" - good question. I don't know? Not obviously wrongthought where it feels wrong as soon as you say it. I - hmmm. 

Okay, so, separating this out a bit, there is, Pilar would be really unhappy in dath ilan. I don't know if I would, except about the only 97% chance of an afterlife. I wouldn't have - this, wouldn't have you, wouldn't know to look for it, I can already see the bits of dath ilan that would if I'd met them first just kind of get in the way of - who I am, and also no one in dath ilan has any power in the sense I find attractive, so I'd be slightly unsatisfied on that front, but I don't think it'd be the worst thing. I worship Asmodeus, if He didn't exist I'd lose something, but - but not nearly as much as Pilar. Should I keep going into further bits or - was anything about that confusing -"

"I - maybe shouldn't be saying this myself, I don't expect you have any training in - how to hold onto yourself, your you, when people seem to be telling you that you are something else, something not quite true to who you are -"

"But when Pilar told me that it would break something, to order you not to become a Keeper because that might hurt you, part of me was like, oh, yes, obviously on a deep level I know that's true even if I can't explain why."

"I could be wrong.  It happens, with deep feelings you can't put into words.  That's why selection-on-heritable-variation shaped humans to use words for thinking too, and not just deep unverbalizable senses of truth."

"It's - the thing I wanted the instant I first saw it. To have the Law and be perfect and not have to wait a thousand years until Hell is done with me. To wear the fanciest headband I can get my hands on at all times, to understand everything. I think all wizards are like that, maybe, to some degree. You keep getting a taste of what it'd be like to be smarter.

But - 

- okay, when I think about you ordering me not to become a Keeper because it might hurt me, I mostly feel annoyed, like, have you met me, I don't care if things hurt me, I care if they strengthen me. When I think about you ordering me not to become a Keeper because it might hurt you, well, I'm willing to be weaker to be the shape you need. Not forever. But for a while, maybe for as long as you need it because I don't think you'll need it forever. 

And Keltham - the most powerful kinds of devil? Becoming them hurts. I don't know the details because it's not, like, physical pain, if it were that you could just take painkillers or something, but it hurts some kind of deeper way, and that's why many people never turn into the most powerful kind of devil. 

But I absolutely intended to. Still intend to except insofar as I'm now thinking maybe I want to become an archdevil and command a whole layer of Hell myself."

"I don't want - to lose you, to that - not just in the sense of not having you but in the sense of that Carissa not existing anymore, to anyone, she didn't even crash her flying-machine and go somewhere else she might be happier, she turned into somebody else and that's where her connected-directed-continuity continued -"

"My model of Pilar is telling me that if for you to become an archdevil means losing you then maybe this relationship was always doomed in the first place."

"Presumably in dath ilan people change over time, right - you lose who everyone was when they were five, but that's fine, because who they are at 10 is better -"

"I... feel like in a lot of ways I'm pretty much the same person as I was at age five?  And have noticed that people in Cheliax seem more, changeable, somehow, they seem like less exactly themselves from one moment to the next."

"It feels sad, if I imagine only having you for a year, or ten years, and not forever.  Crazy, right, when we've only been together a week?  This is why Civilization thinks that people who try to promise themselves to each other into the Future are not virtuous predictors."

"Right now I want you forever and the thought of losing you in a hundred years feels terrifying and I don't know how I'm supposed to coherently reconcile that with the probability of my changing my mind in another two weeks, after we've stayed together twice again as long as we've stayed so far."

"...well. I don't think you're going to stay the same in two hundred years and I bet when you're - whatever you become - you won't actually want a Carissa who is as small as she started out."

The word 'bet' continues to mean only one thing.

"Odds and stakes?"

"That in two hundred years, if you still want me at all, you don't want me exactly like this and want me to get smarter or become a god or become a devil or something? ....eighty percent? I don't know what would be reasonable stakes for a two-hundred-year bet, though."

"Doesn't matter, my brain is putting higher than eighty percent so there's no bet."

"Why did prophecy have to be shattered here?  How can anybody fall in love in a world without that?  Not knowing whether this is going to work out is terrifying.  I don't want to fall even deeper in love with you and then lose you."

- lean. 

