"I would have us all do as our Lord instructed, and not leap to greater excesses of zealousness when it seems our Lord could easily have instructed more zeal if it were wished."

"Also, if there are 'tropes' about, you are baiting them."

"I have gone to great lengths to be free of 'tropes' and had sincerely hoped never to hear of them again."

"Hell is the destruction of hope.  I presume you've read the most recent reports out of Project Lawful, regarding the asexual and her absent superpowers?  To say nothing of the hidden cleric who could only be detected by one who would not reveal the truth to Keltham and Sevar?  We must at this point regard 'tropes' as simple fact."

"Then are we to never seek any victory for Asmodeus, fearing ourselves to invoke the wrath of 'tropes' if we dare try?  Why not sign Cheliax over to the rulership of these 'tropes', then, if they and not our Lord now command us!"

The Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus is feeling very tired right now.  She did not need an entirely new class of pseudo-divine entity-forces to worry about, either, but she is not going to pretend they don't exist.

"I know that you have little taste for romance novels.  Even amid the chaos of your ascension, I do recall hearing the report that you had all Chelish authors of them put to creative deaths, by their own lovers when possible.  But in this case -"

"That is not precisely true.  As a young girl I tried several such and found them wanting.  After I ascended, yes, all of those authors met appropriately romantic fates of my own design.  But I gave new instructions to new officers, after, and in my first years personally checked all synopses to pass final word on their approval."

"Today, I admit, I have less care for such matters and so less attention.  But every year or two I deign to have some author of seemingly good repute brought before me to kneel in wait while I read their latest work, and the results are running half-and-half between authors enriched and authors incinerated.  On the whole there has been a vast improvement since my reign's beginning, if I do say so myself, though much about the temper of literate Chelish women remains to be perfected."

"What of it?"

Aspexia Rugatonn thinks to herself that she really should monitor more closely every single thing that Abrogail Thrune II ever gets up to, it's just that the dark water in that well seems to have no end.

"Turn your over-cleverness to this, then.  How is Hell's victory over all the realms to be made the appropriate ending of a romance novel?  For Keltham did seem to think, and I would not assume him wrong, that the 'tropes' stood above all gods; and if those could be invoked about Hell's victory over all realms, I might begin to hope for it myself."

"Hmmm.  I admit, I do not at all want to consider that question, but if I must, then I must."

"Corrupting Keltham would seem to be the obvious key.  The story ends with him and his Carissa finally of one accord on the matter, watching Cheliax's victory and Asmodeus's ultimate victory unfold as if it were their own."

"Or - better yet, we should try to make Carissa rather than Keltham be the character of greater importance.  Indeed, much of that work I have already done, without my even realizing what I was about.  That is encouraging.  And if Carissa is the protagonist that yields a thousand useful romantic possibilities, such as her breaking Keltham with the witness of what he has done and so finally remaking her man to her own satisfaction."

"Perhaps that is how a modern Chelish romance novel would end."  What has Abrogail done.  Aspexia needs to go read one of those novels in all haste.  "How do we make Hell's victory be a fitting ending, the only fitting ending, of a dath ilani romance novel, one produced and approved by Keltham's Civilization?"

"Hmmm.  Hm.  That does seem more difficult."

"If Keltham had failed tragically enough, out of his own deeper fault - out of his selfishness, out of his sexuality, as dath ilan deems faults in him - then would a Lawful Good writer out of dath ilan compose an ending that dath ilan thought the most terrible possible, to show the consequence -"

"Why am I now considering requisitioning for myself a tragical romance novel written by the most intelligent Lawful Good author who has ever written one.  How have I come to this, by what road have I come here?  Somewhere we went astray along the way."

"You speak as if it could possibly be only the one misstep; ask, rather, whether we ever stepped anywhere rightly."

"A thought, then.  Suppose we are to -"

"Wait!  I believe, on reflection, that I should say no more.  I should not speak any of my plans or thoughts on the subject aloud.  I have not already lost Hell's victory thereby, I think, but I cannot speak out loud of how victory is to be achieved and especially not while speaking with the Most High in a tower overlooking my city's sunset."

Is that actually necessary.

As Aspexia cannot but admit the answer is that she doesn't know either, the Queen is, of course, right in her strategy.

"As you say.  I did have one idea about that romantic tragedy, myself, but I suppose I can delay to have that discussion in a plainer chamber."

"Wiser still would be for you to write it to me, and have it delivered not by your own person."

"No, I am too much looking forwards to seeing the look on your face.  But it could be written down for you to read, if you think that will help."

The Queen looks more than slightly weary herself.  "We should end this discussion here, then, on that ominous note."

