"Yes, sir."

"Notice any impulses in yourself to pray to Iomedae too? Since you hadn't fetched Abarco, you could have. Could have run in there to Peranza and told her that you agree with her and you want to take this project down together."

"I didn't - I don't agree with her. She didn't even have an argument really, she just -"

And now she's angry. 

"Idiot. Everything Peranza thought is secret; you have just been apprised of the procedures. I do not need to know, or want to know, right now, what she thought. I asked a yes-or-no question."

"No."

"Then go and bring me that report. Promptly."

She wants to talk to Peranza, too, of course, but that seems like a terrible idea. Is there even a way to have her conscious again without her praying to Iomedae - and then they need to figure out what to tell Keltham -

- she wants to talk to Peranza, she wants to know what forbidden thought can turn a loyal Chelish person into someone who screams the whole conspiracy to Iomedae without a second's advance thought - what makes someone willing to be tortured, forever, for that, because that's what Abrogail promised them - 

- Iomedae can't know, either, or she'd presumably have her paladins go scream it in every public square. Unless Iomedae saw it, right there, just now, and now She does know -

"Is there a way to let Abarco talk to Peranza without that leaking more to Iomedae," she asks without preamble when she reaches Maillol's office.

Maillol looks - very slightly, but readably to Sevar - older and more tired than yesterday, and noticeably angry.  He doesn't get it, when people do this, there's something about it that feels, not Chaotic, but like the primordial chaos from before Pharasma's imposed order.  Like people will be unsensible and insane for no apparent reason but some flaw in Pharasma's creation, some broken bit of physics that makes people trangress against their tyranny even when there's absolutely no sane perspective at all where that makes sense for them.  What's he, what's Asmodeus, supposed to do, when some slaves are like this?

"Nothing that's both cheap and safe."

"Send the little shit to Hell and set up an interview there, it'll cost Hell considerable but not as much as talking to a devil there.  Take her to Asmodeus's lesser grand temple in Ostenso, and run the risk of the Bitch Goddess being willing to expend the effort to pierce her vision through it.  Put her in the central temple of Asmodeus in Egorian, and have the Most High intercede with Asmodeus to block the vision of all outsiders there - if we're willing to run the risk of a full-scale godwar breaking out, once that little shit is outside the interdiction."

"Anything short of that, and we have to assume the traitor stands out like a fucking beacon to the Bitch-Goddess the moment she's awake and thinking, even if she doesn't pray again.  She put herself into the way of torment worse than Maledicted paladins get, with less hope and reward.  I'd be surprised if she didn't read Good, now, if she was powerful enough for us to read, and she may be more Lawful than paladins as well."

"I'm worried that - there's some dath ilani thought that reliably does that, or at least semi-reliably, and now Iomedae knows it, and soon we're going to have people teleporting into Egorian to shout it from every rooftop -"

"What do you propose we do about that, if that's true?"

"Also, I don't quite believe that dath ilan is more Lawful Good than Iomedae.  Just because the gods know thoughts like that doesn't mean they're allowed to tell anyone.  And that idiot Security did report in, himself."

"I don't know what we do about it! I don't - if there's any way to safely talk to her, it sounds like it's a sufficient expenditure of resources that it's not my call, but I want to know why she did that, and how specific it was to her. 

It sounds like it's not safe to have her in class even Dominated, to tell Keltham that she wants to drop out - I worry he'll think to look with Glimpse of Beyond, specifically if someone is telling him they quit -"

"No fucking shit she's not safe to have in class even Dominated, she's already done us more damage than we would have guessed possible from her starting point.  I think we've got to treat her as - a dangerously clever and alien outsider, like dath ilan managed to rewrite her mind as an attack on us."

"In that case maybe the best thing to do is to send her to Hell and not get an answer to any of our questions. And make the girls stagger their evenings of Owl's Wisdom reflection so Abarco can watch them all during and for a while after. This isn't my call, though, I expect Egorian to have opinions, and even my recommendation to them is going to wait on the Security report. 

