It would probably be good to clear up precisely how Sevar wants the girls trained, if she can tarry a few more minutes.

Yeah, sure. She doesn't really know what she's doing at all here, but she knows what would be ideal for Keltham.

Keltham has been running around blessing random girls with his wisdom while Carissa is busy.

Literally; he prayed for 6 Owl's Wisdoms this morning, using all of his 3rds on that too.  That's enough to get half of them today, and the rest can hopefully endure whatever cumulative personality-structural stresses they've got going plus another day of latent dath ilani exposure.  People get deprioritized if they've otherwise had an Owl's Wisdom not too long ago, including before joining the project.  Oddly enough, few of them ever have.  Oh, and after being tapped you're supposed to go to your bedroom to contemplate and maybe write notes to yourself, on Keltham's theory.

Security is a little unhappy about how this requires lots of Detect Thoughts being used up to monitor the girls separately, but they haven't ordered all the girls to get this done in a single place where they can all be monitored together, because for all they know the part where Keltham thinks they need to be in a quiet separate bedroom is actually important.

Ione is already pretty wise takaral!  Apparently being even wiser causes her to complete her sentences with takaral much more often takaral.  It's possible that she's actually working through something faster takaral.  She hopes so takaral.

Apart from that she doesn't experience any startling revelations about herself or her relation to the universe takaral.  She's a Nethysian now rather than Asmodean, and that has relieved all the stresses she can see in herself even with +4 Wisdom takaral.  She reviews her notes from Keltham's lectures to see if anything shakes loose with more Owl's Wisdom, but it doesn't particularly takaral; if there's dath ilani special abilities that cast from Wisdom, the way Keltham warned, Ione apparently hasn't absorbed those yet.  Takaral.

Oh, hey, that wasn't a natural takaral takaral.  It was actually Ione's mind completing it because it thought it was supposed to be there takaral.  She'll have to watch out for that takaral.  But she shouldn't be distracted by thoughts like that; she should be reviewing her notes on dath ilani thinking instead.  Takaral.

Paxti rethinks what she learned in Keltham's lectures, hoping that some of it will soak deeper into her and let her say the sort of things that Meritxell or Asmodia sometimes say.  She does not, for the moment, experience any startling insights about it.

Peranza is well aware that her thoughts are likely being read right now.  She reviews her notes on Keltham's lectures in hopes of being less likely to think anything heretical, and learn something more useful to Lord Asmodeus instead.  She wants to be useful to Lord Asmodeus.

Asmodia gets in on it, barely on time, and manages to give Keltham an inquiring look about whether it's her turn that hopefully didn't come across as being pleading or requesting, which might look suspicious to anyone considering the course of events later.

Once she's been tapped, she diligently goes off to her room to think, planning to review Keltham-lecture notes so that her thoughts won't look too suspiciously empty.

The Wisdom isn't there to provide realizations, it's there to provide an excuse for having had them.

Her plans end up becoming a whole lot more refined anyways as she thinks of them.  She puts most of the thoughts outside of her barrier, it is fine and good for Security to see those, and starts writing.

Gregoria is pretty sure that you're not supposed to get an Owl's Wisdom and then try to think yourself into a devil, or into someone who has some idea no one's ever had before. She's pretty sure that doesn't work. It's like how you're not supposed to take a theology concept introduced in church and go running off inventing lots of things with it; you don't actually understand it that well, it's just the illusion of such deep insight. 

Instead of that she'll pray. Wisdom is how clerics cast so it probably makes you better at praying. 

Yaisa tries to think deep thoughts but doesn't particularly come up with any. She is aware she's not a very deep person. Sharp but not deep, her mother used to say, which is the best kind of person, a good wizard who doesn't get out of their lane. Yaisa hopes that it's also the right kind of person for Project Lawful.

