This will unfortunately free up Aspexia Rugatonn to attend a meeting she is frankly not looking forward to at all, to brainstorm what Cheliax can do that will make Cayden Cailean most happy at minimal expense to Asmodeus.

Aspexia Rugatonn will trouble herself to first stop in at the project office - now in a fake Asmodean temple with no torture chamber, just in case Keltham asks why he is not allowed to visit the admin areas - and take a quick look at Sevar.

Does it look like Aspexia needs to have an angry and probably violent conversation with Abrogail?

Carissa Sevar is talking over lies for Asmodia and Ione with Maillol. She looks - younger, in a weird way, than she did yesterday - not that a Chelish sixteen year old would ever show this much vulnerability on their face, but it'd look less out of place on a sixteen-year-old. She does not look strikingly conflicted or strikingly flinchy.  She's very attached to her dagger.

She nods to the Grand High Priestess with a private smile. Probably it will not amuse the Queen to tell the Grand High Priestess how upset Carissa was that she was dead. It's fairly pathetic.

A gesture, and Maillol no longer hears them.

"The Queen has in fact submitted a report on your adventure."

"It is not a priority for you to do anything about this, Sevar, especially not today, but be it known to you.  Loyalty to myself and my purpose and my office is acceptable.  Attachment to the point that you then blunder into Keltham's room being visibly distressed about a woman you should hardly know, is weakness, not terribly Asmodean, and not something I think we should be inculcating in the new Lawful Evil."

"The Queen suggested that this problem should be fixed by having you torture me to death once per day for a few weeks, and while I believe she had ulterior motives in this suggestion it was not entirely inappropriate as a solution ignoring its costs."

" - that wasn't why, Most High. Keltham wouldn't have assumed any special attachment to you for me to to be distressed at your true death, especially as he knows it's what I fear most for myself. It is part of what he's allowed to know, that we spoke when you came to lay the first Forbiddance - though at the time I only told him I'd talked to a very important person - but I think if I stumbled in on him broken up about the true death of someone I'd only once been in the room with, he'd consider that reasonable, and decide that he would have to fix it for me. It seemed like the best possible grounds on which to ignore his stated wish that no one interrupt him while he was thinking, and I was very worried about what would happen if he went on thinking. Keltham is constantly reminding himself that death in Golarion isn't real and isn't costly; he hasn't lost any of his dath ilani convictions about the horror of true death." And I happen to share them.

"Or - I mean, he does have some kind of weird theory based on his own true death not being such, but then he'd have started trying to convince me of that. I promise, I'd have done the same thing if I'd learned any other mildly notable figure I'd previously mentioned meeting had been terrifyingly destroyed at the front; it was just the most convenient way to get in the room."

Aspexia does not, in fact, believe Sevar about this.  Oh, she's surely being honest; truthful is another matter.

But she cannot push any further on this point without risking disturbing Abrogail's careful pattern of shatterings and fractures while it heals into a new form.

"Do not wantonly strain yourself even tomorrow," Aspexia warns.  "A tryst with Abrogail Thrune is not an ordinary torture session and cannot be treated as such."

And she departs.

Were those the kind of sentences you'd report 'wrongthought' about, if you were a good dath ilani?

Maybe, if it seems wise to explain this to Keltham ever, she'll ask how he would have reacted, if interrupted by a Carissa distressed at the news that the grandmotherly woman who'd smiled at them had been destroyed.

If it was an error it was definitely an error even at the time, though, rather than a justification invented now; this must be the proper version of the complaint that that hated-Security had been ranting about in her ear at the time, which failed to land because she couldn't even understand what he understood her to be doing - and because she'd felt that he had no idea how Keltham worked and should shut up, except they'd controlled Keltham, so he'd reacted as they'd understood him. 

But it's some evidence about whether what she just said to the Grand High Priestess was a wrong thought. When accused of having unstrategically let her emotions guide her into stupidly revealing something to Keltham, she'd been purely and entirely confused, because the interaction she understood herself to be having was perfectly accurate to new Cheliax; if there was an error it was in her understanding.

