"Kid, that is sometimes worth doing occasionally.  Like when it buys a massive nation-scale military and political advantage and makes it less threatening for us to fail for the entire rest of the Project."

"You're offended that you weren't consulted about this."  It's not a question.

"I admit fault -"

"Don't.  I wasn't trying to correct that impulse.  You see there's an Inner Ring.  You see you're not part of it.  You want in."

"That's good, Asmodia.  You can get in.  It's just going to take you a while longer before you're ready to sit down at the table with myself and Sevar and Abrogail Thrune.  You can be in the room where it happens.  You may be a little older than this when you're seated, but there's a place there for you if you prove yourself worthy."

"The only reason I'd be concerned is if, say, you noticed this problem earlier, and kept it to yourself because you had dreams of thinking up a solution and presenting it to your less competent superiors on a platinum platter, so that we'd know to consult you next time."

"That would be a problem, Asmodia."

"I - sir, I obviously tried to think of a solution myself, before I came complaining here - but that was today -"

"Asmodia.  Don't lie to me.  I was going to threaten you and let it pass."

"Turn yourself in for twenty lashes at the temple and be very glad that you are on Sevar's light punishment plan."

"This is why you don't have a seat at the table.  You're simply too inexperienced."

"Let's be very clear on this:  You are not being corrected for your ambitions.  Your ambitions are good.  The way in which you expressed them is bad.  Twenty lashes, don't do this again."

"Acknowledged."

"Dismissed."

When it's over, Pilar offers her a cookie.

It's a cookie with sugar chips inside, which, in the mental scheme and code Asmodia devised to ask this secret question, means that Snack Service isn't saying that Asmodia's sponsor wants her to try to sabotage the Project, or warn Keltham.  With her shielded thoughts and Hell immunity that make her the only person who could maybe plan that and get away with it.

...okay.

PL-timestamp:  Day 78

Maillol sits Asmodia down and gives her the Talk.

When it's okay to undermine your colleagues.  When it's okay to amuse yourself by tormenting your subordinates.  The relatively rare circumstances when you should try to kill your superior and take their place, you are a lot more likely to get away with that if your superior wasn't valuable and isn't anyone's pet and was being visibly incompetent and you are clearly more competent than they are.  Be conservative about evaluating that sort of thing; a lot of people get themselves worse-than-killed by having a self-favoring bias, and being shocked, shocked, that their new superior doesn't agree about them being more competent than their dead ex-boss.  The tyranny is not there to be your friend, it's not your superior's friend either, obviously, but all else being equal the tyranny wants both of you working for it and producing for it.  They're going to check whether any apparent incompetence of your superior was actually you sabotaging them and they were a decent performer before that.  Encouraging that sort of gameplay is not in the tyranny's interest.

Your fundamental job responsibility that isn't directly to Asmodeus or yourself is about making your boss look good.  If you try to kill and replace your boss, it had better make your boss's boss look good, and that's harder to pull off than you might think.

Seizing your boss's job without killing them is unreasonably advanced for somebody Asmodia's age.  Anybody you've replaced like that is likely to hang around severely resenting you.  Your boss's boss knows that, they mostly won't promote you into somebody else's place unless they're ready for them to die, or they have some other position to send them to where the two of you won't get into trouble with each other.

Also, Asmodia's boss is, depending on how you look at it, either Maillol, or Sevar.

The main moral of the Talk is that Asmodia should not try to kill her superiors and seize their positions until she is older.

It's kind of embarrassing, but Asmodia knows that she is being shown favor by being told this, and she will respond with the appropriate attitude of somebody who understands that she's being done a favor and that a return will be owed on it.

PL-timestamp:  Day 79-80

"Can You stop giving Keltham cleric spells. As a - warning to him, that something is wrong -"

"No - We did try to make the case to Otolmens, actually, but She quite reasonably rejected it."

"It's not an intervention -"

"The gods do have a reasonably sophisticated conception of the status quo that isn't 'not taking any actions', and taking non-actions can be an intervention, otherwise none of this would work at all."

"There's certainly a case to be made that in the ordinary course of events You would have withdrawn Your support from Keltham at this point? In light of how he's helping Cheliax conquer the world, and You condemn wars of conquest. I realize there's the question of how knowingly he can be said to be doing anything he's doing, but -"

"Tried it. Split off a bunch of threads of attention and fed them different subsets of information We might reasonably have had about the situation if We'd not been paying it close attention. A couple of them de-cleric him but most don't.

And We don't - want to do that, anyway, except insofar as he's relying on his spells as an assurance he's on track that We have a duty not to give him if We can avoid it. He's inventing all the chemical industry needed to make the world stunningly rich. He's doing everything right. He's just ....doing it in Cheliax."

"They're going to come here first."

"My money's on Andoran, actually, unless we force their hand. Navies take time to build, Nefreti's an unpredictable variable, and once they have Andoran they have a much better position from which to hit us. ...I'm aware that is not very reassuring."

"Correct, it isn't. - Nefreti, please stop that."

One of the houseplants against the wall turns into Nefreti Clepati. "Your staff overwaters those plants, did you know?"

"Are you here to help develop a war plan against Cheliax?"

"No, actually, I was just here to tell you about the plant thing."