Peranza is not-looking-there, she is layers and layers of approved thoughts and safe thoughts and the goal of living on another day in Cheliax, delaying Hell one more day, passing her loyalty tests and not getting into trouble.  It's not much of an exaggeration to say that if you come in and smash all that, you've destroyed most of what's Peranza.

Like a contradiction that proves the negation of everything, the wreckage of Peranza has no safe thoughts left to think, no approvable thoughts, everything at all that she tries to think gets shut down by pain and horror, leaving nothing but a sense of abortive thought-starts and ouches and whatever wordlessness goes on in the background.

That was how Peranza ended.

There's another person inside her head, though, somebody she's pretended herself into being, day after day, somebody who lives in a world with a kinder Hell, somebody who isn't afraid, somebody whose thoughts aren't disintegrating like this, somebody she's been for hour after hour, fleeing into her whenever she could, into the much less painful work of figuring out what alterPeranza says thinks believes how she smiles around Keltham smiles for Keltham -

Her disintegrating mind flees into alterPeranza, while the rest of realPeranza is coming apart, and it manages to be her.  She's just in the Ordinary world there is no Conspiracy no horror Hell is merciful Asmodeus is benevolent this is the true Peranza she's always been the only Peranza, 'realPeranza' was just a bad dream.

It doesn't actually work.  She tries to convince herself it works but she sees herself trying to do that and Keltham's foretelling that she's been terrified of all week just comes to her again.  She knows she can't really believe she's alterPeranza.  Hell will still be there, and the punishment punishment punishment -

AlterPeranza also ends, having lived perhaps half a minute.

Like a contradiction that proves the negation of everything, the wreckage of Peranza (again) has no safe thoughts left to think, no approved thoughts, everything at all that she tries to think gets shut down by pain and horror, leaving nothing but a sense of abortive thought-starts and ouches and whatever wordlessness goes on in the background, can't think can't think -

In desperation, in wordless desperation, the wreckage of Peranza takes the only option that's available to her, that could possibly help, it's not a conscious strategy it's just something her brain learned can help sometimes when her thoughts are failing her, it probably just makes everything worse, but it feels like the worst possible thing is already happening to her, she might as well cast Fox's Cunning on herself before she falls apart completely maybe she'll get out of this agony a little faster and go on to whatever horror comes next -

It obviously doesn't do anything good.  Her thoughts sharpen and, yes, she sure does see even more clearly everything now that she isn't thinking.

But there's a third potential pattern of thought inside Peranza, besides realPeranza, besides alterPeranza, and with a little more Cunning it can boot.

It's a pattern of thought made a little out of explicit Law, and games played with children; and made some out of alterPeranza who had many times thought several thoughts in a row without anything bad happening to her; and made quite a lot out of Keltham, her inner model of him, what he'd say -

- made of stories and legends and dreams, that Keltham has told them all, now and again, Civilization's heroes, the real and the imaginary components, Nemamel, Miyalsvor, people who died the True Death to save others from it on the very very rare occasions that did make sense, stories of Civilization and Civilization's people that alterPeranza has listened to so eagerly for Keltham, with realPeranza behind her also listening filled with a desperate sad horrified painful angry yearning that she's always looking away from never looking there she'll die.  But now alterPeranza is gone and realPeranza is shattered and there's nothing left to stop those feelings.

It's a third pattern of thought that is coherent.  Once it thinks one thought, it knows how to go on to the next.  It isn't built on lies.  It lives in a horrifying universe, but it has ways of handling that.

Nemamel would.

Peranza disintegrates, and what's left inside her is HORROR and FURY and the memory of skyscrapers in Default, Keltham's comfortable home; and a children's song about logistics; and the seeing of what the dath ilani what the dath ilani heroes what their Keepers would think about Hell and Asmodeus, what they would do if they found themselves materialized into Cheliax knowing -

Really just the obvious thoughts to think, after some bits of Law somehow got inside you, enough overlapping fragments within sufficient Cunning to initially boot the coherence between them, when under some new stress all the complicated things that aren't that dissolved into their own contradictions and mutual inhibitions weakening them.

Like a dying star, running out the lesser fuels that maintained its present form against immense pressures, Peranza collapses into herself.

And ignites.

Blazing up brighter than was possible before, Cunning and Wisdom full on high and unimpeded, cognitions now that don't tangle up and get in their own way; her first thought is that Security could be reading her mind right now, probably is, they haven't killed her on the spot only because they don't realize how deadly she is now become to all Hell's works; Security is listening to her thoughts right now and laughing about how she isn't Keltham and doesn't need to be killed within two and half seconds -

- and what Miyalsvor does in that situation is -

- find a single clever winning move that happens too fast for Security to stop even if they see her intentions, some incredibly clever strategy that changes everything and necessarily has to execute at very nearly the speed of thought, has to be put into action the moment that intention becomes visible -

IOMEDAE IOMEDAE PAY ATTENTION LOOK AT ME LOOK AT MY LOCATION READ MY THOUGHTS HELL IS ALMOST ON THE VERGE OF A FINAL VICTORY THEY'RE LEARNING FROM AN INNOCENT HUMAN OUTSIDER FROM BEYOND KNOWN REALITY THEY'RE LEARNING TO MINE SPELLSILVER AT A TENTH THE COST HELL IS GOING TO MAKE BETTER DEVILS ALL THE OTHER GODS NEED TO JOIN TOGETHER AND STOP ASMODEUS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE NETHYS IS WITH HIM AND CAYDEN CAILEAN HAS BETRAYED YOU -

"......at which point I rendered her unconscious. Obviously." He's trembling.

Presumably because she's going to ask the obvious question, now, which is, "Oh? Why then, and not sooner?"

"I, uh, didn't think she could do anything - there's an interdiction - and it seemed perhaps valuable to the Project, to have a full record of her thought processes and where they took her, rather than one interrupted halfway through -"

"Was that also the judgment of Elias Abarco, who heads your division." For the monitoring of the girls whose minds might be walking Asmodeanism-shredders. 

"I, ah, didn't have time to ask him, it would have entailed looking away from Peranza's mind for some time to dispatch someone to go get him and it seemed dangerous to do that."

Carissa is realizing, unhappily, that the cost of having the walking-infohazard girls monitored by more disposable Security is that they'll be monitored by less competent Security. You can't even specifically blame the idiot for being an idiot: she, after all, requested -- demanded -- a selection process that'd get her idiots. "At what point did you have an inkling that Peranza seemed to be having a noticeably, remarkably, bad time?"

"- more or less right away. Sir."

"And at that point, you didn't contemplate getting Abarco's attention, or you did but decided against because -"

"I wasn't sure this was much worse than usual. Since I've only been at this for a week. Sir. And I didn't want to waste his time."

Because Elias Abarco is terrifying. 

"Right," she says tiredly. It's gross incompetence, and she needs to punish it, but also the ultimate errors are all hers. Is that what it's always like, as you get better at seeing it? "Well, now you're going to waste a lot more of his time. You and him are going to go through everything she thought, what she concluded, what pushed her along the way, and you're going to write up a minimally dangerous summary, and then a somewhat more dangerous summary at whatever Abarco thinks is the level that almost certainly won't cause copycats, and then a full summary for the Most High should she desire to see it.

And then we'll return to the question of how two rounds passed before you were able to subdue the subject you were monitoring while she prayed to Iomedae."