"I - do not understand -"  Apart from how it's even scarier.

"He was a man of charitable works until he met you, and now you ply him with drink and try to maneuver him into beating you.  He'd go to the Maelstrom instead of Elysium, at this rate, maybe even the Abyss.  And at the end of your own life, Pharasma would judge you for Axis, for your other attempts at Good deeds and charity to ease the guilt you feel."

"You belong in Hell.  Both Elysium and Hell would be better off, if he and you went there."

"I d-don't belong in Hell - who are you?!"

"Someone who belongs a little less to Hell than you do.  I've loved other people.  You never have.  I've wanted to do Good deeds out of the kindness in my own heart.  You've never felt any impulse to Goodness that wasn't about guilt and rules and what the authorities in your life raised you to believe you ought to do.  You don't want to do Good, you don't want Good things to happen, you want to be obedient and clean and not defy what your priests and parents and teachers told you was right.  I want pain in part because it's in my sexuality, you want pain only because you know you deserve it."

"You need someone to correct you, set you right, hurt you the way you deserve, let you pay for your mistakes, keep you in your place and sear away all the wretchedness inside you, and the problem, you see, is that your husband isn't a devil and can't give that to you.  You belong to Hell.  You've always belonged to Hell.  If you'd grown up in Cheliax you would have been a powerful wizard and a faithful Asmodean, and if you'd been assigned to corrupt a man like your husband you would have gloried in the pure service of it."

"What do you want from me?"

"Your soul for your husband's.  He's no angel for all his charity, or he wouldn't go along with you, but he can pull himself together if his wife doesn't pour out drinks for him.  You're such terribly bad people for each other, and someone else might call that lovely, but Good and Evil both have better uses for you two."

"Come with me to where you belong, freely and of your own will, setting aside that halfhearted attempt to be Good and assuaging your guilt with the knowledge that your husband's soul will be saved by the last decision you ever make in Goodness's name.  I'll leave behind a magic item that repays your brideprice and then some, and he won't try marrying again."

"And - if I say no?"

"If you were going to say no, I wouldn't be here."

"Don't worry, Rosal.  It's the last decision you'll ever have to make as this person.  It's no kindness, to somebody like you, to make them choose and not just tell them how it's to be.  I'm only offering you the choice so that you never try to tell yourself, afterwards, that you didn't choose it, or that Goodness didn't receive what you acknowledged as fair payment for giving yourself wholly to Evil."

"I - I could, change, do better -"

"You'd be even more miserable than you always have been, and not in a useful way where you're learning from the pain."

"But you're not really saying that to protest, are you?  You're saying it in hopes I'll hurt you.  You don't have to taunt me, Rosal.  All the pain in the world is there for you, whether you want it or not."

The figure clad in shadows steps forward -

Rosal freezes in her place, so many thoughts colliding inside her, her mind tells herself that she can't escape, protest won't help, all she can do is - pay for her sins that have finally returned to her -

Her arm is taken, in a grasp that seems both gentle and inescapable, her sleeve rolled back.

A small amount of liquid, hardly more than a few drops, splashes onto her hand.

It's like a wasp sting, the worst pain she's known previously in her sheltered life full of light spanks for children and her husband's petulant blows, like a wasp sting but huger and wider, getting worse and worse past the first round as her skin reddens, bubbles, and Rosal stares at it in horror and open-mouthed fascination.

"Do you think everyone is shaped like this?  They're not.  It's just you.  Asmodeus has always been your god, you just need to acknowledge it."

"My husband - ah! - will be - safe?"

"When is any mortal ever safe?  His soul will be bound for Elysium, so far as such a thing can be known in a world of shattered prophecy."

"My time is valuable.  You know me now for your superior, because I've hurt you and that's how Asmodeans are.  I won't order your last decision but I am ordering you to make your choice."

"I'll - ah! - make the trade -"

Rosal Monserrat is still staring at her hand and wondering how much more pain it will take to make her scream, hardly hearing the words from her own mouth.  She hardly sees the shadowy figure as it tosses down, onto her desk WAIT IS THAT A HEADBAND OF VAST INTELLIGENCE -

- but a colder hand grabs her other arm, then, and for the first time in her life, Rosal Monserrat feels the sensation of a Teleport.

And Rosal Monserrat is standing on the shore of a beach in an unknown land, in the night and the moonlight, with ocean sounds all around her, and a dull low stony fortress rising up before her.  The kind of unornamented fortress that you put up when it's expected to have only military uses somewhere that it needs to impress nobody.

Pain still radiates up from her hand.

"This - doesn't look like Hell?  And who's that?"

"That's Olegario, my personal Security and Teleport monkey."

"Welcome to Cheliax.  Don't worry, it'll hurt plenty even before you get to Hell."

"Congratulations on that, by the way.  Have a fucking cookie.  On me."

(Thiiiiiissss is not really how anything works, but Snack Service supposes that if you give an Asmodean a Chaotic Good curse, they're going to spend their first times wielding it on trying to lawyer a lot of rules that aren't really there.)

"Do we, in fact, have a task force dedicated to figuring out what the fuck Cayden Cailean is playing at. It's derivable from what Keltham knows, therefore it's derivable from what we know, and I'm getting the sense the stakes are fairly extraordinary."

"The task force is that I can't do it, Aspexia can't do it, and if you can't do it either then I don't know who the fuck in Cheliax is supposed to do it.  Why, do you?"

" - well, maybe we can simply ask Pilar to go around finding girls like me instead of girls like Pilar."

"Eleven of the twenty are men.  Regardless, I'll leave that to you, to discuss with Pilar and command her accordingly."

"That is all I had to say of Project Lawful and Project Chemistry that I thought you should hear from my own lips."

If you're good at reading people it's obvious Carissa has many more questions but she's planning to ask them of someone it's not dangerous to yell at.