She's not taking that as much evidence Abrogail wasn't here earlier reading her mind. 

She kneels. 

"I'd suggest you remove that expensive clothing and garb yourself in a penitent's smock."

"My time is valuable, so you can get started on explaining your own fault analysis while you do that."

Nnnnnnnot a sex thing. Almost certainly not a sex thing. STOP THAT AND DO YOUR JOB. 

She starts to change her clothes. Keeps looking at the floor, while she does. 

"There were a number of day-of failures - would probably have been better to take a longer route around the slavemarkets entirely and just tell him straight-up that we were doing so, even though alter-Golarion has slave markets the sight moved Keltham the wrong way, would've been better for there to be a suspicious delay between Ione getting the book requests and sending the books over than for her to be in the bathroom, which is a weaker update towards Conspiracy but a stronger update towards a mindreading one, even though we actually didn't learn there was an emergency by mindreading him -

- but I actually don't think those are the interesting ones - I think if we'd played the day nearly perfectly we'd still likely have lost, and I think it was an operation complicated enough that there were going to be some day-of failures and the plan shouldn't have counted on them being none of them. I didn't allocate enough resources to inventing an immersive set of history, literature and theology for alter-Cheliax two months ago, as soon as we got out of day-to-day emergency mode and had any slack at all. I did a lot of things to a standard where it'd pass immediate inspection, but that was, obviously, something the Conspiracy could do from Keltham's perspective. It would've been worth the costs, though they would've been substantial, of hiring twenty more full-time writers and having an amount of content that was not obviously something the Conspiracy could do. An advantage of the initial Cheliax is basically Taldor plan over the complex alter-Cheliax we ended up going with is that we could've literally just showed him lots and lots of genuine verified Taldor history with some words changed. I knew that at the time, it was part of how I suggested it, but I underappreciated the cost when we started switching away from that. Going even farther back, we should've literally claimed to him he'd landed on the Taldane worldwound contingent and we were a Lawful Neutral country that had nothing to do with Cheliax, but I'd have had to think of that off no context in the first five minutes. 

I had concluded tropes weren't real or weren't operative, after Keltham had some nice healthy romances with no elaborate backstories behind them, after he himself concluded that, after it became obvious he was nowhere near kinky enough for Pilar and all the reasoning from her being a 'romantic option' wasn't right. Tropes - are real and are operative, aren't they. If I'd noticed that I wouldn't've announced the yearlong pause plan aloud to anyone until Keltham was safely petrified."

And Carissa's thoughts and feelings, as she speaks?

Thoughts and feelings what are those she's a PROFESSIONAL she has been asked for a FAILURE ANALYSIS not for INTERNAL SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES.

She's terrified, and off-balance, and embarrassed, and really angry that any of those are emotions that brains will persist in producing when the only important thing is obeying Abrogail or technically Asmodeus. And she misses Keltham already. A lot. She wants him to give her a hug and say nice things to her and probably no one will ever do that again unless she makes them.

"I, most obviously, failed in not giving the Project a minimum budget instead of a maximum budget, even in the midst of a war with Nidal.  I should at the very latest have done that when Keltham perfected his method of acid synthesis and it became clear that his world's ideas had been made to work here.  That perhaps might have encouraged you to think of ways to spend more money, before it was too late to spend it."

"A disadvantage of the plan to have Cheliax be literal Taldor is that he might have expected our country to possess a massive central capital with great walls, which would have required us to reject provisions of the Project Lawful contract breaking down revenues by geographic region, which Keltham might have found suspicious much earlier on.  Similar difficulties apply to claiming ourselves to be the Lawful Neutral country of Taldor, though I suppose we could have also simply denied that any such things as contracts and oaths existed and declined to offer him anything of the sort.  Again, that might have engendered suspicion."

"I think I would not, faced with a sudden Keltham myself, have told him that we were Evil, at all, or that our god was Asmodeus, or our afterlife Hell; that, I think, is the basic act of foolish honesty from which everything else spiraled.  You had already showed him Tongues, he could have demanded a casting of that spell and then examined words' meanings in other languages, as he eventually did."

