"Has Keltham ever seen you take eight minutes to be argued into anything and then change your mind about it?  Real-Maillol tends to weigh things up quickly and -"

"All right, fair catch again.  It can be hard not to think of alter-Maillol as weaker, and yes I get that Keltham doesn't see him that way."

"You spent - let's say about as long as this actually took - and then I made my snap decision that I was going to let you try it, let you fuck up if that was what happened, and let you get hurt enough to learn a lesson but not enough to affect your job performance before I intervened."

"She's all yours, Asmodia.  Real-Cheliax too.  Note that Security reports Tallandria was thinking we're fucking up alter-Cheliax realism by even having this be a notable deal there, you might want to debrief her on that."

"Keltham definitely also thought it was a large deal, but I'll prioritize asking Tallandria about what the web of connections is like there and what Keltham might figure out later."

Asmodia will then take Korva away, to the other side of the fortress, the hidden side, to her Wall.

She has a new pet now!

Well, that certainly could have gone worse.

Korva will follow Asmodia out, and then wait to speak until spoken to. Even if Asmodia was right to see promise in her, she's still going to need to work hard to show her that it wasn't a mistake, after that little performance.

Asmodia's secret lair has high-quality tea and snacks!  She is, in fact, a minor Power in this fortress.

After Asmodia has set out some snacks for both of them:

"All right, Korva, tell me about your theory of how everything we did was wrong for alter-Cheliax and what you think needs to be done in the future to be consistent with it."

Asmodia is feeling weirdly cheerful and excited about this!  It's probably having her own pet.  Practically her own slave!

Moderately deep breath.

"I think it's bizarre that everyone decided to act like it was an emergency, worth the time of both the High Priest and of Keltham himself. In other countries, in other places, I don't think people would have done that - not in a school, anyway, because crying during a difficult test just wouldn't be that uncommon, especially under moderately stressful conditions like the ones that we're operating under. Maybe in the middle of a secret government project, but it still doesn't sound right."

"Apparently Keltham thought that this was a huge deal, too, though. If he's the one who assumed that, and other people followed his lead, well - we've just accidentally confirmed a bunch of things that caused him to make that assumption, without us understanding what those things were, which is sort of terrible. If one of our people decided that it was a huge deal, and Keltham went along with what he was being told - well, I guess in that case we at least have more control over the situation, although we still have to figure out why alter-Cheliax is like that."

"I am totally baffled at the idea that crying during a test would lead to expulsion from the compound. I didn't even think we were allowed to leave the compound after failing out, the other dropouts are all still here. I have no idea what his model is of why silently crying during a math test might make someone a danger to keep in the same building, and if we have any more information on that, then I want it, because I don't have it now. I'm also baffled that everyone involved would make that snap judgement without at any point asking what caused the crying fit, instead of assuming, although maybe the alter version of the High Priest was expected to ask about that, and maybe he did."

"I was expecting everyone to pretty much ignore the crying. I thought Keltham might ask about it, in which case I was prepared to give him an explanation of why alter-Korva was crying. I really didn't expect it to go any further than that. I think that in most places - including Taldor, and including Cheliax of the past - teenage girls actually just cry sometimes, and this is moderately embarrassing for them if they do it in a serious situation, but it's not much of an update about them at all, besides, yep, that sure is a teenage girl, and in some situations it isn't even that."

"Now, of course, we have to find out what Keltham thinks happened. If we were following his lead - well, we want as much information as we can get about what his thought process was, then, so we can determine whether to correct it - if it makes assumptions about the way people are here that are going to turn out to be wildly, obviously wrong if he ever interacts with people who haven't been carefully screened for being the most emotionally stable people we have, or for that matter if any of the other current students here ever have similar emotional reactions to Keltham's math tests, which doesn't seem impossible - or whether and how to confirm whatever assumptions he made about me, and by extension the rest of us. If he was following our lead, then... gods, I still need to know why he thought the High Priest might expel me from the compound. But I suppose we could, hmmm... well, he did warn us that some of researchers might go insane, or had gone partially insane already. Is it possible that everyone assumed that that was happening to me and reacted in line with how they've been reacting to other events in that bucket, or with how they would have wanted to react to those situations with hindsight?"

"Hold on, let me get a transcript en route."

Asmodia goes outside to page Security, she needs a transcript of this whole situation from the start, urgent priority since situation may be ongoing and recovery may be required.

(And strike the section of transcript where Keltham says Korva was slated to be hired even if she failed the math test; that's not vital info to Korva's understanding, and they don't need one more lie to Keltham / Korva doesn't need one more thing to conceal from Keltham that she knows.)

