Cayden Cailean, I genuinely modeled You as having more tolerance for spontaneity than this.  You literally became a god on a drunken dare.

And as I've tried to explain many times to My followers, often in Elysium, when I managed to pull Myself together as a god afterwards, My very first thought with My vastly increased intellect was that going for the Starstone while drunk had been an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA, even IF it had happened to work that one time.  The concept of doing stupid things while drunk does not prohibit the concept of regretting them afterwards.

A lot MORE people are going to die if We don't know how to time evacuations, but We can't exactly ask Keltham to set a hard date and deadline, while We are carefully not encouraging him in any way whatsoever to do any of this.  They're still on a time limit and still going to make mistakes but now neither they nor We know exactly what their time limit IS!

And even that desideratum completely pales next to what happens if We've fucked up the main story logic on any number of possible levels, or if this is happening because Nethys lied to Us about the real goal of His walkthrough.

Indeed.  So now it's time to shift to improvising everything that remains to be done!  Flexible schedules for all the new plans!

Cheer up, Cayden Cailean!  If nothing else, this gives Pilar Pineda more time in which to eat You.

It's not like that between Us.  Seriously, it's not.

And yet it's still a beautiful young thing who ends up consuming that much of You.  Somehow.

Carissa spends the next several subjective days building a wall of sorts so she can keep all the considerations in her head at the same time. Here's how we might try to take Avernus; here's how we might try to use my compact and other forces in Hell to side with us in taking down Asmodeus; here's how we might finagle the release of Rovagug so there's a chance of survivors; here's how things might turn out if we go home and leave this to Iomedae.

To her enormous irritation, there's a strong argument for the threaten-Pharasma plan. It's not one anyone thought of, possibly because it doesn't matter to anyone but her. In any plan for a war with Hell or in Hell, billions of the current inhabitants of Hell will die. Keltham thinks this is good, since they want to die. 

Carissa...grudgingly acknowledges that they get to consider that an improvement over their current situation if that's how they feel about it, but it's still an almost-maximally-bad outcome for them. The man she interrogated about rumors in Egorian hoped for Abaddon, and he wasn't wrong to hope for Abaddon perhaps, but that doesn't mean she'd have been doing right by him by giving him Abaddon. She'd have been doing right by him by giving him other options he in fact preferred to Abaddon.

If they get Pharasma to give them Hell, they can make things better for the entities in it, instead of giving up on them. If they do anything else, probably several layers of Hell get destroyed. 

Devils don't particularly want to live. She can see why, now; it has to do with Aspexia's favorite concept, corrigibility. Something that really really wants to be alive is a notably worse slave than something without any such strong wants. 

Obviously, a great horror was done, when they took the shattered formless soul of someone like Carissa and shaved away the part where she wants to live. But she doesn't think all the horror was done there. Some of it has not yet been done, and will be done when they in fact kill that person using the fact they no longer want to live very much as justification. 

If they do the Pharasma plan, she puts on her wall, they should arrange to be able to fix the devils and the paving stones. It is worth some risk - not, in Carissa's calculation, very much risk - but some risk of losing everything, for the chance of saving those souls too.

She doesn't talk to Keltham about Cayden Cailean and Nethys, but her guesses about what they want make it onto the wall too. They encouraged her cult on purpose. Why? How does ascension even work, does it matter if she has a cult? Should she be encouraging her cult? Would Pharasma care who all the Lawful Evil humans think should be the Lawful Evil god? Can Pharasma even see that?  Why would Chaotic Good want a Chaotic Good god eaten by a Lawful Evil one? What are they getting in exchange for that, or is it more that - only in that manner can any compromise at all exist between Hells Keltham will permit to exist and Hells that Asmodeus will?

What is Asmodeus, at His core? What are the most essential features? He's not, actually, the god of torture; are there Hells without torture He'd abide?

What is the minimum guarantee from Pharasma they'd need to be confident they'll get to keep building Civilization? Can Abadar be trusted to look out for that? If He's handed a specification? How could Abadar not know something important to His domain He's been trying to understand for a long time, what kind of limitation is that anyway? Is it fundamental? If it's unknowable to Him presumably He wouldn't be trying to learn it, right?

How important is Golarion in the multiverse? How much do they lose if it's lost? Are there alternatives to destroying it? Are there alternative distractions that'd let an ascending god slip through? ...Zon-Kuthon's in a vault, right? Can Iomedae be persuaded to let Him out? Is that even worse than Rovagug?

What would Hell be like if it wasn't stupid? Forget what both alien entities hostile to human values - Keltham and Asmodeus - want here, what would Hell be like if it was a place for Lawful Evil as it abides in human hearts? What would the place Maillol should go be, if it wasn't Hell? If he'd turn down Nirvana, not wanting to be smoothed away into something Good?

It is actually only the second most complicated Wall she's dealt with recently but for the first one she had Asmodia and Korva. They're thinking that resurrecting Asmodia, even if Hell let it go through, would be a giveaway about who Carissa works for now. Carissa is less sure that going to the Gardens is impossible, especially since they still should talk to Erecura about anything related to Pharasma-negotiations. Most importantly, Erecura stole divinity from Pharasma and Pharasma doesn't seem notably weakened by it. Is She a different kind of thing than everyone else? If so, what about Rovagug made Him a danger to Her? Was it something about prophecy not working around Rovagug? Can they get them some of that?

He spends most of the time alone, wearing the +6 Splendour headband and using no other enhancements, even as spells.  If the nice comforting deadline has been removed on how long he needs to hold himself together with solder and duct tape, then he needs to recover and put himself together now that he's in time dilation...

