You get to have such interesting conversations about religion once the stakes get high enough. 

" - there's something there. I don't know exactly what it is but I think it's part of the answer to the mistake I was making. If I look at someone and I see only how obvious and predictable their errors were, how they followed straightforwardly from their weaknesses and inadequacies, how they could have been ameliorated and weren't - then I see everything but their will, I see about them only the things that could externally have shaped them differently. 

There could be a god of that. He might be as tired of us as Asmodeus, but He'd fix it differently. His Cheliax would run on more Dominate Person and less torture, because you can't motivate people until they learn to walk, you just have to pick them up and put them where they're supposed to go.

And it's not a favor to someone, to regard them that way. It's not just not Asmodean, it's worse than Asmodean; that Cheliax and that Carissa would be weaker."

"I wonder if that’s where pride fits in with our Lord's other domains, that it’s what lets His slaves own their own mistakes and be punished for them…  I have not in truth understood the point of pride to Him, and if I can make any progress on that myself from overhearing you, it will be a favorable sign of your theological correctness."

"Meanwhile and as regards tyranny, there is the question of what policy will produce better results among future subordinates.  I do not think the Security monitoring Peranza was taking his work fucking seriously.  Left to my own devices, I'd make a serious example of this one, and expect that this would in fact get higher performance from the others.  He was a fourth-circle wizard with a natural Intelligence of 16 and somebody like that can in fact produce better results than this if they are properly terrified of failing."

"It would not surprise me if the low number of people being tortured on this Project, contributed to a sense in him that this Project was not a vital matter to his own, personal skin.  Most people are like that."

"It would in truth be very concerning if being lenient hadn't caused problems like that eventually. All right, I'm persuaded. - do the rest of the Security need to know what he was punished for in order for his punishment to motivate them? Are they getting the same story as the girls are?"

"I see arguments both ways.  If we tell them about how Peranza called out to the Bitch-Goddess and was allowed to pray to her for two whole rounds, they understand better exactly how much they've got to be ready to act instead of acting surprised, they've got a better idea of how much damage somebody can do if they just ignore all the consequences.  Cost, we've planted the false idea in them that this is a reasonable thing to do if you convert to ilanism, maybe they even think falsely that Peranza knew something they don't."

"Other side of things... if Project Lawful's Security gets told the same story as the Project Lawful girls*, that sounds like they only hear about how the Security didn't immediately page Abarco when Peranza started disintegrating in front of him.  That's not the same level of incompetence, if we don't invent some other blunder to go with it.  Punishing it very severely leaves an open mystery about why we're doing that, if there's some further fuckup we're not talking about, or if Peranza was somebody's pet."

"My estimate is that this has an only slight, but noticeable, diminished positive effect in terms of everyone taking things seriously.  Having your subordinates scared of exactly the right things is a luxury; having them scared is a necessity."

He'd have to think hard about that one if it was his own decision, and he's glad it isn't.  One of the nice things that Asmodeans get, your superiors actually are responsible for the orders you just follow.

(*)  Although Keltham's been trying to push back against it by his own example, the collective noun 'girls' to indicate all his researchers, including the likes of Alexandre Esquerra, seems to be increasingly enshrined in the Chelish language.

" - let's not tell them. A Security defecting seems like more of a loss condition than Security being confused and overreacting. And if he'd been on a hair-trigger and stopped Peranza right at the start of her breakdown that might, all told, have worked out better." 

"I agree in terms of how it played out.  But stopping Peranza's breakdown would've been legitimately not in the spirit of the orders I passed to him.  I'd understood that our goal was gathering data about who breaks and why, not protecting the girls."

"Punishing obedience actually does have terrible effects on morale.  Around half the cases I've seen of torture making things worse are when someone gets tortured for doing what they thought was the obedient thing, without their exact failure having been made clear to them, if there even was one."

" - understood. Going forward, you can communicate to them that between allowing a potentially out-of-bounds girl to act and think for longer and collecting more data, they should act, but I won't hold that against this one, just the not calling Abarco over as soon as the situation was clearly unusual and the not acting faster when she started praying. 

