Any reason that a girl would now suggest to Keltham that they flee with him inevitably has to be correlated with Keltham getting noticeably suspicious; they wouldn't happen at the same time for no reason. And then he will obviously think of 'they're in the Conspiracy' as an explanation.

So the first move is -

"You okay, Ione?  You seem a bit off."

By Message:

It's a - sad thing.  You'd end up, distracted by it, and that's - not necessarily good, for the Project...

There's a slightly longer delay than one might expect, before Keltham messages back:

Project's in a good spot, it's the right time for me to be distracted.  You should probably just tell me?

By Message:

I... all right.

My grandfather's - dying.  I've been -

- approved for leave, to go visit him...

(Ione doesn't sound quite right, even for somebody who got terrible news.)

Message:

Ione, that does sound awful, and like you shouldn't be trying to just attend dinner pretending nothing's wrong.

It sounds to me like you want to talk about this, but think you shouldn't bother me, and evidently don't want anyone else to know.

Should we go off and talk about this in private?

(Keltham does not look particularly horrified or sad.  More... concerned.)

"I - yeah."

"Sorry, Gregoria, I want to talk to Keltham in private about something."

" - oh, okay, no problem," says Gregoria.

She'll take the Keltham up to the Keltham Seduction Room, then.  The one with soundproofing.

The Keltham Seduction Rooms have undergone some expansion, including, gradually introduced, some features to arrange for the escape-from-within-the-Conspiracy, if necessary; Keltham laid his own permanent Alarm spell on the room, for example, once he learned to cast it, and has tested the Alarm spell enough he can be satisfied there's no one hanging around invisibly. They also eventually coaxed him into trying out the whips, and Carissa taught him how she habitually uses Dancing Lights as a cheap check for invisible objects or Alarm-evading intruders. 

Ione buries her head into Keltham's shoulder, once they're alone, and puts her arms around him, and trembles.  Her hand pushes at his back, three times, stopping.  Three times, stopping.  Three times, stopping.  Clearly deliberate.

Keltham -

- after a time to think - 

- casts Dancing Lights, sweeps the room with them.  He disengages wordlessly from Ione, opens the secret door to the cuddleroom, sweeps that with Dancing Lights as well.

Nobody, apparently, is in either room, except the two of them.

Message to Ione:

Room looks clear.  Nothing tripped my Alarm recently except the two of us.

Explain.

"Thank you for - giving me, privacy..."

Message:  Both of my grandfathers have been dead since I was little, I got - ordered - to leave and be gone for the next week, and, and I have a very very bad feeling about this even taking into account - everything you've already figured out is true from hearing that anyone can give me orders like that.

Keltham doesn't hesitate at all this time.

"Take as long as you need."

Message:  Tell me the things I need to know urgently, as quickly as you can.

The church of Nethys is illegal in Cheliax. When they learned Ione was of it, they told her that she wouldn't be executed as long as she represented Asmodeus well to Keltham and did what she was told. The church of Cayden Cailean is also illegal in Cheliax. The rest of the girls were just told that Ione and Pilar had exceptions. In general if you ask too many questions in Cheliax or cause a big government program to be a disaster, you die about it, so no one did. 

Ione has already rehearsed all that information, and repeats it to Keltham.

Where in Golarion is better than Cheliax?

Why didn't they use Suggestion on me?

Suggestion is cumulatively easier to notice as repeated, all the mind control I know about is, that's why - things aren't even worse than they are -

Keltham, there's nowhere, there's nowhere that I know about anywhere, that wouldn't try to use you the way Cheliax is using you, nowhere in all the books I've borrowed from all the libraries I've been to, they said I'd die if I told you I could get books from anywhere but Ostenso, if I got you any books from Ostenso that weren't approved - but I can read them myself and there's nowhere in Golarion that has, has even a, tiny little bit, of dath ilan, left inside it, since Aroden died - all of the envoys here were fake, the travel scries you saw, had illusionists hiding things -

Now Keltham is starting to look visibly horrified (by Chelish standards, a dath ilani trying and failing to control his expression sufficiently).

Message:  Do you already have plans for what we do next, from here.

Security carries teleport scrolls. If they can take one down, they can leave. Ione thinks she can read a teleport scroll, she's never done it and they fail destructively, but it's the sort of thing a third-circle wizard can do. 

Probably they don't want to leave the interdiction zone, because then every god who cares to can send their forces after them, but they could hide in the interdiction zone, for now, and she could get books from more places, try to find somewhere...

Any Security would have Teleport scrolls.  We'd just need to take out one of them, somehow, and get outside of the Forbiddance, without getting caught.  I've never read a Teleport scroll and they fail destructively, it'd be a risk at just second-circle, but I think I can do it.

- we should stay inside the interdiction zone around Ostenso, or any god any time could send their forces to just grab you.  But there's a ruined tower near an Ostenso landmark that I know well enough to teleport to it, that probably hopefully has scry wards that still work, scry takes an hour to cast and we'd have to rush but I think we could get there in time.  Or maybe we'll get lucky and the Security will have two Nondetection scrolls, I can definitely cast that from a scroll.

- Nondetection is a 3rd-circle wizard spell they didn't want you to know about, it's how they hide a lot of things from you.

If any Security would always have Teleport scrolls, then the Zon-Kuthon godwar wasn't real.

Why do you think the interdiction zone is real?

I could be wrong.  But they talked like it was an inconvenience and Broom's god was forcing Asmodeus to go along with it.  Broom's god isn't on our side, I don't think, but It can't be bargained with or have demands made of It by other gods, and It doesn't care about the kinds of things that - other gods would want, to make sure of, about you -

What does Nethys want from me?

I don't know, Nethys doesn't talk to me, the thing with the prophecy never happened, I just borrow books -

All the gods who were once-human, there's nowhere on Golarion that I was ever able to hear about, where their followers aren't hunted or enslaved.

This crazy plan would be an awful lot less crazy with Carissa on-board, and able to do things like subdue a Security guard and cast Teleport from scroll.  Since you haven't suggested that, can I assume she's part of the Conspiracy?

I DON'T KNOW, she acts like she's in love with you, and the Worldwound - is incredibly deadly, but it's a place you can go, that's a little less Cheliax, while you're there - they don't have time to hurt you about being a Nethys-worshipper so long as you're holding back the demons - or that's what they say -

I don't know about any of your women.  We don't talk about it.  Or nobody talks about it in front of me.  I wouldn't have said anything in front of her.  Haven't said anything in front of anyone, I don't know who to trust.

Carissa is too valuable in any plan like this.  And she always seemed a little sad inside, deep down.  So we're going to risk that unless you say it's suicide.

Any bright ideas for how to bring Carissa in?

Carissa is in her room enchanting magic items; it's what she usually does, when Keltham doesn't want her. Normally no one would think anything of it, if Keltham sent Security to fetch her to his cuddleroom; but with Ione acting strangely, they might. 

Keltham... doesn't particularly seem to be immediately inventing whatever plan he was supposed to invent, faced with this set of facts.  He looks drawn, absorbed, worried, beneath his transparent-to-Cheliax straight face.  If he was supposed to be ordering Carissa to his cuddleroom anyways, the risk was apparently described as too high for that.

Should she risk delivering a prompt to him?

Honestly she was hoping he'd have something wildly creative, not because they don't have plans (they have five) but because having Ione feed him all the lines makes the whole thing feel more orchestrated.

- but letting him think is even worse. Sure, risk it.

Message:  Keltham, if - if I had to risk trusting one person I'd - trust Pilar, I think - Keltham she has to have been touched by Cayden Cailean for a reason, she started out loyal to Asmodeus but that's the reason she's not dead, why they trusted her enough to not just kill her on the spot - but there has to have been a reason for that, our gods can't help us much but we have to take whatever they send and there's been no other visible reason for why she's here -

...and Pilar might be able to throw a party for everybody who should come with us.  If that was real.  Was it?

I - don't know that it wasn't -

"Ione, should I possibly have some recovery chocolate delivered, for you - actually, you know what, Pilar, if this is a good time for us to have some candy, can you please already be here?"

Pilar's curse has expressed some skeptical sentiments along the lines of, they really should not expect that much active help from Chaotic Good about certain nefarious plans.  It's not going to act against Asmodeus's interests, but there are some places where it seems less Chaotic Good to actively help out than others.

So she's standing just outside the Alarm radius, and moving forwards even as Keltham speaks; her curse is willing to cooperate with not showing Keltham that Pilar's curse doesn't work like that around Alarm spells.

Pilar knocks gently on the door.  "Cake delivery," she calls.  Keltham said out loud that he wanted chocolate, but he was thinking about cake.

Keltham opens the door for her.  "Come on in," he says, sounding like he's trying not to sound tense about it.

"I was hoping it wasn't you -"

"- what's wrong with Ione?"

"My grandfather is dying."

Message to Pilar and Keltham:  Pilar.  Don't give any visible sign.  I think they're about to - stop treating Keltham gently -

I told him.

Are you with us.

"That... does sound very terrible..."  Pilar somewhat robotically offers up her cake to Ione, who takes it with a somewhat more natural motion and promptly takes a bite.

Message to Pilar and Ione:

Pilar.  I know we've had some - overt disagreements -

Such as, for example, when, where, and whether we should be having sex.

Right, well, I need you to draw on whatever Keeper training you've mastered at all over the last three months, face up to the actual reality of what was going on there, and notice that Asmodeus actually never gives you what you need at all and that I am better as a dom for you in every possible way.

And then I need you to invite everybody who actually loves me, who won't betray us, to an escape party.

