"Mm.  Suppose I asked you who is the current greatest weak point of Project Lawful?"

"Given that you're asking me, the answer is probably supposed to be myself, but without that information I would've said Tonia."

"Oh?  How so?"

"Almost never speaks out in class when Keltham has just said something alarming to somebody in realCheliax and less alarming to someone in alterCheliax, a problem partially shared by Gregoria and Peranza though Gregoria is improving.  Tonia is too scared generally to think interesting thoughts that will let her say interesting things to Keltham.  From Keltham's perspective Tonia probably doesn't have a distinct personality at this point, also a problem she shares with Gregoria and Peranza.  That's with Jacme and Pela out of the running, as otherwise they'd be much worse offenders."

...apparently she can talk okay, more or less, so long as it's about her work, and so long as the amount she's sweating under her clothes won't count against her.

"What an interesting perspective.  Well, Tonia, Gregoria, Peranza, would you care to gainsay that, or shall we all ponder now what sort of personalities you ought to develop?"

Tonia tries to open her mouth and say something and it doesn't work. Aaaaah. Good job proving Asmodia right. This is terrible. This is terrifying. Say something. 

"Alter Tonia is also scared and in over her head," she says after a horrifyingly long silence. "She's not like you, she met a stranger for the first time when she was ten, she doesn't know much about the way Cheliax works, outside its farms, where most people live, and which I've been representing fine to Keltham, when it comes up. She's very awed about meeting all these fifth-circle wizards who can really teleport."

"The big barrier to my showing more personality traits," Gregoria says, "is that the occasion when I think alter Gregoria would be most tempted to argue with Keltham is about all the putting classes on hold for the sake of his sex life, and I don't think we want him to do less of that."

"There isn't anything interesting about the real me," Peranza manages to say.  "Nobody has - ordered me -"  This probably sounds like making excuses to the Queen of Cheliax and that is probably not a smart career move.  "I stand ready to obey orders on how alterPeranza should be more interesting than I am."

"It's not clear to me, Gregoria, that Cheliax wouldn't be served better by Keltham teaching more and fucking less.  While he is awake and thinking we are losing ground, while he teaches us Law and technology we are gaining it.  But that is Sevar's remit finally, and if I will not gainsay her decision, you certainly shouldn't.  Meanwhile, consider that alterGregoria could have as many as two or even three different facts being true about her, rather than one."

"AlterTonia, perhaps, could try being scared and in over her head loudly rather than quietly.  Showing vulnerability in alterCheliax would be much less punished; alterTonia should have less reason to hide her weakness and her fears."

"Peranza, if there is any benefit to this reduced-punishment conceit of Sevar's, it will be that when people like you are failing, you are less afraid to go to your superiors and ask for new orders instead of waiting to receive them.  Have you felt any positive motivation to do anything, has there been anything you wanted or felt interested in, over the last few days?"

"If you think alter Gregoria would take Keltham to task over delaying lessons for sex, then do that; whether or not it serves our interests directly, which I think is a bit of a wash, it is bad for our interests for anything to be absent that ought to be present in alter Cheliax, and a student who is annoyed about all of the sex distracting from building Civilization seems like it might be that. Is this alter Gregoria motivated by jealousy?"

" - she can be, if that's convenient? Mostly she's motivated by wanting to build Civilization and noticing that everyone keeps flirting instead."

"Well, she can't be asexual, Asmodia's doing that and two would be distinctly overrepresented, in a population that was selected for being willing to have Keltham's children. But she can be very pragmatic, that seems fine. I might pass you instructions on when you may or may not push, but it seems fine. As one of your several personality traits, as Her Majesty pointed out."

"Has anyone got a list of personality traits it'd be nice to see represented, or anything?" says Gregoria. 

"It generally helps if the personality traits are inside you somewhere, at least until your Bluff is a great deal higher than at present.  Peranza here, for example, thought about Keltham's Silent Image show of dath ilan and its surroundings, which someone will somehow arrange for me to see at some point and yes that is an order.  Then Peranza was terrified of having had such a heretical thought, and tried to hide it from herself so that she would not be committing treason by hiding it from me.  AlterPeranza then could have the personality trait of being fascinated by the things of Civilization and pressing Keltham to say more about it, which is itself something that I think will work generally to our advantage."