"If I'd already told him that our country was named Cheliax, I would have later confessed to him that a better place for him would be Taldor, a richer country on which we were with good terms, and arranged a Teleport to someplace claiming to be that.  That could have been done after you had a little more context.  It would then have been possible to send Keltham on tours or scry-tours of other countries with escorts claiming to be of Taldor, and he could have asked after Taldor's reputation and heard nothing of remark.  Any questions about Cheliax would have been the exception rather than the rule."

"I could have thought of that, once the matter was reported to me.  I could have thought of that again after the Zon-Kuthon godwar began and Keltham's real importance became clear.  Told him that Cheliax lacked the power to properly defend him or support him, while the war with Nidal continued, and that we were arranging for Taldor to host him.  I did not in fact think of it.  In retrospect I should have done what Keltham called a 'pre-mortem', visualizing out in detail how the whole thing might fall down in time, asking myself at the end of that imagination what I could go back in time in do.  Certainly, once Keltham explained the principle in so many words, I should have done that."

"I don't think I'd have done the fake Taldor transfer even if I'd thought of it.  It would have presented different complications, not fewer.  I'm not sure there was any way to satisfy Keltham once he started looking, and the path we chose seems well-chosen for extending the time before he did."

"Going on my rereading of all of Keltham's thought-transcripts, I think you are attributing too much power to tropes and too little power to ordinary causality.  What set Keltham off seems to have been Cheliax's presentation about a massive nationwide push on spellsilver manufacturing, which made him realize that we were taking him seriously and that a set of sudden demands for verification would be something we'd have to meet.  That should have been presented to him after he was statued, not before.  Without foreseeing the particular disaster - as may not be done in a world of shattered prophecy - it signaled to Keltham that things had changed.  It was a disruption of his status quo.  And that is the general act that we should have avoided until after he'd been petrified and unpetrified.  It wasn't your announcement of the plan to the Project that invoked tropes, it was our presentation of the fake plan to Keltham that changed the way he was looking at things."

"I failed to see that, too, and so did Asmodia, but you are the one person in Cheliax whose job it was to think of that."

That hurts, but in the way where it's true, and correct, and she's glad she heard it and she wishes they could get to the torture instead of having to endure more of this and she's aware of exactly how weak and stupid that is. "I didn't think of it. I was busy with the logistics of the pause; he seemed at first to take it as reasonable of us, and as a boost to his pride, I saw no further cause for worry."

She actually does feel angry, then.  "That is a manager's-first-project sort of mistake, Sevar, that one thing seems to be going well and it consumes all your attention, and you've never had a project before, and never watched it FAIL before, and you don't understand in your guts and liver why you should go on being AFRAID OF FAILURE!"

There's fire, then, and an end to a smock's brief honor of being worn by Carissa Sevar.

She wants Abrogail to fix her so she doesn't make mistakes anymore. 

She is aware that this is literally impossible and that even devils make mistakes. She still wants it. 

"I wasn't - scared enough -"

If she's still TALKING and THINKING then she's NOT ON FIRE ENOUGH.

...Abrogail will in fact give Carissa Sevar a hug, during a pause in her punishment, and tell her that the Queen cannot, in fact, think of anybody else in Cheliax she could have assigned to this, that would in fact have done better.  Carissa must still expiate the ways in which she fell short of perfection, and pay for those actual outcomes she obtained in what was her assigned task, for that is Hell's way; but these punishments are aimed to burn away her sins, not her pride.  She is still above others, did better than others would have, and while her performance does not (yet) merit her to be a Duchess of Nidal, it suffices for her to be a para-Baroness at least.  Higher ranks must needs wait until she has demonstrated her ability to produce stable Asmodean ilani, though, as is now her next one task.

She knows. That no one could've done better. It's just, she's the only person who can do any of the things on her to do list, so she doesn't consider it even partially reassuring, that no one else could've done this.

...if she's still not REASSURED then the TORTURE WILL CONTINUE UNTIL HER MORALE IMPROVES.

(Why is Carissa like this.)