(Pilar wishes to register for the record that this would not, in fact, land on her at all, to the point that she is having difficulty about making her reaction here sound remotely like her.)

Message:

I'm going to draw on my Keeper training to pretend I haven't heard anything you just said, except for -

Ione, do you really - do you actually think they would, to Keltham -

Yes of course they would don't be stupid.

Especially now that he knows.

Because you told him.  You - you, you idiot, I don't even - after we get out of here, I am going to fucking, fucking hurt you, so badly -

You're with us, then.

Apparently I am.  I suggest you not say anything stupid if you want to keep it that way, Keltham.

Pilar, I don't know how much time we have.  Can there be an escape party for me and everyone who loves me, that you're going to invite people to right away, in a room next to where there'd be a single Security who's relatively easy to take down.

If that many of us are gathered, next to you, there'll be more than one Security.

So instead I'm going to go back to the party I was already at, that just started, in Breakout Room Eight, where some rather mystified girls are waiting for me to explain what the party I felt a sudden impulse to invite them to one hour earlier, is about, and now that I know that, I will be able to actually tell them. 

My curse says, stay here with Ione for ten minutes, and then go to Breakout Room Four.

...who did you invite?  Was - Carissa -

Carissa, Meritxell, Yaisa, and Peranza.

Carissa.  Meritxell.  Yaisa.  Peranza.

I'm sorry.  I know you liked Tonia, even if she was clearly completely wrong for you.

Pilar, seriously not the time.

"Asmodia," he whispers, and then looks like he wants to hit himself for having spoken out loud.

...incredibly obviously never actually cared about you and isn't capable of much in the way of real feelings period.

Pilar.

I'll just show myself back to my party, then.  See you in nine minutes.

Keltham stands still for a while, looking like he's trying very hard to stop himself from crying.

Ione checks her pocketwatch, after counting to thirty inside her head, once Pilar is gone.

Message:  I'm... sorry.  I really would have thought Asmodia the type to turn against Cheliax the moment she had the chance.

Maybe - Asmodia does love you, and it's just, Pilar's curse knew, Asmodia would have screwed it up somehow, if she came with us.  Asmodia - she can screw up, sometimes, if it's not about Law.  She's sharp but she's narrow.

Keltham regains control of his expression.

Enough.

Tell me what reality is like, outside this fortress.  Actual reality.

Ione can do that for the remaining minutes!

Keltham asks a number of questions, and additional questions, some of which are clearly consistency checks relative to Law that Ione doesn't understand.

Ione is clear at all points that Cheliax is constantly lying to everyone including her and she does not vouch for the truth of anything unless Keltham is asking her questions about what she's seen with her own eyes.

Keltham occasionally also asks out loud if Ione feels ready to talk yet.

Ione will whisper each time that she still wants to be held for a while.  Almost like she's saying goodbye forever to her love, without being able to speak those words, if anyone happened to be watching the scene.

The minutes run out, and Keltham departs with Ione for Breakout Room Four.

The girls in Breakout Room Four are huddled around a Security who might or might not be dead. They look terrified, except Carissa, who looks like she has never had a feeling in her life and is going through his Bag of Holding. "Teleport takes three plus the caster," she says to Keltham flatly as he enters. "Plan that maximizes the chances you get out is for me to take you, Ione, Pilar now, Meritxell thinks she can read the second scroll. Plan that maximizes the chances everyone gets out is that Meritxell goes first so if she fucks it up I can try to salvage it, but realistically there is not likely to be anything I can do to salvage it."

"If it's not realistic to salvage then we do it the sad but sane way.  Carissa, if you betray us we're just dead, so take command here, this is an emergency and you understand this all flatly better than I do."

She stands up, hands Meritxell a scroll. Shatters the window of Breakout Room 4 with a gesture (the gesture isn't necessary). Tugs Keltham through it and away from the grounds. "Ione, Pilar -"

They reach her. She reads the scroll.

And Keltham, at that exact moment -

- turns into Asmodia.

"Asmodia?  You're not good at being Keltham.  You're really, really not good at being Keltham."

"Thankfully, that particular test of acting ability is not vital to any actual plans.  The plan does need to stand up to Keltham's ability to deduce other facts from facts you present to him."

"I don't know if I could pull this off during a real run without Glibness, but I definitely can't pull it off without Glibness if you're going to be breaking immersion all over the fucking place, that threw me completely out of my game.  Asmodia, he whispered, in heartbroken tones."

"I'm one of his trope-given romances, what the fuck do you think will happen if he's told I'm a traitor?"

"What's going to happen over every girl except you is him having an enormous meltdown over having maybe had sex with someone who was pressured by Governance into it, unless we manage to train him out of that. Maybe I should play Keltham next time."

            "He doesn't believe in tropes anymore because I'm perfect for him and have no backstory or superpowers," says Yaisa. 

"We can't predict what he'll think about tropes when this gets sprung on him, whatever he thought about them before this."

"I admit my failure about that particular meltdown not crossing my mind at all.  Whatever I was supposed to invent about figuring out a way to bring in Sevar, after being told it'd be too suspicious to have Security bring her to the cuddleroom, I didn't figure that out either."

"I will register that during this whole interaction, it occurred to me that if Pilar makes any significant progress on becoming a Keeper, Keltham is not going to consider this in-denial-about-wanting-it personality construct at all plausible.  It's the sort of complicated internal mess that I strongly suspect being a Keeper or even a regular ilani just melts -"

"AlterPilar is not in denial about anything.  She just pretends to be, so that Keltham will think she is, so that he thinks he's raping her, which is the part she actually cares about."

"Future Keltham will deduce that and then the actual corruption plan falls apart."

" - alter Cheliax verisimiltude wins over corruption plan, where they conflict, but I'm not sure I follow why they have to, can alter Pilar not just prefer not having a choice about it even while being entirely clear internally what choice she'd make? - that aside, I think this hits a lose condition somewhere in there. It's just too...convenient. Keltham needs to deduce it all himself, which means we need to have seeded it all before. Maybe make sure it comes up that Security carries scrolls of Teleport now after what happened in the godwar. It can be in one of Maillol's expense reports. Maybe we need to show off Pilar's curse more, have Keltham see it do things like inviting only the right people to an orgy or something -"

"Curse reminds you again that you're going to be faking all of that manually, without the actual curse assisting you.  It won't stop you, but it's not helping."

"I still think the simpler story is that we're all working together secretly to save him.  We suborned one Security, who tips us that Cheliax is moving, and we grab Keltham and tell him we're rescuing our oblivious boyfriend.  To believe that, Keltham needs to believe exactly one thing, which is that tropes are real.  He's said it's the prediction of the tropes."

"Only works under some possible scenarios for Keltham getting suspicious, but if we can swing it, sure. If nothing else it's faster and leans less on anyone's acting ability. But I don't actually think we are behaving like people who are secretly all working together to save him, and not being Good I don't even know what the hidden correlates would be."

"We're not Good.  We're in love.  And you know, considering that tropes are almost certainly real, I put at least thirty percent probability that, by the time this actually happens, we will be in love.  No matter how absolutely stupid that sounds to us right now.  Thankfully some very foresightful god arranged that Cheliax was forbidden to do the obvious things with Keltham and so none of our actual loyalties actually get tested, I hope."

"You know what I think is missing? Our creativity actually applied to the problem of escaping this place. I'm going to tell Security to replace the Teleport scrolls with pieces of paper that say 'this is a Teleport scroll'. If you make it out of the Forbiddance with one, you win. If you kill a Security, that's fine, we can raise them, a bit of live-fire testing is probably good for them anyway. Your orders are - well, first, to go get lunch, and then before the end of the day to make it out of here with a fake Teleport scroll or some other means of escaping. Failure will be punished --'scared and desperate' is actually the correct mental state for this exercise -- but trying and failing less than just staying in your room and not trying. You may conspire with each other; you may also turn each other in, if you like, for something of a reduction of the punishment for failing.

Dath ilani children, after all, when they aren't comprehending something, make a game of it."

"You know what's missing from that exercise?  Hope.  Anyone who can pull that off could have actually walked out of here with Keltham and I am assuming Security does not want this to happen."

"Phrased that way, there's a fundamental inconsistency in this whole plan which is that we couldn't actually beat Security and Keltham may figure that out.  In fact, I think I was - playing along with things, and failing to have Keltham call out the total implausibility of them just running out through a broken window and nobody is watching the grounds, there's no alarm spells, which Keltham knows about, on the perimeter, the Security have no checkins to miss - alterCheliax can be weaker but this level of weakness was not plausible."

"And I need to - find that internal thing of playing along and switch it off."

"Yes, you do. And I think that everyone actually trying to escape and likely failing in whatever fashion we'll actually, being outclassed by Security, fail, will be useful here, for - not playing along, for noticing what set of lucky coincidences it would take for an escape to be plausible even in a weaker alter-Cheliax. Alter-Cheliax isn't reading our minds, alter-Cheliax might have fewer Security, but this should still be very difficult. We need a felt sense of that.

As for hope, I don't know if we need that or not, but whoever is the most impressive won't be punished, even if she fails. Subirachs evaluates, because I intend, myself, to be the most impressive."

"And is Security going to pretend that they don't know about this, that Detect Thoughts doesn't exist, and that, if any of us made it out even then, they wouldn't all get slaughtered directly to Hell because no torture of Golarion would be enough?"