So, up to 8 minutes for his Wisdom to wear off, at up to 2 minutes per caster circle, and then some more time to think after that if necessary, and then they should reconvene for another run on Probability... Keltham probably should have thought to set that schedule before sending people off to their bedrooms to think.  Well, he'll send somebody around to knock on doors for a 5-minute warning in about 20 minutes, say.

Note from Asmodia to Sevar, delivered by Security after Sevar leaves Subirachs's office:

Keltham tapped six girls with Owl's Wisdom and told them to go off to their bedrooms to think afterwards.  Asmodia was one of them.  This report was written in haste under the Owl's Wisdom but completed after it ended.

Asmodia has now realized that when she responded to Keltham's inquiry about her superpowers by asking 'Why is everyone asking me that?' this was a potentially catastrophic error, if Keltham had not believed that the Crown was supposed to be aware of his speculation.  Asmodia had not been briefed on that aspect one way or another, so the correct decision for Asmodia would have been to take the lesser risk of not mentioning that anyone else had asked her; even though this would have also been a risk because, if Keltham did expect others to know, real-Asmodia would have behaved differently from alter-Asmodia.  Asmodia notes in her defense that she had very little time to think when Keltham sprung that question on her, and that she erred on the side of not lying, even though concealment was the correct course given what she didn't know.

Asmodia notes that she believes the fault for this narrowly averted event lies not only with herself, but also that nobody briefed her on Keltham's expectations about the Crown order to check her for superpowers, in particular, whether Keltham was supposed to know that this event had happened.

Asmodia registers her suspicion that too much information is being hidden from people who aren't Keltham.  This isn't an ordinary project where people can know only what they need to know, it's a project built around an intricate fragile lie and everybody who isn't being lied-to needs to know what's going on with every part of the lie at every point.

Asmodia notes that she would probably have tried to deny this whole chain of thought to herself if she wasn't on the new only-Taldorian-punishment regime, shutting it down well before it got to the point of Asmodia thinking about having done something worthy of punishment somewhere Security could hear those thoughts and censure her if she didn't report them.  Initially starting to look for and think about what you might have done wrong is dangerous, if you will need to report any new errors you find and get punished for those.  Asmodia is also being more honest in reporting what she sees as potential flaws in what's going on around her, because she expects less to be punished for that risk if she questions her teacher and proves to be wrong.

Asmodia registers Prediction:  Tonia will either fail wholly to master dath ilani thought, or will be tortured beyond the point of usefulness for heretical thoughts, or will have dath ilani thought successfully tortured out of her as something inside her realizes that she loses points each time she plays the game.

Asmodia means no insubordination by any of this and will obviously accept instruction and correction if she is mistaken.

Asmodia has also realized that she is acting very visibly different from her supposed alter-Cheliax self.  Alter-Asmodia is incredibly curious what the Abyss Keltham was talking about, which real-Asmodia also is, but alter-Asmodia does not have any reason not to be talking to Keltham about this already, because alter-Asmodia isn't scared quiet by Security or Sevar or concerns that something huge is going on that she is not supposed to know about.  Alter-Asmodia wants to know if Keltham has a way for her to get superpowers next time she's in Hell.  Alter-Asmodia asked him about it at breakfast in front of all the other girls.  Please advise.

Well, the experiment is bearing fruit. Might be poisoned fruit, but that's how it goes, with experiments. 

The big constraint on briefing all the girls more is that there's only so many excuses that can be manufactured to be having group meetings without Keltham. Carissa suggests (to Maillol) that they get all the girls Rings of Sustenance, and then can have briefings during those precious hours that will be unaccounted for to Keltham. 

In the meantime she can talk to Asmodia about why the Crown thought she might have superpowers.

Asmodia is visibly looking a bit fearful here.

"Hello again. You wanted to know why Keltham thought you'd have superpowers. This isn't a very satisfactory answer, but Keltham has a category of theories formed based on - reasoning from the fact he landed here, and not other places, and now and not other times, and for confusing reasons it makes predictions like 'he'll have a fight with the Queen over his girlfriend' and 'Pilar will mysteriously go to Elysium', and he predicted you'd have superpowers."

