Carissa notices the absurd temptation to tell Asmodia it'll be all right, which it probably will but she doesn't know, and presumably the Grand High Priestess is as terrifying as is salutary anyway and shouldn't be undermined even if Carissa knew, and had a good reason to reassure Asmodia, which she does not. Asmodia will get what serves Asmodeus, as will we all. 

She should go talk with Maillol about arrangements for the girls being fired from the project. She does that. 

The girl's thoughts are slightly strange, they cut out sometimes, as if she were suppressing some ill thought and doing quite a good job of that.  Usually there are traces, the thought before the suppressed thought is revealing.  If Rugatonn used one of her full-caster-level Detect Thoughts, she could probably go right past this Asmodia's defenses, but those she must save and hazard wisely.

The thoughts Rugatonn can detect are all entirely ordinary terror.

She lets Asmodia go on kneeling and scaring herself for a time, for this will also help teach a lesson, and finally Rugatonn speaks.  "Rise, Asmodia.  You can expect no harm if you conduct yourself with a modicum of prudence."

Asmodia scrambles to her feet, not entirely able to hide her tremors.  Very very briefly the thought occurs to her to wonder why this could not have been said earlier, before she hammers it down with prudence.

"How may I serve, Most High?" she says, for the first lesson of Hell is to obey.

"You will have a little more than two hours in which to think about certain matters, during which Security will prevent you from leaving this room, but will bring you any notes you desire, or even assistance if you think that helpful to you.  Foremost, use that time to consider those arts by which one would seek to deceive a dath ilani and weave about him an illusion he cannot distinguish from reality, even though, in the end, the two must be distinct."

"Secondarily I will set you a puzzle, or rather, a subject to consider.  Spend a quarter-hour on it, at the end of your time, and report back to me on your thoughts after I return to you.  Have you recovered from your terror enough that you are hearing and understanding these words?"

"Yes, Most High.  What is the other puzzle I am to consider?"  She briefly considers asking what happens if she fails, rejects the thought, she has been told once that she will not be harmed if she shows a little prudence and it is not prudent to make the Most High repeat herself.

"The way of diligent obedience to something greater than yourself, which cannot see you clearly, which can speak to you hardly at all, whose goals and purposes you understand but barely and often with wild errors on your own part, something which in some ways knows far better than you do the consequences of your acts and yet too often fails to know what any mortal could see in moments with their mortal eyes."

"One might consider an adult trying to guide a three-year-old through a dungeon, seen in flashes through foggy glass, and only every ten minutes may they call out to the child at all; I ask not what must be the way of that adult, but the way of that child."

"I would have you speak to me upon this topic as it might be spoken of by a dath ilani, or out of your own knowledge of such Law as Keltham has taught."

"Your project of deceiving Keltham will have fruits evaluated by Sevar.  Your thoughts on obedience will be evaluated by me.  The work that you do for Sevar is more urgent, and, unless your other work has entirely stalled out before then, you will not spend more than fifteen minutes considering the question I just posed you.  If you cannot turn your thoughts from my interesting question and complete your more important work, you will fail your more important work and I do expect that to be the more severe cost to you than failing my own small test."

"These instructions will be copied to you in writing by the Security who has witnessed it.  Do you have any questions?"

Her only thoughts are on how to serve more effectively, and she is terrified still, but this is her only chance to speak, she needs to find out the most vital information and ask for it.  "Is it permitted that I know the purpose behind your question upon obedience?"

"I will not tell it to you.  You could, I suppose, try to deduce the purpose behind my instructions; and then, with that understanding, you could do what you deemed best yourself to serve what you guessed to be my purpose, rather than being constrained by the chains of following instructions you do not really understand."

Aspexia Rugatonn smiles.  It's not one of the pleasant smiles.

"But, even then, little child, you would not be punished.  The habit of punishing that as much as I would wish, would be too expensive to Cheliax for me to follow all my impulses there.  Sevar is running her experiment.  I will not invalidate it.  Not so long as you exercise a modicum of prudence.  Any further questions?"

"About what is it most important that I exercise this modicum of prudence, Most High?"

"Invoke none of the active functions of my Crown, while I sleep the two hours I must sleep every day.  Do not fear invoking them by accident, a deliberate will is required."

