate pain and visible failure on your next step.)

Carissa brings the paper over to her a couple of minutes later. "These are good questions," she says. "I think some people think of them and then avoid asking them, because they're worried on some level that the questions don't have good answers, or at least that if they asked then people might think they think the questions don't have good answers."

Peranza nods in obedient terror.  She's not going to be punished by Sevar right now, for not having done a good enough job on her assigned task, but she knows without words that this was a mistake and very much not the fate she should actually have been avoiding.