Try to forget you heard her admit to running Detect Thoughts maybe there's enough other people around she won't notice oh no that's censored isn't it -

"Keltham will notice if everyone in alterCheliax has personality traits that serve a purpose of realCheliax.  I think that's a problem even if the trait is also there in realPeranza.  Where are the traits that disadvantage realCheliax?  Where are the traits that don't mean anything?"

Wait did she just criticize the Queen?  She needs to stop thinking suicidal thoughts when she tries not to think hidden ones.

Peranza is frozen in utter terror and horror if anybody's bothering to track that.

"Yes, Asmodia, you did criticize my suggestion just then.  It's a very dangerous game, but for the criticism to be apt is a winning move.  Indeed, if we are playing against a dath ilani then we must create an illusion indistinguishable to him from reality, and that means people having traits inconvenient as well as convenient to the true Cheliax.  We do already have some such, for example, alterAsmodia's and alterIone's tendency to say clever things."

"My being shy is inconvenient to Cheliax," says Tonia somewhere between stubbornly and hopefully.

"Someone can get miserable when cooped up in a fortress and plead with Maillol and when that fails with Keltham to be allowed out to go swim at the beach, that's the kind of thing that happens in places with worse discipline. And if they just uneventfully go swimming and come back that's evidence against tropes, to Keltham. Best for someone who actually will get miserable when cooped up in a fortress.

Peranza, it's not actually heretical to notice that Keltham, a random teenager smarter than average but not by much who dath ilan didn't think incredibly highly of, lived like a King, or to think that dath ilan manages to present a really really nice front to people who don't know the secrets it's keeping, or to think maybe you'd like it even if you did know as many of them as your mind can stand. It is heretical to think that Asmodeus's Civilization won't be grander, I suppose, but if you're panicking at the stage of noticing that Keltham's world looked nice you're not just protecting yourself from heresy, you're protecting yourself from thinking. Heresy we can correct. There's no corrective I know for not having any thoughts in the first place."

"Well said.  It's also really really boring."

"Correctives include running a Detect Thoughts and hurting someone every time they try not to think, until they start thinking again.  It works about half the time, and better if you are more gentle and patient, which, at that point, I'm usually not."

"Do you think dath ilan's keeping secrets that'd make it seem less Good, then?" asks Meritxell.

"It's pretty much got to be. Keltham knows nothing about the entire way that societies structured themselves before Civilization. His language doesn't have words for it, and Tongues wouldn't just give me the words that he specifically knows. They rewrote their whole history to hide something, and the most Good explanation I can think of is that it was to enable the mass censorship effort that keeps sadists from ever knowing. In terms of running a Conspiracy, they put us to shame. Everyone knows there are vast swathes of human knowledge they're not allowed to have, and figures the reason is good enough, and they train that in in early childhood too. Good is too weak to pull that off, frankly, and even if dath ilani Good aren't that weak, Good would also be constantly internally divided about it. You need a tyranny to manage that kind of achievement."

- nod. "So maybe dath ilan's not so different than us, but hides that from people like Keltham, because they're more useful that way? And maybe - they're hiding something that we're going to blow up the project when we trip on."

"Those are two of the possibilities that have come to mind, yeah."

Abrogail sighs.  People who are not herself are sometimes very silly.

"While that is a fine thing to worry about, I do instruct all you here to be more wary of what Keltham may know that is safe for him to know, in a world that seemingly lacks or perhaps has hidden all traces of magic and wizardry and clerics, which is not safe to have known here in Golarion with its magic.  We are very wary of whether Cayden Cailean does in truth hold any common interest with Asmodeus, but that is one of the plausible ones."

"I should also think it slightly more likely that Keltham's Civilization went to such fantastic lengths to, for example, kill every worshipper of every god and destroy every scrap of information by which those gods could again be given an anchor in their world.  And then, perhaps, decided to eliminate the knowledge of sadism, so long as they were about their larger endeavor.  To be clear, I do not know that it is possible for a world to cast loose its gods in such a way; I do not know it to be impossible either.  It seems a more plausible thought in the light of dath ilan's secrecy."

"....I guess probably Cayden Cailean wouldn't want that but I wish I was more sure."