Ione is actually holding the blade, too!  She's just holding it reversed so that it's the wide hilt that strikes Peranza hard over her eye socket, rather than the blade.

Asmodia, considering things, decides that she needs to not in any way risk blowing her cover with the comms officer who sent her message to Gorthoklek.  Her plan needs to not use that fact at all.  Gorthoklek might not be amused himself, among other considerations.

So Asmodia goes over to the real temple mid-afternoon, and demands to examine copies of some standing orders.  She gets confused looks but obedience from some officers who haven't been told about the exercise.

Asmodia takes the paperwork to a nearby table to examine it, and then, with some effort, copies a forgery of Subirachs's signature to some paperwork she's already made up in her best handwriting.

There's enough of a passageway from the main temple to the comms office that Asmodia can use her disguise items from the morning exercise, which she has accidentally forgotten to give back, to turn into Subirachs in that passageway.  'Subirachs' hands the paperwork to the comms officer, and is rather brief about her directions, but that seems to raise no suspicion.

If they claim one of the remaining Security decided Asmodia needed a full-time invisible watcher while going to the real temple, Asmodia will complain about that not being realistic.

...but that all probably still isn't going to work, or be accepted if it does work, or be the most impressive performance if accepted.

So next Asmodia goes over to requisitions and asks for a wand of Hold Person that Project Lawful needs for a training exercise they're running while Keltham is statued.  She's duly marked down as having requisitioned it.

After that Asmodia conspires with Pilar, to have Pilar distract a Security officer by jumping him, after which Asmodia will use this wand of Hold Person she has obtained by undisclosed means to take down the Security.  She doesn't trust her ability to draw and fire the wand unobserved if the Security's not distracted.

Pilar, rather bemusedly, agrees to this, and is promptly stunned while trying to grab the Security officer.

(This would be because Asmodia has turned Pilar in as a traitor.)

Pilar is not really sure what happened there, or if Asmodia got caught too.

But you know, that business a bit earlier, where the Chelish intelligence services didn't want to trust Pilar's ability to stand up under torture, if that hadn't already been tried on her?  That was kind of insulting.  Pilar is not actually giving up her co-conspirator unless Security can actually fucking get it out of her.

...which, in turn, means that Pilar Pineda is in a security holding cell, being tortured, at the time when Tonia - who was previously told to trust in Pilar's curse and await further developments - finds herself a hundred paces outside the Forbiddance, holding a real Teleport scroll and a cookie, with no memory of how she got there.

What. 

Does she win because it's a real Teleport scroll or lose because it's a real Teleport scroll - no. She's pretty sure that means she wins. "I WIN!" she declares very loudly, resisting the urge to drop the Teleport scroll like it's on fire. She does not defect, she does not really contemplate defection, she probably couldn't read a Teleport scroll she has nowhere to go it might be a test she sold her soul. She yells "I WIN" until someone comes to get her.

"Well."

"Well."

"How unimpressed should I be with the Security here?  Or, for that matter, with you, Maillol?  I'm interested in hearing your arguments about that."

"I'm not impressed with the Security who got caught with his pants off."

"Ione Sala - I think just shows a legitimate truth that if we can't use Detect Thoughts, and somebody near Keltham is willing to sacrifice a huge amount of pain to warn him and kill him, that's doable."

"Sevar got shot down by the Security on overwatch, which isn't good because she now has some clue about that measure being there and wasn't supposed to, but again there are limits to what we can reasonably stop without Detect Thoughts."

"Pilar's curse has made its point about how we only get to keep Keltham because it lets us.  At least, that's how it looks on the surface of things.  I expect there were godagreements about what it can't do, though that's your department now."

"Tonia was the one moved to the most extreme acts to win.  Which you might call a victory for conventional Asmodeanism, except for the part where the extreme act to which Tonia was moved, was, in fact, praying to Chaotic Good divinity for aid."

"Asmodia is the one who most personally impressed me, whether or not her message gets acted on up the line.  The fact that the comms cleric has no arcane sight and won't spot even a low-level disguise is a real hole in our security, one I'm still trying to figure out how to fix without another fucking full-time soul-sold wizard."

"I'm not sure what to say in my own defense except that you're not going to find very much better outside of the Queen's personal guard.  Security is harder than Security makes it look."

"I am, with some reluctance, going to call the game for Tonia, because my inner Aspexia Rugatonn is warning me that if I don't predictably do that, Pilar's curse would have gone to further lengths to spare her from punishment."

"I admit fault, I would've missed that."

...he is in fact pretty glad to be on Sevar's light punishment regimen right now.

Carissa was sort of hoping that someone would have a devastatingly brilliant idea that could, as is, be used on Keltham, but she feels like it was a very productive exercise all the same, even taking into account that she didn't win and that bodes poorly for how pleasant her evening is going to be. She reports to Subirachs for a debrief.

Subirachs has in fact had something of a helpless feeling here, about how to guide Sevar towards Asmodeus.  Sevar's earlier punishment in the palace torture chamber apparently hugely backfired, and shook Sevar's faith greatly, because the torture did not immediately make her stronger.

Subirachs will fall back on Rugatonn's apparent strategy: make sure that, if the torture doesn't work, it's at least Sevar's own fault for doing it wrong, so that her Irorian leanings will tell her to torture better next time and not that torture is bad.

Subirachs will ask Sevar what punishment she intended to inflict on Tonia if she failed.

"I don't actually feel particularly competent to assign punishments that are meant to be scary and was thinking about just giving her to Abarco because he's very good at scary. If you have advice I'd be grateful."

Security, read Sevar's thoughts.  "What are your goals, Sevar?  What state of mind would you have told Abarco to achieve in Tonia, while she was being punished?  What change in Tonia would you have wanted that to accomplish?  To make her stronger?"

Carissa is not an idiot and is aware that this is a conversation about her and not about Tonia, at this point. "The point of this punishment is that three hours ago the girls needed to be in a state of feeling desperate, and pressured, and scared, because we needed the kind of creativity you get from people when they're desperate and pressured and scared. This punishment isn't about making them stronger, though we of course can't actually afford to have them weaker for very long; it's about following through so that next time we need them desperate and pressured and scared we can credibly deliver them into that state. It's about - breaking the self-satisfied sense that you did reasonably well, or did your best, and replacing it with desperately wishing you'd somehow done better."

And no, she's not sure how that's best attained in her; she feels like somehow a dath ilani could be there already, anticipating a punishment that would shape them so. She is not thinking of herself as a special snowflake who needs specially customized torture to stay loyal, she's just assuming that this is the normal course of Chelish punishment, which she is being taught since she now has subordinates and needs to learn it.

"Mm-hm.  And how would you achieve that state of mind in Carissa Sevar?  Come up with something, or your punishment becomes worse."

Abrogail knows. 

She canNOT say that.

Though she can hope Abrogail happens to read it. 

"I don't think this is a respect in which Carissa Sevar merits any special concern, High Priestess; 'desperate and scared' is a state Cheliax needs be credibly prepared to induce in her as much as anyone else."

"Perfect, then," says Elias Abarco from where he's standing at the door, invisibly, and suddenly there's an Unseen Servant at Carissa's throat -

- which, she'd know, she's been playing around with Unseen Servant precision a lot herself, lately - takes a degree of finesse that takes real effort to acquire -

"High Priestess," he says with a nod, and drags Carissa out.