"Goodbye, Keltham."

She leaves without another word.

He watches her go, and then gets back to his work.

It happens, needing to say goodbye to somebody for a time.  Not, usually, when you're this young, but it happens.

"How much do I need to pay to buy my own tiny sword of glibness to keep."

"Your soul," says Carissa, entirely seriously, and reaches out her hand to take it back.

PL-timestamp:  Day 63 / Long Night

Carissa has learned lots of dath ilani techniques for shaping herself better. She has learned how to notice her mental flinches, so she can hammer them out of existence; she has learned how to catch herself having an unAsmodean impulse, and punish it near-instantaneously so as to train the habit out of her mind at the very start. She has gotten absolutely nowhere on teaching this to anyone else, but that's all right; you perfect yourself first, and then see if anyone else can be salvaged. 

She sort of wanted to get torturing the Security who fucked up the Peranza situation nearly to death over with quickly, but on examination that was an unAsmodean impulse, less about her valuable time than about still relating to torture as something distasteful. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but sometimes it's healthy to do exactly the opposite of what feels natural, to teach yourself that it still works out fine.

So when she needed to go to sleep last night, she did not tell him that it was over, and now she will be resuming. 

This is a skill, after all, and if she wants to be a Power in Hell she needs to be as good at it as she is at spellcraft, and if people insist on volunteering to help teach her, well, she'll use their sacrifice to learn. 

Snack Service hasn't objected to this, for some reason. Uncharitably, Carissa figures that Cayden Cailean only cares about pretty girls who cry out to Iomedae and not about prematurely-balding men who cry out to nothing in particular.

Subirachs is very very relieved about the report she'll be able to pass on to the Most High, about this.  It places Subirachs's own eternal fate, to say nothing of her status in Cheliax, in less worrying doubt.

It would be better if the Chosen were enjoying this more.  But even if she's not, so long as the Chosen is not feeling much active distaste, not feeling like she's forcing herself to do this, if she's just getting used to it, that's also progress.  Sevar can maybe try again later to find her own particular enjoyments in this activity, if any, once she's over the general shock.

She wants to be like Abrogail, wants to understand people well enough that when she takes them apart she can put them together stronger. But you can't let the gulf between where you're at and where you want to be get in the way of getting better from your current starting point. Sure, look for clever shortcuts, but if there aren't any, then get started on the work. 

She's not feeling miserable. She's actually doing a lot less feeling things lately, which has worked out great. And she must master this and will master it, and will enjoy it once she's good at it. 

She doesn't kill him. There aren't that many Security-cleared wizards, and she just put all that effort into training him. And besides, it makes the whole thing better, the look on someone's face when they learn that they're not, in fact, going to die. 

Yet. 

She leaves the torture chambers in time to get some spellcraft practice in unless Subirachs wants her, which she reluctantly trots off to find out.

Sevar should exhibit her work to the rest of the Project, at some point?  That's a lot of the point here.  Torturing him in a way that makes him better is hard, when the punishment has to be this severe; it's a lot easier to make other Security better with it, and the other Project personnel.  That's the greater part of the reward of this activity, which Sevar shouldn't neglect to collect for herself.

- she sort of assumed word would just get around, since there's been Security stationed? Is she supposed to do a guided tour? At the Worldwound you could hear the screaming and that was pretty much all the information you needed.

Word has also gotten around the Project that Carissa Sevar is secretly the daughter of Infrexus.

Sevar has made a point of being merciful under carefully defined conditions of mercy, broader than usual.  It needs to be known, not just rumored, that Sevar personally tortured this fool, that the Chosen's patience is in fact limited.  It needs to be explicit under what conditions her tolerance was exhausted, and that it didn't consist of this man, say, spurning her sexual advances.  Subirachs doesn't need to have heard that rumor to know it exists, spontaneously materialized into Golarion by whatever ethereal entities produce them from nothingness.

It is really no wonder that Asmodeus hates humans so much.

Fine. Everyone can gather around, then, and she'll explain.

This is a hard job. It is a dangerous job. Expectations are high. Carissa expects high performance, and she has tried very hard to ensure that it's rewarded, and ensure that mistakes which look like mistakes on the way to high performance are not punished. 

However, if you are responsible for monitoring a girl in the middle of a mental breakdown, and you don't think of telling any of your superiors that she's in the middle of a mental breakdown because they're intimidating, and then she starts trying to do something incomprehensible and dangerous with her mind and you take fully two rounds to figure out what to do about that, and then Gorthoklek needs to be called in, then she'll in fact be irritated enough to practice torturing people on you for a couple consecutive nights. 

Is that confusing? You will not be tortured for asking questions, asking questions is not very similar to failing at monitoring a girl having a mental breakdown for a very long time in a fashion that requires emergency intervention from Egorian. 