Day 90 / Osirion

People from one human-populated planet would rarely count as neurotypical on any other human-populated planet.  To say this requires some measure on the human-populated planets across the multiverse; but if you pick a sensible such measure, the truth of the statement should be obvious enough on priors.  Begin, say, from 50,000 years ago in dath ilan's history; most descendants of that primate species can interbreed with each other, if they're still extant and haven't deliberately shaped themselves otherwise.  Thellim's world of "Earth" branched off no earlier than that - quite a bit later, in fact.

Keltham looks human.  He can interbreed with humans.  He is in fact human.  But Keltham, in several ways, does not work quite like a Golarionite expects humans - or their related mortal species - to work.

Dath ilan, from the perspective of most human-populated worlds, has some unusual problems.  Dath ilan has noticed those problems at all, but they don't know those problems are unusual or unusually severe.  They have nothing else to compare themselves to.  The dath ilani don't know that their failures are not part of the plan, any more than they think of themselves as being unusually good at coordination or decision theory, or their planet having above-average intelligence.

Every human-populated world that is alone in its neighborhood of the multiverse "dances like nobody is watching", you could say.  If a planet is embarrassing itself in some regard, compared to the average descendant of that 50,000-year ancestral branching point, most such planets have absolutely no idea.  If you ask the inhabitants to guess where they fall on the unseen spectrum of world-branches, they will have no more-sensible guess than 'Probably we're somewhere in the middle?'

Dath ilani know they have a problem where a lot of them aren't very happy a lot of the time.  Their current approach is to have a societywide norm that unusually unhappy people shouldn't have kids, and, to a lesser extent, that unusually happy people should have a lot of kids.

But that takes time, so for now, the dath ilani carefully tweak their environment to make it possible for as many people as possible to be happy within the framework of their current genetics.  This takes a lot of tweaking and a lot of work, and the dath ilani don't particularly realize there's anything odd about that; they don't have other human worlds to compare themselves to.

The dath ilani carefully raise their children in an environment free of spoilers about sex existing or how it works, so that young adults may have the pleasure of discovering that for themselves, among themselves - in an effort to preserve every bit of that rare stuff that is fun.  They relegate pornography to the Ill-Advised Consumer Goods Store, because if a dath ilani reads a book about interesting people having incredibly interesting and exciting and fun and complicated sex, they will start to hold their own sexual encounters to the same standard, before they would naturally have become bored.  Why wantonly burn up the time remaining until ordinary sex starts to seem repetitive? - so thinks dath ilan.

They're aware they have a problem, an aspect of reality that isn't as good as it could be.  Of course they're aware.  Dath ilani, by their nature, and by comparison to an average human world descending from their 50,000-year ancestor, are aware of dissatisfactions like that to an incredible degree.  Their world is so optimized not least because any visible problems bug the crap out of them.

The dath ilani are aware they have a problem where it's hard for people to be happy, and they're applying all of the heritage-optimization pressure they can spare from more important matters to solving it.  They don't know they have an unusual problem.  The dath ilani don't know that their average species-cousin gets bored less quickly, or can much more easily become happy.

The dath ilani don't know that their cousins experience emotions, in general, more strongly than dath ilani do.  The difference is more pronounced for positive emotions, but it's true about negative emotions too.

How'd it happen?  Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history.  Obviously the change didn't happen on purpose.  Probably there's something like a balance, inside minds, some sheerly neural relative weight of cortex and thalamus; and the ancestors of Civilization selected on themselves for intelligence without paying proper attention and obeisance to that balance.

So dath ilan dances, less happily and excitedly than average, like nobody is watching.

