"When you end up in my office with pain being applied to you, it indicates you've made a mistake.  Whimsical cruelty is more Subirachs's thing."

"You poked a dangerous thing you shouldn't have poked.  Guess which dangerous thing I'm talking about?"

She's actually not sure at all. 

She explained her reasoning on the salt. She's - pretty sure that's it for interactions with Keltham.

She was arguably rude to the Chosen of Asmodeus, though she was actually trying to be helpful while remaining in character, there, and would in fact never be rude to the Chosen of Asmodeus deliberately.

She - ignored most of lunch because the chefs here can't cook duck and she has a Ring of Sustenance anyway?

"I confess I do not understand my error, High Priest."

"That's an improvement over all your wrong guesses so far.  At least you didn't guess something stupid, like that it was Sevar."

"Out on the Worldwound there's a distinction between what goes on at base, and how you act when you're out on patrol.  You want to play Asmodean games on base, push somebody into a corner, take advantage of them, or just be cruel for your own amusement?  That's being a good Asmodean, so long as it doesn't significantly impair their combat efficiency."

"Playing games while you're out on patrol?  That's serious."

"I've never had the job before of breaking a county heiress, but I've had the job of correcting some rich asshole's son who just didn't get it.  He didn't have a mode he could go into for not playing Asmodean games.  Couldn't switch it off when our Lord's interests depended on that to hold the demons back.  He played the enigma, dropped ominous hints, on patrol."

"Eventually he ran out my patience, I corrected him hard enough to reduce his combat capability, demons ate him, I wrote up a brief report and Egorian never sent me any questions."

"You're here because Asmodia came into my office saying that she didn't understand why you were calling the others 'peasants' around Keltham, couldn't figure out if that was a game the real Lady Avaricia was playing, or alter-Avaricia's game, or what.  Asmodia reported that she couldn't predict what you were going to do next around Keltham, because you had not explained any such game to her while setting up your alter-Avaricia persona.  She didn't request you to be corrected, if you're wondering, Asmodia just requested orders from me.  She was rightly unconfident of her own ability to steer from there."

"You want to play games with the Chosen of Asmodeus, test her on her ability to decipher you, critique her outfit?  I won't stop you.  Could be good for her.  Sevar's new to her role, used to work underneath me until a couple of weeks ago in fact.  Maybe learning to play the game against you will be good practice for her."

"But do it when Keltham's not around."

"Or if you're doing it as alter-Avaricia, clear it with Asmodia first, so that alter-Sevar can play whatever part she's supposed to play."

"Anything you do around Keltham needs to be completely transparent and predictable to your superiors."

"When you are near Keltham you are out on patrol at the Worldwound."

"Clear?  We are playing a lethal fucking game, we do not have time for surprises from you, we do not care about you, and you will adapt to those conditions immediately or be removed as a liability."

The Chosen of Asmodeus started it!!

She is not stupid enough to argue. "I understand."

"You'd better be right about that."

"Your next move is to report to Asmodia, explain what you were thinking before, and set up a pre-approved gameplan for alter-Avaricia that takes into account whatever the Abyss she was doing today."

"Now, you do give off the impression, maybe it's a false impression, but who knows, of somebody with a short attention span who thinks all this is beneath her.  Somebody who might be distracted by fiddling with her nails, or maybe just wander off."

"To make sure that doesn't happen while Asmodia is talking to you, your arms and legs will be removed."

"If you impress Asmodia with your good behavior under those conditions, your limbs may be Regenerated afterwards."

"Any questions before you're taken away?"

She keeps her face still. There's not a lot of point in complaining that she has a very safe and predictable conception of alter!Avaricia, had it in mind all along, and would have told the idiot-child-on-a-power-trip all about it if the idiot child had asked her instead of asking Maillol. Going to Maillol instead is precisely the thing that an idiot-child-on-a-power-trip would do, and having pegged someone as an idiot-child-on-a-power-trip you don't get to be surprised or offended if they behave like one.

You can either avoid even faultlessly provoking idiot-children-on-power-trips or you can accept the consequences. 

Relatedly, if your superior is a grouchy old man who hates nobles because they don't spend enough time in the freezing cold fighting demons, which is what all people should be doing, you're not going to argue him out of that; you have a superior who hates you and is going to persist in that, even if you're right and he's wrong. Being right doesn't give you power; power gives you power. 

(She is right, though.)

She can't help it if they're reading her mind but she can have the good sense to show none of that. "I don't particularly have questions, High Priest."

