"My own choices were entirely legal, ended up benefiting myself even more than I'd hoped, did no harm to anyone else, did no harm to this Project's interests, and in fact advanced this Project's interests in multiple ways."

"I see."

"Asmodia, Keltham, with me, please."

...Keltham will trudge along, after asking for everybody to still be here in 15 minutes, if that's okay.

Still not as weird as the candygod thing, so why does that feel more objectively real somehow, compared to this?

When they're more in private - though not all the way to Maillol's office, just a private 'breakout room' near the cafeteria - Asmodia finishes reporting.

"Security gave me a Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom first, before taking off the headband, so it wouldn't be too much of a shock at once.  And at first I thought I was going to be okay, it just - I sort of went successively crazier over time, riding some kind of developing high, couldn't get back to sleep.  They tried slapping me to bring me out of it, which seemed to work at first, and I went to read for a half-hour but I could tell I wasn't normal at the end, so I told them to set my hand on fire for thirty seconds and I thought that had brought me out of it but it didn't, I told them to use a sleep spell on me for an hour and when I woke up I still wasn't normal."

"They tried Fox's Cunning on me first, which I think actually made it worse, but before dispelling that, they tried Owl's Wisdom on me and then I was okay again.  And I was still okay after the Fox's Cunning wore off, but not when the Wisdom did. Boosting Splendour didn't change much either way there."

"So now I have a nice +6 Wisdom headband I should probably never take off again, which I maintain is a wonderful outcome for Project Lawful."

"I've never heard of anything like that happening to anyone."

"Manohar said - by comms, he didn't come back - that he suspected an interaction with the part where I completed the Law of Probability while wearing the headband, like, that insight had actually reshaped my mind somehow and it couldn't function at my innate Wisdom anymore."

"I don't especially buy that it was the Law of Probability part, myself.  I remember this huge rush of happiness and - glory - while I was figuring everything out, which, I thought at the time, was just my being really happy about figuring out all of Keltham's problems and completing the meaning of all the math and seeing the world the way Keltham sees it."

"Keltham, does dath ilan know about anything like this?"

(It's feeling more real, maybe just because the shock is wearing off, or maybe it's just that this part particularly seems more real -)

"No.  No headbands there.  We don't know what happens when you boost a mind way up and then take it back down again."

"All I can say is that, if her brain did rewire itself to need the boost to go on working at all, I'm not surprised it was the" cognitive reflectivity "Wisdom part rather than the Intelligence or Splendour parts."

"I am absolutely not happy about this, Asmodia.  Your implied inability to wear an Intelligence headband, unless and until somebody obtains an artifact-grade headband which boosts both Intelligence and Wisdom, is a serious loss to your future career as a wizard and your potential usefulness to Project Lawful."

"I would now consider myself primarily a student of Law before wizardry, and might have elected to request a Wisdom headband in any case."

"Are you under the impression that you're now primarily answerable to Keltham rather than to me, Asmodia?"

"That did form some part of my calculations here."

"Mm.  Keltham, anything to say about that?"

"I... am going to have to consult with Carissa on this one."

What the FLOOP does he do NOW.

"I admit, I was hoping you'd tell me to please take Asmodia aside and yell at her exactly the way I would if I were still her boss, on your behalf."

"The thought had occurred to me that you seemed to be expecting that.  But - and I realize that Asmodia may well have guessed this part - Civilization's view of what she did may be substantially different from the Chelish one."

"Not saying I'm not going to come back in an hour and tell you to do that.  But I need to talk to Carissa to - get to grips with this entire thing."

"All right.  I'll warn you right now that if this behavior is not somehow punished you can expect her to do more things like this in the future, and in fact worse ones, as she goes on testing the bounds of what she can get away with while working for you."

"Not necessarily the prediction I'd make about myself.  But if so, I predict that I won't act that way for unimportant reasons, nor in a way that I expect to harm the project."

"Asmodia, are you okay, you sound different."

Yeah.  She does.

And did even before the Most High delivered her the Wisdom headband, to learn so that she could teach.

In the end it didn't seem like something they should gamble on hiding from Keltham successfully; and the advantages of Asmodia being able to wear her new headband openly, after true events that didn't happen in alterCheliax, also seemed large.

It wasn't something they wanted to attribute to the Grand High Priestess trying experiments on Asmodia without asking Keltham, or, by the same reasoning, to any nonrogue part of Chelish 'Governance'.  The resulting plan wasn't one that anybody was happy with, but nobody had anything better by the time the next day came around.

"Combination of +6 Wisdom and knowing the Law of Probability, I expect.  You'd kind of expect that to make a person sound different, I think, already in the... what's the dath ilani name of the probability before you've seen any evidence to shift it with."

"'Prior'."

...why does this seem sad.  It shouldn't seem sad.

"Just from the 'prior'."

"I don't want the Civilization inside me to just overwrite Golarion with itself.  I wish that this hadn't happened all at once and with a major personality rewrite.  I never even got to know the previous Asmodia."

Asmodia laughs.  It's genuine.

"I'll be okay, Keltham.  Okay, and still Asmodia.  I just need a while for my head to shake out."

"How'd the whole thing end - how'd you get to the dining hall?"