"There's not a story, sir, and if you alienate everybody you won't be able to fix everything."

"Asmodia said, under Osirion-supervised truthspell, that the tropes were probably real, that she'd been temporarily turned into a dragon, that a god gave her a permanent +1 Intelligence boost, and that she was in fact asexual - someone who doesn't experience sexual desire - and had ended up as the one who stands back and watches it all."

"Nefreti Clepati said she'd explain things to Ione once they were offscreen."

"And no matter what the in-world rationalization, the fact remains that Golarion contains damage-resistant 'masochists'."

"You'd need some context to get all that.  But I think there's a story."

Keltham is still trying to figure out how to make use of the fact.  Most stories where the characters know they're in a story resist being easily manipulated by the characters, and sometimes the story makes an example out of the first character who tries, or warns them off in a way that discourages anyone from trying again.  'Do not mess with tropes' and all that.

"Was Nefreti trying to convince you, sir, or trying to convince Cheliax?

But that's not the important bit, actually, not really.

You remind me of the Pharaoh. Not this one, his predecessor, his grandfather. He was a good man, as far as that goes. Osirion grew wealthier under his rule, and that's what matters. But no one else was ever properly real to him. When they spoke, they were just delivering the latest development in his story, the story of his rule; when they wept, it was a test to see if he was compassionate. When there was a famine, the gods had cursed him to try his commitment. When his baby died, he was paying for his hubris. 

I suppose I don't have a counterargument, if that's how you want to see the world."

"Doesn't sound like a happy character, does it?  But this story is not apparently setting up for me to be happy, and at that point, if you're to go on playing at all, it makes more sense to speedrun the story as quickly as possible, and hope it ends with me and Carissa together again, than drag it out by futilely trying to be happy during the Osirion arc -"

"I guess I don't know that's the obvious strategy the way it would be inside a dath ilani story.  This sure isn't a dath ilani story medium, we couldn't send True Dead people to places where a-priori-unlikely events would happen around them, and the tropes - are not quite right.  A-priori-unlikely: things you wouldn't have expected before you saw them.  There's a more precise technical meaning but it takes math to explain."

"Anyways.  There's only one possible answer to that argument, in dath ilan or anywhere else, if you're reasoning validly - in a way where conclusions follow from premises."

"If the world is a story, I desire to believe it is a story; if the world is not a story, I desire not to believe it is a story; let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want."

"Whether the belief will make me happy, or unhappy, does not enter into it."

"In a Golarion story, sir, the person who is treating everyone around them as interchangeable faces and every major event that affects billions of people as a message from the gods for them personally isn't just a sad character, they also lose, because when it matters they weren't paying attention to -

- which of the servants stole a princesses jewelry to pawn for a Remove Disease for their sick baby -

- and which of the King's advisors is glad they're here and which is unendorsedly resentful of how much money he lost on the betting markets about them -

- and who has a crush on them and who is painfully reminded of their dead brother and who overheard them talking about contraception and is resisting the urge to immediately shake them down and get an explanation of how to do it, and who wants to help them whatever it takes and who wants to help them so long as it doesn't destroy Sothis and who will keep going with or without them -"

"My reluctance to think like I was in a story, my wanting to believe my apparent world was real so I could be happy there, is why Golarion is now facing down a Cheliax which, thanks to me, is scaling up the ability to produce spellsilver and intelligence headbands at a tenth of the current cost."

"Your people are alien to me, I am here with you trying to understand them and when I try the message I get back is 'This is huge and broken and full of children torturing each other and those children don't want you fixing them' and if reality is going to throw tiny detective stories at me on top of that then this so-called reality can burn.  Pick a different protagonist, because there are limits to how much I'm willing to suffer for a world that might not be real at all.  I was supposed to be selfish, it was my thing."

"I see, sir."

"I apologize for inflicting my overt emotions on you.  I don't need to be yelling at you, I need to be plotting out a path through time to destroying Asmodeus."

"I think I should be getting along to Sothis, now.  Do you get to keep the five silver or does somebody grab it away from you as soon as I'm not looking anymore?"

"- actually in this specific case I go talk to the pharaoh and then he compensates me whatever the difference is between the five silver you pay me and what I would've charged if I'd known what this was going to be like."

"Uh huh.  Well, I'm not going to offer to pay you more, though I got more than five silver worth of value here on my own end, because if you predictably pay upwards then people just bid downwards.  But you get to keep the money?"

"Yes."

"Recalculating recent evidential updates in light of this important fact."

"I'll take your advice, and head into Sothis to see if I can talk with a female that Osirion considers a woman, and I will ask them what they'd have Osirion's fate be."

You might, possibly, get an overly rosy picture of how happy and functional a place Cheliax was, on average, if (a) you were inside a fortress being run by Carissa Sevar and (b) you were all carefully presenting a happy functional face to a dath ilani who might notice any subtle departures from that picture.

