(It's now been slightly over exactly ten minutes since they departed for Hell.)

"Carissa.  Do not sell your soul.  This is an absolute order.  If you want to protect Cheliax this is a wrong and counterproductive move."

She has enough Splendour to only slightly visibly startle. "Hard to talk out of this" since I don't know why I decided it, "told you what it'd take to make me stop. I'd be yours, if everything else I have to protect would be safe that way."

There's no further reply, of course, because Sending permits one exchange only.

Is it possible that the effect on Keltham is the point? That for some reason doing this causes something good to happen with him, but not if she knows about it? ....no, she thinks that Keltham wouldn't treat someone setting their memory-wiped self up to threaten him differently from directly threatening him. And she's not threatening him. 

She has something in her mind next to Keltham that wasn't there yesterday, some intuition or learned-habit, that says - a vague formless thing, that Cheliax isn't safe from him - she already knew that though -

He won't destroy it while she's out, will he? It wasn't just the risk to her holding him back? 

- doesn't matter, cooler Carissa and Abrogail and Aspexia will have made the tradeoffs, her job is to execute on them - 

- her hand is dripping blood, now, from the wire that she's holding. Probably that's on her; she's clenching at it excessively fiercely. The black spires of Dis have grown into buildings around them, and more have emerged through the haze; the people walking the pale streets no longer look like distant scurrying ants, except the ones that are in fact ant-like in body plan.

They land. She casts Infernal Healing to fix her hand. 

It's easy to see, from the air, where the Iron Scepter, the palace of Dispater, is; it's at the center, the greatest and most elaborate building, with both rivers twined around it like necklaces. 

The ground is burning. Carissa is resistant to fire.

The ground is screaming at her in agony. 

Fixing the paving stones and making them useful is going to be difficult but it's definitely on her to-do list. 

(Keltham, love, you can't protect all my concerns for me while I sit in safety, I've gone and put all of Hell in my concerns.)

And she walks, with the Unseen Servants holding up the hem of her dress and no other concessions to the landscape, through the streets of Dis, unhesitating, winding her way across red-hot metal bridges towards the palace. She has activated the pin of Glibness, by now, but it's not mainly Bluff she's leaning on. This is Asmodeus's, and she has been commanded to go to Him without thought of other choices, and to remember that she is not Irori, and so here she is, where Irori would never go, to give herself over to Asmodeus; He alone can win a contest among the gods simply by ordering it won for Him. 

She is afraid, but not very afraid. Smarter Carissa had a plan.

She reaches, in time, the gates of the palace, and the devils standing to attention there; smarter ones, older ones, leering horned devils, a winged munagola. 

Words bell forth from a Bdellavritra, from the end of the giant sluglike form that has three human heads, all speaking in high voices like slime dripping into ears.

"Who seeks entrance into the Palace of Dis?"
"What brings a mortal to the Palace of Dis?"
"With whom is your appointment?"

"I am Carissa Sevar. I have come to bargain with Dispater."

At the sound of the name 'Carissa Sevar', every devil's head, or other sensory appendage, turns in her direction.

Something covered all over with spines speaks in a sound like screeching metal.  "I will raise you as a pet, and sell you to a Duke of Hell when you are better trained."

"I will bargain with Dispater as I am, today, because Asmodeus's interests in Golarion will not wait on us; after that the Lord of the Second will of course make arrangements for me as He sees fit."

"And what if I -"

Destruction.

The spell doesn't slay the thing, but it howls away half-disintegrated.

The gates of Dis's palace are opened, then, for Carissa Sevar to pass.

Right. That's everything going according to plan, then, mostly, probably. Not that she knows what the plan is. 

Dis's palace is cool, and the air is clear, even fragrant. Petrified angels, their wings spread, their postures intricately wrangled, stand in spacious alcoves in the cavernous halls. The faces in the glossy marble floors shift below her feet. The ceiling arches upwards far too high to see, and balconies open downwards into what is to all appearances a bottomless pit. There are no fires to be seen, but the reflections of fire are everywhere in the black marble, lighting their surroundings with a cool orange glow.

There are railings, on the staircases, but they're of metal cut sharper than any knife. The floor is slippery. 

A good time to Fly. 

...hopefully there's less than nine minutes of this.

Ironskin.

It's a trivial spell but one whose power scales with caster level, and cast by Rugatonn 'sharper than any knife' won't cut it.

Yes, yes, she's getting the sense that wandering around Dis is stunningly lethal if you don't have a ninth circle cleric defending you, presumably smarter Carissa knew that when she came up with this plan. 

They're attracting a bit of an audience; not much overt, but lots of devils trending in their direction substantially more than chance, some of them invisible about it, some of them disappearing by Teleport from behind them only to appear by Teleport ahead of them. 

The stairs are only a few minutes, thankfully, and then they're winding through a hallway decorated on both sides with a spectacular green-glowing forest of construct trees made with eerily mathematical precision, each one precisely alike, some gooey bloodlike substance pulsing through their false-veins in perfect synchronization. It's quite cold. She already had Endure Elements up. 

They pass by a ballroom, where dancers move gracefully in perfect synchronization, their smiles gentle, their eyes desperate and pleading. They pass by balconies overlooking an utterly silent library. 

And then Dispater's waiting-room, a mockery of a comfortable warm parlor such as you might find in many places outside Cheliax, with stuffed armchairs to suit all body-configurations and drinks and snacks set out and an ordinary fire in an ordinary fireplace. And a silken rug that's got some powerful enchantment laid about it spread across the whole floor.

Carissa stops short of it; Dispater can do whatever He wants to her, obviously, but she's not sure she's supposed to just walk into it. 

"Dispater is polite to His guests, perhaps the most solicitous and courtly of all devils.  Here they may wait with time hardly seeming to pass for them, until Dispater is ready to greet them.  Where mortal guests are concerned He almost never lets them wait until they have aged down to husks, unless they have in some prior way offended Him."

- oh that's cool. 

It's not unprofessional to stand here breathing it in and trying to make sense of the whole enchantment and get it all to fit together in her head, right? She's not thinking anything outrageously impudent like that she thinks she could learn how to do divine-domain wondrous-items herself.

It's a good thing there's only one Carissa Sevar, because Aspexia Rugatonn wouldn't know what to do with two.