- do you know of other - cases like this, other kinds of people who've gone insane and decided to betray everything while already soul-sold -"

"Yeah.  Sometimes people - just do.  I don't know why, really, but my guess is that whatever part of them understands what's waiting for them in Hell just - gives up, from all the weight their mind is putting on it.  The knowledge of the torment awaiting them keeps forcing them to do a job they don't like, and one day that part breaks, they decide reality is too unpleasant and, just deny it, step out of that state of mind to something else.  They Teleport out of Cheliax and just don't think about what's waiting for them when their sold soul gets collected, I imagine.  I guess.  I don't know what's true, and I can't imagine what that feels like from the inside."

"Most of those just hide.  A very few of them - give every secret they've got to a temple of Iomedae."

"I don't know why.  Maybe they think that Hell can't hurt them any worse than for desertion?  We tell them that's not true, that you can always go lower, but -"

"It happens.  I don't actually understand it."

"I don't think whatever dath ilani technique this was involves denying the truth."

"I don't trust dath ilan that much.  On the Tallandria hypothesis of dath ilan's real origin, their happy citizens could be programmed with ideas specifically designed to make people from Golarion go insane in a useful way, maybe even targeting Asmodeans directly."

"Or Peranza could have snapped in some much more ordinary way, and yes, denied reality, after Keltham's teachings put her under too much stress also in a very ordinary way.  We don't know."

"Well, Security will get us our report shortly. - for the record, possibly at this point we should have all the staff here mindread directly by devils."

Security brings their report. The version judged almost certainly safe for senior staff to read says that Keltham had introduced a mental technique for ceasing self-deception, and Peranza had gotten stuck on the idea it'd take effect when she used Owl's Wisdom. She did so, and had some kind of total collapse from accumulated strain over how much she was self-deceiving. She tried to mentally retreat into alter-Peranza, which didn't work either, and then while flailing around mentally cast Fox's Cunning and ended up hitting on 'be a dath ilani from Keltham's stories'. Security acknowledges this doesn't sound like a reasonable thing that would reasonably happen but they haven't got anything better. Then, she decided a dath ilani from Keltham's stories would betray the project immediately for Iomedae, and did that. 

"That's so - unsatisfying - why are humans so terrible - all right, if there's a way to make it safe I want a Security to talk to her, to see if it's contagious, and for that matter if it's permanent.

And then we kill her." Some instinct wanted to end that sentence with 'I guess', but she stops herself. Obviously then they kill her. That's the obvious thing to do. There's no reasonable case for doing any other thing; she only undermines herself, sounding like she's in doubt.

"I'm frankly not seeing how to make it safe.  Not in a way that doesn't consume Hell's intervention budget or a Miracle diamond."

She's not upset about sending Peranza to Hell, she's genuinely not. But - but she's not going to become a devil there. Hell can't fix her. Abrogail warned them, that all this niceness had a flip side, that if they betrayed the project then they'd hurt, forever, even if that wasn't profitable for their owners, even if it was a waste -

So Peranza shouldn't have done that, should she have. You can't not follow through on a commitment like that once you've made it; if anything, that means people will force your hand more often. Maybe Carissa was too nice, and that's why this happened.

"Right. Then -"

"I have a supposedly extremely urgent delivery of a cookie to the Chosen, along with the message:  'You don't have to order that yourself.  He's already here.'"

- who, Asmodeus? is Carissa's first incredibly stupid thought. 

Her second thought is to be annoyed that someone thinks she can't handle being a cruel tyrannical Asmodean, which is her entire job here.

"Uh, who's here?"

"That entity is one I find to be of increasing concern, especially given that it seems to be evading a direct meeting with myself."

The dusk-skinned, white-eyed, 8-foot-tall armored man probably doesn't look particularly familiar to anyone here.  But if you've heard General Gorthoklek talking before, it's very clear whose voice that is.

Carissa will kneel with considerably more terror than she feels at unexpected Abrogail. Unexpected Abrogail happens often enough to practically be expected. Senior devils do not.