Abrogail Thrune II storms into the breakfast hall of Project Lawful.

- okay turns out Carissa does still feel terrified out of her bones around Abrogail, if Abrogail's in the mood to be scary.

She does not kneel until she gets confirmation that Keltham's definitely not headed this direction, which thankfully doesn't take very long because her legs are threatening to override this decision and give out.

A perfectly normal distribution of students are in the breakfast room. They also kneel.

Aspexia arrives only a moment after.

"Carissa.  Win this trial and become a Para-duchess this very night, later Duchess of southwestern Nidal after we conquer that land."

"Aspexia can give any orders in this Fortress and in this emergency that I might have myself, I do not know how useful I will be, after this."

"May Asmodeus witness your day of glory even if He cannot help you in it."

She pulls off Carissa's +4 headband with her left hand, and with her right hand, takes the Crown of Infernal Majesty from her own head and places it on Carissa Sevar's.

She does not collapse.  Abrogail was not weak before she took the throne.

What's left of Abrogail turns without another word and leaves the hall, escorted by Aspexia.  She is being a distraction, and cannot be much of an actual help for a while and maybe not at all.

- oh. 

Oh. 

She's not using this to the best of its potential, she can feel that now, it's the kind of mind that you need to grow new habits for, she can see farther and she can direct her mind better and she's using only the barest fraction of that, if she sets herself only to being Carissa faster.

Well, she can't just use her miraculously enhanced mind to think 'oh' over and over, that's a waste of it, and she also should not use it to be concerned for Abrogail, Abrogail eventually reading her thought-transcripts will be annoyed with her. Instead she needs to use it to outthink Keltham and stop everything from being lost. 

- how good at spellcraft do you have to be to make one of these.

Not the time. 

What's he going to ask Maillol for?

The obvious things are things that are not too inconvenient for alter!Cheliax to get, but are deeply inconvenient for true!Cheliax, like the books. What else is in that category - people to talk to. That whole category of request she feels confident they can handle, actually, with glibness pins and impersonators.

People to do a Sending to. Sending takes ten minutes but that's all building the spell, picking the destination doesn't have to be done until the end. They blocked Sending into and out of the fortress, they told him that they'd done so and they should probably tell him also that many important people do the same thing to avoid random unsolicited Sendings, even though they'll lose a 2 for that.

Financial and tax records - they'll just have to send him real records and pray it takes him longer than one day to figure them out. They can petrify him once he sleeps. 

Books about theology and Asmodeanism. They have worked up some fakes specifically on that topic; he might ask for them in other languages, though, or ask for ones with specific traits that'd exist in the real world but that they wouldn't happen to have included in their manufactured ones. 

- oh, there's an idea for what he might've been doing with the books he destroyed, not a sure thing but a thing she'd do in his situation - there'd be math, for without memorizing or even reading a whole text being able to be sure if it was changed around on you so long as the person changing it around didn't know what you'd be checking. Something like 'counting all the Es' except faster.

An antimagic field, into which he can demand everyone step after having verified its properties as an antimagic field. Has Keltham run across the concept of antimagic fields? She doesn't know. 

A walking tour of Ostenso where he can accost random citizens with questions. They have the capacity to handle that, she thinks, between telepathically giving people cues and Dominating them. 

Something he can scry - some place in Hell he can scry, maybe - they could just give him parts of Axis instead - 

Verification of the Nidal war, she is setting that whole category aside because they're not lying about the Nidal war. Verification of Zon-Kuthon-related topics, same.  

"Are you, at any point, going to bother to cast the obvious enhancement spells on yourself for at least +4 boosts, or have Security here do so?"

You could almost think Abrogail's voice was strong, if you had many fewer ranks in reading-skills than does Aspexia Rugatonn.

"It is genuinely amazing how little sense of drama you have, Aspexia."

"Sevar," says Elias Abarco, "turn off the Crown of Infernal Majesty's spell resistance and immunity to mind-affecting magic."

"Try harder to avoid sounding like you're giving me orders, Abarco," says Carissa, but does that, because he's obviously right. There is absolutely no chance that anyone will let her have the Crown of Infernal Majesty during this operation while not even mindreading her to make sure she's not secretly trying to help Keltham win. 

It's an effortless mental action. She wants a headband like this. She never wants to take it off though obviously she'll do so the second the crisis is over. 

Is there also a mental action to make it look like her normal headband - yes. 

Carissa will burn in the fires of Hell for as many centuries as it takes to become capable of forging magic items like these. 

"Maillol.  I'm sorry, and apologize for how unannounced this is all going to be.  But with the nation of Cheliax investing a significant fraction of domestic product into scaling up the Project, I think the point has come where it's silly for me to not ask for some things that are expensive and inconvenient and will enable higher Project output from myself."

"Most of those are non-urgent and can be negotiated sensibly and with due notice.  The reason for this abrupt set of requests is that I have been kind of stuck in this Fortress.  I now want to take a set of measures whose point is to test whether Cheliax has been truthful with me about conditions outside it, and the less time hypothetical Conspiracy Cheliax has to prepare for those, the better.  If I ask you for something impossible, that I didn't expect to be impossible, I obviously cannot alter reality to make it be possible for you, but please be creative about thinking of other ways to do it; it costs Ordinary Cheliax its probability when that happens and I didn't expect it to."

