This, too, will be printed out for Abrogail, and perhaps she'll see what to do about it or perhaps she won't, but -

- and as soon as she thinks that she knows it is wrong. 

All of this she has thought very calmly, lying near-asleep in her bed, her face slack and expressionless, the voice in her head calm and even-keeled. And then there's a lurch of -

- reorientation, everything being upside down -

- are they reading her mind right now? She's nearly fifth circle, wearing a +6 headband, conventionally she'd be expected to detect an attempted divination more often than not against most of Security. They could have someone more powerful on it, of course, harder to detect, but Abrogail and Aspexia are genuinely busy finishing the war in Nidal. If Cheliax wants to read her without her noticing she's not a softer target than Keltham, and they had him mindread only rarely, as a significant commitment of resources. 

Also, everyone on Security is terrified of pissing her off. 

And it's the dead of night and for the last several hours she's been uninterestingly attempting to sleep.

They're probably not, actually, reading her mind right now. 

Forget the 'probably', which is an insufficient determination for something that matters as much as this. It is in her actual sober careful assessment as soon as she turns her mind on the question very unlikely that she is being mindread.

She's worked so diligently on not having thoughts that wilt under observation, on openly and boldly thinking in the presence of the Queen, on not having any parts of her hiding in dark corners so that she needn't fear any part of her being exposed. And suddenly it feels - sideways, backwards, like it wasn't the achievement she thought it was, like maybe actually everything that matters is in the weeds beneath the paving-stones she laid down in her mind while she prettied it up for an audience.

 But it no longer feels like there's nothing there; it feels like it's behind a wall which she is terrified of scaling, because, of course, 'probably not' isn't 'definitely not' and it's not, exactly, like she has nothing to lose. 

Be a fucking ilani for once. It's not the right tool for every situation, but it's the right tool for when it's very very important to figure out what's happening around you when you don't have knockdown arguments, just uncertainties that add up either to less or more uncertainty than they began with.

The seventh-circle wizard on staff is almost certainly there to mindread her and make sure she isn't about to defect. A seventh-circle wizard can read her frequently, if it's their only job; maybe a quarter of the time. So she could go around with a presumption on 3:1 odds against being mindread at any given moment.

However, a seventh-circle wizard specialized in divinations should be able to mindread her without her noticing only about 2/3rds of the time. She felt it once, while she was interrogating Maillol. That breaks down into some chance that it was a lie that he's seventh-circle, that the wizard is much more powerful than that, or that they're a seventh circle wizard with an uncanny knack for subtle spells.  Or that they weren't, in fact, following her around mindreading her all the time, and did it a few times at particularly key moments, probably 3 or 4 times, listened for half an hour on each occasion, and was satisfied. 

She can feel part of her flinching away from this calculation. What's up with that. Oh, it's that that part of her feels that thinking is only allowed if she is ABSOLUTELY SURE she is not being mindread, and that no numbers that come out of a process like this will be ABSOLUTE SURETY so they may as well stop now. 

Well, she can do the math and then decide not to scale the wall, but - but there's kind of a lot at stake, right, there's whatever Cayden Cailean is playing at and whatever Keltham is playing at and whatever Asmodia is playing at and a very real possibility, she hasn't thought about numbers, that Cheliax is going to be annihilated, and, if she won't risk anything to scale the wall, then she's risking missing whatever's on the other side - things you don't think about can still destroy you - so she has to keep trying -


Before the observation, with Keltham in her head saying that only Keepers can say 'before the observation' and mean it, how likely would she have considered it, that this wizard had some kind of secret technique for reading people without being noticed -

- vanishingly unlikely because if Cheliax had that capability they would have used it on Keltham instead of dragging the Queen and the Most High here personally. 

How likely would she have considered it that the wizard had only mindread her three or four times, for the fifteen to thirty minutes a caster of their level can do?

Reasonably probable, if they didn't have instructions to do nothing at all but mindread her. Three or four times a day is a lot of mindreading, by the standard of any non-Project-Lawful project she's ever heard of, and it must have crossed the wizard's mind that Carissa Sevar might get annoyed with them. 

And besides, she was doing so well. She was so Asmodean. 

(There are definitely feelings, on the other side of the wall, about that.)

Call it 20:1 in favor of 'I can notice them the approximately predictable amount' over 'they're stealthy and I can almost never notice them'.

