"Clothes can't be spies?" says Keltham to Meritxell.  "That sounds like something a piece of clothing would want me to believe.  Are you a piece of clothing?  What happens when you are taken off?"

"Why, I don't know! Many men have tried to take me off but none of them were clever enough, or dangerous enough, or dath ilani enough, so there's no way to know if it's even possible."

"This would seem to imply that you are not only clothing, but men's clothing, and yet you appear to me to be a woman, which would self-evidently make you a spy.  Are your apparent clothes also spies?"

"Well, you can't check if someone's clothes are spies while they're wearing them, which is why I check in the morning before getting dressed. So whether my clothes are spies is unknowable until someone manages to coax me out of them."

"And what am I expected to do, after what sounds like a great deal of effort on my part, if beneath all of your clothing is, in fact, a man's shirt?"

"Compose the world's most interesting urgent security breach report for the Grand High Priestess, obviously. 'The project has been infiltrated by a shirt pretending to be Meritxell. Two new projects should be spun up at once to research the violations of the laws of magic that this implies.'"

"You have some strange notions of how to spend a fun evening.  I thought you might suggest that, in this case, I might as well try wearing you, but if you'd rather file security breach reports..."

"I told you, no man has ever succeeded in wearing me. What makes you think you're different?"

"No man of Golarion has ever worn such a shirt as I wear even now.  Also the last god who went against me ended up in a little box."

"Then perhaps you could triumph where all before you have failed. Or perhaps when you turned your gaze from defeating gods to wearing me, you aimed too high even for a dath ilani."

"Can't actually say no if you put it that way.  See you later in the evening?  Just to be clear to everyone else, though, that isn't going to work on me twice."

"Nothing will work on you twice," Yaisa says. "We'll have to get up to steadily more depraved things just to do something you haven't thought of, and in two months you'll only want squid, polymorphed into girls, whose eternal servitude you earned by slaying their squid Zon-Kuthon."

Meritxell beams fiercely at Keltham. "See you later tonight."

"See you later, Meritxell.  Well, also see you imminently after dinnertime, if that time works for you and the other three."

"And Yaisa... welcome to Civilization."

PL-timestamp:  Day 6 / Evening

They've got something like a proper meeting / breakout room, now, for this conversation.  Well, not by Civilized standards, obviously, but better than just grabbing a random not-especially-so-purposed room in an archduke's villa.

...Keltham probably owes that guy a favor at some point.

Anyways.  It's pretty clear at this point that competence at learning Law has stratified into Carissa-Asmodia-Meritxell-Ione, Pilar-Gregoria-Peranza-Tonia, and Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  The original contract for having the girls come in was for one week, as Keltham understands it.

So, um.  Keltham isn't sure what's... expected, about Jacme-Pela-Paxti-Yaisa.  On his model of things, the bottom third there will noticeably slow down further lecture learning, and probably not produce enough work output to make up for it.  And if there's any ability to add additional people, they're opportunity-costly, they'd take up a limited number of student slots...

Okay, now that he's saying this out loud it's pretty obvious what the decision has to be, even though Keltham really doesn't like it.  (And feels even worse about how he was just flirting with them while managing not to think through this line of thought to its clear conclusion, though Keltham doesn't say any of that out loud.)

How does Cheliax handle this situation?  In Civilization in non-top-secret projects, you just let people go work on something they'll be better at.  In Civilization's top-secret projects, everybody who goes through an elaborate screening process to receive classified info has been predicted by prediction market to work out.  In either case, you had an explicit understanding with them before they came in about under what circumstances they'd go, but Keltham is kinda guessing that the reason this explicit understanding has not been mentioned to him is that it does not in fact exist.

This is a foundational question of how alterCheliax treats people in a way Keltham will accept, not of figuring out the consequences of deceptions already decided.  Asmodia will assume it's Sevar's work unless Sevar tells her otherwise.

"On a normal military secret project, you can get reassigned, if the project's not a good fit for you and you've maintained the level of top secret clearance you needed for it in the first place. If you accidentally wandered into something with clearance wildly above yours, and then aren't a good fit - honestly, the usual is probably that you go to Hell, at least until you no longer know anything top secret - like, in a year or two it'll likely be fine to let them go back to their lives. But - if you're going to be reluctant to drop unpromising students from the project for that reason, I don't see an issue with doing something else?"

"I've actually got no idea how much of a hardship it would be considered to be to spend a couple of years in Hell, and I definitely wouldn't be asking that of somebody unless that part had been explicitly explained in advance.  Given how long it took between when I got here and there were girls in the library, there must have been either a very standard contract or a very improvised one - does anybody have a copy on hand?"

As of slightly over an hour ago, yes, this obviously Ordinary-existent piece of physical evidence that Keltham could have demanded at any time in the past six days now exists; and Sevar thought through this section in advance.

"I brought mine," Asmodia says, and hands hers over.  She doesn't allow the slightest trace of triumph to show on her face, even though, in her own opinion, this wouldn't have gotten done in time without her helping to prompt it.  "I think you probably want section 5 point... 3?"

This contract does permit, in section 5.4.1, that if the contractee is exposed to sufficiently secret information and better options don't exist for hiding it, the Chelish government can demand that somebody go to Hell and stay there for up to 5 years as required.  The 5 is written into a line for the exact number.

He finds it soon enough.

"I'm not saying it's not logical, or even that it's not sensible, but this is still weirding me out a bit.  Do people come back totally fine from that, staying in Hell that long doesn't make them less suited to Golarion?  There's no probabilities, what did they think the probability of this being invoked was, when they signed the contract..."

"This is frankly a much more extreme decision than I thought we'd be facing when we considered startup composition.  I'm not sure I feel okay making it."

"If you'd rather the girls get put in a different wing of the fortress being taught something tricky - ring forging - by a senior wizard, there so you can visit them and sleep with Yaisa occasionally, I don't think anyone would object. If that - lowers the barrier to you removing people from the project - it seems obviously worth it. You're allowed to be Evil and just do whatever is most comfortable for you."

"Thank you for reminding me of that, it is not actually something you hear in Civilization very often."

"I'd like them to have that choice, yeah.  Ideally some other choices too, even if it means calling in favors from Cheliax.  It is not something I'd decide one way or the other for them."  He notes that feeling of moral dissonance that he's had before, when Carissa talked about selling tickets to watch rats devouring each other.  "And unless Yaisa has a very specific sexuality that somebody needs to inform me about if so, she isn't to be told that her ability to stay here is contingent on her fucking me, nor will it, in fact, be so."

Asmodia wishes again that she had some way of knowing if the Gardens of Erecura would also receive Paxti, if Paxti could somehow be advised that the Hell option is her best bet... how would she even communicate that, though, or have Paxti follow through, in a way that wouldn't set off twenty kinds of whatthefuck nearby?

Was that thought a stupid one?  No, if someone somewhere cared about Asmodia, she's allowed to give a fuck about Paxti.  Or the other three, too, though that thought seems stranger as yet.

"Sure, that seems reasonable. You have a lot of latitude; give them some choices. If the choices are good it'll also probably help with other students not being scared of failing out of the project, which I bet you'll tell me is useful for learning dath ilanism. And no, I don't think you should keep Yaisa here conditionally, I just think she's obviously into you. ...and I may have, at risk of becoming a too-Good person with a too big headband, asked the High Priestess if she happened to know which other girls like getting hurt, because ...."