"I wasn't - very good at arguing this, when I tried to argue it to the Elysians, and the Grand High Priestess told me afterwards that it was wrong for me to have tried, because they weren't persuadable - but I'll try again -"

"Because I can't exist without somebody above me who hurts me and tells me what to do and punishes me if I don't do it, and what they tell me doesn't have to be perfect but it has to mean something.  I mean, not just anything, but - it's the Lawful part of Lawful Evil, what the punishments and the right behaviors are about.  It can't be somebody Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil who's just, using me as a slave on a farm, and not forcing me onto a right path.  It can't be someone who hurts me because they think I enjoy it and they respect my personal individual desires, like Chaotic Good, that's meaningless, that's not - about the thing that Lord Asmodeus is about."

"I don't know how to say it.  The Elysians kept arguing to me that Asmodeus didn't deserve my loyalty because He didn't care about me except as a useful thing, or at best a pretty thing to own, and, I mean, fine?  It's just very obvious to me that there's no other god I've ever heard of besides Lord Asmodeus who matches the shape of my own soul.  It's not an exchange, it's not a friendship, He's just the god of Pilars."

(though Pilar does sometimes wish that Asmodeus were a little different, in some ways, from exactly what He is)

"Well. - don't take this as an order right this second, but I want you to have ten kids, because it'd be very convenient if that were heritable. It doesn't seem - convinceable, unfortunately. Thank you, Pilar. You should go to the temple and take a punishment for listening to heresy." She's going to hope no one assigns her one, because -

- because the state of her soul is Hell's concern and the Church's is for the state of her project. 

It’s not the right order, and that’s fine.  Her superiors don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be the shape of the thing that has to be above Pilar.

“Acknowledged,” she says, and goes.

"I don't see how you can use probability to solve murders," Meritxell is saying to Keltham at lunch,  "because you'd often end up really unsure and it'd be embarrassing to act while that unsure. Are people really all right with, 'we have decided there is a seventy percent chance this is the murderer, so we're going to execute him now and be done with it'?"

A watching Security continues to think that this is hilarious, and that Meritxell does not seem to have any understanding of how to proactively seduce a high-value target.  Rather than, say, being the pretty girl at the top of her class, who just needs to repeatedly be nearby at a man until he naturally comes to desire her, and make the first move in the game she knows how to play.

"That's exactly what makes it important to have a legible legal procedure which says, we think this person has a ninety-two percent chance of being guilty, which is over the eighty-five percent threshold that all the cities use for non-souldeath murder.  So he goes to the Last Resort, which is the place that has to accept you when nowhere else would accept you any more."

"What's the alternative?  Pretend to be certain?  Pretend that a court in Golarion that claims to be totally certain of its findings, won't actually be wrong at least one time in seven if not more?  When your courts output probability judgments, you can check against the cases where the criminal files a confidential report with the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission saying what actually happened, or the cases where decisive evidence turns up later.  You can check if courts that say ninety-two percent are actually right ninety-two times out of a hundred.  What do you do when a court just claims to be right?  How could you tell how well they're doing?"

"Is it the fault of the number, seventy percent, that you're ending up unsure?  If that's what the state of the evidence is, then, that's the state of the evidence, the problem isn't the number, it's that you couldn't find evidence good enough.  Not reasoning in numbers isn't going to help you not be unsure."

" - I mean, I think I'd say if you're that unsure you keep trying to learn more, it'd be a rare murder where you couldn't be more sure if you spent more time looking. And I think courts in Golarion are far more sure than that, almost all the time, because they get confessions under truth spells."

"Yeah, I guess the charms of probability-theoretic reasoning in criminal justice might well be lost on you if you've got truthspells."

"Unless there's such a thing as people who can defeat truthspells not detectably, in which case nobody has any idea how to figure out what's true without truthspells, and they can go under the truthspell and say that the Chief Executive of Civilization ate their pet goldfish and get the Chief Executive fired.  I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying that's what would happen here, I'm just saying, that's how it would go wrong in a dath ilani fantasy novel.  Happy peaceful Civilization with universal absolute honesty based on truthspells, one person figures out how to defeat them, oops everybody except the protagonist has forgotten how to think on their own and detect lies."

" - I mean, if nothing else, the Chief Executive of Civilization could say under a truth spell that he didn't eat the trained animal, and then everyone would know they had a truth spells problem."

"Fair, they'd have to be slightly more subtle than that.  Slightly.  Have you heard about this weird guy who all these important people just attack, like, yesterday he had to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense, what is up with that."

- giggle. "I think as long as less than one in a hundred people can beat a Truth Spell then you get 99 percent, which seems like a more reasonable rate, but if anyone claims that something really improbable happened, you might still figure they found a way....

Are you allowed to kill the Chief Executive of Civilization in self-defense."

"We don't have truthspells so that would be an ass of a case to try to convince Civilization's courts of, I mean, our Chief Executive is selected by a process which makes it very unlikely that they'd ever try to murder anyone."

"But if we actually had perfectly reliable truthspells, then sure, obviously."