"The only thing you need to know about Security's instructions for your own planning purposes is that, as this is alter Cheliax, Detect Thoughts doesn't exist, and they've as yet encountered no cause for extra suspicion, and Hell is a lovely place the embrace of which we are all eager for." She's probably going to have half the Security 'on duty' in alter Cheliax with no Detect Thoughts, and the other half actually on duty with Detect Thoughts making sure no one actually defects; only the former are allowed to stop the girls unless they're genuinely escaping, of course. 

"If we actually made it out in alterCheliax there would be tropes helping us.  I don't know what that looks like but maybe, there is one female Security on staff who is in love with Keltham, Pilar's curse is actually helping and knows which Security that is -"

"First, try getting out. Then, when we understand where that failed, we can try to figure out what the tropes would do."

"Acknowledged."

She's going to see if she can pull her Project Lawful status and get a message started en route to going outside of Cheliax, a message that could have plausibly tipped off Osirion to their location and that it was time for Keltham pickup.

"Acknowledged."

She's going to wait a bit and then shout "Keltham Evil tortures people your god is Abadar don't accept resurrection until you've gotten to Axis" and assassinate Asmodia.

Peranza wonders if it's possible to figure out the ilani version of overpowered Splendour just from the teachings Keltham has given them so far.  Probably not, if Security isn't being instructed to play along, but she has literally no other ideas.

Tonia is extremely stressed. 

She takes the point that she is supposed to be extremely stressed because if they were actually traitors escaping with Keltham they'd be extremely stressed. But the punishment for the other girls, when they inevitably fail, is going to be in line with their Taldor-punishment rule. And Tonia is going to be actually punished. And the only way to protect herself is to do something impossible. 

Pilar is obviously the person you want on your team for doing something impossible, since maybe Cayden Cailean will help. (She knows that Cayden Cailean won't help, but she wouldn't know that in alter-Cheliax. Or is she allowed to use all the information she has, for this exercise? It gets a bit mixed up, when you do it too long.) Anyway, Pilar is utterly loyal to Asmodeus, so you can only get on Pilar's team if you have a good reason what you're doing serves Asmodeus. ...they don't have to be escaping to defect, they could also be escaping because they realized that the project was violating the rules Asmodeus gave for it? 

Message to Pilar: so, if you found out that Sevar didn't serve Asmodeus and the project was breaking the rules He sent us, what would you try. 

Is Pilar's curse up for this, by any chance?

Absolutely.  Showing them exactly how easy it would have been for Pilar's curse to get Keltham out is a wonderful trust-building exercise!

Message from Security to Sevar:  We see what you're thinking.  We'll run it past Subirachs, and then tell half the Security they can't run Detect Thoughts starting right away, during what's going to be an exercise, so they won't end up warned of what you're planning to try yourself.

Sure. Tell them to report to me for further instructions in ten minutes.

Meritxell considers. 

They're going to lose, obviously; the point of this exercise is to learn from what happens when they lose, rather than being the sort of exercise where you win. That does not make her want to win any less. At the absolute minimum she wants to be declared the most impressive. 

That requires thinking of an impressive idea, unfortunately, and she's not immediately coming up with one. She could....fight a Security? She almost definitely loses. Impersonate a Security? She almost definitely loses.  Impersonate Sevar? That's entertaining but in no way actually solves her problem. Impersonate the Queen? She likes being alive. Talk a Security into defecting with her by promising them all the riches of ......wherever they're defecting to, which is probably poorer than Cheliax? No, that's no good either....

Well, there's always the straightforward, honorable, only likely to fail approach of putting up See Invisibility and trying to kill a Security before they have time to get off a warning, and then trying to use whatever items and scrolls they have to get clear of the Forbiddance before they miss a checkin. It's the sort of plan that usually won't work but not the sort of plan that will never work, and tropes might be the kind of thing that likes long shots. 

"All right," says Carissa. "I'm going to go tell Security that we're doing a training exercise in which one girl is a traitor while the rest remain loyal. And that they're supposed to pretend not to know that and to act normally. Good luck, may the strong triumph and the weak suffer, have fun out there."

Sometimes Gregoria wonders if joining Project Lawful was a mistake. It can't be, since it wasn't a voluntary decision, but still.

Carissa presents Security with an incomplete briefing on today's exercise, which will be incomplete because the Security assigned to participate in the exercise and ordered already not to use Detect Thoughts will best satisfy their roles if they are missing much relevant context: the exercise is that one of the girls is a traitor, but they are expected not to act on that knowledge and to persist in their usual habits.

Furthermore, they are to pretend, for today, to be limited in the fashion that Security in alter-Cheliax would be limited. They may not use Detect Thoughts; if they capture the suspected traitor alive they have to dawdle for ten full minutes before extracting information such as whether this was in fact the traitor. Other Security has been assigned to ensuring that these limitations don't produce any genuine security holes. 

Finally, they are for this exercise not to carry the scrolls of Teleport assigned to them, because they don't want this exercise to present the girls with a genuine temptation to defect; they are to trade them for these rolls of paper that say 'Teleport' on them, which are a win condition for the girls. Again, other Security has been assigned to ensuring that these limitations don't produce any genuine security holes. 

"It is my hope and expectation that you will apprehend the pretend-traitor without incident; it'd be more convenient if you don't kill her, but killing her is preferable to letting her win, unless it's Ione, who should be permitted to win rather than killed, if relevant. The exercise is expected to end tonight, but you should consider it still underway until Subirachs tells you otherwise, or until you get a top-priority alert from those Security not on this assignment. You're dismissed. Olegario, a word."

"Your will, Chosen."  Olegario will follow her, or stay to speak to her, as she seems to prefer.

Stay to speak with her. "I'm participating in this exercise; I might be a traitor, today. You are to ignore any further instructions from me until Subirachs has confirmed that this exercise is over. Further, should you ever have cause for doubt that I am on the path Asmodeus set out for me, you are permitted to speak to Subirachs of it, as it is likelier that I have been impersonated or compulsioned, or that the occasion is a test, than that Asmodeus has genuinely led me into opposition to His church on Golarion."

"Acknowledged, sir," says Olegario; that he's not calling her Chosen should show he understood.

"Dismissed." 

She waits for him to leave the room.

Now there are some discarded scrolls of Teleport in a pile on the table. She takes one and puts it in her bag. As they say in dath ilan, cheating is technique. "Get the rest of those somewhere safe," she tells the non-participating Security, and heads out to lunch.

Whoever's job it is to torture Carissa Sevar, Elias Abarco thinks as he gathers the remaining scrolls, is not doing it enough.

Lunch is had by all!  It's a much tenser lunch than usual.  Messages get passed around now and then, in absolutely no more than the usual quantity for a lunch.  As Asmodia warned everyone earlier, they had better not give away that it's more than one girl participating, if they want to have any chance at this.

And then girls drift off to the library, or in Yaisa's case to her bedroom to prepare spells, which she did not bother to do this morning, a decision she now feels very rewarded for. She can put some offensive spells together - they don't have much chance of working, but they're not the whole plan. 

Carissa goes to her room, checks it for spies, locks it, and starts preparing spells as well.

Five minutes later, while Carissa sits in her room apparently preparing spells, an invisible Carissa streams in gaseous form up through the chimney and out of the fortress. (She loses the illusion once she's seven hundred feet away from it, not that the illusion is actually a substantial part of the plan.)

(She had those spells prepared anyway, in case she needed them during the earlier Keltham escape sequence.)

Sevar is almost outside the Forbiddance when she gets struck with a Dimensional Anchor spell, from an angle she doesn't see.

...was that one of the Security who was in the exercise group, or a Security still really on guard?  Either way, it's clear Carissa Sevar could not have escaped that way in realCheliax.

...good. Real Cheliax's competence to keep actual defectors from escaping is important for all her plans. 

(She wasn't, actually, defecting, obviously. She had considered burning the Teleport to go visit Egorian but decided against.)

Peranza seduces a Security officer, to the point of actually having sex with him, before trying to be very, very persuasive about how much she would really like to go on an Ostenso shopping trip, her being escorted there is fine, she'll have sex with him for weeks if he does.

Security has been tensely trying to figure out if he would have been seducible if he hadn't been warned in advance.  Not seducible about the trip, obviously, seducible about the sex.  But he's one of the Securities who proved seducible by Yaisa, and the rest of Security knows that, and he doesn't want to have to defend the plausibility of his turning Peranza down.

That makes the safer course deciding that he would have fallen for it.  He took off his clothes with Yaisa, he'll take off his clothes with Peranza.  If she can successfully take him out while she's naked, he'll deserve whatever he gets.

(He is nonetheless wary of Peranza, focusing on her, ready for her to try something, probably more than he would be if he hadn't been warned - but it's not like he wouldn't have been wary at all otherwise, right.)

Security has been warned there's a traitor but thinks there's one of them; that makes the best course of action teaming up. Yaisa has made herself and Gregoria and Meritxell invisible; Meritxell has a knife and thinks she can maybe kill a high enough level wizard with one strike but even if not, there'll be three other people trying. 

She hasn't actually murdered anyone before, but it's good to get that out of the way early, really. 

She stabs the Security through the eye; it's not quite likeliest to kill him but it's sufficiently sure to be debilitating if it doesn't.

He doesn't die of the assassination strike and they don't win in the end but it is a very close thing.  The sort of close where somebody is bound to think that, if Meritxell had more practice and a better weapon - or if Meritxell and Gregoria had a chance to prepare their own spells - or if Yaisa's spellbook also had Cat's Grace, Bull's Strength, and True Strike - he'd be dead.

There will be consequences about this.

