"Ah.  I suppose I owe the tropes an apology, then."

"I will look about those priests who might otherwise be suitable to take my place, to see if there is a mathematical adept among them.  If you can indeed teach them to be my suitable successor, you may have your last reward the day after, as you will, or at the end of your days after a glorious life."

The mission is not actually optional, nor would failure at it be tolerated, but these things need not be said aloud while Sevar's strange experiment is in progress.

Asmodia bows her head.  "Acknowledged," she says.  All her thoughts are consumed with trying to restrain the continuing fear and have fewer of her thoughts be unreadable shit she did it again needs a distraction.  "The headband that Project Lawful requested for me?  At least +4 Wisdom, and anything else that can be found, including Splendour?  It is very needful to keep Keltham deceived a little longer, and the more of his Law we possess, the more likely I am to be able to teach -"

Wizards.  "I will hear from Sevar after she's reviewed your performance and come to a decision there," Aspexia Rugatonn says coldly.  "You are dismissed from this place.  Go."

Asmodia hardly needs telling twice.  She goes very very quickly.

Aspexia Rugatonn is aware that she has performed suboptimally.  It happens to her.  More often than ten years ago; she is getting old.

She ought to be happy, overjoyed, that there is now more of a prospect of being welcomed into her Lord's embrace without that proving utterly catastrophic for her Lord's interests.

If she'd found Asmodia thirty years earlier, she would have exulted.

Now it's like finishing some long-awaited work of revenge on somebody you really really wanted to torture to death thirty years ago, and while they're finally screaming their last, all you can think about is how much you wish you'd gotten this when you first wanted it, and how much the way you got it wasn't the exact way you spent thirty years dreaming of.

There's a knock on the door from outside.

Aspexia tears open the door, wondering what fool this may be, any emergency worth disturbing her is worth a message, not a polite knock on the door.

Pilar flinches visibly, and almost fumbles the piece of cake she's holding.

"I'll leave, I didn't realize it was you, my curse - must think it's being funny -"

"Stay," says Aspexia Rugatonn, and exhales a long breath.

The tropes gave her Pilar, for which she might be grateful if she knew gratitude to anyone except to her Lord.  The tropes gave her Asmodia and that is, in the end, a blessing, however bitterly delayed.  For all the uncertainty surrounding both of their purposes, it is not - entirely unsuggestive - that the tropes are not as hostile to Lord Asmodeus, as might be expected from a dath ilani romance novel; and that is an encouraging thing.

"What exactly did your curse say to you, on this occasion?"

"Nothing, I just found myself outside this door, believing that the person inside could use a piece of cake."

"I told my curse earlier in the evening, when it tried to tell me that Paxti needed cake, not to bother me about things that it thought would be beneficial to me, only what would be beneficial to Lord Asmodeus.  So I thought - when I found myself here, with the impulse to knock - that it would be the right course to knock -"

Aspexia takes the plate Pilar is holding, and samples the cake.

It's slightly stale, perhaps, but better than nothing.

"Was that - beneficial to our Lord?"

"Plausibly very slightly so.  I cannot say from this that your curse has yet betrayed us."

"Do not get into the habit of trusting it, whether or not it has as yet betrayed us visibly."

"Acknowledged."

Aspexia Rugatonn also needs a hug.

Not unless it's necessary to save all nine layers of Hell itself from destruction.

Pilar's curse knew that Pilar wouldn't do it.  Pilar's curse just wanted Pilar to know.

"Dismissed, child," Aspexia says wearily, and, not really noticing herself doing it, takes another bite of the slightly stale cake.

PL-timestamp:  Day 6-7 / Late Night

"I have an unusual request for you," Carissa tells Peranza. "For the next two hours, I want you to try to think about things that people in Cheliax - not you specifically, necessarily, but it's allowed if it's you specifically - lie to themselves about, things that dath ilani Cheliax will have to handle differently since dath ilanism makes self-deception difficult. If you are confused about this instruction, I can give examples to start you off."

Something in the back of Peranza's mind is trying to scream in terror about this being a suicide mission that ends in execution for heresy and then a worse time in Hell afterwards.

Peranza squashes the heretical thought.  Obviously Asmodeanism is not, cannot be, based on lies.  Anyone who said that would already have fallen into heresy.  This is about lies such as heretics believe, or, at any rate, those who are not perfect Asmodeans.

The part of her that's internally screaming manages to prevent her from asking for any examples, even though she doesn't understand at all.  Probably the point of this exercise is to see what she ends up understanding, right.

"Acknowledged," says Peranza.

(If Sevar has a Detect Thoughts up, or is on relay with Security who do, she might be informed that Peranza's thoughts are not full of understanding.)

Carissa gets that on relay from Security and wants to scream. "When you are explaining things to small children, you might say 'the Sun is a big ball of fire', even though my understanding is that technically the Sun is a different thing than the contents of the Elemental Plane of Fire. Not the truth, just the closest example they have the capacity to grasp. Many of the things we believe are the version for mortals of truths that mortals can't fully understand. Does that make sense."

"Of course," Peranza says, feeling very relieved.  She just needs to list out things that she knows she doesn't fully understand.

(There isn't even any terror in it.  The part that was screaming is not that smart and can't read that far ahead in this game.)

"Ione, who is a heretic and therefore wise in the ways of heretics - maybe, maybe she's just being stupid, we'll see - thinks that when we all start learning dath ilanism, we'll start questioning the version-for-mortals we're given, and we can't go to a priest for counsel because our worries are going to be ones outside the space of normal mortal errors, and then we'll end up in trouble. We are trying to get out in front of that, by finding all the possible errors we might run into, now instead of in front of Keltham."

The screaming inner terror is back!  But it's not an agonized mess of aborted thoughts because she has a clear if wordless path to follow: just list out things she's unclear on such that it's only light or at most moderate heresy to claim they could be unclear, then wait to have whatever horrible thing happens afterwards happen.

Operating under conditions of screaming inner terror so long as you can see a way to apparently-sincerely-to-yourself obey orders is a universal Chelish life skill.

"Understood," Peranza says, more firmly this time.