Pilar walks forward, receives her truthspell, and then speaks.

"Yeah, not really sure what to say here.  Everything I told you about the relationship between myself and Lord Asmodeus was true, Snack Service said to make sure it was.  I think that Cheliax is -"

Pilar realizes that she is unable to say 'Cheliax is a great place and doing everything right' under truthspell.

She's had horrifying realizations like that before; it doesn't cause her to have a total meltdown the way it would've three months ago.

"Cheliax is the only place I've ever heard of where I can exist as myself, Hell is the only afterlife I can imagine myself going to, Asmodeus is the only god who fits me in any way.  I was similarly honest when I described to you the kind of sex I like, that keeps me in my place.  I've always enjoyed being forced into sex, I was never actually in denial about it, that was a lie to see if we could get you to force me into bed without my saying yes to anything."

"I went to Elysium because of my curse.  They showed me what Hell was actually like for the people in it, and spent a lot of time apparently trying to talk me out of things and telling me how much Asmodeus didn't deserve me.  I came back to Golarion willingly, to serve Asmodeus in this world, and then in Hell."

"My big breakdown after your Keeper lecture was actually about the part where I realized I didn't want my mother and sister to go to Hell, and Snack Service told me that it'd arranged for my family to be kidnapped by Osirion, atoned to Lawful Neutral, and killed so they'd end up in Axis instead.  I am still a bit salty about this where relations with Snack Service are concerned, but Aspexia Rugatonn says that Snack Service seems to have done the right thing to serve Asmodeus's interests, therefore that is the truth."

"Not particularly attracted to you.  You are not nearly, nearly, nearly Evil enough."

"Sorta figured.  There was definitely something, magnetic, sexual, about your whole character concept, but you were clearly too advanced for my level of perversion.  I figured I'd get there someday."

"Obviously, I'm going to have to do a lot of refiguring now, about a lot of things."

There's only one person left, now, and he just wants to hide, go to Osirion without hearing it.

...to be fair to Snack Service, that one person was the important one, and, without hearing all of these other confessions, earlier, for context, whatever Carissa had to say wouldn't have been - whatever it was - it wouldn't have been coherent with anything.

"Second to last, but first in Keltham's heart, Carissa Sevar."

"Oh, Aspexia Rugatonn, we're going to need another ten minutes here."

"I grant and compact on behalf of Cheliax to another ten minutes, added to the twenty, under the same terms as before."

"We can just leave," the Osirian leader says to Keltham. "The fact this serves Asmodeus is strong reason to think it doesn't serve you."

"There is a chance that this is reality," which subjective probability has actually been growing, these statements may be wild but they don't feel put together wrongly the same way as - as, in retrospect, a lot of other things have felt, over the last months -

"There's a chance this is reality, and, if it is, then yeah, I need to hear all the things that are said under truthspell."

Sure. They'll truthspell Carissa. 

...Keltham will cast this truthspell himself, actually.

She's been ordered not to speak, though.

(Also she is in a state. It's not actually the losing the crown and having everything she cared about collapse to pieces on her - she was impaired, by that, she was not at her best, but that's not what got her to her current state.

What got her to her current state is standing here helplessly while Snack Service prances around acting out the story it has apparently been planning for a long time.

Tropes are real.

Stories are real. This is a story. This is a story run by something sympathetic to Snack Service.

 Carissa is not the kind of person who can ever really wish she didn't exist, or even didn't exist in this particular context, but it's definitely the most horrifying context imaginable to exist in. She'd much rather go to Hell forever like Peranza, to be tortured and not changed, than be in Snack Service's story.

Nothing feels real, nothing feels like it possibly could be real or possibly could matter, everything she hates most in the world has absolute power over her and only wants to use it to mock and humiliate her, everything is a lie and specifically a lie aimed at the very concept things happen for reasons instead of because it amuses Cayden Cailean and Nethys.

When the balloons rise into the sky she feels herself giving up on the very concept that the state of the world depends in any way on what actions you take.)

It takes him a moment to work out why Carissa isn't talking.

"Carissa.  You can talk now - the earrings are supposedly still real on this layer of reality?  How were you going to get around it if I ordered you to speak truth?"

"Security could suppress them temporarily. But they're not - they're not supposed to be possible for me to get around, that'd kind of ruin the whole point. Cheliax's commands to me can contradict yours, but - my own will certainly can't. 

That came out - a lot more miserable, a lot more cynical, than it would have yesterday, I'm sorry. I'd consider it - a really big mistake, if mistakes are in fact the kind of thing it's possible to make instead of everything being scripted which is kind of what I'm currently thinking is going on, but, okay, you're valiantly trying to live like this is real and matters so I'll try too. I haven't been hurt nearly as badly as you, here. And I'd regret it for the rest of my life, if you walked away thinking that I'd mostly been hurting myself, or - weakening myself - for you. I wasn't. It turns out that being paralyzed here while Cayden's shitty manipulative fucking puppeteer mocks us all is not the kind of being powerless I'm into, but, hey, I did notice that pretty much immediately, so I'm pretty sure I would also have noticed if it were true of anything else, of anything with you.

