"You did not particularly give off a vibe of wanting me to ask, as I tried to read it.  Was I wrong about that?  Do you want me to ask, now?"

"No! If you'd asked before I would've had to lie about most of it and if you ask now I guess I don't have to lie about most of it but I also, just, haven't got a story ready that's true, if that makes any sense? You might think you don't have to get a story ready, if it's true, but actually telling the truth is harder than lying. ...maybe that's less true outside Cheliax. I figure, we have a relationship that is about sex and money, and you're not responsible for me and I'm not responsible for you, and we're better off without things getting complicated."

"Well, I won't ask then!  I am in fact, amazingly enough, feeling upset and betrayed about you sneaking in an orgasm, because the entire point was to build up the frustration in you!  You could have just quoted me a higher price to reflect the days I didn't know about, Yaisa!  I will give you a temporary pass because of the entire torturegod Conspiracy incredibly traumatic upbringing business, but we'd have to talk about that explicitly before resuming any such relationship."

"Okay! I promise I won't fuck around like that in the absence of a torturegod Conspiracy, though I'll go on having a traumatic upbringing. I don't really think the traumatic upbringing was specifically the problem. I like you and I hope we do get to talk about that someday and not just because otherwise I'll suffer an awful fate."

"Oh, if this is reality, there's going to be all kinds of stuff happening that is not me, like, walking away and forgetting that any of this ever happened."

Yaisa smiles at him but does not offer a goodbye kiss.

That's fair.  Keltham isn't offering to pay for one.

"Unfortunately, Peranza can't be with us here today!  Obviously, they didn't tell you the truth about that event!  But, please don't make any decisions about things related to that, until you're sure you know the whole story there, including the key fact that only one person here knows enough to infer.  There's parts that you'll definitely find disturbing to hear about, but the Project and its employees didn't deliberately hurt Peranza much by Cheliax's standards or hers."

"Peranza wasn't in love with you.  She could've fallen in love with you, given the chance, but she was in circumstances she found pretty stressful and didn't have the energy, really."

"And next up...  KORVAAAA TALLAANNNDRIAAA!"

"This is a good time to sit down, stretch, or take a drink from your wineskin, because this may take a while."

“My feeling is that I think you suck,” says Korva, and then feels a small wave of relief, internally, that that really is what she feels, that she’s not lying to herself. “Not because you didn’t hire me, I think you were totally justified in that. There are actually an incredible number of other things I want to say about how much you suck, though, so I worry that whatever’s left of twenty minutes won’t be enough.”

“But I’ll give it a go.”

“I have lived my entire life in Cheliax. I think I was - seven or eight, when I realized that all the books were lying. Not just the textbooks, which were obvious, because they take out or invent whole noble lines and wars between semesters, based on what was most convenient for the government that year, and everyone had to act like it had always been that way. I mean - every book in every library has been either written or selectively edited to present a certain inaccurate picture of the world, although obviously a different one than what we fed you. We live in lies, Chelish people, the way fish live in water. I imagine you’re feeling very upset right now, and I want you to know that everyone in Cheliax has lived their entire lives inside a conspiracy of similar magnitude. The thing you’re feeling - all of us got it out of the way when we were children. But if any of us had thrown the kind of fit you’re throwing about it, at your age, we would have been tortured to death in public, and then gone to hell to be tortured for eternity, and then, if we had ever done anything otherwise worth remembering, had our names erased from the history books, as though we never were.”

“That is the world I grew up in, Keltham. And you know what I fucking did about it? I read more books. Because lying is hard, and censors can’t do it perfectly. I learned to do some of - the thing you do, that people think makes you so fucking special, where you realize that facts have implications, and can see that - if someone is illusioning a thing to look different, but they forget to change the shadow of the object, you can learn something more of what the object really looks like from the object’s shadow. I checked stories against each other. I took note of what didn't make sense. I read fiction, old fiction produced outside of Cheliax, which is differently hard to censor than history. I read the world by its silhouettes, even though I’d never be able to see it clearly. I have educated guesses, for what lies beyond the lies.”