"My highest priority request is for as many possible daily newspapers, preferably including newspapers from previous days, in the same language this page is written in," Keltham holds aloft a random page from his shirt, "in whatever country that is, and at least three theology books from that country mentioning multiple gods but at least the gods Asmodeus, Nethys, Cayden Cailean, Zon-Kuthon, Iomedae, Irori, Norgorber, Calistria, and Aroden, and at least five fictional novels preferably from five different genres, bonus if there's a lot of descriptions of interesting magic in them.  I imagine, but am willing to hear otherwise, that this is something you can get done in an hour on an emergency basis.  Happy to hear a cost estimate, which I think I am okay at this point charging to the Project; this is something the Project needs to do in order to gain access to additional knowledge of mine.  Oh, I also need a scroll of Comprehend Languages, preferably divine version, brought back, if at all possible."  The schedule disruption of now worrying about mindreading has also affected Keltham's planning in other ways; this was supposed to be combined with the Tongues project.

Shit.  She had rapidly updateable approved Chelish newspapers from the "previous week" ready to go, dates and weather reports quickly modifiable -

Somehow it didn't occur to Asmodia that Keltham could just go demand newspapers in a different language from a different country.

Asmodia hopes Keltham picked a language that Cheliax can actually get to, in some country with newspapers; Keltham's not going to be certain that's possible, but he's going to update against them, fairly or not, otherwise.

The sheet of paper is in Tien. 

That's actually good; Tian Xia is far enough away that their newspapers, if they've even invented newspapers, won't say anything about Cheliax, and the Church of Asmodeus doesn't to Carissa's knowledge even have a presence there. It'd be worse if it were Kelish or Varisian or something. 

Maillol should do as he'd do in alter!Cheliax, here.

"I think that's a language from the continent of Tian Xia, I've got no idea which language from Tian Xia.  That's two Greater Teleports if true, assuming we can find somebody who knows where that is, and a major city in it.  Doesn't take much detail for a Greater Teleport, but you need some.  I don't know if I can promise that whichever country that is will have newspapers, even if they've got printing.  They're definitely not going to pay attention to all the same gods, Norgorber for example is a god who ascended on this continent and He's going to be of much less interest in Tian Xia."

"Then let's run the trial and I'll take the results whatever they are.  That's the way of finding reality whatever reality is."

"Cheliax can afford a couple of Greater Teleports even with a war on, but Keltham, it's not trivial.  That's probably a resupply delay to a Worldwound station, and yes they're going to have one day's safety margin on that, but still.  Not saying not to do this, but I'd be worried if you had - more than one further request like this, with zero notice, for today?  I mean it can be done, I'm not saying it's impossible to the nation of Cheliax, but you'd be burning pretty noticeable amounts of political capital.  That's also a regular Teleport to Egorian, to transmit the request there, and if we don't burn Teleport scrolls, as really are expensive and for emergencies, we've only got so many Teleports ourselves - I guess everything can be done but it starts to really cost at some point."

"Yeah, I get that, but I do need to run this check before I start doing more stuff like spellsilver, into which your nation is investing a noticeable fraction of domestic product, and anybody who gets in the way needs to be told that.  I think I'd expect the Queen or Lrilatha to have common sense on the matter if somebody's being an obstacle about it."

...there's a tinge of power, of pride, about doing this, ordering a country to obey him and crushing all objection to it, and Keltham's dath ilan sensibilities try to shut that down before he even has a chance to think about why he should.  Keltham tells the shutdown to please go on hold, along with those emotions, he'll think about all that part later.

"Acknowledged," Ferrer Maillol says respectfully, obediently; for he too heard that note, and it may not be too late to corrupt Keltham even now.

"Let me get a sheet of paper, I'll need to write down the details, which you might need to repeat.  If possible please give me a priority on which items are most important, whether it's better to get more of something in 2 hours than to get everything back in 1 hour."

Fair enough.  He can do that.

Right, then, it's a good thing the war is going well because she actually wants to send out several different teams to the Tien-speaking parts of Tian Xia to find different written materials to present Keltham with so they have a variety to choose from and can quickly scan them and eliminate the problematic ones. And she wants a guess from someone in Egorian what would've happened if Keltham had made this request in alter!Cheliax where he's still very important but there's no conspiracy, whether there'd be pushback, what it'd look like, who'd get sent. 

And as soon he's done he's going to say bye and then suddenly turn and run for the breakfast hall at top speed, because if there's a Conspiracy, it was learning as it went during the early days.  In which case, if the Conspiracy is still keeping up, they've perhaps now appointed more Law-competent executives as Keltham trained those for them.  Carissa and Asmodia may be coincidentally absent from the breakfast hall due to having been emergency-summoned to a command center somewhere.

"Incoming, sir," Abarco says. 

Carissa Sevar wouldn't miss breakfast this morning for the world, no sir! 

- actually, with higher Wisdom, she notices that Keltham hasn't seen her genuine and delighted smile in weeks, as she's struggled with the enormity of what they're taking on (and also been dreading the petrification.) (and also been bothered about Peranza.) An error, but not one she can correct now by smiling extra.