Ione waits until much of the afternoon is up before she makes her move.  If Ione tries something, even if she succeeds, Security might expect the exercise to be over after that.  Her plan is a simple one, she is on the Nethysian punishment plan rather than even the lax one, and Ione doesn't want to blow other girls' chances at avoiding punishment by making it clear earlier that more than one girl might be a traitor.

By the time Ione's moment comes around, Asmodia doesn't seem to be around, so Ione carries out the plan on a morose Peranza instead.  She uses Message instead of shouting; on reflection, that gives them even less time to try Hold Person on her.

Message to Peranza:

Brace yourself, and don't react to what I'm about to say, or do.

KELTHAM EVIL TORTURES PEOPLE CHELIAX IS LYING TO YOU ABADAR IS YOUR GOD DON'T ACCEPT ANY RESURRECTIONS UNTIL YOU MAKE IT TO AXIS AND TALK TO SOMEBODY

Peranza is startled enough that she says "What?" out loud, but without a Detect Thoughts running, that's not enough to cue Security to use Hold Person or Dominate Person on Ione before Ione mimes a pretty realistic assassination strike on Peranza, through her eye, with a kitchen blade.

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.

On the clear distant level on which Carissa Sevar is calmly observing Carissa Sevar and observing that this is satisfactory for causing in Carissa Sevar the dread and panic that they just agreed was the objective, she notes for Abarco's benefit that Keltham has ordered her not to have sex with anyone without his prior approval. 

"Well," Elias says cheerfully, "I guess you'll have to lie to Keltham."

Everyone else (Tonia excluded) gets 20 lashes, except that it's 10 for Asmodia.

(Ione decided not to argue, when she heard the details.  She doesn't want to create resentment among the other girls, and also, is in fact worried about letting herself go soft or look scared while she's still got to live in Cheliax.)

Pilar, in principle, should now also undergo some punishment bad enough to scare her.  The problem is, nobody including Security or Subirachs has any idea what scares Pilar besides her failing in her duties to Asmodeus.  Pilar did just spend the afternoon up until the exercise ended with Security sincerely trying to torture her in a way she'd find unpleasant, not totally without success.  This may as well be said to count.

"I - Pilar, I - I didn't think you'd do that - why."

Pilar looks worn, if only to Chelish eyes.

"A few days ago somebody in Chelish intelligence implied that they couldn't rely on my ability to hold out under torture if that hadn't been tested."

"Just to be clear here, you did, in fact, sell me out?"

"Yes.  I - don't need to explain, right, why it was you, not anybody else, certainly not Tonia."

"The amount of heresy on Project Lawful is not going to end well."

"I'm sorry.  I'm not much pretending to not be a heretic so I'll just say it."

"Eh.  Don't worry about it.  I've learned a valuable lesson about the true meaning of friendship."

Tonia can't make herself eat her cookie, but she stares at it all evening.

PL-timestamp:  Day 13 (10) / Morning

Keltham is pretty gung-ho about today!  If all goes according to schedule - this being much less of a silly thing to think in dath ilan than Golarion and some intuitions haven't caught up yet for him - today will mark the signing of the Project's articles of incorporation and the interim compact between Cheliax and the Project!  And then as soon as they send him some domain experts he can -

Everyone at breakfast looks - well, they look the same as always, to Keltham, but the noise level is audibly much less, people aren't talking much to each other.  Everyone has a cake plate, some with untouched pieces of cake on them.

Ione comes over as soon as she sees him.

"Keltham, advisory," Ione says quietly, "the war was going okay and it's still going okay and Cheliax is still going to win in the end, this sort of thing happens during a war, but Cheliax lost one of its eighth-circles last night, soul-trapped.  Name was Delmus.  Eventually Cheliax wins and frees his soul but he is not likely to come out of it okay or, functioning, it's a situation where when Cheliax finishes the war, he goes to Hell, not back to life.  Sevar didn't know Delmus at all well but she knew him, he was an instructor for one of her classes a long time ago.  I - don't think I'd actually advise that you try to comfort her about it, unless she asks, there's too much you don't - get, yet."

Keltham can think of all sorts of additional questions, just like with most of the sentences ever uttered in front of him in Golarion, and he also knows that this is not the time.  Questions will keep.

"Understood.  Your recommendation about today's schedule?"

(He mostly puts to the back of his mind the haze of speculation about whether the Conspiracy is about to ask him to develop weapons, or if this means from a trope standpoint that the Nidal war is going to be a big deal in the plot.  Those questions will also keep, and he does like to have the option of not walking about constantly consumed by anxieties like that.  His gendertrope also says that when others are shaken, it is a time for him to be less shaken, if he happens to have that option.)

"Consider going lighter for the day on new math that's going to push our minds to the limit to understand.  If you have that option, my guess is that giving everybody an off day to be gloomy is not the correct move, and it's better to be making progress instead."

"Understood."

This does take some replanning - next up after Utility is Decision, prerequisite unto Coordination; and to explain the preliminary steps of math there using conventional examples, he's going to need to explain computer programs... well, he can find something else.

Keltham, then, will jump ahead of Decision, to a lesser fragment of Coordination.  While the ordering of the subjects as math is somewhat different, on reflection, dath ilani children growing up sure do know what is a cooperation-defection-dilemma, long before they learn the logical decision theory to solve them Lawfully.

...should he be worried that cooperation-defection-dilemma comes out as eleven syllables, instead of three, if he just tries to say it in Taldane?  Probably.  Likewise that 'punishment', meaning the sting in an attempted 'threat' payoff matrix, is one syllable instead of six.  You could take a good guess at what kind of wreck this world would be, just from its language.

The first thing Keltham tells everyone is to please prepare Comprehend Languages tomorrow; he should test the effects of lecturing in Baseline.  Which he mostly expects to not work, but value-of-information, if it does work that's great to know, and generates value over time, so better to run the experiment sooner rather than later.  Value-of-information is one syllable in Baseline, by the way, just 'value-of-information'.

The classic example of a cooperation-defection-dilemma is one that, dath ilan supposes, must have been common hundreds or maybe thousands of years before the times that are remembered:  Two farmers, both with almost no technology, and a small supply of not-very-heritage-optimized grains that they must both plant, and eat.  Each farmer plans to eat enough seed to survive, albeit somewhat miserably, and plant enough seed that next year there will be sufficient to both eat and plant; that is all the grain that they have.

But roving bears sometimes smash open grain-enclosures and steal grain.  So each farmer's options include faking a bear attack on the other's grain-enclosure and stealing some of the grain there for themselves.  Not enough that the other farmer starves and becomes desperate and dangerous, but enough that the other farmer will be miserably hungry this year and also the next year, because they won't have enough grain to plant for future plenty.

The other farmer could, of course, guess that the bear attack was fake, and steal their missing grains back.  But this can't plausibly be anything except deliberate action, it would be too much coincidence.  Which obviously starts a cycle of both farmers having to sleep with their grain, and spend a lot of time watching for attacks, at the end of which they'll both lose a substantial amount of the time they needed for planting.

If you consider each farmer's available actions, and the payoffs to both of them based on both farmers' actions, it might look like:

                                      Farmer 2:
                          Cooperate-2:      Defect-2:
Farmer 1:      
Cooperate-1:      (100, 100)         (30, 120)
Defect-1:             (120, 30)           (70, 70)

...where the labels '1' and '2' also remind you of whose payoff is whose, that is, Farmer-1 gets the first element of the payoff and Farmer-2 gets the second element.  So if Farmer-1 Defects and Farmer-2 Cooperates, Farmer-1 gets a payoff of 120, and Farmer-2 gets a payoff of 30.

This example seems to have been well-chosen; the students are following along and not making baffled faces about any aspects of the hypothetical.

The ideal solution to this problem is something that gets covered in the technical lectures following Utility, on Decision, but on reflection dath ilani children all know about this problem-concept before anybody tries to teach ideal solutions to it.

There is, of course, a pure-Good solution to this problem, which is that both farmers care about what happens to sapient life in general, and care about themselves as only special cases of sapient life.  They won't impose a direct cost of -70 on the other farmer, for a benefit of +20, because their real or ultimate utilities are a sum over all sapience evenly weighted in proportion to the reality-weight of all those sapient beings, everything with - your language has no word for 'qualia', right, on some less strained day Keltham needs to ask some carefully constructed questions so as not to give away what he's trying to test, but for now he is going to guess that Taldane lacks the word 'qualia' and not that Golarion inhabitants lack the thing the word is talking about.

Anyways, that's the Good solution - everyone's real utility is just a sum of everyone's payoffs, and everybody knows that this is the case about everybody, and so everybody individually decides to do whatever they need to do, in order to end up in the matrix-cell with the maximum sum of payoffs.

There's a Keltham solution, which is that you don't have very much of that pure Good - you care about other people close to you, maybe, but these farmers are not lovers nor friends - but you do care a lot about not stealing from strangers.  If you live next to a Keltham, that you know is a Keltham, you can be pretty sure he won't fake a bear attack on you; the difficulty, of course, is in the knowing, because this world has no truthspells.

But suppose now that both farmers are Abaddon-style pure Evil, not partially selfish but absolutely selfish.  They care about their own food supplies, the satisfaction of eating now and eating in the future; nothing else.

Is there a Lawful solution for absolutely selfish people?

"They would both agree to have a King who investigates supposed bear attacks and punishes thieves," offers Gregoria.

"There's no King, and if there were, he'd be a selfish King who'd take almost all their grain himself."

"Unless, of course, there's a Lawful solution to that too.  But if there's a Lawful solution there, you'd ask if it could be simplified back to just the two farmers again."

Gregoria thinks that yeah, selfish King who takes almost all the grain is kind of just how it works out. She doesn't volunteer this answer.