They are.

"The problem is that you didn't get it approved in advance, Avaricia.  It doesn't matter how predictable your concept seems to you.  If you don't actually explain it and get it pre-approved, it still ends up a wonderful clever surprise and you get to see that beautiful look of suppressed confusion on those peasants' faces."

"Your superiors don't need to be able to predict you.  They need to have actually predicted you."

"Take her away."

"I'm going to note for the record in case it makes any difference that I did not actually ask for this, and then move on."

"So.  Why was alter-Avaricia calling the rest of us peasants in front of Keltham?"

"I actually thought this had been adequately communicated earlier, but perhaps I was being too diplomatic, and therefore too indirect.

The Lady Avaricia, in alter-Cheliax, was raised as the heir to a Chelish county, and raised believing that because she is much better than everyone else, it is her duty to study hard and become wise and govern them responsibly. Yes, her mother is Good. She has been warned she'll probably end up Good too, once she's a Countess, but it's considered healthy not to try to rush there deliberately, when you're young and your decisions don't yet affect other people. 

The Lady Avaricia is not an idiot, and it would have occurred to her, at some point, to wonder if it was true she was much better than everyone else and that it was reasonable for her to rule over them. She studied the matter carefully and concluded it was entirely true. Most people are terrible at planning, barely if at all literate, impulsive and violent, sexist and stupid. If you ask them how their county ought to be governed they propose less taxes and more public-goods." She uses the Baseline, rather pointedly. "Lots of them want to conquer Andoran; the most popular complaint about the Church is that it's not out there killing more infidels. It's not just an impoverished upbringing; my tutors' children, raised alongside me, are stupider, and have worse judgment, and handle themselves worse in negotiations. My best guess is that half of nobility is in the blood, and the other half in the bearing, and you actually do need both. 

Now, 'better than everyone you've ever met' need not translate to 'better than everyone in Cheliax'. If nothing else, there's all the other counties, and there are Dukes, and I have never been given reason to believe I rival the Queen in any of my strengths. And so the Lady Avaricia, advertised a secret project, joined eagerly, not because she wants money - she has all the money she could reasonably want - but because there might be people there who are as good as her. 

The Lady Avaricia was disappointed. The project had some children with the blood, maybe, to be nobles, but not the bearing; some who can surpass her in how fast they do arithmetic in their heads, or how desperately they want to impress the teacher, but none who actually see as far, none who can pay attention from as many angles, none who are doing anything other than trying to race down the track Keltham laid out at top speed, none who are venturing off the track every few minutes because they see so many connections, between what's being spoken and what they already knew. And Keltham, himself a child with no leadership ability to speak of, selects for his favor those who hang on his every word, because that feels, to him, like those are the ones who really understand it.

The Lady Avaricia does not blame them. They are all peasants. None of them were raised to rule because none of them were going to. The skills they lack would have been less useful to them than the skills they possess, if they'd gone off to fight demons like they were supposed to. But she is disappointed, and she is aware that she is unlike them, and she does not care to be like them; if nothing else, she thinks it'd be a loss to the project. 

All this but my mother's alignment, wall-girl, is green. Should we go on to the parts that are orange?"

"It's on the wall now in green, I guess, if it doesn't look like we can revise it retroactively.  Maybe it should have been orange and that's the issue here."

"We lie to Keltham as little as possible, but the truth isn't safe either.  The fact that Asmodeus is Lawful Evil is on the wall in red, not green, because, true as that fact is, Keltham has correctly seen that fact as an anomaly in the light of other lies we've told him about Asmodeus."

"Keltham makes deductions using Laws we don't know.  I'm trying as hard as I can, and I can't begin to read far enough ahead of him.  To him, what you're describing about Avaricia isn't a fact about her, it's a fact about an equilibrium of forces we don't understand that hold Avaricia in place, like a balanced element inside a spell being hung.  Forces out of real-Cheliax that even we in real-Cheliax don't understand."

"There's an Avaricia like that in real-Cheliax.  Does that Avaricia exist in Taldor?  Does she exist in alter-Cheliax?  Does she have a Lawful Good mother?  Keltham has met a fake paladin that we intended to be realistic, that paladin would not have seemed like Avaricia's father."

"It's not enough for your version of Avaricia to be above others.  The others have to know that they're below her.  She doesn't hide that she thinks she's better than all of us, on her first day in that strange place, she flaunts it openly and without caution, because for others not to oppose her then and call her out on it, confirms her place and her power."