"If they're not perfectly reliable, then a one-in-a-hundred failure rate doesn't mean you get 99% good results.  The 1% of people who can defeat truthspells become criminals and bring the whole system down.  You're not dealing with crimes by random people, you're selectively more likely to run into crimes committed by people who know they can defeat truthspells.  Are there people like that in Golarion?"

"Are there people who can defeat truthspells? Not that I know of but one doesn't imagine they'd advertise it. I'd be kind of surprised if Nefreti Clepati couldn't. Anyway powerful wizards mostly don't have to listen to courts anyway, places outside Cheliax, so I'm not sure they'd bother beating truth spells rather than saying 'yeah I murdered that person, what are you going to do about it'."

"Can we actually go back to the part about the Confidential Criminal Court Calibration Commission?" says Peranza, who's nearby listening in fascination.  Nobody has actually briefed her that Meritxell is running seduction on Keltham and should maybe be left undisturbed.  "Dath ilani criminals file secret reports of what they actually did?"

"They can and we give them some reason to.  If your next question is how we know we can trust the criminals' confidential reports of what actually happened during the crime, the answer is that we don't trust them based on everybody being that Lawful, but sometimes later decisive evidence turns up.  That gives us a picture of how often the criminals tell the truth in their confidential reports.  I don't remember the exact figure, but it's high?  Civilization is careful not to give the criminal any incentive to lie, and if decisive evidence turns up later, a reporting criminal gets paid, not as much as the crime will cost them, but some, and that's only if they told the truth."

"I hope I don't have to explain that the criminals trust Governance confidentiality because yes Governance actually is that Lawful, they have incentives to be."

Or at least incentives to never ever get caught not being such, Meritxell does not say. "What happens if you confidentiality submit a report of a crime that hasn't had its effects yet, like, you released a deadly plague but it hasn't yet been discovered."

"They keep it a secret.  If they wouldn't, the confidential report wouldn't have been submitted, and we wouldn't actually be any better off."

"Releasing deadly plagues kinda is a thing you don't talk about in Civilization, in much the same way that Golarionites might not consider it a fun party conversation to discuss how you'd theoretically murder someone's spouse.  It's not that dath ilani do that often, it's that the losses are so potentially huge if anyone does.  I think the equivalent here would be a rule that Rovagug-release jokes are not funny."

The girls nod fervently. 

Keltham is pondering whether Meritxell is attempting to flirt with him using some gendertrope that he is just absolutely failing to recognize at all, and if he should possibly attempt to flirt back at very high initial levels of plausible deniability?

Asmodia finishes her plate, puts it away, and approaches the possible protagonist of a frantically god-constructed romance novel.

"Keltham," says the love interest entirely uninterested in love, so far as she knows, "is this a good time for us to go off and have a private conversation about why you thought I'd have superpowers?"

(Also nobody has briefed Asmodia that Meritxell was running seduction on Keltham and should be left undisturbed.)

Meritxell hasn't told anyone she is running seduction on Keltham because then they might judge her for failing which would be the worst thing in history. She'll tell them once she's succeeded, which she will eventually, surely.

She glares cheerfully at Asmodia.

"Sorry, Meritxell," Keltham says, thereby acknowledging that he was talking to her in particular throughout lunch, which hopefully counts as any counterflirting at all (deniably).  "Maybe later?  Asmodia's question probably has any priority on it."

It's not like Meritxell isn't hot.

The fortress is not, by and large, as pretty as an archduke's villa.  Not even close.

It does have the advantage that it's being explicitly renovated, on a somewhat larger Otolmens-funded budget than before.  Parts have been hastily redesigned for something like the real uses to which this fortress will be put.

If you leave the library-adjacent dining area, and go up a narrow spiral of stairs, there's a hastily-constructed but already-slightly-pretty private dining area, with a lockable door and quieting spell, three comfortable chairs around a small decorative table, an enchanted window that looks out on the ocean but doesn't let out any light the other way, and a secret door that leads to a soundproofed cuddleroom.

It is the Keltham Seduction Room.  Somebody literally put that name on the first edition of the fortress layout map that went up in Maillol's 'official' office, the one Keltham knows about, along with the secret cuddleroom explicitly marked, and the mistake was barely caught before Keltham got a look at this official map.

The girls had in fact not been explicitly authorized to know about this architectural feature, until approved for the use of some particular seduction operation.  Unfortunately, the first person to spot the map error as such was Paxti.  Now they all know, and furthermore, don't know this was supposed to be a secret.

Keltham is openly appreciative as he enters the private dining area.  "Oh, lovely," he says, looking out through the ocean view.  "I should've looked earlier to see what was up here."

It occurs to Asmodia that Keltham's first time seeing this room is probably wasted on the two of them, in particular.  Oh well, not like she gives any shits.  "I heard about it from Peranza, who, if I had to guess, heard about it from Paxti," Asmodia says.  "I expect it's meant more for - you and Sevar, or you and whoever, but it seems like it'd also work for private conversations."

Modulo the obvious part with Security listening to the conversation, and to her thoughts, which cannot be read.

She's got to try to think fewer unreadable thoughts.  Does she actually feel attracted to Keltham, in accordance with the 'tropes' Sevar was talking about for dath ilani romance novels?  Not that Asmodia can tell, at all.