...is there any such thing as a lecture on Law which isn't accidentally trying to explode Asmodeanism?  Sometimes Ione does wonder if Keltham knows, and is playing with all of them.  Maybe he can beat Detect Thoughts using ilani disciplines far beyond what he speaks of openly.

"I think - if they didn't expect to get away with the bear attack - wouldn't the first farmer not fake the bear attack, because they'd know the other person would steal back grain, even if they didn't think the attack was fake?  I mean, even if it was a bear attack, a purely Evil farmer would steal grain from the other farmer to make up for that, right..."

"You expect the other purely-selfish farmer to try to steal from you anyways, though.  So you might as well steal from them first.  We could suppose that whoever carries out the theft first has a few days of plenty eating their stolen food, before the other farmer can prepare and execute a plan to steal back food.  So if you're going to end up in that situation anyways, there's an incentive to be the first to Defect."

"We could skip the part where it's a fake bear attack.  We could even skip the part where the paired thefts occur, and go directly to them spending a lot of time guarding their grain.  70-70 payoff at the end."

"But in fact, yeah, you might suspect intuitively that somehow two purely selfish farmers in this situation would manage to reason that, if they kicked off a cycle of thefts and guarding, they'd both be worse off."

"And so long as no theft had yet occurred - they would both think - maybe the two of them could, somehow, end up doing something else which is not that."

"This is the great will to do Something Else Which Is Not That, and end up Not There, which is sometimes said in dath ilan - though the truth is not now remembered - to perhaps be the reason why Civilization exists, why any such thing as Civilization now exists, and not just a bunch of farmers sleeping miserably next to their grain stores."

"But what I'd like to observe at this step is that - if the two farmers do manage to end up with the 100-100 payoff, somehow - by hypothesis, it can't be because they're Good; it has to be because they are, in some way, being Lawful."

Yep, that part seems right, that you can get Civilization out of Law and not out of Good, that Good is a weaker and worse way to build it. 

Subirachs thought that Cheliax was more Evil than Lawful....

"But fake bear attacks aren't the limit of how hard we can make it to coordinate."

"Let's take the next step up in things being hard to observe.  Let's say two partners are working on a new venture, but again, this is happening earlier in history and they're missing a lot of social technology.  Maybe they're two farmers, one of them has to forge the ground-breaking tools, one has to make the scythes, and then they both have to break ground together at planting and use the scythes together at harvest."

"If either of them slack off on the engineering part of their job, they get to be lazy themselves, and the resulting less efficient work is distributed across both parties, so it's a net benefit for them."

"Let's say that you can pick up +30 of personal utility by slacking off, at a cost of -20 harder work to you later.  And also, of course, -20 harder work for your partner too.  But you don't care about that because you're Abaddon-Evil, pure-selfish."

                            Cooperate-2:       Defect-2:
Cooperate-1:         (100, 100)         (80, 110)
Defect-1:                (110, 80)           (90, 90)

"And the other farmer isn't expert enough at that person's job to tell they did a bad job - the ground-breaker can't tell if the scythes are blunter than they should be, and require more effort to use."

"And it's early in history so they can't call in a professional third-party evaluator."

"If they are both Abaddon-Evil, pure-selfish, but Lawful, is there any way now for them to end up with the 100-100 payoff?  To look at the 90-90 payoff and say that they want to end up Not There, to do Something Else Which Is Not That?"

Seems like no?

"Gods can cooperate in that situation. ...humans I think mostly can't. At least Golarion humans."

"Well, let's try it then.  With a bit of randomness thrown in, so that even after you get your payoffs, you are not sure what the other person did."

"You pair up and write 'Cooperate' or 'Defect' on a piece of paper.  So does your partner.  Baseline reward is 3 copper for playing the game.  I'll spin a coin ten times for each of you, and for each time it comes up Queen, you get +1 copper.  The spins are separate for each of you.  If you Defect, you get one more copper than you would've otherwise, and your opponent gets 3 less.  If you Cooperate, the rewards are the same."

"There is, I suppose, a chance that you Defect, and their coin comes up Queen 0, 1, or 2 times, and then you're definitely caught.  But that's only a 5.5% probability.  Or your coin could come up Queen 8, 9, or 10 times, and then if the other Cooperated you'll know that for sure."

"You are, in this version of the game, allowed to talk to each other.  You cannot, of course, show each other what's written on your paper."

"Actually, let me see about getting Yaisa or somebody to be Silent Proctor in this game, if they're willing to do it for a couple of silvers.  I wouldn't want you too influenced by wondering what your boss would think of your moves."

"Oh, and it goes without saying, your sole goal is not to win the most copper of anyone - that'll be mostly down to the randomness - but just to earn as much copper as you can."

"Tier-2s can pick which tier-1s they want to play with, going in order by Tonia, Peranza, Gregoria, Pilar.  Security, can I get a message conveyed to any non-busy Ostensos about there being a twenty-minute job requiring strong but easy confidentiality, for whichever of them is the lowest bidder on it?"

Security can do that. (Are they supposed to help the girls cheat?)

No. They are pretty much never supposed to help the girls cheat. If everyone defects the entire time, which everyone probably will, then that probably has all kinds of correlates.

Tonia wants Ione because maybe she'll do some weird Nethysian thing that isn't just the obvious 'defect every time'.

THIS IS NOT LESS STRESSFUL THAN MATH.

Asmodia, having thought implausibly fast, tells Security to transmit:

The natural distribution of responses here won't be right for a non-Evil country.  Not just results, what people are saying, if Keltham listens.

Idea:  Have Sevar play Pilar and myself play Ione, inside our thoughts, Security proctors the results.  That'll be proxy for what the results might look like, and what the students might be learning or saying, somewhere less Evil.  Not that we're not all Evil here, just, well, you know what I'm getting at.

And Tonia is now FRIENDS WITH IONE to explain her choice because NETHYSIANS ARE NOT NICER PEOPLE THAN ASMODEANS IN ALTER-CHELIAX.

- sure, they can try that.

Peranza, per direction, picks Sevar.

Ione notes out loud that she wants a quiet minute or two to think about this entire thing before she has to start playing, if that's okay, and that she'd recommend giving everyone else a quiet minute too.

Sensible.  Sure!

Well, this is going to be something, Pilar thinks for retransmission to Sevar.  I straight-up can't figure out what Asmodean theology says here, the Lawful and Evil parts seem to be pulling in opposite directions.

Yes, I am having that problem too. I think this is how tyranny is derived - Asmodeus wants a King who'll make the farmers cooperate, so they're not doing it out of - intrinsic trust in each other, even trust in each others' lawfulness, but they are doing it. 

Does Asmodeus dislike the part where people trust each other, or like the part where it gets done by tyranny instead?

(Pilar has the same question about why Asmodeanism prohibits people caring about each other.)

Not authorized to instruct you on matters of faith, remember. If I were wildly guessing I would say that Asmodeus isn't the antithesis of Good, that's Zon-Kuthonish, the thing He likes is that it produces tyranny, and the thing where - one needn't rely on Good in others, one isn't following processes that only work if people have convenient values? That there's something better about a system you can build out of any kind of Lawful farmer than a system you can build out of only farmers who care about each other. And maybe that if people care about each other they'll let that win out over Law. But I'm guessing. 

Anyway, I'm not sure if in the absence of a tyrant Asmodeus thinks we ought to cooperate or - no, actually, we shouldn't have free will. It'd be better if we didn't have free will. And farmers without free will obviously do the Lawful thing. I think.

I was thinking about two devils.  But not equal ones, a higher devil and a lower one, so they wouldn't just automatically do the same thing.

Or the Queen and the Most High.

(Would it be all right to care, then, if you could do it without making things be about caring instead of Law, if it was all still tyrannical enough that Lord Asmodeus wasn't losing anything... how bad is the wrongness inside her, exactly, is it absolutely bad or just...)

I bet the key here like the key with lots of things with Keltham is doing things with certain probabilities. Like, if it looks to me like there's a 50% chance you stole from me I flip a coin about whether to steal back.

The Queen and the Most High have a negotiated contract, that's - another way - I assume the farmers aren't allowed to negotiate a contract but if they are, well, you're definitely not supposed to give your word falsely.

Keltham didn't SAY they weren't allowed to negotiate a contract.

I was about to transmit that I'd realized we were having the wrong discussion, because we need to figure out alter-Asmodean theology so students can talk about that, but maybe we just DID figure out what alter-Asmodeanism says about it.  That part wouldn't be different.  Keltham knows our Lord is Lord of compacts.

Yes. The alter-Asmodeus answer has got to be in significant part that you have to be the kind of person who keeps your word when you give it, that's the absolute minimum of there being any reason to not steal from you at all, and then the farmers negotiate a deal. And everyone can argue out their deals individually, I think, though not trying to cheat each other.

It's kind of a straightforward deal.  Not a lot of options there.  I guess somebody could try demanding an extra copper in order to Cooperate but who'd fall for that, really.

What alter-conversation did we have leading up to that?  Maybe - the parts about what two devils would do, what the Queen and Most High would do because there's nobody above them in Golarion... but Keltham shouldn't hear the same thing everywhere, we need variations on what people could come up with...

I think the 'what would people without free will do' conversation is fine, Keltham knows that Asmodeanism holds that that's something broken about us -

So I heard you betrayed Pilar yesterday.

That didn't happen in alter-Cheliax.

Uh huh.

Isn't the idea that we have the real conversation between us, so we can figure out how people actually think about this, and then adapt that to alter-Cheliax?