"There's probably a less Asmodean version of that pride in Taldor, that's still pride.  Maybe only among children whose mothers are not Lawful Good, I don't know if it's in Lastwall.  I - I'm not sure how I know this, but I would bet at a very high probability that it's not in dath ilan.  That Keltham will see it as something very strange and hard for him to understand, he will kneel down to peer closer, he will ask questions, he will be driven to understand it.  Ione is not wrong that there is something of Nethys about him and his world -"

"I'm still not explaining this right.  Keltham can feel the difference between fiction and reality, I think, on some level below all his Law and math.  He knew that Manohar hadn't really put an artifact headband on me, and his thought transcripts showed that it was just - how it felt to him."

"What you did feels to me... well, it feels like fiction, first and foremost, a pose, a mask.  And that's bad enough even if your alter-Avaricia would do it, because Keltham is so watchful, for signs of fiction being woven around him, we should have picked a different alter-Avaricia instead."

"Much worse is that it's fiction out of the true Cheliax, and not the alter-Cheliax we've been constructing."

"If even I can sense that, I'm very worried that Keltham can sense it too."

"Which is why you need to, yes, spell everything out very very explicitly and not take me by surprise about the way that alter-Avaricia - suddenly thrusts out a huge new theory of what it's safe for Keltham to believe about the equilibrium that produced an alter-Chelish heiress who is very much like a real-Chelish heiress."

"Have you met nobles in Taldor?"

"Obviously not."

"They are not actually less prideful on casual inspection than Chelish nobles. How exactly you signify it goes in and out of fashion, of course, but they are like that. And some of them are Lawful Good. Not Lastwall Lawful Good, if Lastwall is your concept of Lawful Good you're going to have a hard time explaining why there are nobles at all, but 'it is our duty to benevolently govern our inferiors' is a Lawful Good ideology, if out of fashion among Cheliax's specific political opponents right now. 

I did, actually, listen to your entire incredibly tedious speech about people being the products of all the equilibriums that hold things in the place they are, and nobles with a conception of their duty of benevolent governance is already implied by nobles existing at all in the society you built. That's where nobles who have to justify themselves to other people land. 

It is mildly interesting that it sounds pretend to you and probably to Keltham, you sure might want a plan to handle that. Mine would be 'go talk to Taldane nobles until you figure out what you were missing that made reality seem fake to you'."

"Those are harder to kidnap, excuse me, rescue than the Taldorian refugees we have in the Facility.  I'll file a request to see if the Crown has any captive Taldorian nobility on hand anyways that I could try talking to."

"I'm afraid, Avaricia, that we still have a problem with respect to you and my wall.  You seem to think that you can say what ought to work and then argue me into agreeing.  Problem is, the one who has to believe your story isn't me, isn't reality itself, it's Keltham."

"Keltham does not know all these things that you know.  They are - complicated, like saying - not just that a ship comes in, but that it comes in from Absalom - and if Avaricia seems strange enough to him, if her perfectly reasonable and even true arguments ring wrong to him, the way he doubted that masochists really existed -"

"You believe that you're in the right and what you're doing is safe and fine because the arguments for it are so right.  You're not getting it.  We are fighting a precarious pitched battle in which we are outnumbered and there is no margin at all for error, because what is at stake is not whether we win but how fast we lose.  We are desperately trying to lose slowly enough that we can get enough Law from Keltham before he leaves us, or maybe, even, bring him all the way over to Asmodeanism first."

"Oh, that reminds me, you may want to check in with Sevar at some point about what Keltham ought to end up thinking is Asmodeus's concern of pride.  Keltham getting really unpleasant associations about that off you seems like it could interfere with Sevar's game and not just mine."

"To return to point.  We're playing an absurdly complicated and delicate game, not all of whose considerations are known to you.  There are gods playing that gameboard, and stranger things there haven't been time to explain to you.  You need to plan out all large moves explicitly, spelled out, to me, carefully, in advance, as you take your first steps onto this gameboard; not argue to me afterwards about how your moves were the clearly correct ones after it's too late.  Unless and until you prove to be better at my job and able to take over running my Wall; and if you think that's terribly likely I'd invite you to start a prediction market about it.  You'll outbid me, I'm sure, but I won't mind taking your money and I expect a lot of Security will want in on the action too."

