"I can consistently not be able to seduce anyone worth a fuck.  That does lie within my acting abilities."

"Were you, when you said that, actually just trying to seduce Keltham from your best model of how to do it or were you doing something more complicated."

"Trying to seduce Keltham in one minute, while so terrified that producing an outward appearance of not being terrified was the limit of my acting abilities and I couldn't fake any other emotions."

"I knew Nethys had made me an oracle, I knew that'd give me an alignment aura of Lawful Evil from my personal aura only, I knew that might look at first like I just got a single Lawful Evil cleric circle but that I wouldn't be able to get past the subsequent investigation, I knew that if I couldn't attach myself to Keltham before he left the room I was dead and that Nethys would shatter my soul if I didn't try.  I couldn't be seductive under those circumstances, all I could do was make Keltham the biggest offer I knew how to make."

"So alter Ione gets added to this project. She's a Nethysian and her brother has told her to keep quiet about it, and she knows he hates her but she doesn't know if he's lying about that. Then it immediately becomes clear that this warrants more resources than are currently pointed at it and she wants to be among the people who gets to stay very very badly and she decides that the thing to do is seduce Keltham in one minute and tries it. 

What...else does that produce, what else is that alter Ione up to, how would that alter Ione address her error when she realized that actually being a Nethysian was fine and that she's not going to get discarded from the project as long as she can keep learning the math."

"...I mean, as near as I can tell, the answer to that is alterIone, who I've been keeping as close to realIone as possible?  She saved the Project from Nidal in the process of completely blowing her cover as a Nethysian, and everybody accepted her because she was powerful and useful.  Then she was freed of all the horrible fears that had cowed her over her whole life before, and burst out of her shell like a phoenix rising.  This, by the way, is also incredibly visibly true of Asmodia if you have any before-and-after comparison."

"Asmodia went to Hell and it was good for her," Carissa says flatly. "She can decide for herself if she's going to have a more detailed story prepared than that, but it's what the rest of us observed and it is unsurprising to us because Hell is often equipped to help people notice ways they were holding themselves back."

"Gosh, I wonder what interesting thing will happen to Yaisa, that causes her to stop being afraid of Hell, and that we'll have to cover up from Keltham so he doesn't notice the tropes densely pressing in on him from all directions."

"Do I have approval here?  It sounded like I have approval."

"You're dismissed; come to us if there's anything else of note in the transcripts of all your conversations with Keltham you're going to go read."

She'll walk out without further ado, then.

"Maybe the secret Keltham possesses is the secret of getting Cheliax to not write outrageously manipulative and deceptive contracts."

"If you think I'm underpaid you can just pay me more, you know, you don't have to lose bets to me."

"All right, what's your interpretation."

"I don't think he can possibly have been warned that Cheliax usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts, because he'd just leave. I checked that assumption by reaching out to our Church in Lingshen, where I figured most people wouldn't be apprised of Inner Sea politics, and asking them to ask all their priests what they'd do in a similar situation, and none of them would stay in the country that usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts. Because it's inherently appalling and because why would you want to make them richer even if you could. 

So - he's this cautious when not warned that Cheliax usually writes deceptive or manipulative contracts, or this is standard language where he's from, and he's very financially sophisticated. We knew his civilization was very financially sophisticated, but he must individually work in contracts within it, to have been able to reproduce all this from memory, or else have some way to access its information and records, or to speak - perhaps via Sending - with the people of his home world. If he has that I'm guessing it's very limited - Sending would be limited enough - because he would hire a bunch of advisors there to review everything, if it weren't too limited, and they'd have caught Cheliax in a lie by now."

"Or Cheliax is also communicating with this other world on their own and, for example, bribing his team of advisors to assure him everything is fine, or manipulating their communications to him."

"Maybe? I lean against that whole class of theories because Cheliax is behaving like if he dies or leaves the interdiction zone they're out of the game forever, which is less true if they have contact with his world."

"In what sense are they behaving like that?"

"I'm at 90% now that everyone identified as associated with the project is still on-site in the fortress in the interdiction zone, despite having skillsets that'd be incredibly useful elsewhere. They aren't yet observed to be increasing the number of Project Lawful girls. They wrote this notably conciliatory contract, and sold him an option on Sevar's soul, which is not something Hell generally does or is willing to be known to do, and that contract was also notably careful. To our best observations he hasn't left the building since he got there. Sevar's been assigned responsibility to a fairly ludicrous degree given what we've been able to learn about her qualifications.

None of those are dispositive but they're 2:1 each, more in some cases, for scenarios where Cheliax does not actually have a plan they think is viable to survive long-term in a world where he leaves. This is a major focus of Intelligence at this time, obviously, since it means that we may have a war on our hands the second we pick him up."

"Or the kind of civilized but unpleasant interaction with which two Lawful countries in principle ought to be able to avert war, not that I know it to have ever worked, where we arrive at agreement on how it'd go and pay out accordingly."

"It's Cheliax. I wouldn't trust them with a peace treaty; sure, they won't break it, but it might have a hole I can't see. - relatedly, how sure are we that these contracts are in fact relatively innocuous?"

"Not positive but we do have a lot of effort pointed at identifying unexpected interactions of the terms and there are some ways they can cheat him on the margins, but - solid odds, at this point, that they mostly felt constrained to straightforwardness on the core terms, lest they lose him entirely. It's Cheliax, they're lying as much as they can get away with, but the most significant new information from this contract is that there are real limits here to how much they can get away with."

"Also that he's going to make Cheliax very rich on fairly short timescales."

"Also that."

"So we have to be prepared for a war with Cheliax at the drop of a hat, while they're getting stronger every day and we're not? And they obviously already outmatch us, if not tied up in Nidal and at the Worldwound? Have we asked Nefreti -"

"We have commissioned a scroll of Wish from Felandrial Morgethai. We gamble that Keltham, when he flees, will knowably to Cheliax know some things we could do with it if they saw fit to go to war."

"Which I have at eighty percent."