Is the stealthy version of this wizard who has instructions to read her as much as possible mindreading her now? Even that wizard can't actually get 24 hour coverage, and might choose to sleep themself, and prepare spells, while Carissa Sevar is in bed tossing and turning and being boring. In fact she probably seriously inconvenienced that wizard, what with not sleeping last night. Maybe 2:1 against, for the worst case scenario wizard. Nearly all the chance she's being mindread comes from the worst case scenario wizard; the wizard who mindread her approximately four times yesterday is something like 20:1 not reading her having boring insomnia in the dead of night. 

- no, actually, wait - could they have started mindreading her when they cast the Owl's Wisdom?

Only if someone saw it; and she's unscryable by strategic necessity and Alarmed her surroundings and is (10:1, maybe?) alone in the room; she can see invisible people, unless they went to some considerable lengths, her Alarm would ping unless they went to even more considerable ones, and she doesn't think any Security other than the seventh circle assigned to Carissa-observation would have the nerve, tonight, to creep into Carissa Sevar's bedroom around her Alarm.

They probably would mindread her, though, if they did notice that; she has a higher chance, more like 50%, of noticing them with Owl's Wisdom up. 

So two possibilities point towards the most worlds where she's currently being mindread: wizard with special skill at being sneaky and reading her near continously, which she pegged at a fortieth of worlds, and normal wizard who just got alerted she cast Owl's Wisdom, which is about a twentieth of worlds. 

The math isn't the answer, Keltham says, but it focuses your attention. But her gut agrees with the math. It's unlikely. It is not vanishingly unlikely. 

Is that good enough? 

The Owl's Wisdom only lasts eight minutes. She thinks fast, with the headband on, much faster than other people; she can read books faster, hang spells faster, follow lines of speculation through her head faster. But eight minutes isn't very long, really, if you might possibly have a vey big problem on your hands.

She's lost fully one of them already to not understanding herself, and then one of them to calculating whether she's being mindread; six to go. There is no point in wasting some of them on agonizing over a decision; she may as well make it right this second.  Say there are twenty Carissae sitting in twenty rooms; how should they choose so the most of them survive not just this decision but the war that is about to come?

She is, actually, with a vague lurching sense this is risking more than she's ever risked, willing to condemn one Carissa so all the other ones can scale that wall. 

And as soon as she thinks that she's climbed it, in her head, and is looking out at - still an empty space, but one that she can feel her brain already starting to unspool into -

She doesn't have time to revel in it. She needs to figure out what she's trying to accomplish, what she's Chosen to accomplish, what is possible to accomplish from here, so she can get it done.

- is she chosen by Asmodeus? What actual probability would she place, between being of Asmodeus's choosing and being someone else's, with Irori as the likeliest candidate? Tropes are real, Keltham thought tropes meant she was a secret cleric - secret clerics aren't even a thing but Asmodia was right, that they kept not thinking about tropes because of not liking to think about tropes.

She likes it when people call her Chosen of Asmodeus. 

That's not evidence at all.

The Irorite, Derrina, felt - like meeting something she'd never met before, like meeting Keltham, like meeting something that she'd been groping blindly for her whole life -

- It.....seems like she did not, in fact, possess the skills necessary to run the conspiracy, which is some argument against Asmodeus having chosen her, though not a very powerful one since He wasn't stipulated to have a stunningly clear understanding of human nature anyway - but surely Asmodeus's interventions cannot have been pointed at this. This is a failure, a catastrophic one. She isn't sure what her mistake is - willfully turns herself away from trying to find it now, there'll be time for that later -

Does it serve someone else instead? Presumably Asmodeus would not have, even for a high price, put the selection of another god in power over His project. Though He could have been too confused to have a guess about whether she'd do better or worse than anyone else, it could've been part of the tangled web of commitments that brought Keltham here and brought Cayden Cailean on board -

- she can sense already that she's turning her mind in the wrong direction, thinking about questions Owl's Wisdom will help her with only a little, not-thinking about the ones right in front of her. Even knowing that, even making that explicit in front of her, it still takes additional effort, to make herself drop the what-do-the-gods-want question.

What's the thing she's looking away from.

(Like opening your eyes to stare directly at the sun...)