I read your mind, the first day we met, right after Tongues had worn off. I was a good Asmodean. I knew that I was weak and flawed and that I would suffer in Hell until I was perfect. I wasn't that scared, I figured I'd just have to get really, really good, so that much of me could be preserved, in the devil-making process, so that I'd make a really good devil. But I read your mind and I wanted that, I wanted my thoughts to be entangled like that and to move like that and to chase down implications like that, I wanted to be able to follow them the way you followed yours. I told Maillol you were very important. I didn't decide to join the project, obviously, I was ordered to, but I never - uh, except during my date with Abrogail - regretted it for a second. I knew what was possible and I wanted it. 

I don't like Hell. I'm Lawful Evil, I obey Asmodeus, I don't mind hurting people, I don't get worked up about how, oh, no, torture, I'd still rather endure a hundred years of it than the twenty minutes of Chaotic Good we've just been subjected to. But I don't like feeling like people are weaker, instead of stronger, when they get hurt, if you don't hit them just right, I don't like the ways that the fear of Hell makes them more pathetic instead of less so - I'm very pathetic, right now, so you can't take any of this as particularly criticism of other people, understand, but I can see it, very clearly, how pathetic everyone is all the time, and I want it to stop, I want people to be like Her Majestrix who it's absolutely illegal to casually call 'Abrogail' by the way, I want to be like that myself, or at least like, a piece that fits in with that, strengthens it, instead of just falling short of it. And Cheliax doesn't produce people like that. It's not really trying, honestly. As long as they go to Hell - and they do go to Hell - it doesn't matter. But it matters to me, and as soon as - we started - I was thinking about how to fix it. I wanted to understand you, I wanted to be like you, it felt like not just everything I'd always wanted from my life but also everything I'd always wanted for the world. Something beautiful, instead of something that we were all - buried under, flinching from. 

I didn't plan on falling in love with you. I planned on becoming an expert on you, and understanding you, for the sake of my project of building Asmodean ilanism. And then - in addition to being good at thinking - you were so indignant, at the ways the world was bad and could be better, you were so - enchanted, at the idea that you could have the things you wanted, the things dath ilan couldn't give you - I don't really believe the things you told us about dath ilan, by the way, I kind of think there has to be some kind of horrible conspiracy behind the scenes, but maybe that's just because I'm projecting.

It felt like when I was yours, you and I were both more complete. 

I thought they would torture me until I stopped having stupid feelings like that, but they didn't."

"I got put in charge of the project while we were in Egorian. I got into an argument with Maillol about how we were handling it, and I saw - that Cheliax had entirely the kinds of people Cheliax built, people whose lies left - shadows - because in Cheliax you didn't need your lies not to leave shadows, half the time you really didn't want people to believe them anyway - I think dath ilanism will be much less exciting to people in other countries, in some ways, I think part of what happened was this - chemical reaction - between the ways Cheliax built people and the ways dath ilan did it. I had the idea of setting up the date with Her Majestrix, I wanted you to see that getting really, seriously, horribly hurt could be really good for me, and to feel possessive, and maybe a bit jealous, that she knew how to do those things you didn't know how to do. 

She did, uh, an immersive hallucination, sort of like some of the things that have happened to you over the last day, and made me think that I'd failed, and you'd figured it out, and were leaving, and now I was going to be tortured and petrified and buried underground so I could never have Hell. It was - really good for me." She is relieved she can say that, she hadn't been totally sure. "Horrible suffering generally is, if I survive it, if - if it's personal, if I'm the audience, if I matter. 

You might be wondering why I didn't tell you the truth once I realized I was in love with you. The obvious answer is that Security was monitoring me very closely and would have Dominated me and then figured out an impersonator somehow however much credibility it cost us. That's - not the whole answer though it was definitely happening. I tried to escape once, as part of the plan by which we all tried to escape in order to figure out what a convincing fake-escape would be like, and it didn't work - 

- another part of the answer was that you weren't ready. Even - even in the world where your values didn't collide too hard with ours once you'd had time to think, or in the worlds where I fixed up Hell and by the time we had to tell you about it it wasn't really very objectionable, it'd have hurt you, to hear it, and I never enjoyed hurting you. There's lots of stuff that fit fine in Ordinary that I didn't tell you, because I didn't want to hurt you. There are children, babies, in the slave markets in Absalom. We bought them all before your trip, so you wouldn't see that. - uh, and gave them back to their parents afterwards, to be clear."

(There is some concerned communication among the Osirians to their superiors in Sothis, about slave markets.)

"So.  I'm not really - able to process this very well, right now.  Hence the transcripts."

"For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the only reason I can process this at all is because of all the context I got from everybody else going before you.  Otherwise I'd just be listening with an ear to, trying to rip down this next layer of reality, and that would be all I heard."