Here's another not-so-little irony of Keltham's life, one that he'll probably never have a chance to learn now:  When Keltham reached age 20, and Civilization's institutions first revealed to him the net subsidy that all interested parties would pay to him to have kids -

- as is kept obscured, until the socially-usual childbearing age of 20, for obvious-to-a-dath-ilani reasons; you don't go around telling eight-year-kids that secret prediction markets expect that Civilization won't want more of them, or not enough to pay for it.  That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And then if you tell the other kids that Civilization probably does want more of them, the silence is conspicuous for those who aren't being told.  Judgments like that aren't final to begin with; sometimes, indeed rather often, kids turn out differently than expected.  These are not confident prediction markets.  It has not been found to be fun for kids, if you tell them that unconfident prediction.  This too is information-that-harms-the-hearer, better not to know if you're not a Keeper.  And the only way to be silent about it to some kids, is to be silent about it to all of them -

- Civilization would have told Keltham that they did, in fact, want more of him.  He's shifted honorably-selfish away from altruistic, yes, and that's a little weird; he's noticeably less reflective than the average dath ilani, and that's bad; but he also experiences emotions more strongly, has stronger drive, than the average dath ilani, and that matters a lot.  This organism is made happy more easily; he's happier than you'd expect for a self-conceived misfit.  It would have outweighed his selfishness, in the eyes of what Civilization considered its future targets; and the possibility would not have been lost on Civilization that maybe that higher-selfishness business was correlated with the happiness part.

It's definitely the sort of interesting mindstate where, if nothing else, you'd like him to have four kids out of sheer curiosity, to find out if the traits stay correlated in his children.

There are dath ilani who would have gone through everything Keltham just did, and felt nothing but a distant sadness about losing Carissa, after having barely managed to connect to her in the first place.  They might have walked through the entire thing Exactly Correctly, not because they are that disciplined, but because their emotions were never strong enough to knock them off their Way, or even push on them too hard.  On being told it was all a lie, they would not have dissociated from a single one of their emotions, even if it felt relatively awful, because it was so rare for them to feel anything even that strongly, in their lives.

They'd feel that same distant sadness, maybe, on turning 20 and learning that Civilization's institutions would offer them negligible subsidy for having children.  A lot of people like that need to not have kids, if you want to create space for people like Keltham to have four kids experimentally to see about fixing that problem.

Keltham feels unusually strongly, for someone of dath ilan.

By the standards of Golarion-outside-of-Cheliax, not so much.

After having previously dissociated some of his emotions to run in emergency mode, Keltham isn't able to cry, even in private, until he puts on the Splendour headband that's found for him; knowing, as he does so, that he might well end up never wanting or able to take the headband off again.

Afterwards, Keltham consumes the food brought for him, skims some books in the library.  He tells them that tomorrow he'll probably want to talk to an expert on theology and afterlives, who can at least point him at which books to read.

He asks for a Sleep spell (technically Deep Slumber).  He doesn't really feel like trying to go to sleep naturally.

Day 91 / Osirion

Keltham awakes with his mind feeling numb, dissociated, distantly sad.

He looks at the Splendour headband, which he did manage to take off last night before asking for the Sleep spell.

Keltham decides - not to put it on, just yet, for a while.

There's a saying out of dath ilan, "You can face life without drugs, but there's often no point in trying."  In context, it doesn't have exactly the import that the bare words sound like, because it's an instance of a proverb-template about how "You can X without Y, but there's often no point in trying."  That proverb-template in turn is intimately paired by rhyme and prosody to a successor proverb: you probably should try at all, like once or twice, just be willing to give up if it turns out there's no point?

Keltham is going to try not to get addicted to Splendour immediately and in the middle of a major life crisis.

He prays.  He asks for two Comprehend Languages in case he needs them for reading books in other languages.  He asks for two truthspells.  He keeps his Owl's Wisdom.  He leaves the rest of his list blank.  If his god is back in touch with him, his god should be able to fill the list as his god sees fit.

Commune, fucking finally. 

Some new and unfamiliar spells that Keltham will see about identifying, in substantially increased total quantity.  No Sanctuary, no Vision of Hell, no Protection, no Enchantment Foil, no Spell Immunity, no Summon Monster III.  Cool.

He - sort of wants to eat breakfast around people - and at the same time doesn't know anybody or trust anybody and the only person, now, that he could even arguably eat breakfast with, is, like Ione Sala, maybe possibly Asmodia if she could be rescued.

Frankly, what he wants is to eat breakfast with Iomedae.

Keltham leaves his bedroom to find out what's up around here.

He doesn't forget to bring with the pin of glibness.