Asmodeus is not a god who gives you what you want as a reward for your service to him. Asmodeus is owed your service. You cannot become a Power in Hell through your exceptional and exemplary service to Asmodeus; you'll just be Asmodia, plaintively saying to everyone around that they should do what's in Cheliax's interests, while they laughed at her, while Maillol laughed at her, while Avaricia laughed at her, while they knew the rules she was born outside, didn't know, must have known, the strong win and the weak suffer.

She could conquer all of Cheliax and in Hell she would be Asmodeus's most treasured possession; He told her that. She could build an army of devils and it wouldn't make her a Power in Hell. She could understand everything perfectly, have all the answers, and that would make her a very clever slave.

The way to fix Hell isn't to purchase Asmodeus's gratitude. It's to fucking fight him, and beat him, and make him do what you say. 

If humanity could overthrow Asmodeus they obviously should. She was using this fact about the world to make predictions already, on some level, even though actually thinking it feels like falling off a cliff she can never, ever climb back up. It is in the interests of Asmodeus to enslave humans; it is not in the interests of humans to be Asmodeus's slaves. It is worse for them than many of their other options; of slaveowners, even assuming the rest of the gods are precisely that, Asmodeus enjoys tyranny, enjoys cruelty, enjoys subservience. A master who only wanted the products of their slaves' work would be kinder. Carissa, when she only wants the products of her slaves' work, is kinder. 

Four months ago Carissa believed that Asmodeus would conquer all those other gods. Even narrowing down to the worlds where that wasn't a lie all along, Keltham changed it. Now, whichever power wields Keltham will win everything. She knew that. She said it aloud, in strategy discussions - that if Keltham made it to Osirion and Cheliax wasn't able to wipe it and him out, then Cheliax would be defeated. Keltham thought that Civilization could perhaps directly win a war with Zon-Kuthon. Now, there's no question in her mind, he's planning for Civilization to go to war with Asmodeus. 

Asmodeus might win.

Asmodeus is not obviously going to win. Abadar, too, is an ancient god. And Irori has something to do with this, she doesn't really actually believe that Asmodeus warned her off him just because he was a good example of what not to be. And Nethys sees everything, and intervened here, and it probably wasn't because He really likes explosions, but because He really likes Civilization -

- she's racing away down a single thread of possibility and she doesn't have time for that. She has less than six more minutes. Less than six minutes to become a Keeper become Carissa, figure out what she wants and what she has to do to get it.

Your world and your god go to war, whose side are you on?

Well, who's the winning side?

If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 99% of the time, then Carissa wants to be with Civilization and not Asmodeus, even assuming Asmodeus destroys her in the worlds where Civilization loses. If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 1% of the time, then she wants to be an archdevil, which isn't done the way she was pursuing it before but also isn't done by siding with Civilization to fight Hell. 

Chase those probabilities down to the middle, figure out in what range 'can Civilization beat Asmodeus' produces a change of plans -

If Civilization can beat Asmodeus 40% of the time she does not want to throw in with Civilization. That's too many worlds in which - she's destroyed, for one thing, one thing she cares about a great deal, but also where she isn't an archdevil and Hell goes on existing as it is.

This should be reassuring, since it's (probably, tentatively) a conclusion she's on the right side after all, but something feels strange about it - 

- and one of the many directions in which her thoughts are simultaneously racing is suddenly highlighting itself as important - if Civilization can beat Asmodeus 40% of the time, and Civilization and Asmodeus both know it, they shouldn't fight. They should agree on an arrangement where they get what they want in proportion to how much they win. In a couple worlds they screw that up and one or the other or both gets destroyed -

(- there's something terrifying and awful and not-Carissa, not part of the person-concept she thinks she's recklessly plunging towards,  about setting aside worlds like that, about being willing ever even in her own mind to think something like 'some worlds get destroyed' without pausing, but she's in a hurry right now -)

(- no one else, she thinks, not Keltham, not dath ilan, maybe not even the gods, really understands how important it is, that people not be destroyed, that devils not be destroyed, that worlds not be destroyed - any Civilization worth building will be better than dath ilan, along this specific axis, will not be willing to sacrifice itself to tidy up the Larger Universe, Keltham's the wrong person to build that because she never did succeed at explaining to him that she was the enemy of any Civilization that wasn't that -)

- anyway, in a couple worlds they screw up, and perhaps only she can make those worlds rarer, but mostly they settle. Mostly, a Civilization with the power to possibly-defeat Asmodeus at all makes Hell more Civilized to whatever degree it has the power to possibly-defeat Asmodeus, and that is, from Carissa's perspective, a good outcome from 'moves it slightly more Civilized' all the way up to 'reforms it entirely'. So unless she thinks the chance Civilization will defeat Asmodeus is very low, she sides with Civilization. 