Mindreading results:  They're very confused about what could go sufficiently wrong with a second-circle teenager that a pit fiend gets called in to handle it.  Nobody in fact has any questions that they're refusing to ask for reasons that strike the Security as Sevar-disapproved.  Many people are thinking 'What the fuck actually happened', but correctly inferring that this is probably dangerous information, and if they were meant to know it they'd have already been told.

A lot of the people in this room, especially the men, are experiencing significantly greater respect for Sevar and the Project's stated priorities, now that they know the price of exhausting her patience and that she's not simply weak.

Good. That's good. She should really have been paying attention to what they thought of her already, that's an important variable. Another way this incident was her fault. 

Ione Sala looks at the broken wreck of a Security and keeps her expression neutral.  She's - not sure how she ought to be feeling, her model of herself doesn't say.  She hates Security, right?  And she ought to feel reassured, about Peranza, by this.  Even if nothing is being said about what happened to Peranza, and even if Gorthoklek got called in for some reason, Sevar personally wrecking the Security who failed does not particularly seem like the act of somebody who didn't really care about Peranza.  Nor is Sevar the type to torture an innocent Security in order to fool people about whether she cared about Peranza, that's just silly.

...Ione doesn't know how she feels, but she sure isn't asking any questions.

She hopes Peranza will be okay, eventually.  Maybe she'll ask Sevar afterwards if the Special Girls are cleared to know what really happened to Peranza.  But she definitely isn't interrupting now.

Carissa would like this project at this time to be very focused on getting spellsilver cheap enough to be a substantial competitive advantage for Cheliax, ideally without the help of anyone, second-ideally without the help of anyone but Avaricia. If that happens, she may seriously recommend to Egorian that they all join Peranza in being petrified for a whole year, so the project cannot fall apart before Cheliax is in possession of a decisive military advantage. That is, at this point, the only way they could even possibly lose, so better to cut it off at the pass.

She'd like Security to be monitoring for thoughts about whether anyone isn't sure they want to win.

Ione Sala definitely doesn't want Cheliax to win, and is placing her faith in Nethys to stop that, but with tinges of visible effort.  Likewise in her efforts to convince herself that she would never betray Lord Nethys over that, who has charge of her soul and could shatter her with a touch.

Alexandre Esquerra would be terrifically disappointed if Cheliax won while he was statued and before he could build armors to slay Cheliax's enemies himself, but this is not, in Security's judgment, a significant loyalty issue.

...several Project personnel are confused about what Sevar's plan even means, like, they just straight-up failed to understand what the plan was about or why they'd be turned into statues or how that gives Cheliax a military advantage.  They are afraid to ask.

Sure, okay, she'll talk slower.

"Several people are confused, but didn't ask questions. It would have been appreciated if you asked questions.

We are close to having a process for making spellsilver very cheaply. This is a decisive military advantage. If Cheliax has that, and no one else does, then eventually we will conquer them. A thousand very well-equipped high level magic users with arbitrary resources to throw at the problem can topple any government in the world. Once that happens, the only way Cheliax loses is if someone who knows the secret defects, or if Keltham leaves and goes to Osirion and we can't conquer Osirion fast enough. 

So, once we arrive at that point, the gains to Cheliax from the project proceeding normally are still substantial, but the downside is very high; we have enough of an advantage to win, and are only playing to not-lose. I don't like playing to not-lose. One solution is to petrify Keltham for a year. But the reason we haven't considered that before is that we'll change, from not being around him, and he'll be suspicious. So to do that safely, we spend that time in stasis as well. We wake up with Cheliax already having the resources to conquer Osirion on an hour's notice, and we proceed from there."

It's a gamble, telling them this. But Peranza sincerely thought Cheliax was going to lose, and so it seems important, to give people a concrete, testable description of how they'll know Cheliax is on track to win. 

Ione tries, and fails, to prevent herself from thinking where Security can hear it, that if tropes govern all of this or Nethys has a plan, that predicts Keltham leaves before the Project can get spellsilver manufacture to that level no no that's silly right the dath ilani romance novel would probably let Cheliax get that far in order to raise plot tension.

...this thought is duly reported to the Chosen.

Carissa thinks that, actually, she's not a character in a story, and whether Keltham leaves depends on her competence not the next plot beat. 

But noted.

Asmodia has not been consulted about this plan.  Apparently Sevar came up with it just while talking to Maillol and Subirachs and Abarco or whoever.

Asmodia feels a bit insulted about that, in fact.  Isn't she practically Sevar's second-in-command?  Isn't it her job to check over clever ideas like these for consistency?  Have any of those apparently more-important-than-her people been checking over every scrap of information that Keltham interacts with?

(Maillol, the actual second, would recognize this feeling immediately; it's the feeling of not being far enough into the Inner Ring.)

Asmodia will decide when and whether to later bring up the issue that apparently none of those other important people saw, when they were making this plan without consulting her.  She can always claim to have thought of it later.

PL-timestamp:  Day 64

PL-timestamp:  Day 65