Advise Sevar that there's a question in progress about how likely students are in alter-Cheliax to cry during math tests, and whether somebody is going to need to tell Keltham at some point that something he thought was happening, was not happening, but we're still in the middle of figuring out what was happening.

When Asmodia is back:  "I think I'm going to recommend to Sevar that we not lean as heavily on the Taldor framework in the future, or at least, not tell newcomers so much that's what we're doing."

"This isn't as bad as the case where Avaricia suddenly decided she knew all about how nobility in Taldor worked and therefore she must be authorized to act a particular way.  You needed to improvise and you only improvised as much as necessary, good job on that, but still."

"People need to stop thinking that, if they know how something in Taldor works, they know how it works in alter-Cheliax."

"Alter-Cheliax is clearly not in fact Taldor.  Even a short visit to the Facility showed me that relatively educated women in Taldor have much worse Bluff than we've already shown Keltham in upper-tier Ostenso wizard students.  Keltham already knows that incoming students are accustomed to showing very tight emotional control by dath ilani standards, and that he has to repeatedly tell students to give him any feedback on how he's doing."

"That's probably not why he thought a big emergency was going on, but nonetheless, he already knows it."

"It's occurring to me that people - know which reality they all live in, and agree on that, because they spend years inside it together, and what we have here is a situation of everybody trying to improvise pieces of reality.  Telling people that we sometimes take inspiration from Taldor is one thing, but it's just not true that when you know something true about Taldor you know something that's authorized to say here."

Asmodia is weirdly not more-panicked-than-usual about this, the way she'd normally be?  Maybe because she has a minion to help her now!

"I think there are a lot of problems with the Taldor framing, yes. In this case I think the crying thing is more general - I think that lots of places have people occasionally cry in stressful situations, including the real Cheliax. Reasoning being that I am from the real Cheliax, and I started crying. That makes me pathetic, by our standards and perhaps by Keltham's, and we can give Keltham a story that's consonant with that, but I think there must be a way to make it consistent. The big problems are - if Keltham later sees me acting in a way that isn't consonant with what he assumed we all agreed that my mental state was, or if someone else starts crying later in a way that makes Keltham suspect that it's actually less of an emergency than he assumed, which seems - unlikely, but not so unlikely that it isn't a way that we could get unlucky, in a project where everyone is operating at this level of stress."

Security brings in the transcript, which Asmodia quickly skims.  It includes more of Korva's thoughts than Asmodia had seen before, but not, unfortunately, Keltham's.

Resigning herself to being a paving stone?  Ouch.  That's - bringing up bad memories of, like, all of Asmodia's entire life before the Gardens of Erecura which Asmodia has mostly been trying to forget about of late, as is probably healthy for her since alter-Asmodia doesn't have those memories anyways.

"All right, new read on this whole situation, Security speculated that Keltham was supposed to be notified in alter-Cheliax, probably because they thought it was a, large event, as it would in fact be in Cheliax, also because Keltham has previously been pretty unhappy about not being told things, Keltham was told but not in a way that signaled it was a large event, Keltham reacted to it as a large event, Keltham asked Sevar what she thought about it, Sevar thought it was a large event."

"Maillol hasn't told Keltham at any point in this transcript that he thought it was a big deal.  Maillol may have acted or emoted in a way that doesn't show up in the transcript, I'll have it checked with him.  But this situation may be partially recoverable if Maillol calls back Keltham asking Keltham why he thought this was a major emergency.  If we think that's a good idea."

Asmodia passes Korva the (briefly censored) transcript.

She reads it.

"Hm. 

"If he thinks I'm having some particular pattern of 'emotional spiral of doom' - I'm not sure I can act consistently with that, not knowing what it is, which makes it risky to keep me around anyplace where he can see me. The safest thing to do in the short term is going to be to remove me from anywhere that he can make direct observations of me, let him think that nothing more complicated than his existing hypothesis actually happened, although that might break down if he does decide to ask further questions about the specific reasons for it. There are longer-term risks from confirming everything he thinks is happening and then letting him see some other element of human behavior here that comes into conflict with it, but I'm not sure whether those are outweighed by the amount of mistakes people might make in the recovery - the high priest would have to have a strong sense of what happened in alter-Cheliax and why his alter-self's assessment of it is, if we want to take that route, which might be just as fraught."

"The safest thing is to figure out what we're doing in alter-Cheliax and do exactly that.  Every time we ask what's safe for the Conspiracy, we act like the Conspiracy."