"Snack Service isn't playing games, or isn't just playing games.  It's optimizing.  The question is what for."

"Isn't that the question. We've been debating it for months, haven't gotten anywhere. Maybe it'll be clear once you're in Osirion. I am pretty sure I hate being treated like this for the sake of Good optimizations exactly as passionately as I hate being treated like this for no reason, but obviously I don't expect Snack Service to want to avoid harming me, given all the givens. Harming me is plausibly part of what it's optimizing for, and that would be reasonable, since if I could harm it I definitely would.

I think I don't want to talk about Snack Service.

I talked with Subirachs, at one point, about how awful it felt to - be doing this to you - I explained that I'd been conceptualizing it as - service to the Lawful Evil Keltham we were hoping to awaken from his Lawful Good upbringing, hoping to make able to understand everything without it breaking him and willing to take it, once he had it. Iiiiii think that like many of my plans was running on willful self-deception but it was how I was thinking of it. I tried - to make as much real as I could - they didn't tell me when you were planning to attack me and drag me off - I ordered everyone else to not pretend with you -

- uh, I did, at one point, on a day you were petrified, have sex with Elias Abarco, I didn't want to, I tried to stop him, and I'm sorry, that I did it and that I didn't tell you even though I couldn't tell you without blowing the whole thing open. Aside from that I actually tried to do what you asked of me, the best I could, and to make sure no one you were sleeping with was - the thing you were so scared we all were -

- I'm not trying to convince you I wasn't incredibly Evil. I was incredibly Evil, I hurt a lot of people. I'm just trying to convince you that I love you, not just in a way where we have feelings we don't know how to describe but in a way where - I tried, to make the thing I was doing bring you joy and not hurt you secretly, except I was lying to myself about everything. 

And to be clear, I still am, probably, lying to myself about some things. Since I'm still Chelish, and this is still my project, and I can only achieve any of the things I want to achieve if I manage not to steer myself off any cliffs of heresy in the meantime. I wouldn't - take the things I'm saying right now as particularly right, about what happened. When you come back - if you come back - I think I'll understand it better, and I'll be able to give you a proper confession. 

In private. Because this is ludicrous."

"But, uh, the parts I'm sure about are - you were what I needed, and I was very happy, and you were making me stronger, and I loved you, and I still love you, and I'll probably always love you, and I hope some day once you've made whatever determinations you need to make, about what's real and how the world works, you'll come back for me."

"Yeah, about that."

"Aspexia Rugatonn.  What's your price on Carissa Sevar?"

- some nervous mutters pass among Telepathically Bonded Osirians. Osirion has slavery for debt and as a criminal punishment. .....maybe the criminal punishment situation applies here? None of the things confessed to so far were, actually, crimes.

She has been doing a lot of calculations, in her mind, and this is not, from several of those angles, a sensible thing to do.  Bringing herself into range of a small army with only this much protection, for example.

But it is clear enough that Abrogail Thrune belongs within this lineup, that is now beyond all dispute.  Given that truth, to stand back would defy tropes, possibly, and not only Chaotic Good semidivinity.

And Abrogail Thrune has her pride; in no small sense she is her pride.  If there is a greater person within her that contains the proud image of Abrogail Thrune, it is not very much greater, for being so much filled with it.

It is beneath her pride to wait to be summoned, beneath her pride to be dragged forth by tropes, beneath her pride to hide from a place of the story where she belongs because of fear.

Dimension Door.

"Return to us reading Lawful Evil, ready to own and use Carissa Sevar as she must be owned and used.  She will certainly be for sale to you then, and at a reasonable price."

Abrogail -

Shut up.  This is the correct thing to do from multiple dramatic standpoints.

There are a number of factors that enter into Abrogail's decision here.  One of those is that, in her cold judgment, if Sevar goes with Keltham to Osirion now, their cleric of Irori is not coming back.

Another is that it is not, even now, determined exactly what manner of story this may be; and it may not be too late to establish that Keltham must become more Evil than this to win Sevar's heart and her ownership.

Had Sevar sold her soul, the decision would be more fraught; but Abrogail thinks she would make it this same way.  She is not defying Hell's command.

Somehow, Surprise Abrogail is the thing that makes Carissa's brain fully return to functioning. Surprise Abrogail is just a common feature of the world you have to be constantly on the lookout for, it's not something wacky and incomprehensible. 

"I'd be grateful for permission to kneel to my Queen," she murmurs to Keltham.

"No.  Somebody has rather trampled on my pride, if she is a real person; I find that I have not much care for hers, at this moment."

"You were barely a real person when you arrived in Golarion, Keltham out of dath ilan.  If there is any more substance to you now, it's because we led you, step by step, away from the small, hemmed-in, crippled being they tried to make of you.  That indignation you're feeling now?  The fact that you'll now let yourself have that much pride?  We gave it to you."