"Pilar thinks - Asmodeus wouldn't want us to be weak, and asking us to be weak is - asking us not to listen to Him. Sort of. I don't know that she'd say it that way but I think she's onto something. But if the will of the gods is knowable at all - and often it really isn't, they're doing excessively complicated things you can only see corners of -

- I think Asmodeus also wants me to be yours. Because you were dropped on me, by what must have been a coalition of Law and Chaos and Good and Evil alike, and I have very good spellcraft but the obvious reason for why me isn't the spellcraft, it's that I'd want you the second I met you, like I've never wanted anyone or anything. And so I don't feel torn, between you and Asmodeus, when you want things from me that He'd never ask of the humans who are His, that are vaguely against what we're taught to aspire to, because I think - I think maybe you're supposed to learn this, learn to understand what it is to own someone and what Evil says to do here - at your own pace, and without me about to fall apart if you're too slow -"

"You know, if gods tried pulling this kind of shit back in Civilization, the Keepers would force them to get a signed consent form from me first."

"I realize the alternative was literally my true death and that there was no way to have me read or sign while I was on the plane and the gods are incredibly limited on comms bandwidth but even so, Carissa.  Even so."

"...but thank you," Keltham finishes in a lower voice, not quite a whisper.  "To you, and to them, if it was gods at all."

"Conditional on all of this actually working out, to be clear."

"I apologize on behalf of our gods for them kidnapping you for their own benefit, and not yours, and applying-a-god-amount-of-optimization-power-at-you-such-that-your-path-was-extremely-overdetermined." Taldane has a single word for that.  "I think if your god was part of the coalition then it checked whether you would have agreed with full information, at least."

"It'd be a more comforting thought if the local - not laws of causality, those don't change, the surface rules - if the local rules didn't say that prophecy was shattered for gods and they could no longer apply-a-god-amount-of-optimization-power-at-me-such-that-my-path-was-extremely-overdetermined.  Which means, first of all, there might be a big probability of a bad ending, even if on net that's outweighed by probabilities of better endings; and second, that it likely wasn't gods in the first place.  Maybe delegates from Good and Evil and Lawfulness and Chaos all signed on; I doubt they wrote the contract, even my own god."

"I don't think we're supposed to think about the gods when we're together, I think we're supposed to work things out for ourselves.  The more we do that, the less expensive optimization they have to apply, and also the less they get to determine our futures using values that maybe aren't exactly our values.  I wonder if that's, like, the literal opposite of that 'faith' Pilar was talking about, based on the sound of the word."

" - there's something there but I suspect it of being really complicated?" And she doesn't have permission from the Grand High Priestess to raise the question of how to make mortals better at obeying gods, even indirectly, as she'd be tempted to here. "I think of faith as mostly being like - when I'm confused, I don't know the answer but I know that it's known, I know Asmodeus has it, even if I would have to become as a god to understand it. But as I said I'm not as devout as Pilar and if you want to hear the actual proper articulation of it you'd want to ask Subirachs. There's a saying about theology that anything you came up with yourself by thinking about what feels right is almost definitely heretical."

"About how - unprofessional, selfish in excess of standard Evil expected by Cheliax - am I being, if I tell everyone that we're not reconvening for another couple of hours, and tell you to go wait for me in our cuddleroom, you can grab light food first if you want and they've got it or I guess Pilar probably has it otherwise, and come to you in, maybe, five to fifteen minutes - I'll send a message to you if it's going to be longer than that -"

"But how much would I be inconveniencing everyone and how much political capital would I be burning?"

"I think that is considered a wholly normal Chelish amount of selfishness and I for one will be relieved, as I am whenever you're Evil. ...I guess it might make hiring another dozen researchers before we've got results to show slightly harder? But if I were someone high up in the government I'd be glad you were taking care of yourself."

"I'll go do that, then."

"So," says Gregoria to the room after not only Keltham and Carissa but also Pilar and Security have wandered off, "was that....planned, or...."

"Planned by someone, let's all pray Asmodeus," says Meritxell darkly.

"I feel that somebody should be notifying ME about these things.  I feel that I was assigned a job and that doing my job requires this information."

"Oh, suck on it, Asmodia.  I worship the literal god of knowledge and you don't hear me complaining about Security never telling me anything.  Why?  Because they don't care."

"Should we be, um... putting probabilities on things, now..."

Peranza feels like she's just been informed that not applying Keltham's Law is also heretical and part of her just wants to keep on screaming and screaming.