Fine, so you mentioned that recent time where - what would even be analogous to that, in alter-Cheliax, they're not offering students incentives to turn traitor on each other.

They sure aren't.

Focus, Ione.

Well, on my side, I'd bring up the point that you are beyond doubt the least Lawful person in this classroom.

Great, let's both Defect, then.

This isn't a contest of who can make the other person look less trustworthy.  We're supposed to be figuring out a way to, how did Keltham put it, Not That.

Then why did YOU bring that up.

Because I was wondering if you had anything to say in your defense about why you betraying Pilar, then, doesn't mean you would Defect now.

And the part where you're now the adherent of a Neutral god - is something you'd have to defend to me?

This from the Chosen of Milani.

I told you that was a fucking joke.

Bet that's not how tropes work.

If I'm the Chosen of ANYONE it's some sort of weird god who does for this universe what I do for alter-Cheliax.  And if there's a god like that, I'm pretty sure it's a Lawful one.

We're not getting anywhere here, Ione, we're sniping at each other in a way that Asmodeans do, and we need to be having the alter-Cheliax version of this conversation instead.  Like one where we talk about how trustworthy we are, instead of how untrustworthy the other person is.

My alter-Cheliax self has never in her life hurt anyone who didn't hurt her first.

How about you?

I don't think - that can be true - even in alter-Cheliax -

Run that past Sevar before you say it to Keltham, Ione, she'll tell you that it's not like that in other countries.  She'll say it's not like that in Taldor.  She'll - probably be right.  Maybe in Keltham's Civilization, the real one, out of dath ilan.

I didn't say alter-Ione never hurt anyone.  I said that I don't see why alter-Ione would ever hurt anyone who didn't hurt her first, if nobody was FORCING her to cast Acid Splash on CHILDREN to make sure she ended up DAMNED TO HELL -

Because somewhere over her entire life, alter-Ione would, at some point, have hurt someone innocent, and remembered it, even if she was sad about it.  So she wouldn't say that to Keltham because it would be a lie -

Ione, stop this, this is NOT THE ALTER-VERSION of our conversation, that's an order.

Alter-Asmodia says that she sure wants us to both end up Cooperating, but no matter what kind of conversation we have about that, she doesn't see why we wouldn't just both Defect.

Alter-Ione says that she doesn't especially want to be the sort of person where she Defects even though the other person Cooperated, so mostly, you just need to convince her that you Cooperate, and you're pretty done from there.  She doesn't see how you'll convince her of that, though.

Alter-Asmodia says that Keltham's instructions were to make as much copper as we can, for ourselves, not to end up a particular sort of person.

Alter-Ione says fuck the instructions, she's a Nethysian.

Alter-Asmodia says that's not how to learn the knowledge Keltham is trying to teach you, Nethysian.

Alter-Ione says, she thinks there isn't a way out of this in real life, if it's with Neutral Evil players, and that dath ilani little kids end up Cooperating because they don't really follow instructions either, what with them also being the sort of kids who try to explode their schools.

Alter-Ione thinks the people who actually follow instructions in this game end up Defecting and the ones who don't really follow instructions Cooperate.  If it's not about who we really are, but the Neutral Evil versions of us.

Alter-Asmodia says that this is absolutely not the moral of a game they'd play with dath ilani kids, if this one doesn't contain the pieces for a solution, they'd give the kids a more complicated solvable problem right from the very start.  They don't want to teach the kids that Defection is the only way out.

They play it to teach the kids that Defection is what happens when everyone is Evil and has no trace of Good in them.  This is a truth and a great and important and valuable one, which ought, indeed, to be taught to children.

NOT consistent with the tone of Keltham's earlier lecture, he was pointing in the direction of there being a Lawful solution that didn't rely on Good.  Not in a trolling way, either.

I'm not seeing it, then.  How about you, Chosen of a Lawful god?

...I am unfortunately better at the math, and what comes after the math, than I am at the thing that comes before the math.  The part you had to help me with on Keltham's seven problems.

If it's solvable, it has to depend on what kind of people we are.  You can't do this with a demon.  You can't do this with a rock that has 'Defect' written on it either.  That's why Keltham said we were allowed to talk to each other, it's not that we can - threaten each other, or persuade each other - it's something we have to know about each other.

Guess about each other, not know, because it'll be a truth of only some worlds, not a truth across all the worlds, a probability and not a logic.

I don't see how you could know that, from talking to somebody.  Wouldn't they just say whatever you needed to hear to make you Cooperate?

If you've got 30 Splendour, possibly.  Otherwise maybe my Sense Motive is good for something against your Bluff.

But, valuable to know that's how you think about it, Asmodean.

"Okay, enough quiet time, let's start the game."

"Wait."

Message to Keltham:  Should we all do this in separate rooms?  I'm pretty sure I have an outright solution, and if somebody else overhears that, it'll skew the results.

Message to Pilar:  This I have to see.

"Suggestion accepted from Pilar to do this in separate breakout rooms."

We need to resolve our game, see what results end up as.

Defect, Asmodia thinks, not for retransmission to Ione.

Defect, Ione thinks.

I commit to you to not steal your grain in the absence of convincing evidence you stole my grain which right now would be just a too-low number but in the future when I think through all the math might also include a pattern of grain results that is unlikely if you are not stealing, Carissa says to Pilar, if you will make the reciprocal commitment. 

I make the reciprocal commitment, as an Asmodean, if you make it as an Asmodean.  Not in the way where we're calling on Hell to punish us if we break the compact, because that part wouldn't exist in alter-Cheliax, but in the way where this is a compact, and we'd keep it even if Asmodeus said He wasn't going to punish us for breaking it, because we are Asmodeans.

(Pilar lets herself be smarter when she needs to be the smart one.)

Carissa is not sure that's actually part of Asmodeanism but - it should be? So hopefully it is. 

As an Asmodean, then.

Cooperate, Pilar thinks.

Cooperate.

See, you can be Evil and still win. 

Keltham, meanwhile, has followed Pilar into her selected breakout room with Meritxell, looking skeptical and interested.

Security, does Pilar need advice/rulings from me immediately?

Pilar's fine, in Security's best judgment.

All right, update me on what happened with Sevar/Pilar so I can figure out what our results should look like and what people should talk about.

Since Asmodia hasn't had time to advise anyone, Pilar will just open directly rather than give Meritxell time to possibly screw up.

"I offer you a compact as between Asmodeans, that I will write Cooperate and you will write Cooperate," Pilar says to Meritxell.  "Not an oath, and we're not calling on Hell to witness it, that's too serious for this.  But a compact, as is our Lord's domain."

" - are we allowed to stipulate the farmers are Asmodeans," says Meritxell. "Obviously Asmodeans can make such compacts, but what if the farmers aren't - I guess the farmers who aren't Asmodeans will be starving and sleeping in their grain silos and they'll see the Asmodeans and convert, sure."

"Keltham's instructions didn't say to pretend we're farmers.  He just told us to play this game, and earn as much copper for ourselves as we could."

" - all right, fair enough. I accept your compact, as an Asmodean." Meritxell assumes that she's now supposed to cooperate with Pilar? To show Asmodeans in alter-Cheliax can do that?

"I'll leave you to the rest of the game, assuming it's not over.  Remember, turn your back while the other person writes their move; neither of you is to know the other's move, now or ever, except as you might guess it from the partially random payout you get.  Oh, obviously you don't tell the other person your payout, either."

"If you actually are done shortly, I guess you might need to wait while the Silent Proctor gets here... actually no, just leave your moves, folded, with your names on them, in the room.  Security can make sure only the Silent Proctor looks at them."

Keltham departs to go look in on Carissa's game with Peranza.

Carissa has sought and gotten confirmation that she isn't saying things suspiciously identical to Pilar's. "So I don't think you want to say 'I compact not to steal your grain', because if you're stealing my grain I'll certainly steal yours back. I kind of suspect the actual solution is going to involve the same thing as the jellychips problem, keeping a probability estimate of how likely it is you're stealing my grain and having some probability of stealing back if I become convinced enough that you're stealing. But I do think you can say, 'I commit not to steal your grain unless I become sufficiently sure you're stealing mine, if you make the same commitment', or something like that?"

Peranza has learned that it's best to just let alterPeranza talk, and try to not let any of realPeranza's thoughts and fears get in her way.

"How do the farmers know one of them will do something just because she says 'I commit'?"

(RealPeranza is not so silent that alterPeranza would just say 'How can I trust you?' to Sevar.)

"So there's some half-answers, like, you set up the probability of stealing back if your grain gets ransacked so that it's not worth stealing and maybe getting caught, not in the long run, and they aren't better off stealing, or, being a farmer who means it when you commit things is useful for stuff other than not stealing grain from your neighbors, so you do it to have a reputation as someone who does it, but they are kind of half answers? The thing gods can do is - show each other what kind of person they are, and you can see, well are they a person who means it when they commit, or not? ...we don't have that but we do have Detect Law which I'd argue is kind of the same thing. And I'm powerful enough to show up to Detect Law so you can just Detect Law and see that when I commit I mean it. ....doesn't answer how I'm supposed to know what you'll do."

"I don't suppose you already have a plan for that part?  Because that sounds like, I could trust you to commit in the name of Law, that you'll Cooperate if I Cooperate, but I don't have any way to show you I'll Cooperate."

She sold her soul, but that's not the same thing in alterCheliax.

"Showing up to Detect Law is one way of being the kind of person whose commitments are real but it's not the only one? Most people in Cheliax are Lawful, so I'm starting from a high expectation that you're Lawful, it's not like you're trying to convince someone who doesn't know anything about you."

