Message:  Security, take her away and give Sevar the transcripts when she's got a free moment.  Not worth interrupting her, but I do not consider this situation successfully handled by me.

Security will do that.

Carissa is blissfully ignorant of all this and engrossed in her favorite activity, glibness sword making. 

Security will store Lady Eulàlia Avaricia de Torso somewhere conveniently nearby, then, and silently and respectfully leave the Chosen a clearly-marked-nonurgent note over a transcript sheaf, to check at her leisure.

Well this sure is some children unproductively sniping at each other. 

"Look, when Keltham wanted to get to know Her Infernal Majesty, she arranged a duck pond, where she sat feeding the ducks and looking burdened by her duties, and talked to Keltham for ten minutes and he was very rude and she corrected him gently and wished him good luck. Do you think you're above that?"

"- no! No one told me to do that! Are you authorizing that deviation from alter-Cheliax?"

"At this point I am somewhat inclined to declare that, yeah, another weird difference between alter!Cheliax and real Cheliax is that for no particular reason you're pleasant to work with. If I declare that what will you do."

" - I suppose work out with Meritxell why I call her 'peasant'? Maybe she calls me some mildly derogatory, yet lighthearted, term for the alterCheliax nobility."

Carissa finds herself tremendously tempted to declare that yes, great, that's this situation solved and she can go back to the swords now.

She has a sneaking suspicion that's not the case. 

Where's Asmodia gotten to.

Sitting in front of a pile of Taldorian books, one of which she's reading, with the Chelish intelligence officer assigned to Project Lawful standing nearby.

(There isn't time for Asmodia to have read all of the books in the 'has read' pile, but nobody will notice this fact.  Probably Carissa Sevar was just working on her glibness swords for a while!)

"Do you want Avaricia off the project?"

"I admit, saying that feels to me like failure, and I don't like failing.  But I'm not able to salvage this situation on my own, and if my superiors don't have better ideas, I'm sure not stepping forth to declare I'll take responsibility for keeping her."

"I can just tell her we're authorizing the lie that she's a pleasant person who doesn't behave rudely, but I wasn't sure if you had hesitated to do that because you expect it to cause problems somewhere else."

"It's inconsistent with her previously shown behavior, we'd need a backstory about how and why she was trolling.  I guess that's doable, it may lose us a quarter-two but so does any other recovery I can see, but -"

"We've got two problems here, fitting her into alter-Cheliax, and her lack of subordination."

"The whole thing with the nobility is too large.  We don't want Keltham looking at things that are this large and confusing to him, I don't think.  By the time he had answers that would satisfy his curiosity, he'd have learned far too much about Golarion and advanced the timelines toward Project failure."

"I'm not having much luck predicting what he'd learn, either.  First I asked what Keltham would deduce from the existence of Avaricia, and then I gave up on it and asked what I would deduce myself if I landed in another plane next to an Avaricia, and I'm not making much progress on that either, besides that I clearly wouldn't be in dath ilan or Lastwall."

"My most brilliant idea so far is to try cursing her with reduced Splendour to see if she's a manageable subordinate without all that driving will and persuasiveness.  I reviewed the transcript of my earlier interview with her and, you could make a case that she told me what she'd do, but she didn't spell it out and I failed to notice how much we weren't discussing any exact details.  I was distracted by her acting like a stereotype, my being certain that was a pose, and my not wanting to admit that I couldn't figure out why she was pretending.  Part of me was still scared of her, and she knew that and used it, and I didn't want to admit failure about it by calling her on it.  I should have told her that this was a serious occasion and to stop with the games, or gone to Maillol to admit my inability to handle her, then."

"Well, if we don't want Keltham looking closely at the whole concept of nobility -and I agree we probably don't - then maybe there's just no way to have nobility on the project for him to repeatedly get a close look at. Though separately it seems good for you to get some practice at noticing when you're avoiding a problem because it'd be embarrassing to admit you have it. 

My current guess is that she knows how to play many different games but not necessarily how to stop playing games."

"I don't think anyone on this Project knows how to not play games at all, besides possibly Keltham, and he does that by not knowing they exist.  He's probably got Law for it too, sure, but right now it's by not knowing our games exist."

"The frustrating thing about this is that I can see that Avaricia's deficiency is a Law deficiency.  Keltham could teach her to stop with the constant Splendour and then she'd be useful, if Keltham were already on our side.  I could teach her to be corrigible, if I was ready to teach the next Most High, which I'm not.  She's here too early!  She wouldn't be as much of a shock to Keltham if she'd arrived later in our timelines when he was more knowledgeable or more corrupted.  I'd maybe be able to handle her if I had more task experience."

"What I want to do is tell Avaricia that she's won, proved that she's superior to Asmodia and won the game and shown that Asmodia can't possibly manage her along with the others, so now she gets to go to Hell and be impressed by the competent devils there.  That's not what's best for the Project, probably, but I'm having some difficulty thinking past it."

"Not what''s best for the project because we'll make faster progress on chemistry if we have her? I'm not particularly willing to trade any chemistry progress for strain on the wall. Or not what's best for the project because weird students mysteriously quitting is definitely likelier in Conspiracy?"

"Because it would be a weird coincidence Probability-wise if what was the most fun to think about was also the best strategy for repairing my wall."

"In terms of - things that are, in a way, close to reality, but also things that don't look likely in Conspiracy - suppose she keeps acting like that, she gives her theory of nobility, the rest of us are like 'what the fuck are you talking about, nobles are supposed to be moderately competent people and not such overt assholes on Government projects even if they're assholes, we don't want to work with this person', it's obvious Governance made a mistake by sending her here, Keltham doesn't hire her, none of this is anything a competent Conspiracy would cleverly plan."

"She's created somebody who's plausibly an annoying asshole from alter-Cheliax.  Maybe the least nitwit-clever thing we can do is just let that play out in the obvious way where alter-Cheliax doesn't hire her."

"Does she cooperate with that?"

"Ask Security or Maillol, not me.  Impersonators and Dominate Person are both things, as are threats of real torture."

"If sending her to Hell is a political problem, why not turn her into a statue for a couple of years until the Project is no longer classified?  I don't think Keltham would find it too surprising that her mother could arrange about paying for Security around her, or unusual ways to keep secrets, to explain why she's not at the fortress and not quickly accessible?"

"I want to think about it but it seems - plausibly workable, and only requires keeping this up for the rest of the week."

"Separately, I request the ability to call in Korva Tallandria on this, or other Project personnel as they seem like they would have relevant knowledge on future problems.  Korva seems like somebody who'd have ideas based on our interview and her thought transcripts.  But commanding others' assistance at doing my job is not explicitly within the scope of my current authority, and today I've learned a valuable lesson about the importance of not surprising your superiors and getting explicit authorizations."

" - sure, go ahead."

"That's all I had."