Tonia is extremely stressed. 

She takes the point that she is supposed to be extremely stressed because if they were actually traitors escaping with Keltham they'd be extremely stressed. But the punishment for the other girls, when they inevitably fail, is going to be in line with their Taldor-punishment rule. And Tonia is going to be actually punished. And the only way to protect herself is to do something impossible. 

Pilar is obviously the person you want on your team for doing something impossible, since maybe Cayden Cailean will help. (She knows that Cayden Cailean won't help, but she wouldn't know that in alter-Cheliax. Or is she allowed to use all the information she has, for this exercise? It gets a bit mixed up, when you do it too long.) Anyway, Pilar is utterly loyal to Asmodeus, so you can only get on Pilar's team if you have a good reason what you're doing serves Asmodeus. ...they don't have to be escaping to defect, they could also be escaping because they realized that the project was violating the rules Asmodeus gave for it? 

Message to Pilar: so, if you found out that Sevar didn't serve Asmodeus and the project was breaking the rules He sent us, what would you try. 

Is Pilar's curse up for this, by any chance?

Absolutely.  Showing them exactly how easy it would have been for Pilar's curse to get Keltham out is a wonderful trust-building exercise!

Message from Security to Sevar:  We see what you're thinking.  We'll run it past Subirachs, and then tell half the Security they can't run Detect Thoughts starting right away, during what's going to be an exercise, so they won't end up warned of what you're planning to try yourself.

Sure. Tell them to report to me for further instructions in ten minutes.

Meritxell considers. 

They're going to lose, obviously; the point of this exercise is to learn from what happens when they lose, rather than being the sort of exercise where you win. That does not make her want to win any less. At the absolute minimum she wants to be declared the most impressive. 

That requires thinking of an impressive idea, unfortunately, and she's not immediately coming up with one. She could....fight a Security? She almost definitely loses. Impersonate a Security? She almost definitely loses.  Impersonate Sevar? That's entertaining but in no way actually solves her problem. Impersonate the Queen? She likes being alive. Talk a Security into defecting with her by promising them all the riches of ......wherever they're defecting to, which is probably poorer than Cheliax? No, that's no good either....

Well, there's always the straightforward, honorable, only likely to fail approach of putting up See Invisibility and trying to kill a Security before they have time to get off a warning, and then trying to use whatever items and scrolls they have to get clear of the Forbiddance before they miss a checkin. It's the sort of plan that usually won't work but not the sort of plan that will never work, and tropes might be the kind of thing that likes long shots. 

"All right," says Carissa. "I'm going to go tell Security that we're doing a training exercise in which one girl is a traitor while the rest remain loyal. And that they're supposed to pretend not to know that and to act normally. Good luck, may the strong triumph and the weak suffer, have fun out there."

Sometimes Gregoria wonders if joining Project Lawful was a mistake. It can't be, since it wasn't a voluntary decision, but still.

Carissa presents Security with an incomplete briefing on today's exercise, which will be incomplete because the Security assigned to participate in the exercise and ordered already not to use Detect Thoughts will best satisfy their roles if they are missing much relevant context: the exercise is that one of the girls is a traitor, but they are expected not to act on that knowledge and to persist in their usual habits.

Furthermore, they are to pretend, for today, to be limited in the fashion that Security in alter-Cheliax would be limited. They may not use Detect Thoughts; if they capture the suspected traitor alive they have to dawdle for ten full minutes before extracting information such as whether this was in fact the traitor. Other Security has been assigned to ensuring that these limitations don't produce any genuine security holes. 

Finally, they are for this exercise not to carry the scrolls of Teleport assigned to them, because they don't want this exercise to present the girls with a genuine temptation to defect; they are to trade them for these rolls of paper that say 'Teleport' on them, which are a win condition for the girls. Again, other Security has been assigned to ensuring that these limitations don't produce any genuine security holes. 

"It is my hope and expectation that you will apprehend the pretend-traitor without incident; it'd be more convenient if you don't kill her, but killing her is preferable to letting her win, unless it's Ione, who should be permitted to win rather than killed, if relevant. The exercise is expected to end tonight, but you should consider it still underway until Subirachs tells you otherwise, or until you get a top-priority alert from those Security not on this assignment. You're dismissed. Olegario, a word."

"Your will, Chosen."  Olegario will follow her, or stay to speak to her, as she seems to prefer.

Stay to speak with her. "I'm participating in this exercise; I might be a traitor, today. You are to ignore any further instructions from me until Subirachs has confirmed that this exercise is over. Further, should you ever have cause for doubt that I am on the path Asmodeus set out for me, you are permitted to speak to Subirachs of it, as it is likelier that I have been impersonated or compulsioned, or that the occasion is a test, than that Asmodeus has genuinely led me into opposition to His church on Golarion."