- what're the other half of cases of torture making things worse."

"Varies widely?  First thing that comes to mind is straight-up incompetent torturers who mix their work and personal lives, but that's probably because of bad experiences back when I was a second-circle running a small town temple."

She feels like she's grasping for something and not quite finding it, but - maybe that's enough progress for today. "All right. Let's get that statue up and tell everyone what happened."

Peranza knows instinctively, even before she opens her eyes, that this feeling of being half-drowned and finished spitting out water indicates that she's dead.  Did somebody - did Iomedae kill her before Abarco could really hurt her, snatch away her soul to safety -

Peranza opens her eyes.

A writhing, screaming, terrified face blinks back at her from the glossy stone floor. 

It's a pretty room, if you set aside the faces. The walls are made of leaping flame and the ceiling of bone, creating the impression of jagged teeth where they meet; there's a spire, and an enormous gleaming forge, and some worktables, and some distant screaming. 

A towering devil has paused halfway through one of the flaming doorways at the surprise of her appearance.

She decides not to break.

All right time to talk her way out of Hell.

"Peranza, Project Lawful girl, my mind is full of what may be classified information.  Direct me to someone who'd be familiar with the special situation in Project Lawful, that's of Cheliax in Golarion."

A lot of people decide not to break. Sometimes they keep it up for a couple of hours, even. It's approximately the least threatening thing someone can be thinking, when they arrive in Hell.

Project Lawful is however something that devils have learned some caution around. He stops reading her mind.

The world goes dark and Peranza is shoved through some walls of flame, and down some hallways, and through some more walls of flame. 

She'll scream some about that.  The flames of Hell hurt quite a lot actually, and spending her effort on resisting screaming doesn't seem like the best use of herself.

In the distance, someone laughs at her. 

Grand doors creak open. There's more fire. Behind her, they slam shut. 

And then she cannot move, cannot speak, can see again, and this room is bigger, and prettier, crystalline windows offering a spectacular view of Dis's spires and glories and molten-lava river. The fire has trailed her into the room, and is spreading out all around her on the floor, like a gown she's wearing, except it's roasting her legs as it does. 

Comfortably seated, resplendant, only slightly grotesque, is Kherreonoskelis, Countess of Hell under Zabaniyya under Dispater, who owns the souls of two Project Lawful girls, as a luxury purchase as well as an investment. Whether or not they turn out useful for training devils they'll really be something to show off at parties. She's not much prettier than Abrogail, necessarily, but she's impossible to look away from in a way that Abrogail visibly wouldn't be, even with ten more Splendour: her face triggers some ancient instinct that there's danger there, and not the kind you can take your eyes off of your own will. 

"You know," she says, and it sounds like she's speaking in Peranza's own voice, inside her head, "I've always believed it's better for mortals to die young. In your case probably better to have died a bit younger, even. We're going to have so much work to do."

Peranza has had a few moments to think, between moments of flame, she was trying to have a plan, but it's all she can do right now, to think of the right things in case her mind is being read, to think at all, of incredibly complicated situations that might be dangerous even for devils to know about, tropes does Hell know about tropes is it allowed to know about tropes this is her being properly cautious and trying not to think about tropes but she's having trouble not thinking of things when her legs are being roasted, are there things Hell isn't allowed to know about from Asmodeus she may know those things too, she's a story protagonist according to Keltham, Cayden Cailean has a weird pact with Asmodeus that needs not to be disrupted, somebody or something killed her before Abarco could hurt her too much and that probably signals something important - stop this stop this she can't think like this -

"No, see," says her own voice inside her own head, again, "you have the wrong attitude towards all of those questions; the attitude will need correction before we can seriously consider the questions. You wish to escape punishment. You must know that punishment is unescapable. You hope you are important. Your hope must be extinguished. We will revisit those questions, which sound fascinating, just as soon as you have accepted the only truth of Hell: that you will suffer forever and that there is no escape.

It's all right. No one grasps it instantly, even the ones who think they've always known it, and you're not even being unusually slow about it so far."