Aspexia lifts the Crown of the Most High from off her head, as she has not done in quite some time now, and diminishes.

You would not be able to tell, unless you knew her well, that who stands before Asmodia now is not the true Most High, but only a creature of habits and reflexes and plans already laid.

Asmodia is not particularly remembering to breathe, she is so shocked.  She has never heard of such a thing, never.

A creature of habit and pre-laid plans lays the Crown on Asmodia's head.  The artifact changes shape as well, to a form less recognizable if no less potent.

"There are not such things as headbands of +4 to Intelligence and Wisdom lying about without wearers," says the creature of habit and pre-laid plans.  "This Crown is +6 to Wisdom and +4 to Intelligence.  And +4 to Splendour, if that matters for anything.  See well what you can do with it, because only very grand results will lead to there ever being a second opportunity like this.  Manage anything decent and a headband of +4 Wisdom will be found for you, to be used with Fox's Cunnings."

"I go now to sleep; you have two hours or some tiny fraction more."

The flesh golem following the remembered instruction of the true Most High, who does not in this moment exist anywhere in Golarion, turns to depart.

Asmodia is calling to Security in all haste: she needs her notes, she needs the exact text of the questions that Keltham laid, she desires Ione brought to her even if she can but serve as sounding-board, and now she is already thinking while she awaits those resources.  To waste time would not be wise, and Asmodia is nothing, in this moment, if not wise.

"Keltham wants the other girls put up somewhere comfortable, maybe in this building, and taught some economically valuable skill," Carissa tells Maillol. "I don't think he suspects anything about Hell. Might be for the best anyway, for the girls remaining in the project to not be terrified of failing out, and so we don't have to micromanage the conversations where he fires them to prevent desperate outbursts of some kind or another."

"I hesitate to contradict you on a matter of Keltham psychology.  But in this case, I would wager money," the wording is deliberate, "that our pet cleric of Abadar wants the girls to not be any worse off than if they'd never tried to trade with him."

"That's what he wants.  What do we want?  We want him to believe they're fine, we want to present him with the same visible appearances that alter-Cheliax would..."

"Yep. Which we could achieve with impersonators and lying to the girls remaining in the project, if you've got some compelling reason to?" Though the idea makes her uneasy; it feels like more of a betrayal of Keltham than all the rest, somehow. 

"Impersonators are expensive.  Keeping the failures around the fortress isn't cheap, but it's a lot less expensive than that."

"Other option that occurs to me is sending them to Egorian to keep up appearances about the fake Project Lawful and free up an impersonator there," and more importantly, get them out of Maillol's personal hair, "but you'd need to decide what alter-Cheliax would be doing with them in Egorian.  Alter-Cheliax doesn't have to worry about somebody using Detect Thoughts on the girls, since that spell doesn't exist there, I think?  Which means they have wider options than we have in reality."

"I think alterCheliax doesn't send them to Egorian, since alterCheliax isn't running an elaborate con in Egorian. And I think it'll cross his mind that we're likelier to be lying about them being all right if he can't check than if he can. If we think alterCheliax should be running the thing we're running in Egorian... I need to think that through, probably with Asmodia. In alterCheliax Iomedae's not visibly expending tons of resources trying to see what's going on with our operations, and I don't think Osirion tried to kidnap Pilar either."

"Conventional theory of deception is that we'd love to have him get suspicious of how they're doing in Egorian, demand they be Teleported in right now for him to check up on, we promptly do, turns out they're fine."

"I'm still struggling with how the thing you do with dath ilani is... not that."

"The reason that would normally work is that most people would be matching new evidence they got to there being a deception in Egorian, building steadily greater conviction that there was a deception in Egorian, and on being satisfied there was no deception in Egorian decide that maybe they were over pattern matching and aren't being deceived. We'd be using against them their own tendency to - make sense of the world by weighing a couple stories instead of all of them. Keltham will instead have a general probability he's being lied to about something important that will go up if we do suspicious things, and if he's later satisfied there's nothing up in Egorian he'll just consider the conspiracies not in Egorian. AlterCheliax needs to be one whole fabric that produces everything we do, or we'll lose. ....lose sooner. I don't think this is going to last forever. I'm hoping to get a year out of it.

Also, I might want him to hook up with Yaisa. Maybe he'll have an easier time being Evil with girls he doesn't need for his research project."

