"And the scope of that authorization?"

...oh no.

"Authority over local Security, and ability to consult with Crown intelligence over which fun non-hurtful prank on the Osirians will most serve our Lord's interests."

Pilar isn't doing anything as unprofessional as making a face on purpose, but hopefully her control isn't perfect and therefore the Grand High Priestess can hear her face trying to shout 'NO' through the mirror.

That was the correct answer.  Well, a correct answer.  Including that suppressed horrified expression, if Pineda looked happy this wouldn't be a good idea at all.

"Try keeping the bargain this time so we can observe what happens."

"Everyone I trust to correctly handle god-agreements with Chaotic forces is outside the Palace, mostly at the front of the war."

"If you listen humbly to your elders and ignore anything they suggest about violating implied god-agreements, I believe you can handle this yourself.  If at some point it looks like I'm wrong and you start expecting it to not go well, I trust you to walk away from it without aggrieving your curse."

"My secretary will supply you with that authorization.  Do not explain why you have it or where the real constraints are coming from."

"Any else top urgent?"

"No."

"Rugatonn out."

"I hate my life."

Pilar gets handed her authorization and shown a meeting room to brief Security on whatever she wants them to do.

Actually, the first thing Pilar needs to do - after saying that the waiting Skymetal Sword guard can go back, since they want the place to look normal, also her curse doesn't want to inconvenience the guy too much - is to talk to Crown intelligence about what the Crown wants Osirion to end up believing.

Security isn't going to be preventing these people from returning home, Cheliax can't hold them to trade for something else.  Lord Asmodeus's interests can only be served here by giving them some form of false impression or false information, so far as Pilar can tell.

Her curse seems to believe that giving another country wildly misleading military intelligence is a happy fun prank!  Pilar is not actually preventing herself from thinking repeatedly about how incredibly stupid that is.  She has much less practice at controlling her own thoughts than most Chelish people of her status.  Her curse, thankfully, does not seem to care.

If they've already heard enough rumors to test whether there's a cake girl, with a reasonably well-designed test, then a) what a fucking disaster, it's presently unclear who's going down for it but someone's going to have to, and b) they're not going to be able to convince them that Project Lawful is nothing big.

This top Chelish expert on Osirion affairs just got emergency-teleported back from the front lines to the palace for this, just ran into the room, and has not actually heard about any of these rumors.

"Can somebody very quickly brief me on who the cake girl is, what Project Lawful is, and why it's a disaster that Osirion has already heard of her?" he says.

Everybody is now looking at Pilar because, obviously, who else in this room would a) be in charge and b) know what people here are allowed to know about what Project Lawful is and why it matters.

"Somebody else say which rumors about the cake girl Osirion is likely to have heard," Pilar says.  "I mainly know the true version, I have not been tracking exactly which rumors exist."

Somebody who actually has been in the palace the last few days, internally screaming forever after the manner of competent intelligence officers dealing with other people who are not competent intelligence officers, recites the basics:

If something nice happens to you that people in non-Chelish countries would throw some kind of fucking party for, a girl is already there and already has a cake to offer you.

It's actually pretty good cake.

Nobody knows what happens if you refuse to eat it.

The cake girl doesn't give a shit about Forbiddances or wards on the room.

Nobody has spotted her teleporting.

Oh, and also the cake girl is one of the Project Lawful girls etcetera etcetera so she presumably has arcane vision, casts both cleric and wizard spells, her soul's price in the markets of Dis is astronomically high, may possibly be Abrogail Thrune, got transformed prettier after she joined Project Lawful, etcetera etcetera.

That's the main line of the rumors, there's too many variant versions for anybody to keep track of.

"I have heard it rumored," someone else adds, very annoyed about it, "that some connection exists between the capabilities used by Cake Girl and the capabilities that deprived Nidal of diamonds - which Osirion might have noticed by now -"

"Ah," says the guy who just got back from the front lines.  That makes a lot more sense than panicking over Osirion believing a completely deranged -

- actually no it doesn't make sense.  "Without meaning to inquire as to anything I should not know, if that rumor's false, are we unhappy to have Osirion believe it?  Should we just be trying to confirm whatever it is they believe?  How did they end up believing it?"

"You," Pilar says to one of the Securities hanging out who's not an intelligence officer, but one cleared to gofer for intelligence work, "find somebody who knows about the diamond thing, which I have not previously been cleared for, and tell them they immediately need to be in this room advising me with respect to what we do or don't want Osirion believing about a connection between the diamond thing and Project Lawful via the cake girl.  Go."

Pilar turns back to the poor confused soul from the front lines.  "I would have thought that we didn't want more attention called to Project Lawful at all but maybe that ship has sailed."

"I have an opinion to offer regarding that," says somebody much older and far more powerful than herself.

"Speak, I have authority here for good reasons but know I am sorely lacking experience."

He nods.  "With all due disrespect to a number of people who should already be in Hell, that ship had in fact probably sailed after Nidal attacked your project site, we launched an emergency response with dozens of people with six seconds worth of intelligence clearance, and then a fucking god-war started immediately afterwards."

"That level of international scrutiny on an event with that many witnesses is simply not evadable.  It's not sufficient if the witnesses were all soul-sold and most are now on the Nidal front.  If you visibly block all information and all avenues of investigation about what started a god-war, some adversaries will start burning ninth-circle scrolls in order to kidnap targets or extract information from them."

"The explosion of rumors may be the better case than that scrutiny focusing narrowly on only things that actually happened."

"Can anybody tell me if there's a policy about that, who runs that policy, and where they are so they can be inside this room instead."

"The general policy for feeding spies misinformation is that it should be hard to immediately verify, leave them confident they weren't noticed, suggest further investigation within Cheliax, and contain things from a shortlist, per country, the Osirion expert will have theirs but it might be a bit out of date -"

"List had nothing about a Project Lawful on it last I heard," the Osirion expert says dryly.  "You want to know what we'd like Osirion to believe about our grain stores, I'm your guy."

"Who would know which rumors we're supposed to spread about Project Lawful?"

Your project director would be the obvious candidate...?

"I've been informed that individual is completely out of contact.  Can somebody tell me what our goals would obviously have been so that I can do more of whatever it was we were doing."

"- keep enough cruft in the water that no one can narrow down on what might be true," a senior person says instantly. "'Project Lawful is a bunch of girls with random novel powers', fine, let's have them be as random and as novel and as uninformative about what actually happened to the Project Lawful girls as possible."