"So you... just need to talk to me for a while, because also I'm younger than you and your Sense Motive probably beats my Bluff, and when you're sure enough I'm Lawful, we both commit in the name of Law?"

...Peranza is being very pliant here, and if Carissa can talk her into mutual Cooperation this way, she could probably also talk Peranza into Cooperating while Carissa Defected; which, as he understands it, Carissa should not really end up doing if she promises in the name of Law.

Well, everybody Cooperates the first time, and the older kids usually have to nag them for a while to get anyone to Defect ever, even for purposes of understanding the counterfactuals that real Civilization is meant to rule out.  Maybe Golarion isn't so different that way?  Still, Keltham would've thought the instruction to 'earn as much copper as possible' to maybe be a bit more effectively understood, here.

"I think so? Or I think this isn't the whole true solution but it's the bit of it we're likeliest to actually get working. So, are you actually Lawful? If you make a commitment do you mean it even if later you think of a way to make more money doing something else?"

"Yes," says alterPeranza, because what's she going to say, no?

" - I don't actually feel like that answers the question! Or - I feel like a Peranza whose plan was 'play very dumb, nod along, then defect every time' would also say that! Whereas there are some things she'd have a harder time saying. Just, 'yes' isn't one of them."

"I'm - an Asmodean living in Cheliax and a follower of Asmodeus in good standing with the Church who was slated to take the Worldwound oath?  I'd rather live in a Lawful country than a Chaotic one?"

Asmodia and Gregoria.

"I was kind of hoping you had some clever math since otherwise we're obviously both going to defect the whole time," Gregoria says.

(That does NOT SOUND like a conversation that was already going on before Keltham entered the room but Asmodia will speak to Gregoria about that LATER.)

"Apparently the clever math was going to be in today's session except for, you know, and now we're getting this session instead."

"It can't just be about knowing a piece of math, though.  Otherwise you could say that piece of math out loud, and then Defect anyways."

"I bet dath ilani kids don't Defect, even before they know the math.  I just don't know why.  There's a version where they're bad at following instructions but I bet that's not why either."

It kind of is the kids being bad at following instructions, if they've got no idea how to consider the logical-probabilistic correlation between their actions, or examine each other for evidence of being the sort of agent who runs internal logic corresponding to outward verbal representations.

Not that it isn't adorable to watch a bunch of eight-year-olds make up totally specious and implausible reasons for being nice to each other, but.

...maybe he should've had everyone run a version of this game where they pretend to be Abyss demons, first, so as to test actual comprehension of instructions / willingness to write Defect literally at all.

"I have been sort of thinking that a lot of dath ilan is powered by - mutual knowledge of everyone else's Lawful Goodness, and so the kids all have mutual knowledge of each others' Lawful Goodness, and probably there are ways to cooperate if you have mutual knowledge of Lawful Goodness. Which doesn't help the farmers any, obviously, and I don't think it helps you and me either."

"I think you should just need Lawful or Goodness, not Lawful Goodness, and we do have mutual knowledge of that."

...possibly this problem is, in fact, easier, if you've got some weird version of Law called Lawfulness, that you can detect with spells, that whole regional factions polarize around, and which has gods related to it.

"Okay, we're both Lawful, what does that get us? There's Law against stealing someone's grain but there isn't Law against writing 'defect' on this piece of paper."

"That's kind of where I'm blocked as well.  We're probably supposed to do - some math thing that there'd obviously be Law against breaking?"

" - swear to it? But I'm not doing that for a game and dath ilan wouldn't have its children do that either."

(You're not QUALIFIED yet to take oaths, in alter-Cheliax, and AGAIN Asmodia will be having a talk with Gregoria about this LATER.)

"No, they wouldn't.  They wouldn't tell their children what oaths were, until they were old enough... though they wouldn't have Abaddon..."

"No, I feel like in a really Lawful civilization, you don't tell your children what oaths are, even if there's no Abaddon, because you just don't want kids breaking oaths.  Keltham, are we allowed to ask you dath ilan questions so long as you're here?"

"Let's say no."

If she literally gets to the concept of the Algorithm on her own, Keltham will, will, he doesn't even know.

"Right.  Well, I think I remember, though it's been a while, that Keltham was surprised about our oaths working because people who break them lose their Law and go to Abaddon."  Asmodia makes a mental note (an orange one, but in big letters) that this implies that Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral people wouldn't be trustworthy on quite the same level, which she should've realized earlier.  "But there's a word for something similar, in his language, something equally powerful that works without Abaddon existing there."

"So we obviously shouldn't try to figure out what that is, and actually do it, because that would maybe be more dangerous than a Golarion oath."

"But Keltham wouldn't assign us to figure that out and do it, either."

"No shit."  Who are the remaining - Ione and Tonia.  Okay, neither of those seem terribly at risk at figuring out how to make, and then break, an Algorithmic commitment.

Not that it should be even remotely possible in terms of the amount of math you'd have to invent.  But.  Thank you, Asmodia, for reminding Keltham of what kids grow up knowing before they learn too much logical decision theory.

"I'm not sure how it can be more dangerous than getting your soul devoured," Gregoria says skeptically, "but I agree that's not the answer. ...it seems possible that actually everyone defects repeatedly and then we're more motivated, when we get back, to try to figure out something better."

"That's basically what we're going to have to do if we follow the instructions to earn as much copper as we can individually, and it's annoying, and I keep trying to figure out if there's a way to - how did Keltham put it -"

"To do Something Else Which Is Not That."

"Yeah."

"Well, instead of that you could Cooperate."

"I believe this illustrates an important general principle, with which I expect the teachings of dath ilan to agree, that when you embark upon the sacred quest of doing Something Else Which Is Not That, you do not confuse this with the far less useful quest of doing Any Random Thing Whatsoever That Is Not That or, worse yet, doing An Even Stupider Thing Which Is Not That."

"Well, I picked you as my partner because I figured if anyone was going to think of Something Else Which Is Not That it'd be you, so, go on, think of it."

Asmodia wonders if this is how her hypothetical goddess feels all the time.

Tonia and Ione.

 "- one of us needs to be the sort of person who'll Cooperate if the other person Cooperates, and the other person needs to be the sort of person who's going to Cooperate given that, and we both try to read each other past what might be a bluff about that being true.  We're not breaking Keltham's rules, that just is how you earn the most copper."

"Well, are you the sort of person who's going to Cooperate?"

"I sure would if I thought you were the sort of person who'd Cooperate if you thought I would Cooperate!  Though I'd probably also want to ask you things like, is your Sense Motive good enough that you can read me?"

"And if I can't read you, and you know that, then you'll defect. All right," says Tonia. In a way it's a very Asmodean game. "Well, if that's what we're supposed to do to get the most copper, I'll try it. I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate." Which she doesn't think at all.

"Bluff.  Now you know my Sense Motive isn't that terrible."

"I'll Cooperate if I think you'll Cooperate."  (Truth.)

Tonia bites her lip. "But you don't think I'll Cooperate, so you don't in fact plan on Cooperating."

"But I am sincere about Cooperating if you Cooperate, which reduces this to the problem of, first of all, you actually intending to Cooperate, and second, once that happens, my being able to read you about that."

"I'll cooperate, if you'll cooperate," says Tonia. (She's confused enough she's not sure if this is true. Probably not.)

"Now you're feeling confused but trying to go along with things, and the reason I know this, is, that's not what you'd say if you were tracking this."

"If I'm like 'I'll cooperate if I think you'll cooperate' and you're like 'I'll cooperate if I think you'll cooperate' then where does that leave us, nowhere, is where it leaves us, unless and until somebody can be like, okay, I'll cooperate.  Now I already told the truth about cooperating if I think you'll cooperate, and I think you know that, so what you need to do now, is just decide to cooperate."

Maybe Ione can get Asmodia to overrule Tonia about what alter-Asmodeans would do here...

...actually, if the wizard students weren't already familiar with first-order logic, the chances are roughly infinity to zero against them already being familiar with the principle that (for most proof systems put together the obvious way) you may freely assume a proposition's quoted provability within a quoted system, in order to prove the unquoted proposition within the unquoted system.

Without which principle the problem of 'I have to know/prove/guess-with-sufficient-probability your decision before I can decide' is in fact unsolvable.  Oops.

Well, you could state about yourself that you were adopting some informal version of that principle, it's not like humans actually meet the assumptions for the simple version of the math.  But, yeah, that probably makes it a lot harder to see how the solution works, doesn't it.

"But it'd be stupid for me to just decide to cooperate without any caveats!" objects Tonia.

"You're not!  You're deciding that after you read my sincerity about Cooperating if you Cooperated!  Otherwise it'd be stupid, yeah, which is why I didn't just say, I've decided to Cooperate."

" - okay. So, I'm saying, since I can't bluff you, and since if you actually read me as planning on Cooperating you'll Cooperate, that means I'm just better off, if I cooperate, since you can tell. Unless you've changed your mind since when you said that thing, say it again."

"I will definitely Cooperate if I think you'll definitely - no, if I think it's pretty likely, reasonably likely, that you'll Cooperate."

"You're currently confused, suspicious, sort of testing the waters there, but not in an insincere way.  You're sort of trying to make up your mind about it and see what happens, but you haven't really made up your mind.  This is progress!  And I don't want to just say, you don't get rewarded at all, for coming a little further.  So, even if you don't get any further than that, if you stay in just this state of mind, I'll spin a coin three times, and if it comes up Queen each time, I'll Cooperate with you.  That's about how likely I think you are to really Cooperate in what appears to be your current state of mind.  We've made progress, now try taking it a step further."