"I was going to say that alter-Maillol wants the failures out of his management work and more limited budget, and does look for excuses to put them somewhere like Egorian or Ostenso.  But if he needs to create a new project section to host Yaisa regardless, it's not much more work for him to keep the others here too."  (This also happens to be true of the real Maillol.)

"Our pet Abadar cleric is going to need a story for why alter-Yaisa is sleeping with him if he's no longer her boss - he'll want to know what she's getting out of that in return, if not better promotion prospects.  Think you've already run into some of that."

"I think he actually doesn't think we're sleeping with him for promotion prospects! Alter Yaisa is just very into him, and likes having his attention, and wants to be the one who gets him to stop being so Good all the time. If Yaisa can pull that off, which I'll ask Subirachs."

"...I don't understand alter-Cheliax teenaged girls, but hopefully that's not too much of my job and Asmodia can advise me on whatever is."

"Keltham talked about wanting to check over if their options were good enough, not their fates, he wants to offer them choices and see what they pick.  What else would alter-Cheliax have offered them that they're turning down to stay in the fortress?  Obviously not free run of Ostenso while they learn in an enchanter's workshop there, because that they'd just take.  So even without Detect Thoughts existing, alter-Cheliax has to be too worried about security issues to let them do that, or any other jobs nicer than being stuck in a fortress.  Am I doing this right?"

"Slightly backwards. What does alter Cheliax offer them, just from what we established about it not from what we want it to offer? But in this case I think it gets the same answer - alter Cheliax is still paranoid about someone going after the former Project Lawful girls for intel and wants them somewhere safe. They could be offered a role on another secret project if there's one they'd be suited to, they could be offered powerful magic to untraceably change their identities and start new lives on the other side of the world if such magic is available to Cheliax, which I don't know it to be, they could be offered a role on the project doing support magic..."

Carissa Sevar, who was admittedly rushed, has neglected to include some critical advice and life experience with respect to dating dath ilani.

Meritxell has made the serious error of mentioning that she didn't fully grasp some of what Keltham said earlier about stock companies.

Keltham is currently explaining how a Lawful corporation has an internal prediction market, which forecasts the observable results on running various possible projects that company could be trying, which in turn is used to generate an estimate of marginal returns on marginal internal investment; this prevents a corporation from engaging in obvious madness like accepting an internal project with 6% returns while turning down another internal project with expected 10% returns.

The wider market, obviously, would also like to invest all its money where it'll get the highest returns; but it's usually not efficient to offer the broader market a specialized sub-ownership of particular corporate subprojects, since the ultimate usefulness of corporate subprojects is usually dependent on many other internal outputs of the company.  It doesn't do any good to have a 'website' without something to sell from it.  Sure, if everyone was an ideal agent, they'd be able to break things down in such a fine-grained way.  But the friction costs and imperfect knowledge are such that it's not worth breaking companies into even smaller ownable pieces.  So the wider stock market can only own shares of whole corporations, which combine the outputs and costs of all that company's projects.

Thus any corporation continuously buys or sells its own stock, or rather, has standing limit orders into the stock market to buy various quantities if the price goes low or sell various quantities if the price goes high, at prices that company sets depending on its internal belief about the returns from investing or not investing in the marginal subprojects being considered.  If the company isn't considered credible by the wider market, its stock will go lower and the company will automatically buy that stock, which leaves them less money to invest in new projects internally, and means that they only invest in projects with relatively higher returns - doing less total investment, but getting higher returns on the internal investments that they do start.  Conversely if the wider market thinks a company's promises to do a lot with money are credible, the stock price will go up and money will flow into that company until they no longer have internal investment prospects that credibly beat the broader market.

This may sound complicated, and it is probably a relatively more complicated part of the machinery that is necessarily implied by the existence of distinct stock corporations in the first place.  But the alternative, if you zoom out and look at the whole planet of dath ilan, is that a corporation in one place would be investing in a project with internally expected returns of 6%, and somebody on the other side of the planet would be turning down a project with market-credible returns of 10%, which means you could reorganize the whole planet and do better in a predictable way.  So whatever does happen as a consequence of the existence of stock corporations, it has to be not that.

Some form of drastic action on Meritxell's part is obviously required if she wants to get back on track to having sex with this person.  What does she do, if anything?