“So I hate you, in part, because - you do all this talking, about wanting to see what the truth is, about wanting to believe whatever is true and not whatever is convenient. But how many things did you do today that you couldn’t have done on your second day here, before all the gods had taken notice of you? You read a couple books, great. They had utterly baffling social and cultural mores in them that you thought didn’t make any sense. Did you push for more, try to seriously figure out what was up with that by reading more books? No. You kept noting, over and over, that you didn’t know what intelligence ten people were capable of, even without anyone trying to hide them from you, even though it crippled your understanding of what could or couldn't be done here. Did you ever try talking to one deliberately, even once? No. You were confused about the concepts of law, chaos, good, and evil, and knew that you were; did you ever try getting a serious account from someone who differed from Cheliax on any of those axes? Literally once, I think, and in only one direction. - have you figured out what Evil is yet, by the way, because I’d love to be the one to make that in particular really come together for you if you haven’t yet."

"I am listening."

"It's hurting other people. I'm sure they'll give you access to a bunch of complicated philosophical definitions in Osirion, but the understanding that almost everyone actually uses, is that it's hurting other people. Making people suffer, either as an end goal or as a means to some other end. Treating people the way you saw them be treated in the slave market in Absalom, which is not remotely the worst this plane has to offer, let alone the lower planes. Killing people. Raping people. Torture. Theft. Anything that makes the world worse for people to live in. And, yes, selfishness is often a cause of that, because it's much easier to get what you want when you're willing to crush other people to get it."

"If you want to know how much of that we actually do around here - I dunno, ask the Osirians to give you some books on actual warfare. What happens to women and children in places that get attacked, not troop movements and generals. Ask them to describe how it feels for a baby to die slowly and painfully of disease, and how many babies that is, and then ask for the prices of a remove disease versus a raise dead diamond, and do the math about how many people have to experience that agony whenever a wealthy person is as careless with their life as you told us to be. If you want a starting point."

"Anyway."

"The other big reason I hate you is - "

“Well, you know, you probably only remember me from the crying incident, at this point, and are confused about why I'm even here. I started crying because I felt like being forcibly put on this project was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and I wasn’t getting the answer to your question, couldn’t make the math come together, and I realized that that made me worthless and that they were probably going to kill me off early, and I’d be useless for the rest of time, only good for screaming and not for doing anything that I might need a mind for, and I was more terrified than I think I have ever been in my life. I was also furious with you, for teaching the way you taught, for starting this project that ripped me away from my otherwise less agonizing life, for being a shitty fucking cleric of Abadar who didn't manage to notice that you were working with people who were essentially slaves, part yours and part the government's, and that all of your supposedly free trade with them was a farce."

"I probably could have held it in if I’d thought it mattered. I didn’t, because at that point in time I underestimated what an asshole you were. I figured you’d either ignore it or think it was funny, like a normal person, or ask me what was wrong, like the decent and anomalously truth-seeking person you claimed to be, and I’d tell you a plausible lie about something going on in my life that you hadn’t known about and which made sense of it, which is really what is usually happening when someone bursts into tears, which I'm pretty sure they do more outside of Cheliax."

“Instead, you recommended that I be exiled from the fortress, for being some kind of emotional leper who would drag down everyone around me. The idea that they would have stored me in a different secure location is laughable. They would have killed me. The only reason I am not currently a burnt, quivering, sobbing, misshappen lump of flesh, as a direct result of your careless, stupid order, which came solely from you and ideas that nobody separately planted in your head, is that Asmodia saved my life by putting me on her consistency team, which I was pretty good at, I think. I was in charge of the team that wrote most of the books you read today. I'm aware that they mostly sucked, by the way, although it's actually really hard to produce that volume of content that fast even if you're barely controlling for quality at all, which is another reason you would have been able to blow this whole thing wide open if you had done it in the first few weeks instead of distractedly fucking all the pretty girls around you."

"Anyway. I think you think I suck. I think you're right about that. But you suck, too, asshat, and I think the way you acted speaks poorly of you from any philosophical perspective you want to take. And I don't think a smarter or a less selfish dath ilani would have fallen for this. Either one would have been enough, I think."

"That was me being evil, so we're clear. I think it's true, but I specifically want to say it because I want you to hurt the way you hurt me, to know that you're not enough and that you wouldn't have been hurt so badly if you were a little less pathetic as a person. That has been, like, something of a driving motivation for the past two months, the hope that I might someday get to say that to your face."

"Honestly, I really wish that I could tie you to a chair until I was done breaking down every single mistake you made and how ridiculously wrong you are about so much of the world around you, and also get it through your skull that there are hundreds of millions of people around you who are living stories as real and as genuine as yours, and that everything isn't fucking about you, even though the gods, for reasons that are totally unrelated to your actual impressiveness as a person, or to anything you've ever actually done of your own power, appear to be obsessed with you. But I doubt your escorts have the time for that, so if you want to know what you're missing, you're going to have to grow the fuck up and look the fuck around you this time."