...she does not think it's very low. Not with Abadar and Nethys and Irori and all the good gods favoring Civilization not to threaten Asmodeus but for their own reasons. A threat Asmodeus would ignore, a threat doesn't lend itself to the outcomes she wants, but Abadar wants Civilization for the sake of His own values and the good gods mostly will too, unless she's gotten herself very confused about what Good is in the course of lying about it constantly. 

So Carissa is presently on the side of this fight which she wants to be weaker; the side whose greater strength gets her less of what she wants, and the other side is missing something essential she could have explained to them and that perhaps no one else will.  

Five minutes. 

Like cresting another hill, or climbing another wall, bringing into view another vista of thoughts she had not been allowing herself to think.

Carissa Sevar does not actually personally like torturing people very much; she does not find it very fun to abuse them, or be cruel to them. She doesn't strongly prefer enslaving fire elementals to paying the fire elementals; when deciding whether to tax peasants to the brink of starvation she'd want to check if that even increases expected tax revenue in the long run. 

This is relevant to whether she's a good Asmodean. It's a character trait she's held at some distance, fretted about, vaguely intended to change, because she can't become a duke of Hell if she's not Asmodean enough. It's a character trait she has also, vaguely, on some level she certainly wasn't conscious of, taken pride in; she's practical, she's only evil because evil is pragmatic. There's a sense in which some part of her is tracking whether she is sympathetic, to herself if no one else, a sense in which she's not Zon-Kuthon, and is glad she's not Zon-Kuthon, because it's okay to be Carissa and not okay to be Zon-Kuthon. 

This fact about her is barely relevant to whether she is Lawful Evil, which she definitely, unambiguously is. She harmed people ruthlessly and without thought, carefully blanked their fates out from her calculations about how to achieve her goals. She gave punishment orders while mostly fretting about the complexity of giving punishment orders. Yesterday, with Maillol, she mostly tried to think about whether the Securities watching were suitably impressed. 

She condemned Peranza to be eternally tortured. She actually feels - something - about that, now that the whole thing fell apart less than a month later.  She wouldn't have done it if she'd known the whole thing would fall apart less than a month later. It does, actually, feel like too high a price to pay for a month. And she could have contrived to keep Peranza alive a little longer, if she'd had 'keep Peranza alive a little longer' in her goals, if she hadn't been careful not to. She doesn't want Peranza to be eternally tortured. She just was ready to order it, and carefully didn't say 'I don't think we should' and thereby prevent it.

Because? 

- and her thoughts splinter -

Because she wanted to impress Abrogail. Because she was hurt and betrayed, by Peranza betraying them after she'd specifically tried to give them as many outs as possible not to do that. Because she was scared of this happening again. Because she'd said she would. 

- none of which, suddenly, feel at all like good reasons, except 'because she said she would', and she could have not said that. No one made her say it.

Keltham has probably had Peranza scried by now, he probably knows. Even if he could have forgiven everything else, he'll never forgive that, nor should he. It's - she has an intuition for Keltham - it's unforgiveable in a way most of the rest is only very very difficult to forgive. People should not end up worse off because they tried to help him. People ending up eternally tortured because they chose Civilization, tried to defect to it -

- he'll burn down all of Hell just for that. 

And she could have said that to Abrogail. Could have told her that for that reason they should not do it. And then it would not have been done. 

Four minutes. 

Why didn't I? 

It wasn't even strategy, wasn't even a calculated decision that it in fact served their interests to send Peranza to Hell and hope Keltham never found out. It was that she had set to a blank wall, in her mind, every merciful or compassionate or anti-eternal-torture impulse, lest she be Ione, or Snack Service, constantly insisting that it served the project not to hurt people. It'd damage her credibility. 

No, worse than that, actually. She thought that it might damage her credibility and then she never thought about it again. One thing to conclude that as an explicit calculation, to weigh it each time and dismiss the decision to speak up, each time. She didn't do that. She crossed off that area of thought as un-Asmodean and declined to think it.  Suddenly the fact that her thoughts were being read and very much used against her feels like a thin excuse; you've already lost, if you can't think. She should have tried, instead, thinking. 