"Right now, in alter-Cheliax, it sounds like maybe Maillol is gently talking to you with his great Asmodian priestly competence at that, like the expert emergency response personnel that he is, finding out what really happened.  He definitely didn't talk for five minutes, and then snap-approve me taking responsibility for you so that he could get you out of his office."

"We need to figure out what really happened in alter-Cheliax, and then we need to figure out what alter-Cheliax tells Keltham about that.  It's fine if that contradicts whatever theory Keltham has now.  What it has to not do is contradict the way he's seen Maillol, Sevar, myself, Security, you, act about it."

"The naive Conspiracy plays along with whatever Keltham believes.  The real alter-Cheliax, the alter-Cheliax that's true to itself, the alternate plane of existence where there's an actual alter-Cheliax if there is such a thing - the real alter-Cheliax doesn't play along."

"Okay. What I was thinking at the time was - I misbudgeted my time last night, spent too much time and mental energy that I didn't have on things that weren't making sure I had the Rule of Succession down pat. I did some work with the Rule of Succession during breakfast, but I wasn't getting it and I was getting frustrated. Then we got the test, and I knew I didn't know how to do it, and - I guess I panicked, panicked in some really specific way that meant I was fine at some kinds of thinking but stopped being able to read math. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I realized that I was going to turn in something totally worthless, and I wouldn't get the job."

"That's all green, what really happened. Now, specifically in alter-Cheliax - alter-Korva had gotten her hopes up about getting the job. Her older sister died in the last year, and she's still grieving it. She'd been hoping that if she was hired, she would be able to make the money necessary to buy her a resurrection, and get her back. The grief hit her fresh again, when she realized it couldn't be fixed, combined with the knowledge that it was her own fault for being stupid and making dumb mistakes. She realized she was crying, and she put her head down about it."

"Older sister real?  Keltham - I can't predict if he'd try to rez her once he's got a spare 10,000gp, but we need to be ready if he does."

"Also if she's not real, veto because we're not being faithful to the Probability of dead sisters."

"Real older sister, really dead. But I don't think we should use the real one; the real one was executed for apostasy, not dead of consumption like alter-Korva's, and we can't trust her to take orders. I do have a cousin about the same age who really did die of consumption; plausibly we could use her, or maybe a completely different actress if we think that people who have actually been in Hell for a few years are going to be harder to control in the relevant ways. Which seems... possible, given we're lying about what Hell is like."

"No shit, Korva.  Your alter-sister is doing great in Hell and you're in no hurry to rez her.  If you accumulate enough money and pull working for me that you can actually rez her, and you feel like doing that, do it off the books where Keltham can't see."

"Do we - think that someone in alter-Cheliax, Korva in alter-Cheliax, doesn't break down in tears just because they can't get the job?  They also need a dead sister they were hoping to rez?  If you're telling the complete truth about what drove you to a breakdown here - and if you were foolish enough to be concealing anything else, you'd better unconceal it right now, because there will be a Security check later - then it's just true that you encountered a stressor large enough to break you in real-Cheliax.  Any time we can go with something very close to the real story, we usually try to do that, because it often has a ring of realness to it that a more dramatic story lacks."

"The stakes for getting the job are higher in realCheliax, but people in alter-Cheliax suffer less crippling penalties for breaking down in tears.  Plausibly that balances out."

"No, I didn't cover why I started crying in real Cheliax. In real Cheliax, I also realized that I wasn't going to get the job, but in real Cheliax I thought that meant both being kicked off of the project and being required to stay in the compound not doing anything else, or else be killed and sent directly to Hell. And - I didn't feel like I'd learned enough, being mortal, I felt that I would look very worthless in terms of real skills to the devils in Hell, and that they wouldn't want me. Not just the way they wouldn't want a project girl; I thought that I had been turned into someone worthless by the project, someone who could have been moderately valuable if I'd just gone to the Worldwound and been a normal wizard, but who was instead going to be frozen at what I knew in young adulthood, because I'd been pulled onto this project and then cast off with nothing else to do with myself, nowhere else to grow. Even if project leadership didn't kill me, I wouldn't be allowed to do anything real, the sorts of things that might have made me more valuable in Hell. And I hated myself, and my circumstances, so much, in that moment, realizing that I wasn't inherently worthless but might have been rendered so, or nearly so, in the last week. That's why I started crying. Because I was upset about what the project might have done to my eternity."