"Asshole."

Did she somehow miss the part where he's a young punk from a Civilization greater and brighter and smarter than himself, repeating back things told him by teachers more devoted to the Way than he?  Keltham had thought he was being pretty clear about that part, but maybe that was just illusion-of-transparency.

He is not going to argue, given what would (if this is reality) happen to Korva if he won any arguments.

"Interesting thesis you have there!  Sorry about almost sending you to Hell if that was actually in fact a thing in any way!  There's a number of things I could say about the rest of it, but mostly, let's continue this debate sometime when you're not going to have your thoughts read about it and get hurt for arriving at particular opinions."

"Next please!"

"Asmodia, please read the piece of paper that you'll find in your pocket!"

Pilar doesn't think quite fast enough to grab control of her body back before Snack Service can finish saying it.

"Next up.  Piiiilaaaaaaar Pineeeeeeeeeda.  It was actually written with all the extra vowels.  I refuse to pronounce all of these exclamation marks."

"Resuming.  Piiiilaaaaaaar Pineeeeeeeeeda, faithful Asmodean, second-circle wizard of Cheliax, and unwilling oracle.  Chosen of Cayden Cailean, the glorious and exalted god of parties, sex, and drunken blackouts.  Who went to Elysium, and returned to Cheliax freely of her own will.  Also known as 'the cake girl', the Giver of Cookies, She-Who-Bears-Cake, Cheliax's Secret Weapon, I'm going to skip over this part it goes on for a while and the worst part is I'm sure it's all true.  Universally acknowledged to be the sanest person on Project Lawful, that's also true, even Ione would've agreed.  Bearer of the Curse of Laughter, also known as Snack Service, the bestest oracular curse ever.  Please welcome, and then truthspell, Pilar Pineda."

Hundreds of multicolored party balloons appear around Pilar Pineda, and promptly rise up into the sky!

This is even more impressive when most of the planet doesn't know what 'helium' is, and sees the balloons rising without Arcane Sight or Detect Magic offering any hint about why they'd be going up instead of down!

"I'm seriously going to fucking slay that thing someday."

It seems pretty unambiguous to Carissa at this point that Snack Service is trying to leave Keltham in a state of utter inability to tell if anything is real or not. She has no idea why, but that's so obviously what's happening.

The Osirians, watching the balloons, collectively draw all of the following conclusions: 

Evangelism for Cayden Cailean and all chaotic gods should definitely continue to be banned in Osirion, and probably the government should go much further. Snack Service should definitely be banned. Anything it writes should probably also be banned. 

Cake girl is a victim.

Premarital sex is definitely the road to all manner of existential horrors. 

Also, sending women to school is a horrible, awful mistake. 

The most outrageous and exaggerated stories of the sexual degeneracy and awfulness of Avistan appear to just be straightforwardly completely true.

It is better for everyone in Osirion to die than to become like Avistan in any way. 

Between the two characterizations of Cheliax that people outside Cheliax argue about, the one where the people of Cheliax are fundamentally deceived by Asmodeus/tricked through soul-selling and so on to go to Hell despite being basically normal people, and the one where Asmodeus manages to successfully make everyone in Cheliax into such horrible people they deserve to go to Hell, it's definitely the second one.

The world Keltham came from before this must, aside from its superior knowledge of alchemy, be an utterly horrifying place for Cheliax to have been able to pull off the harem play. 

Cayden Cailean has either ceased to have any qualities whatsoever besides inane silliness, or really desperately wants Cheliax to believe that and is willing to make horrifying expenditures of resources to make it look like He has nothing going on besides inane silliness. 

The new cleric of Abadar is clearly in the middle of a profound and horrifying breakdown and should probably spend several months in a monastery in the mountains, desperate as everyone is to speak with him. 

Also, Snack Service's illusions are really compelling - the balloons don't appear illusory. Which raises the question of whether literally everything that has happened since they arrived in Cheliax has been an elaborate deception meant to persuade them of one or more of the above things. 

"My entire Civilization used to spend, I think the calculation was, something like 1% of planetary income on trolling each other.  Snack Service is doing medium-okay by our standards given its technological constraints."

Is that a CHALLENGE?

NO.

It was totally a CHALLENGE!