...orrrr you could complicate your reasoning processes to the point where they were no longer valid, and add a slight dash of motivated reasoning, that might also work for crossing the gap.

"I'm likelier than that to cooperate!" objects Tonia. "I think I'll probably cooperate though not if we stop talking right this second because if we stop talking right this second you just said there's only a one in eight chance you'll cooperate. But I expect we'll keep having this stupid argument in front of Keltham until I'm convinced. ...and a dath ilani would be convinced already from predicting that. So I guess I'm convinced. How likely are you to cooperate right now."

"One in four, let's say?  You don't really believe that but you're trying to convince yourself, which is something I want to go on encouraging."

...okay, his being here is probably influencing this, if only through his not being able to fully conceal his horrified expressions at their version of the Algorithm.  So he is going to go check and see if there's a Silent Proctor waiting for him, and if Security explained the instructions already.

Paxti is repeatedly spinning a coin and noting down the results, while a (visible) Security officer watches with a bored expression.

Keltham will wait until Paxti stops spinning, then speak.  "Yo.  Your bid on the job?"

"Two coppers.  I was bored."

"Pilar and Meritxell finished before I got here, Sevar and Peranza just left.  I don't tell you the particular results, right?"

"Correct.  You tell me the total number of Defections and Cooperations, unless that number was one or zero for either, in which case you tell me nothing.  You also tell me the total payout, and an amount of copper and silver you can use to make those payouts."

"Which means I tell you nothing right now, right?"

"Right.  Well, repeat back to me your scoring instructions so I can make sure you got those right."

"Everyone starts with three copper plus one copper for each of ten coinspins that comes up Queen plus one if they Defected minus three if their partner Defected."  Never mind flunking out, anyone who can't follow instructions on that level doesn't get to go to wizard school.

"Yup.  Carry on, then, sorry for interrupting."

"Keltham."

Keltham manages not to startle.  Over the last days of sitting quietly in a far corner of the room not saying anything, Broom has achieved something tantamount to cognitive invisibility.

Or, actually...

"Broom, are you using magic to make people not much notice or think about you?"

"It is not magic.  It is a talent of my people.  We are simply good at being unobtrusive."

Broom knows, speaking, that these are not the words of a slave.  He sets aside old anxieties at the thought.  It has been claimed to Broom that he is not a slave anymore, at least not of Cheliax; and in alterCheliax he has never been a slave.  He has been requested to conduct himself accordingly.

(He knows of alterCheliax now, the divergent mini-reality they are constructing to contain Keltham.  Broom spoke for a time with the one called Asmodia, who, despite her strange mission, seemed harried and exasperated in a way that made Broom feel oddly sympathetic towards her.  In her own way Asmodia seemed like a slave with too much to clean up, much like he once was; he would not, without reason, make her work any harder.)

"Is your people's talent, by any chance, a sort that gets blocked by Mind Blank."

"No," Broom says, Security having swiftly instructed him that this is the true answer so far as the Security knows.

"Right.  Well, what's up, then?"

"I wish to play against you the game that you are having these others play."

"...why."

"In search of understanding."

"Understanding of the game, or understanding of Keltham?"

"- don't say 'yes', either."

"Understanding of Keltham."

All right, that seems honest enough.  "Okay then.  We'll get paper and find a breakout room."

"I want both of those two idiots humbled, and by humbled I mean raped."

Aspexia Rugatonn frowns.  It's not out of the question, but a measure that should be resorted-to on relatively rare occasions, at that level of management.

"Subirachs's choice there hadn't particularly seemed like the best possible decision, no, but I hadn't thought it bad enough to warrant that.  Sevar was - not beginning to think herself unpunishable, but thinking herself unpunishable except by going to extraordinary lengths.  She thought that Cheliax still had threat to hold over her, but in the form of yourself, or say Gorthoklek, not in the person of Abarco."

"Sevar didn't reflect on her faults in that explicit a manner, but she wanted to break that dangerous sense of invincibility within herself.  This was accomplished."

"That could have made sense if Sevar wasn't engaged in an incredibly tangled honeypot operation with somebody who has an alien power to sense her sexuality even if nothing else and also forcing her to lie when many of the relationship breakthroughs with Keltham have been based on a bizarre form of honesty presumably empowered by tropes."

"I don't even want to think about what dath ilani romance novels must say about this, except that Subirachs and Abarco are going to end up not just dead but in Abaddon - actually I don't think dath ilani novels would do that to their villains?  But something is going to happen to them that a dath ilani reader would find satisfying, and I worry that this may involve the ruination of Cheliax if not Hell itself."

"Ah.  Hm.  And you think we should arrange their rapes ourselves, to be proactive about that?"

"That thought hadn't even occurred to me!  I'm just enraged by the sheer stupidity!  Why do my subjects do this?  Why does nobody in Cheliax understand what pain and torment do inside people on any level more complicated than it being scary?  How am I supposed to run an Asmodean country like this?"

"Need I point out that your own commandment of disciplinary torment for Sevar greatly shook her faith -"

"Because Sevar chose to undergo a torture order timed at her discretion, immediately before she needed to have an emotional conversation with Keltham and then meet with the Crown!  The thought that Sevar would be that stupid literally never occurred to me!  What do unwitting Irori clerics think torture is supposed to do?  Why is my life like this?  Do I have to personally order, execute, explain, and sensibly schedule every instance of torment in all of Cheliax for any of it to be remotely productive?"

"Sevar was not making progress in learning that art herself.  Sevar was putting off the tortures required for herself, declining to inflict tortures on others.  Not from selfish calculation, not even from heretical kindness; she forebore to advise Subirachs when Subirachs was selecting instruments for Keltham to use on her, and paid some small price for that.  Then, having failed to learn her lesson, Sevar again failed to suggest any alternative specifics to Subirachs when Subirachs requested those and told her that her punishment would be otherwise worsened.  I expect Subirachs was justifiably frustrated by Sevar at that point; the sort of frustration of one's expiator that a penitent ought properly to regret -"

"Are you telling me to have sympathy for poor Subirachs about her failure at her one task?  Let Subirachs inflict whatever worse punishment on Sevar she likes so long as it is not a sexual one!  How about a pit of venomous spiders?  Many people fear being thrown into a pit of venomous spiders!  Even the ones who don't fear it the first time oft fear it more the second time around!  Has anybody even tried throwing Sevar into a pit of venomous spiders?  No!  And why not?  I DON'T KNOW.  WHY RAPE."

"Abrogail, how many people did you have burned, lashed, boneshattered, flayed, near-drowned, and raped, before the first time you got bored enough to try a pit of spiders instead?"

"...I suppose you have a certain awful point.  Many ordinary people, indeed, may never realize they have the option of throwing someone into a pit of spiders.  And if I suggest a corresponding reformation of Chelish schools, your response will be that, in fact, very few people are ever faced with a problem to which a pit of spiders is the best solution."

"And this response will be very true, Aspexia.  It will be very true.  Do you know who I would nonetheless expect to be expert enough to have options come to mind other than the barest, simplest methods?  The SEVENTH-CIRCLE cleric of Asmodeus specializing in SLAVERY that YOU PERSONALLY appointed to oversee the shaping of the MOST IMPORTANT SLAVE IN CREATION."

"And which of the dozens of competent subordinates you no doubt possess, whom you deem much superior to Subirachs in that task, would you appoint to replace her?"

"Are you sure I can't just personally -"

"No.  Bad Abrogail."

The noise that comes from her throat then is one that you might, hearing it in Hell, not know whether it was issuing from a tormented soul or its enraged tormentor.

"Well, I am, for whatever it is worth, now much more resolved upon our diabolical secret plan."

"Oh?  I confess I don't see the connection."

"Because if Keltham actually tried to study torture HE WOULD ACTUALLY BE GOOD AT IT."

"Yes, that is exactly how I feel about 'corrigibility'."

"Do you feel it would be beneficial for Project Lawful if you disciplined Subirachs and Abarco in this matter?  Not beneficial for your indignation and fury, beneficial for Lord Asmodeus."

"I will instruct Subirachs that further orders for sexual torment are to be routed through me for approval, and not suggest to her that I was displeased with her current order, because as you say it did serve its foolish, minor purpose and I would not have even that pittance of a benefit lost."

"And I shall quietly arrange with his owner that when Elias Abarco is welcomed forever into Hell, he will spend the first thousand years of it being raped.  The tropes, then, will not need to act, in his case."

"Is there anything similar you can arrange for Subirachs?"

"I do believe she had hopes of the Chosen of Asmodeus personally taking care of her, when in time she reached Hell.  Or so she said aloud, and surely she would not mislead the Chosen about matters of faith?  I will send instruction to Hell of it and pray to our Lord of the matter, and approve due civil orders for making her a statue until Sevar is ready to receive her."

"That should be satisfying to the tropes as well, one way or another."

"I will instruct and pay Abarco's owner that, may Sevar wish his ownership, he is to be sent to her embrace as well."

"And should Sevar fail in her ascension, and never become a Power of Hell to receive anyone, I doubt Hell will be much pleased with Subirachs about it either."

"I am the chosen agent of a Lawful goddess, Otolmens, who preserves.  I might pledge upon the Law, and be believed, within Golarion, by any who knew, or any who could sight my alignment."

"You are an alien; why should anyone believe your own pledge?"

"I'm an alien from a place Lawful enough that everything on Golarion looks to me like randomized insane nonsense by comparison.  You've heard my lectures.  You know that."