"I now have additional questions."

(This is something that people have occasionally heard Keltham say over the last few days.)

"I bet. Go ahead."

"I'm - having trouble figuring out where to start.  What did he say about Pilar going to Elysium?  And he's not dead so he didn't fight the Queen over you, but what exactly did he think would happen?"

"So to be clear we've been piecing things together from several different sources, he doesn't explain it much. But - it's like he thinks he's in a romance novel, only he's not accusing us of setting it up, just, uh, some entity, when he died, having put him in a romance novel instead of putting him in different contexts than that. And in a dath ilani romance novel, the different girls you date would all have fascinating secret backstories you had to sleep with them to understand, so a universe where we all have fascinating secret backstories is more like the kind of universe someone would stick him in. And in the dath ilani romance novel, all the girls fulfill different aspects of his sexuality, so, when I said that I'm kind of neutral on being raped he predicted that one of the other girls would be into that and have a fascinating secret backstory. And here Pilar is. 

He, uh, ended up agreeing to rent me to the Queen so they wouldn't have to fight over me, is how that ended."

"I now have additional additional questions."

"You can consider this an experiment in indulging you and seeing if that actually produces useful results."

In fact Asmodia's mind is repeatedly repeating "I now have additional questions" so loudly that she is having trouble figuring out what any of those Additional Questions are.

"So like - am I wrong that not a single one of us had any secret backstory before we started working on Project Lawful?  We only started getting secret backstories once Keltham appeared?  I'm not actually going anywhere with this question, just - I don't know what I should ask -"

"What's giving us those backstories, according to Keltham?  In real life it's Nethys for Ione, Cayden Cailean for Pilar, Asmodeus maybe for you, we don't have backstories because we're in a romance novel, we're getting backstories because of things gods are doing to us - why are all those gods doing it to us, going along with setting up the romance novel for Keltham, you're the only one who might know, Asmodeus does things for reasons even if Nethys and Cayden Cailean don't -"

Asmodia realizes that she's not talking exactly like somebody who doesn't have anything special about herself, and stops talking and looks like she's waiting for an answer.

"You're right; the group of girls that Cheliax gathered was not particularly remarkable, the reason it looks to Keltham like his girls have backstories is that the gods want us very badly, for some reason. I don't understand the reason, exactly. A devil said we are valued in Dis because it is thought we might be able to train better devils. But that can't be Cayden Cailean's reason or Nethys' reason."

"Or the reason of whoever acted on your behalf. But it's because you're part of Project Lawful, and I do expect they want Project Lawful to continue and to at least by some definition of success succeed."

"...I can't even tell whether I'm supposed to say that I know you're just guessing that, or -"

"Maybe my special thing is now that everyone thinks I'm special and all the other special Project Lawful girls invite me to whatever special court sessions you have while everybody tries to figure out which superpowers I've really -"

"Or maybe I could go back to Hell and get superpowers if I asked for them -"

"Should I just ask a lot of questions to Keltham?  Which parts of this is Keltham supposed to know we know, which parts is Asmodia supposed to know, I think that's the most important thing I'm supposed to ask right away."

"Keltham knows that he's aired his tropes theory to us and that we took it seriously, though he's currently leaning towards it not being true and I do not want him encouraged in thinking it's true, at all, zero. You can do things Asmodia who had an average time in alter-Hell would do on learning she should've come back with superpowers, though mind that I don't think you particularly want Keltham's personal attention. - not because he's cruel, I wish, but because he can tell whether people are enjoying themselves with him or not.

Asmodia has probably been told that the Crown asked if she had superpowers, and then been asked by Keltham, and then maybe asked a Security if the question from the Crown was classified or if she's allowed to say she was asked it, and now has further questions."