"You're currently a limbless torso propped up fetchingly against a wall because Sevar is running an experiment about mercy, possibly a temporary one.  Blundering in here like this on an ordinary Asmodean project, throwing your pride around and expecting others to follow in your wake afterwards, would ordinarily get you a much more severe reminder.  I am considering recommending for that at this point because you do not seem to understand how to coordinate with others on this Project.  You don't make huge moves like that with a hundred implications, and then explain to me afterwards why they were clearly the right moves because sure nobles are like that in Taldor.  It is not your place to decide that the win condition for your idea is the fact that nobles are like that in Taldor.  You come to me or Sevar with the idea, you politely sell it to us, we check implications you don't understand, we maybe approve it, then you do what we expected you to do and nothing more surprising than that."

"Avaricia's an asshole, fine, it's maybe too late for alter-Avaricia not to be one too, but she can't be a revealing asshole.  Talk to me about what alter-Avaricia hoped to gain by offending her classmates in front of Keltham, keeping in mind that if she was just lashing out blindly then maybe alter-Asmodia and the other tier-1s would logically recommend to Keltham that alter-Avaricia not get hired or not be given a tier-1's authority."

"At this point I think I do need to get to the parts of who alter-Avaricia is that should be orange on the wall. Alter-Avaricia is not scared of you. She does not expect that if she disagrees with you you'll escalate until she is no longer capable of objecting. She does not want this job that badly, if taking this job is going to require appeasing people she thinks are worse than her. Alter-Avaricia is not in this for the money, she is not in this for the power, she is in this for the chance to meet people who might be interesting, and they haven't impressed her yet and she doesn't feel like pretending they have, even if it means Keltham doesn't hire her.

And if the game you want to play is 'no, you should in fact act like you're scared of us and act like you're desperate for Keltham to hire you, because we'll arrange to make you regret it if he doesn't, because we'll take away everything you previously had in life and make sure this is the only thing that matters to you', well, then fine, you're in charge here. 

Every other one of your new hires is desperate for Keltham to hire them. Because they don't actually believe that being a massive threat to national security who is also useless ends well, and the fact that the last batch of rejects are presently being treated well is nowhere near enough assurance on that front. You probably literally could not give them sufficient assurance on that no matter what you tried; they're stupid, but they're not that stupid. They're people whose lives are on the line and they can't entirely act otherwise.

They're not going to be able to act like this is something they tried that might work out or might not but which would leave them perfectly fine if it didn't work out. Luckily, Keltham does not seem to have caught on about that; maybe he thinks the incentives he's offering are powerful enough to explain all their desperation. 

You seem very invested in making it clear to me that I'd better be desperate for Keltham's approval, that I'd better in fact think of whether I'm hired or not as the sole determining factor of whether I have any opportunity to do anything at all with this life or the next one.

As Maillol put it, 'The moment your mother handed you over to Project Lawful, your usefulness to the Church as a proud heir to Girona County was finished.  You come out of this as a Duchess, or you end up as a heretical future paving stone.'

So the question is: do you want me to act like that?

Or do you want me to act like a genius kid who has never had a job and didn't expect to ever need one, who if she fails to impress Keltham spends a couple years under house arrest and then goes back to ruling a county, who knows that and therefore expects the project to impress her as much as she needs to impress it? Who isn't scared?"

"I must say, I never realized until now how much of a life disability 18 Splendour could be, if it wasn't in a headband and you had no way to take it off."

"Stop trying so hard to persuade me, Avaricia.  Every time you do that, I have to redirect attention away from what you're actually saying, and make metaphorical Will saves against being the sort of person who just believes anything told her by somebody with 18 Splendour."

"What I'm hearing from all of this is that alter-Avaricia doesn't make alter-Cheliax look so great, or act like she's trying to impress Keltham, and that's a better look to his Probability-Sight because somebody like that should exist and alter-Avaricia should logically be her.  I'm concerned that you're vastly overestimating how much Keltham expects somebody as rude as Avaricia to exist in Golarion in the first place, I'm worried that he'll deduce something from that we don't want even if it's something that's not true, the more it surprises him the more it narrows down which surviving realities he's still in and that's our loss condition on the whole Project, he does not need to think that 'Governance' would send him anyone rude they could have just all been filtered out earlier..."

"As for how worried you need to be about failing out of Keltham's Project, Sevar's going incredibly far out of her way to make that less scary than usual.  If that's not unscary enough for you to act unafraid then you're a liability, because we're all going to end up in more stressful situations than that, places where we might blow the whole Project, before this is over."

