"I expect Korva to be better at it."

"Are you vetoing this?"

"No.  It wouldn't actually be my choice in Civilization, who you get to hire, and I'm reluctant to exercise whatever further power I have here.  Delegating to Maillol, mostly, whether he still wants her around in this fortress."

"I know that I don't understand terribly well how things work in Cheliax, know that I may be making a lot of wrong inferences based on how things would work in Civilization, and do have any inhibitions against ripping a life-rope out of somebody else's hands when somebody else is throwing them one."

"Just - be careful, Asmodia.  In Civilization this would potentially be the start of a story about the grim doomfate of Asmodia.  Not in a tropes way, a reality way.  You'd better not be Evil enough to take her on out of compassion unless you're very sure that you're Evil enough to cut her loose.  Next on the list of proverbial traps here is that if somebody doesn't want to go to a Quiet City, or Hell, I guess in this case, and you're the only place they have to stay that isn't that, that's a trap for you as much as for them.  And neither of you are likely to be happy in the trap together."

" - to me this all sounds like dath ilan desperately trying to implement patches for having bred their population for Good incredibly aggressively for generations, where Chelish people will simply fire someone if they are not an asset in a typical week, and not hang out with them if they are unpleasant to hang out with. Asmodia, if Korva's not actually very good at this but cries on you about how you're the first person to ever be nice to her, are you going to be conflicted emotionally about hiring Jacme instead?"

"I won't be, and I'm confident of that," alterAsmodia states honestly, and, so far as she knows, in green.

Asmodia doesn't wonder whether that claim has become unreliable, now, for her, until after the words leave her lips.

She doesn't take them back after.  There are limits to how much of her heresy she's willing to show openly.

Carissa does not like how much of this situation was unpredictable to her - why'd Tallandria break down, why's Keltham taking it this strongly -

- but she thinks that Keltham arriving at the strongly-held stance that you should as a matter of principle never inconvenience yourself to keep someone else out of Hell/Quiet Cities (what an ominous name) is a positive development on the whole though she really really wishes she had more of a handle on all of the moving parts.

"I think it's a good idea to have Maillol looking out just in case, but - Cheliax doesn't have that conventional wisdom and in this specific case I think it's because making that error would be incredibly rare. In Good countries you get - people living sad small lives so they can care for their aging parents and disabled siblings who don't care to go on to Heaven yet. Here kids are raised better.

- also people here might...cry more...I wouldn't want her in my unit at the Worldwound because sometimes your friends who don't have a resurrection arranged will get killed in front of you and you need to be able to keep doing your job, I wouldn't want her on the Project because sometimes we get attacked by Kuthites and have to take a sword for Keltham, but I don't particularly expect incompetence in jobs that definitely don't require those things." A lie, but one she's pretty sure is true in Taldor, going off observed crying frequency of kidnappedrescued Taldane girls.

"Like I said.  Leaving it to Maillol to decide if it's okay for her to be in the fortress."

He'll wait until Asmodia is gone before mentioning to Carissa - by Message, because he doesn't particularly want Security to hear - that you might have thought Keltham's dad would have been one of the more relatively selfish people in dath ilan, but Keltham's dad still got caught in a trap like that anyways, for three years or so, before Keltham's dad met Keltham's mom.

- hand-squeeze. 

She honestly has no idea what exactly this supposed trap is but - maybe it's revealing too much, to say that. 

"May I ask you for a favor?"

"You can ask, and I can take responsibility for saying no if I don't want to, because if even I can't do that, it's embarrassing for Civilization in front of Golarion."

"If I am ever making you sad, and you think you'd be better off not dating me, leave. If I cannot expect you to be that Evil I'm going to be worried all the time."

"Think that falls under the category of if I can't, it's my own fault, no?  By Chelish standards."

"It's - obviously what I'd try to do?  I wouldn't want to do that to you either.  You are not the sort of person my dad got temporarily doomtrapped with.  But it's hard to promise anything for certain when you're afraid your 'genes' might predispose you to a mistake."

"I'll tell Ione she's the one person responsible for calling me out on it, if she thinks that's happening anyways."

"If you do that it's your own fault. Anyone would agree. 

But I'd like to cry on you, when you push me that far, and not wonder if I'm causing you to make some kind of mistake your overly-Good society bred you for.

Probably Ione would catch it."

"Totally different kind of tears, Carissa, unless I'm very mismodeling one of you or Tallandria."

Korva is pretty sure that Maillol's office lives more in real Cheliax than in alter-Cheliax, so she allows her real self to have some thoughts, though it's still not - well, actually, the emotion her real self seems to want to feel is the kind of quiet clarity she gets when the internal screaming breaks off to make way for thoughts that matter again, so sure, her real self can have emotions again, if it's going to be responsible with them.

Her honest assessment of herself is that she obviously fucked up the math test, but she acted in ways that were perfectly resonant with how alter-Korva would have acted. Nobody else acted how she expected their alter-selves to act, though, except for Asmodia, so she suspects that project leadership is going to have a much dimmer view of her guesses at what alter-Korva would have been doing, and she's going to need to course-correct, if they let - well, Asmodia said she was stealing her, so she probably should actually figure out what the appropriate course correction is and not worry about the scenarios in which that's a pointless exercise.

She bows her head, clasps her hands, and waits for instruction.

Real Maillol has no particular reason to speak to this failure.  Apparently Asmodia wants her for something, so any useful conversations are pending on Asmodia.

Asmodia will be there soon enough!

"Highpriest Maillol, Keltham is leaving it to your alter-self to talk me out of my intent to employ Korva Tallandria, citing it as your own decision whether Korva can stay in the fortress."

"Is your alter-self opposed to this sufficiently that alter-Asmodia couldn't talk him out of it?"

"Think my alter-self would plausibly tell you that he was monitoring the situation and stood ready to withdraw his permission for Tallandria to be there at any time."

"Sir, I'm not asking you what your alter-self would plausibly say, I'm asking you what your alter-self would say.  Keltham thinks in probabilities, not places where you definitely wouldn't -"

"Good catch."

"I think my alter-self is a little tougher to talk around to this, if you don't have a better excuse than Tallandria possibly helping to write your math curriculum.  Unless she can actually do that."

"Security said she thought she could.  I am far more confident in her ability to contribute to my Wall, however, that’s why I actually want her."

"Asmodia, we're not actually discussing whether Tallandria can work on your wall, we're discussing whether or not Keltham knows she's still in the fortress."

"Yes, sir."

"Not sure what kind of mistake you were making there.  Smells a bit like alter-Cheliax becoming too real for you.  Whatever it is, fix it."

"Acknowledged, sir."

"Tallandria, is there Keltham-visible work alter-Tallandria could do, that would talk alter-Maillol into letting me keep you around?  For that matter, does real-Tallandria even want to be visibly still here?"

"Alter-Tallandria can, in fact, write expanded versions of Keltham's math curriculum, which will be useful if the project ever scales up enough to require employees who aren't our top dozen people. I would like to remain here and attend your lectures and any other math review lectures given by other researchers, even if I can't attend Keltham's, since it'll help with that goal."

She's... also baffled as to why crying during a math test would lead to expulsion from the compound, but that seems more like a Wall question.

"Mm.  Not actually easy to figure out alter-Maillol here.  My first reaction... it took alter-Asmodia around eight minutes to argue him into that, assuming she was being stubborn enough about it, and then alter-Maillol told her fine but Tallandria had better be producing and not causing any more fuss."