"Acknowledged, sir," says Olegario; that he's not calling her Chosen should show he understood.

"Dismissed." 

She waits for him to leave the room.

Now there are some discarded scrolls of Teleport in a pile on the table. She takes one and puts it in her bag. As they say in dath ilan, cheating is technique. "Get the rest of those somewhere safe," she tells the non-participating Security, and heads out to lunch.

Whoever's job it is to torture Carissa Sevar, Elias Abarco thinks as he gathers the remaining scrolls, is not doing it enough.

Lunch is had by all!  It's a much tenser lunch than usual.  Messages get passed around now and then, in absolutely no more than the usual quantity for a lunch.  As Asmodia warned everyone earlier, they had better not give away that it's more than one girl participating, if they want to have any chance at this.

And then girls drift off to the library, or in Yaisa's case to her bedroom to prepare spells, which she did not bother to do this morning, a decision she now feels very rewarded for. She can put some offensive spells together - they don't have much chance of working, but they're not the whole plan. 

Carissa goes to her room, checks it for spies, locks it, and starts preparing spells as well.

Five minutes later, while Carissa sits in her room apparently preparing spells, an invisible Carissa streams in gaseous form up through the chimney and out of the fortress. (She loses the illusion once she's seven hundred feet away from it, not that the illusion is actually a substantial part of the plan.)

(She had those spells prepared anyway, in case she needed them during the earlier Keltham escape sequence.)

Sevar is almost outside the Forbiddance when she gets struck with a Dimensional Anchor spell, from an angle she doesn't see.

...was that one of the Security who was in the exercise group, or a Security still really on guard?  Either way, it's clear Carissa Sevar could not have escaped that way in realCheliax.

...good. Real Cheliax's competence to keep actual defectors from escaping is important for all her plans. 

(She wasn't, actually, defecting, obviously. She had considered burning the Teleport to go visit Egorian but decided against.)

Peranza seduces a Security officer, to the point of actually having sex with him, before trying to be very, very persuasive about how much she would really like to go on an Ostenso shopping trip, her being escorted there is fine, she'll have sex with him for weeks if he does.

Security has been tensely trying to figure out if he would have been seducible if he hadn't been warned in advance.  Not seducible about the trip, obviously, seducible about the sex.  But he's one of the Securities who proved seducible by Yaisa, and the rest of Security knows that, and he doesn't want to have to defend the plausibility of his turning Peranza down.

That makes the safer course deciding that he would have fallen for it.  He took off his clothes with Yaisa, he'll take off his clothes with Peranza.  If she can successfully take him out while she's naked, he'll deserve whatever he gets.

(He is nonetheless wary of Peranza, focusing on her, ready for her to try something, probably more than he would be if he hadn't been warned - but it's not like he wouldn't have been wary at all otherwise, right.)

Security has been warned there's a traitor but thinks there's one of them; that makes the best course of action teaming up. Yaisa has made herself and Gregoria and Meritxell invisible; Meritxell has a knife and thinks she can maybe kill a high enough level wizard with one strike but even if not, there'll be three other people trying. 

She hasn't actually murdered anyone before, but it's good to get that out of the way early, really. 

She stabs the Security through the eye; it's not quite likeliest to kill him but it's sufficiently sure to be debilitating if it doesn't.

He doesn't die of the assassination strike and they don't win in the end but it is a very close thing.  The sort of close where somebody is bound to think that, if Meritxell had more practice and a better weapon - or if Meritxell and Gregoria had a chance to prepare their own spells - or if Yaisa's spellbook also had Cat's Grace, Bull's Strength, and True Strike - he'd be dead.

There will be consequences about this.

Ione waits until much of the afternoon is up before she makes her move.  If Ione tries something, even if she succeeds, Security might expect the exercise to be over after that.  Her plan is a simple one, she is on the Nethysian punishment plan rather than even the lax one, and Ione doesn't want to blow other girls' chances at avoiding punishment by making it clear earlier that more than one girl might be a traitor.

By the time Ione's moment comes around, Asmodia doesn't seem to be around, so Ione carries out the plan on a morose Peranza instead.  She uses Message instead of shouting; on reflection, that gives them even less time to try Hold Person on her.

Message to Peranza:

Brace yourself, and don't react to what I'm about to say, or do.

KELTHAM EVIL TORTURES PEOPLE CHELIAX IS LYING TO YOU ABADAR IS YOUR GOD DON'T ACCEPT ANY RESURRECTIONS UNTIL YOU MAKE IT TO AXIS AND TALK TO SOMEBODY

Peranza is startled enough that she says "What?" out loud, but without a Detect Thoughts running, that's not enough to cue Security to use Hold Person or Dominate Person on Ione before Ione mimes a pretty realistic assassination strike on Peranza, through her eye, with a kitchen blade.