Aspexia frowns.  "Is there anything particularly dramatic I should do, in the way of departing -"

"You're making it less dramatic with every word you speak.  Just go."

As her Infernal Majestrix wills, so it must be done, in the end.  The Most High departs without further word.

Just as planned.

Cayden Cailean doesn't know why Nethys insisted on Cayden thinking that to Himself, if this meeting went approximately according to any of Scenarios 1-4 for it.  Cayden Cailean does not see how a private thought would have any further effect.  And it did not, in fact, go precisely as planned.  But it is not worth questioning Nethys about such a matter, else He starts going on about orthogonal angles and things that make you more real when they look at you and 'anthropics'.

Asmodia has ever needed to flirt before, she has needed to smile, she has needed to gasp in false pleasure.  She has never received the slightest reward in return, nothing good has ever happened to her as a result, only a diminution of punishment.

Now here she is, smiling at Keltham, coming on to him far more blatantly than most of the other girls.  And the other girls haven't actually been briefed on Asmodia's situation yet, there wasn't enough time before dinner.  So their almost entirely masked expressions of confusion are priceless, each time she touches Keltham's hand and suggests in a low sultry voice that they go off to bed together, and lie there fully clothed reading books, and maybe in a year or two she'll find him attractive.

She's flirting with a man who can't have her tonight, who'll never have her at all, who knows he can't have her, who is smiling back at her because he doesn't know he can also never have her heart, or that she'll Teleport out of his life at the first possible moment; and she was promoted in her top-secret top-priority project, to effectively second-in-command almost, and placed in charge of an incredibly challenging and exciting game of deceiving him.

Her life is just like a romance novel, now.

Except that even if Asmodia fucks up she won't get tortured, and even if she fucks up completely she can suicide before getting tortured to death and hope that somebody is nice to her again within 100 years.  Those aren't the way it would work in a romance novel at all, but both of those facts just make her life unambiguously better even if it wouldn't work as fiction.

Asmodia is right now having the time of her unfucking life, her defucked and unfuckable life.  Keltham's Civilization has it exactly right about the message that it thinks proper to tell asexuals.  Asmodia would change nothing about this situation if she could.

"I feel like you're not having enough fun with this," says Yaisa. "If it were me with a dozen boys from another world desperately fighting for my attention I would say 'kiss my feet, slaves' and see who did it fastest."

"Not everyone shares your kinks, Yaisa. Maybe Keltham enjoys watching people come up with excessively complicated plans by which to try to win him, so he can judge whose plan is the cleverest."

"I mean, you can also say, 'kiss my feet and then go bring me back a real live kangaroo, first one back wins, slaves', and he's not even doing that."

Was Carissa ever a teenage girl? She is pretty sure she wasn't.

Apparently Keltham has never had a proper chance to be a teenage boy before.

He banters back as fast as he can think of witty replies, and if he can't, he only needs to wait another two seconds and somebody will deliver him a different prompt.

If he had to declare a winner on the basis of clever lines, it'd have to be Asmodia; but that's not all this contest is about, and Keltham does not quite feel like clothed bookreading tonight.

"I suppose I could make you all compete to solve math problems for it," Keltham says, grinning about as widely as he ever has in his life.  "I mean, it's possible some of you might have other capabilities too, but that's the main capability I've seen so far from you all.  Am I missing anything I'd find interesting?"

He... doesn't think he's going to be no longer okay for casual sex, as a result of falling in something with Carissa?  He's currently looking forwards to selecting one of Ione, Meritxell, Peranza, or Tonia to schedule a nighttime rendezvous, at the end of all this; and Keltham expects that to go basically well, unless he stumbles over some weird new aspect of his own sexuality.

(Yaisa is the one to whom he feels most sexually attracted, in fact; but that would be a little um pending discussion with Carissa et. al. of what happens to, among other candidates, Yaisa.)

(He'll ask what a 'slave' is later, if he remembers; from context it's obviously something like 'masochist' or 'submissive'.)

"You make us solve math problems all day," Yaisa says. "The romantic contest should be of a different nature. Or I suppose it could be something like strip-solving-math-problems. I'll lose, and Asmodia will win, but apparently that suits us both."

"You should really tell the site manager that our uniforms aren't sexy enough so they budget us new clothes," Tonia says. 

"The site manager will say, 'ah, but perhaps the clothes will be Kuthite spies,'" says Meritxell, "and propose instead that we all go around naked."

"Well, you know, he has a point, have you checked if your clothes are Kuthite spies?"

"- clarification, clothes cannot actually be spies," says Meritxell helpfully to Keltham. And to Yaisa, "why, I check every morning, before I prepare spells. Don't you?"