Would Keltham, primed to greater suspicion by a warning from Abadar, see suspicion even in something genuinely unsurprising, like Carissa being sad about the death of an important figure in her religion who she'd only spoken to at length once? It's objectively not suspicious, in new Cheliax, but would he have found it so? Maybe; it's hard to be suspicious only of the exactly correct things. And if Keltham is going to be suspicious of everything then maybe it's not enough to do things you'd do in new Cheliax, maybe you'd have to only do things that'd parse to him as having absolutely no suspicious traits - except then that's obviously manipulated -

To Maillol, Carissa appears to be staring off into the middle distance frowning for a long time after the Grand High Priestess departs.

"You look like somebody thinking too hard.  If you're not ready to go to sleep, get a book.  Director."

It is in his own best interests that Sevar get back together quickly.

"Is that the degree of professionalism with which I served you? .... but you're probably right.

All right. Ione may lie about how big a problem it would generally be for someone to be chosen of Nethys, and about how rare oracles are, because if she's claiming she was one before she joined the project they can't be that weird without Keltham concluding tropes are afoot. We get into a mess if we try to lie about how the entire death and sorting system works, so Asmodia should tell the truth that she sold her soul - but voluntarily, on her graduation and before joining the project, because she's really good at math and wanted to secure an academic role in Hell if she got herself gobbled up right away at the Worldwound. Asmodia is authorized to lie about literally everything about Hell that's not also true of Axis; she might not know what that is, but you can tell her.

Lie about Pilar is that a bunch of researchers are fascinated by whatever is going on with her and have begged her to stay a little bit. Since we're not going to be able to pretend she's not incredibly weird."

"Acknowledged, Director."

Off Carissa trots to bed.

Ayat Himinshi, a merchant with a seasonal spice shop in Egorian and a side business of passing the results of various divinations on to a prince in Taldor where his family lives, is sleeping soundly in his bed that night.

Not especially knownst to Ayat Himinshi, who has probably never thought about it in that way, and sort of not very explicitly knownst to Taldor...

Essentially everything Himinshi sends on ends up in Lastwall eventually.  Lastwall has very good spying operations on other countries' spying operations on Cheliax.  It's so much less expensive, as they count costs, than sending people directly into Cheliax.

Anyways, there's a knock on his door in the night, really a lot politer than you'd expect if Security had caught him.

He puts on an amulet that fuzzes his thoughts like he's awfully drunk, takes a drink to back it up, and gets the door.

A well-dressed and painfully polite Imperial palace functionary apologizes for the suddenness of this interruption, but they wish to invite Ayat Himinshi to attend on a gathering in the Imperial palace.  The reasons cannot be explained here; this location is not secure.  He has the Imperial palace's reassurance that he will not be harmed, and that, regardless of how things may seem, there is not any reason for him to worry.

What.

"I'll plan on it. When?" he asks, his words not slurred but kind of close.

"I'm afraid it must be now, sir.  I apologize again."

A fancy carriage waits outside his door.

"'m drunk," he says. "I was out late. 'm in no state to go to any palace. 'pologies."

"It's fine.  We plan on serving alcohol in any case and there's no expectation for anyone to stay sober."

He gets into the carriage, nervous but mostly baffled. This is not how Cheliax works.

This is no longer the Cheliax you find familiar.  You are now entering the control of Project Lawful.

At yet another location in Egorian, a stunningly beautiful woman lies in bed with a minor noble of House Thrune. It's a classic but the classics are classics for a reason. 

This woman has high enough Bluff to pass a DC 40 Bluff check to defeat Detect Thoughts by having the correct thoughts.

Her Sense Motive is nothing to sneeze at either.  Defeating it would take a lot of Bluff and Splendour.

She wanted to participate in this operation somehow.  Sue her.

Very sorry, Mr. Thrune, your sex worker is urgently needed to attend upon a special occasion at the Imperial palace.

Well, Amela apparently thinks, that sounds interesting. Can't turn down an opportunity like that. 

To Abrogail, who is extremely hard to bluff, it's obvious that her secret thoughts are more worried than that. But not panicked; she can pass a Truth Spell, she can pass Detect Thoughts, she has a resurrection on tap if she gets executed, she mostly doesn't have nervous sensation in her body because she's not actually into all the favored Chelish kinds of sex....