Grief, and horror and - you could call it self-hatred but it feels far more comprehensive than that - 
 
- her self-recognition as someone whose stupidity and shortsightedness and cowardice caused irrevocable harm to everything she cared about, the realization that she is a failure by every criterion she might have thought to hold herself to, and that everything she did was bad, and that it would have been better if she'd just the instant she met Keltham stabbed them both -

- or, you know, let's not waste precious seconds down the incredibly stupid path of martyrdom fantasies, the instant she met Keltham gone to the Church of Iomedae, also stationed at the Worldwound, not a trivial trip but they'd have been protected by the treaty while they went -

- a thing that she wanted very badly to believe for the last four months was that she had no choice, that everything was inevitable, but it wasn't inevitable at all. They'd have Dominated her the second they read her mind, fine - they were not reading her mind every second. At any time they weren't she could have killed herself, and Osirion would probably have resurrected her in ten minutes flat. 

Is that what Asmodia realized? No, Asmodia was soul-sold. For Asmodia it was legitimately a much, much harder choice.

But Carissa isn't soul-sold. Not for Asmodeus's reasons, she can see clearly now that it's not in his nature, wouldn't have served him.

Tropes say she's a secret cleric. 

She's never heard those are a thing, but she's also never heard of mysterious inabilities to sell your soul.

She's a fucking idiot. 

At the beginning, had she dared to look at Keltham and think the thought 'does this change Asmodeus's inevitable victory? since it obviously does, how do I in fact feel about Asmodeus's inevitable victory?' she could have won the war for Civilization. 

She didn't, because she was not the kind of person who had thoughts like that. She was the kind of person who smiled at him and took his hand and delivered him to the church and lied instinctively, impulsively, before she had any concept of alter-Cheliax, because she knew in her heart that the Hell they were all condemned to must not be looked at, must not be closely contemplated.

She does not like that person, that person who is her, that person who she feels she is looking at for the first time. She does not see any excuses for that person - or she sees them, but they're all weak, pathetic, insubstantial, the excuses you make for someone you dare not try to hold to the only standard that actually matters. Almost anyone more idealistic than her would have been maledicted long ago, sure. But someone with her same values, but slightly more awareness of them - slightly more ability to stop and catch fire when everything changed -

- that person could have done it, and so there's no excuse for not doing it, there's nothing sympathetic in it, there is not even the excuse that she was irretrievably condemned to Hell because she wasn't, there's no points for having required what in hindsight was plainly the combined Splendour of many of the most powerful people in Cheliax pointed at the task of carefully manipulating her -

 (- that thought links up with a distant thread of thought dropped earlier. The way Aspexia Rugatonn spoke of Irori, the way Subirachs did - is predicted, by it being Irori who was the reason Carissa could not sell her soul. It makes more sense of everything than other theories do. She should have been sure sooner. Would have been sure sooner, if she'd try turning the full force of her own capacity for thought on the question, instead of trying very hard not to know the answer to it.)

Three minutes. 

Osirion knows that she has not sold her soul. Keltham must know, by now, what she is, what she did to him, how easily she could have done otherwise. He must hate her, and he must -

- be in so much pain -

- Keltham. Keltham Keltham Keltham and now it's only with tremendous force of will that she's keeping herself from sobbing. She has no idea what she feels for him; you can only feel if you have a self, maybe, and in place of a self she has only lies, and crimes, and crimes made out of lies, things she did for no reason, 'muddled' doesn't even begin to describe it, wrongs she did out of a calculated desire to not be a person who had to think about how they were wrongs.

He did know, instantly, the magnitude of what it meant, that he was here, and he lit up delightedly, at the thought of mutual benefit, gains from trade, prosperity, sharing, all the things she tried to twist to dust in his hands because it'd serve Asmodeus. She loves him less, she thinks, than she did when he arrived, and it's because of what she made him, what she spent every waking minute with him sculpting him into. She saw something beautiful in him, something that ought to build a whole human civilization, and she tried to hollow it out and make all the beautiful parts of it feel futile to him so he'd consign himself to ruling over some cowed slaves instead. She's not sure if it was a stupid thing to try. She's not sure if it could never have succeeded. But it wasn't what she wanted, it wasn't what he deserved, it was a wrong to him far greater than murdering him would have been, it was a wrong enabled by the fact that she loved what she was destroying, and she did it, and basked in praise for doing it, and -

- he loved her too, he thought she was clever and ambitious and wanted to strengthen him, wanted to help him, he thought he had an ally, he would have overturned every stone in Golarion to find her petrified body, he would have ripped apart the world for her, and she took that, the only no-strings-attached gift anyone ever gave her, and used it to destroy him, to lie to him, to betray everything that mattered to him. She took the thing he was most afraid of, and did it to him; she took something he should have had really and honestly, and gave it to him poisoned.