It is now full two days since both of these conditions abruptly ceased to obtain inside the Fortress of Law.

People are being idiots.  Would it kill them, would it damn them to Abaddon, to wait a few weeks until Sevar gets back from her punishment, to make any changes to this perfectly good status quo?

Unfortunately, as Maillol knows all too well, if you are not literally at the Worldwound then there are limits to how useful it can be to try to clamp down on friction between your subordinates.  If you let dominance challenges resolve themselves, your subordinates resolve themselves into a stable low-tension arrangement where everyone knows who's stronger and the stronger ones are in charge.  Anything you do to influence affairs away from that creates a higher-tension arrangement which you, as superior, will have to do ongoing work to maintain.

Maillol can foresee Sevar not being incredibly happy with this unfortunate bit of project manager wisdom, nor feeling fully answered by the observation that they are supposed to be less heretical Asmodeans henceforth.  But if Sevar didn't want this to happen the moment she stepped out, she should have spent three rounds casting to prepare for it, frankly.

The slave population in the Fortress of Law has been forced into unnatural arrangements for quite some time now.  Some minor strife now will provide both a natural release of those tensions, and an excuse to correct any unfortunate qualities of the resulting arrangement when Sevar returns from her recovery vacation with the Queen.

Besides, it will probably be good for Sevar, a start on her new Asmodeanism, if she returns to a situation that requires her to correct her slaves with fire and lash.

Maillol and Subirachs seem to be inclined in different directions about this?  Fascinating.

A story you could tell about Project Lawful - not the only story you could tell about Project Lawful, certainly, but a story you could tell about Project Lawful, goes like this:

A man arrived from another world, that had a bizarre math-inspired form of social organization and also a really extensive knowledge of chemical processes and how to improve them. He believed, apparently with complete sincerity, that the two went hand in hand, that the chemistry was a byproduct of the math-inspired form of social organization, though it was invented back in his society's screened-off history. As a result, Cheliax set its people not just to learning chemistry but also to trying to master his world's math-inspired form of social organization.

This was a mistake.

It's not that being interested in the math-inspired form of social organization was a mistake. Hell seems interested; they all serve Hell; that is enough reason to try to grasp it. 

But you can also just take the parts that are about how to iterate on chemical processes, and then get really rich and conquer the world. And in terms of order of operations, that one is really the important one. Especially since no one has figured out how the math-inspired form of social organization is compatible with Asmodeanism, while getting really rich and conquering the world is entirely compatible with Asmodeanism.

Asmodia, not that the Lady Avaricia would contemplate criticizing her in the slightest, is obviously one of the major drivers of this mistake. She was the subject of some kind of divine intervention, cementing everyone's sense that she's Very Important. She's not particularly talented at improving industrial processes. She was utterly necessary, while they had Keltham around, because the math-inspired form of social organization was important for lying to people who rely on it. But she's from the beginning conceived of the whole project as being about ilanism, instead of as being about getting rich and conquering the world.

(Much the same could be said of Sevar, but Avaricia does not say it, for it is said, don't criticize your superiors without a plan to take their job, and she has noticed that Sevar's job involves a lot of being personally tortured by the Queen of Cheliax.)

Did Avaricia say that she was organizing a new faction inside Project Lawful, comprised of the real Asmodeans who clearly deserve to be running things while those open heretics burn in Hell or at least suffer a little under their natural superiors?

That's a touch unsubtle, really.

(Yes, yes, commoners have to be idiots, but do they have to be as idiotic as they always are?)

She might say, though, that Sevar did suggest that open heresy was going to be less tolerated, going forward, and Asmodia does not seem to have fully comprehended that reprimand, which suggests the Project might be wanting for competent, loyal, non-heretical leadership.

Who correctly understand the primary objective of the Project as conquering the world for Asmodeus, and who have justifiably been chafing under Asmodia's heretical and also incompetent direction.

Okay!  You're now the 'Church' faction!  Which would make Asmodia's faction the 'Crown' faction!

SHIT.

They prefer the term 'Sevar loyalists', actually.

Asmodia is not in charge of the Sevar loyalists.  They are sufficiently intelligent to compute their own best interests in unison and move in coordination.

They may not be ilani, as yet, but there is no point in letting themselves fall that far short of ilani.

That's an interesting, not Asmodean, not-at-all-functional way to run a project.

She wishes them good luck at it.

Asmodeus's loyalists will be following orders. They'll punish heresy, because actually, heresy is bad, and heresy on this project has distracted it from what should be its singleminded aim on improving chemical processes. Those of them who are officially Asmodia's subordinates will obey her, because that's what Asmodeans do, until such a time as they can arrange a transfer to work under a real Asmodean and not a heretic.