"I'm still considering whether we should be trying to undo any of these moves, but let's say we don't.  Are you considering a romance arc where Avaricia gradually gets more impressed with Keltham and switches from being rude to him to trying to please him more?"

"No, I was planning to keep not giving him the time of day. Seems implausible for all the girls to fall all over him. Maybe eventually he realizes he doesn't have to put up with that."

"All right, good.  I'll tell Security to monitor your thoughts about that for signs of changes, though.  Among the considerations you haven't been read in on, for sheer lack of time and to avoid distractions, is that there's something like an unshattered prophecy about Keltham landing in a plane containing women who might fall for him.  Keltham is very aware of that possibility and knows that it operated for himself and Sevar, but we've been trying to conceal from him how much detailed evidence there is about a lot of other cases, places where Keltham made predictions and we've hidden from him that those predictions came true."

"I don't think you'd be one of his girls, there's no evidence of any particular god having chosen you for that.  But if you act hateful towards Keltham and then fall in love with him, well, I don't need to spell out how stereotypical that would be, do I?  If you do fall in love we'll almost certainly have to hide it from him, under those circumstances."

"Noted.  

I don't hate him, I'm just continuing to reserve judgment about whether he's worth my time, as an individual separate from the things he knows about a more mathematically advanced society. 

I don't hate you either, I just have arrived at a judgment on the same question with respect to you and it's that you are a peasant in a job that needs a ruler."

Asmodia doesn't bother trying to conceal her smile.  She's genuinely amused, and wants Avaricia to know it.

"Oh, we have all sorts of special Project Lawful girls around here, in the jobs that require them.  We have Nethys's chosen safety officer, Cayden Cailean's chosen faithful Asmodean who delivers warnings and cookies, the asexual who stands back and watches it all - Keltham doesn't know I'm a true asexual, by the way, that would be too much confirmation of one of his predictions, he thinks maybe I'll start to desire him at some point - and, of course, Carissa Sevar herself."

"Possibly there's room for a ruler in the mix, somewhere, if you don't hate him."

"If you think the Wall needs a ruler operating it, though, I suspect you're just wrong, what with the god who improved my ability to do that having chosen me instead of you."

"Now.  Supposing for now that we accept your story.  Keltham asks you why you referred to Meritxell as a peasant.  After all, though Keltham doesn't say this out loud, Meritxell was, according to the story that she gave him, the daughter of a priest of Asmodeus who went looking for high-Intelligence fathers, and grew up in a temple.  He's quietly wondering whether 'peasant' means something other than what we told him, or if we were lying about everyone's backgrounds."

"How does alter-Avaricia respond?  You tell me that, like literally answer me as you would Keltham, and then I'll try to figure out what kind of Probability update Keltham would do about that."

"Peasants are people who were raised to work a job for their daily bread. It's a very different mindset from mine. People like Meritxell think of themselves as different from people who grew up on a farm, and there are differences, but they're a lot smaller than the difference between being raised to work a job and not. 

I still wouldn't've called her that after she'd done a Worldwound tour, if she'd done one. War is the sort of thing that changes - the things about you 'peasant' says."

"'So I'm a peasant,' says Keltham, 'and the Chief Executive of Civilization is a peasant, and only people who go to the Silent Cities - no, it was Quiet Cities - are not-peasants... I'm confused, is being a noble not work or does it not get paid?  And why would the Worldwound change that, fighting at the Worldwound is work...'"

"Yes, I can tell my model of Keltham isn't perfect, you're welcome to predict out loud what he'll say and if you do a more accurate prediction maybe you get my job."

"It sounds like your civilization doesn't have this distinction, if you and the Chief Executive of Civilization would be in the same category by it. Nobles don't work for pay; their lands might grow more productive, and earn them more tax revenue, if they're governed wisely, but that's different from getting paid money in exchange for work; doing nothing in particular with your lands and just living off their rental income is perfectly respectable, if you don't have something better to do. Peasants get money from selling things they made, or selling their labor; soldiers are paid by the crown for their service in defense of the country or at the Worldwound the world; those produce different mindsets. Though honestly historically the origin of the distinction is probably that soldiers, if they're mad at you, will overthrow you, and peasants won't."

"Obviously my language doesn't have this distinction or the Taldane word would've translated for me, says Keltham... no, I don't know it doesn't translate."

"Keltham just focuses directly in and asks you to explain about the mindsets in detail.  It's not what he actually does, at this point, he asks some weird sideways question but I don't know what."