She wants him to help her fight Asmodeus. She isn't sure she can do it without him.

She doesn't want to do it without him. 

That's what the story was meant to be, if there is one: she shows him why the world is worth preserving, and he shows her why it's worth fighting, and then they go take over Hell.

If she were him she'd never want to speak to her again. 

Keltham, is there some secret you didn't get around to teaching me, that would make it possible to step forward, here, instead of just - 

- staring at the gaping chasm of what could have been -

Two minutes. 

(It's not that she'll have to stop thinking when the Owl's Wisdom runs out, but she needs to switch modes at some point from having epiphanies to coming up with a plan, and also under the obvious plan the minutes do matter.)

It's not the kind of thing you can apologize for. It's not the kind of thing you can ever set right. It's the kind of thing that will be awful, always, forever. So what are we doing here? Why are we staring at this particular terrifying yawning hole?

If we stare at it long enough maybe we'll decide we might as well just go be an eternally tortured paving stone along Peranza.

That won't help either.

(Actually it'll probably hurt Keltham further, just slightly, if he scries and looks.)

Step over the yawning hole of horror. You did that; you can't undo it; it can't be forgiven; it'll never be okay. What are we doing next?

Sensible.

She can't do it, though. 

She can't step over it. She can't step away from it. Not - not after less than a minute of thinking about it. It does sure seem like the kind of thing that's unforgiveable, like Peranza that way, an awfulness that simply is always and forever at the core of everything Carissa has done - 

- but what if it's not. 

What if she fixes it. 

She admittedly cannot at all think how. But it seems like the kind of thing you ought to think about for at least a minute, even if you don't have much time before Owl's Wisdom wears off, even if they could start reading your mind at any second if they aren't already, even if it seems from here like a problem which obviously does not possess a solution. 

No, every problem has a solution, even if you'd have to be a god to accomplish it, even if being a god wouldn't be enough. Maybe that's the way to start here, start by imagining a solution, and then see if it can be trimmed back enough to be a thing a person could ever, ever do just with really good spellcraft.

What if she owned Peranza's soul. Well, then that would fix it. She doesn't own Peranza's soul, and she doesn't have a way to get it, but sometimes it's better to start with a solution and then reason backwards, if the thing that feels impossible is the situation being solvable at all. 

If she owned Peranza's soul -
- not just Peranza's soul - 
- if she owned the souls of every person affiliated with Project Lawful, every person who could possibly now or at some future point be in Hell because of what was done to Keltham, and ensured that all of them had a nice Abadaran wonderful afterlife -

- well, seems like the kind of thing that might be forgivable, then. 

...what is this 'forgivable', what's it suddenly doing featuring prominently in her reasoning processes, what does it want and where did it come from. Carissa's self-concept is not that she wants to be forgivable. 

So what does she want?

To not have harmed Keltham; to have dealt with him fairly by his rules, where interacting with her is something he'd have done with full knowledge, where it left him better off, where it didn't harm him from any angles he wasn't expecting. For Keltham, thinking back on it, to be glad he landed on Carissa Sevar. 

Well that seems flagrantly, utterly, absurdly impossible, but it's better to have a specific impossible thing than a general pit of impossibility, maybe. 

What else does she want. 

For Civilization to exist and be credibly able to beat Asmodeus in a fight so he instead concedes and stops having Hell. Well. Stops having Hell the way it currently is. You could have a Hell that was all right, but it'd have to be very different. 

Okay, some tiny fragmented slightly hysterical fragment of thought says in a cheerful shrill voice, so, you buy everyone's souls in Hell and then you build Civilization and then Keltham is better off for having met you. Problem solved. Go do that.

She can't build Civilization. She isn't strong enough. She can't do it in Cheliax, because Cheliax can't do it; it'll be obvious at some point that the thing Cheliax is building inherently cannot possess Civilization's strengths. She could - speed up the project elsewhere, if any project elsewhere would have her, which it wouldn't, and if she had any way to get out, which she doesn't. 

- doesn't she?