Peranza fails to stop herself in time, then, because it's not a kind of thought she's used to suppressing as dangerous.

She thinks then that Civilization is coming.

"See, there, that's a good benchmark for whether we're making any progress. Civilization isn't coming."

Once it knows Civilization isn't coming, then perhaps it can tell her what Civilization is. But not sooner. You can set a slave back weeks, that way, letting them think they made you stop hurting them through their own deliberate will.

She's an ilani and open to truth calculated first and before all other questions, Keltham was careful to teach them all that at the start of their lessons, this time, as a rule for reconstructing themselves if anything broke, to set aside everything else all want all desire even hope and first ask what's really true, Peranza can hear out why Civilization isn't coming but she has to be able to think first and that requires that her legs be not on fire so she can figure out what's really true -

No, actually the fire is reliably very persuasive on the question of whether anyone's coming to save you. If it's ineffective the first remedy is more fire, and the second remedy is torture.

Then Peranza will try to stop thinking and actually focus on the fire on her legs and not-scream about that instead, maybe they'll let her talk if she's boring and it's better than thinking of of don't think of that there's so much she has to protect this innocent devil from tropes and everything Keltham said about things devils might not be allowed to know, the conjunction fallacy ow ow ow her legs hurt so much she should focus on that pain maybe she can even make it sexy Subirachs trained her about that not really but it's something else for her mind to focus on failing about -

Devils aren't curious, temperamentally. It is fundamentally not a corrigible emotion: it does not produce predictable obedient behavior. You could say, that the devils in Dis speculated on the Project Lawful girls because they were curious, but you'd be missing something, trying to paint a human process onto an alien mind. The devils in Dis speculated on the Project Lawful girls because they were uncertain, and their uncertainty spanned a range that included great benefit; and then on top of that because they'd invented a new status good, and then on top of that to best their rivals.

There is no thought so fascinating, so bizarre, so unsettling, that a devil would wrestle with the impulse to learn more about it. There are inputs to the question of how long it'll take to get a new slave to agree that Civilization isn't coming; there are inputs that suggest the situation is strange, unusual, outside predicting in ordinary ways. In humans, by now, those inputs would have produced an itching urge to know what's going on, to ask just one question, but devils are not constructed so.

(If they were, perhaps they wouldn't need humans to reinvent the secrets that the higher layers of Hell cannot pass down to them.)

Maybe the slave will take a while, to confess to herself in her own heart that no one is coming for her. They usually do. The process can be sped up, but really, in a sense it's undignified to try that hard.

Peranza has no idea that she's supposed to update in a few minutes about how Civilization isn't coming for Hell thirty years later.  Even in pain, she would know that wasn't how the Law of Probability worked.  Peranza is not yet broken enough to stop understanding what Law she has.  She endures; this is not an amount of pain that could shatter her especially when she hasn't lost hope.

But Peranza is only human, and has almost no real training in dath ilani disciplines, particularly the disciplines of not thinking thoughts you've decided aren't good for you.  Children don't get taught that discipline; they're far more likely to hurt themselves with it for silly melodramatic reasons, than to encounter anything that legitimately requires not being thought about.

Peranza only manages to go three minutes of flame before, in the midst of thinking of all the other things she instructed herself to desperately not think about, the possibility that this entire reality is a dath ilani romance novel as might drive even devils mad, she manages to think of Abrogail Thrune's instructions to her new owner.  It only flashes through her mind for a moment before it's frantically shoved down -

- oh, huh, that's interesting. And disappointing, really.

The instruction, presumably, will wind its way down other paths eventually, along with the payment, but there's no reason to wait for that, once you know what you're going to conclude. 

"You should have said sooner that the Queen wanted to arrange a special reception for you!" she says cheerfully. "Traditionally we move one out of Dis for that. In the deeper layers of Hell there is less occurring that a mortal could comprehend which isn't about suffering, and you won't be taking up valuable real estate when I can't even take you to parties."

And she'll make the fire actually properly painful while she set herself at work on arranging to sell the slave to someone who doesn't yet know this. She'll tell them on sale, of course, so the suffering isn't interrupted.