"I truly don't envy Sevar her own job.  Prediction, Sevar's going to have an additional lecture about this, where she tells everyone how much she is going to make sure anybody in her fortress stays useful to her, including them being tutored in ringmaking or other advanced wizard skills, which Paxti and the others are.  If that's what it takes to get people not to break down on math tests in ways they wouldn't in alterCheliax."

"Prediction, it's still not going to work.  People in Cheliax, their whole previous lives, they're all fucking... I don't even know what word I want to use here.  'Scared', I guess, and the fact that everyone's required to believe they aren't scared means that they can't think about whether or not a situation is actually scary."

"I'm going to try selling Sevar on how much we show everybody else that nothing bad was allowed to happen to you and then maybe at least this crop of newbies will actually fucking believe the Chosen of Asmodeus about fucking anything."

"Which does still leave us the question of whether the job-stressor part and the fear of failing out of the Project and being stuck in the fortress was enough to get to alter-Korva."

"I don't think so, not on its own. If you're not worried about it hurting your eternity, the fortress isn't a bad place, and alter-Korva doesn't have other reasons to care that much about the money that everyone keeps throwing around. There's probably something, if we've fenced ourselves in everywhere else, but it doesn't ring true to me."

"I do think - if the claim that my alter-self is in no hurry to rez my sister and isn't sad about her death was an order, then I'll take it and work with it, but in case it's the sort of thing I'm supposed to dispute, I think it's wrong. My sister has a young son that she's missing the childhood of, and alter-Korva would miss her, too. People in other countries - even Good countries - do, actually, grieve and feel sad about it when people die, even when they think they went to afterlives where they're having a wonderful time. I think it we build into alter-Cheliax that people don't grieve here, ever, that runs a risk of running into problems, too."

" - also I don't think you can resurrect people who were executed for apostasy, but that's - sorry. Not what we're talking about."

"It's illegal by default, but if the Project drops spellsilver prices by a factor of ten, I expect that to not be an obstacle to Project Lawful girls.  Well, researchers, if any of the male candidates make it."

"Sevar might overrule me if she sees some way it plays into her own game of corrupting Keltham - like, if she's sure Keltham will choose not to resurrect your sister, and expects that to be good Evil progress - but I am reluctant to make that be the story, given that we can't actually rez your actual sister.  Keltham could ask to scry your sister.  It's a truth that leads into too many other possibly required lies."

"There's nothing else in your life, alter-Korva's life, that she'd have been emotionally attached to doing, if she could only get a million gold pieces to do it with?"

"No. Not that I've thought of. When Keltham assumed we wanted money I was offended at the wrong assumption; when Pilar told me I'd get a duchy if we won, I was annoyed with her for assuming I would want one. I've been thinking about why alter-Korva was even here, given she couldn't have been kidnapped into it, and I think I can piece together enough half-reasons to justify it, but - not reasons to cry about failing. Not ones I've thought of, other than wanting her sister back.

"I could probably think of some things that people who weren't me might want. They'd be harder to play, if he ever saw me again, because I not only don't want them but am learning that I apparently feel contempt for the idea of wanting most of them."

"I wish I could be on all of the Telepathic bonds constantly monitoring all of the situations and think quickly enough that in a situation like this I could actually talk the entire thing through with you fast enough to determine that you were not crying in alter-Cheliax."

Otolmens is not messing with the correctly-thinking mortal AGAIN after what happened LAST TIME.

"Option one that I've been able to come up with here, alter-Korva is weak, cracked under ordinary pressure."

"Option two, alter-Korva did have something she desperately wanted to do, she doesn't want to talk about it, Security truthspelled her just in case but that doesn't mean the rest of us know.  Mostly, we don't mention that to Keltham because it's private to Korva, we just tell him she hoped too hard.  If Keltham presses, which I predict he won't, Security tells him that it's about your dead sister who committed a murder and got executed over it, it's illegal to bring her back without a Crown order and you thought you could get that by outperforming."

"I predict Sevar vetoes option two, but want to give you a chance to sell that over option one.  I'm halfway inclined to veto it myself. on grounds of how much it sounds like you might be a romantic interest fated to Keltham by unbroken prophecy, like Sevar, which is... one of those complexities we didn't want to try to explain until you'd all mastered the basics.  But I think we may just need to press ahead and explain the tropes tonight, at this point."

"A - can I -

"You know what, no, I don't think alter-Korva wants to resurrect a sister who committed murder. I think I can manage weak. I am weaker than most Chelish people. If those are our options, that seems like the more plausible option, and if we don't act like it's absolutely unthinkable for largely untested students to turn out to be that weak, under these conditions, then it doesn't even fence us into making it implausible if someone else happens to crack later, too."