Is his will failing, here?  Possibly.  Being able to keep up a storm of work for three months on Project Lawful when everything is going great and you are having fun and in a lot of supportive relationships and your problems are fundamentally way way easier, is not the same as being able to work continuously under his current conditions.  Even with a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution.

He will, if he gets a look at Carissa's wall or checks in with her on what she's thinking about, remind her that she cannot plan to threaten Pharasma by proxy.  If she expects him to threaten Pharasma successfully, and prefers that outcome, she cannot help him with that in any way.  Carissa can try to reduce associated harm to herself and Pharasma, maybe, if her method doesn't hinder his plans, but she can't plan to threaten Pharasma.  That is the whole reason why Good couldn't do this earlier.

The fact that she came up with her plan to delay Cheliax's invasion and give him more time to work, while still in utter horror at his plans generally, is helpful.  That shows Carissa wasn't threatening Pharasma by proxy, in trying to give him more time to work.

But if she's started thinking there's a case for being less than utterly horrified with all this, that is going to require him to be much more careful in considering Carissa's further suggestions to make sure that they benefit Pharasma as well as himself.

"Yes, yes. I promise I still want you to stop all this and go home. But when I'm working on alternatives I need a calculation of exactly how bad your plan is so I only present you with alternatives I genuinely think work out better by my values in expectation."

The old saying 'why trust what you can verify' out of dath ilan seems to apply with some small degree of additional force when one wrong thought not even inside his own mind potentially destroys the multiverse when it could otherwise be saved.  So he is, in fact, going to be doing some extra checking and reminding here.

She does not, actually, mind. Keltham trying to make sure they don't accidentally blow up the world is the most sympathetic remaining thing about him. ...that and his smile when he succeeds at casting a complicated spell.

After some recovery time with only Splendour boosted, he tries getting a Fox's Cunning, which takes him to +4/+0/+6 (over baseline 18/16/14, innate +3/+4/+5).

When nothing bad seems to happen to him after a few minutes, he applies an Eagle's Splendour to himself, and takes off the +6 Splendour headband, which takes his stats to 25/20/23.

It... does not appear to send him back to the way he was before... his emotions weaken but do not vanish...

So he puts on the +4/+0/+4 headband, before the spells run out, to stabilize his stats at 25/20/23.

You can't really get much done with only INT 21, is the problem.  He doesn't know, in retrospect, how dath ilani who are only +2sd Intelligence get through life.  He sure didn't get far on +0.8sd... well, probably it's that nearly all dath ilani never try to do anything really complicated.  Or if they do, they take a lot more time to do it.

And he goes back to work, or tries to.  He is still, tired, inside.  The lack of a concrete deadline on how long he needs to keep this up, is not helping.  Especially at only Splendour 14+5+4, which, he suspects, does not end up the same thing to a dath ilani, as Splendour 14+5+4 is supposed to be to most Golarion natives.

But INT 25 is enough for him to go back to his MSOM (Magical Simulation of Magic) crafting attempt.

He's gathered, by now, that Baseline is not the key to wording Wishes, that there is something that takes language and goes from there to a spellpattern and that is why Wish phrasings matter so much.  When he gets to INT 29 he will cast Arcane Sight and Haste and watch his other stats getting Wished-up by efreeti, possibly get efreeti to cast some other standard Wishes just to watch those, and maybe at INT 29 he'll be able to make a standing leap to some understanding of how Wishes turn into spellforms.  Hand-building an emulator of magical physics, or even trying and failing to do that, seems like it is plausibly on the critical path towards his being able to do that later, if anything is.

Building his Magical Simulation of Magic would probably be any degree easier if he had Carissa Sevar's kind of Spellcraft.  But not that much easier, to be honest.  He's got his own Armillary Amulet now.  Most of the challenge, fundamentally, is coming up with any system of magical physics with a visible subsystem that emulates an isomorphism of magical physics.  Not making the process happen, coming up with any process with that property.  Crafting ad-hoc supports for holding the systems together...

Well, he could, in fact, go a lot faster between trials and errors, if he was better at crafting spellsilver into magical supports and then tweaking the crafts.  But the item-crafter he has on hand, in his base, is somebody to whom it takes longer to explain what he's trying to accomplish, each time and tweak, than it does for him to try the tweaks himself.  At least this way he's learning himself, at INT 25, and speeding up at the exact form of crafting he needs to do.

...he gets another Eagle's Splendour and swaps to his +6 Intelligence headband, and, yeah, with stats of 27/20/23 it feels like he is able to make real progress on a couple of his current challenges, for the few minutes it takes before the Splendour is about to run out, and he has to put his +4/+0/+4 headband back on.

Changing abilitystats, he suspects, is not actually good for him.

Not as bad as swapping Wisdom up and down, forming new mental skills and circuits that depend on a certain kind of boosted reflectivity which then abruptly vanishes just as his brain was getting used to it.  Bumping Wisdom up and down is probably literally the worst idea.  (The worst idea inside the realm of practical abilitystat manipulation, to be clear, not the worst idea in full generality.)

But even Intelligence going back and forth between 27 and 25 is maybe not as good for a dath ilani brain as he would have liked, in an ideal world.

It's time for a conversation that he's really dreading, and if he was significantly less calculating, or less reflective, or had less force of personality, he wouldn't be able to bring himself to say it.

He is going to try to explain that he thinks all the changes of abilitystats are really not good for him, and then, ask Carissa for her headband... more or less for the foreseeable future.  She can have all of his own augmentation items, they can spend even more money on Wisdoms and Splendours, but - if the time she's bought is going to mean anything, and if - it's considered a good thing that he holds himself together - he needs a constant statblock, and he needs that statblock to have INT 27.  There's not, really, any other obvious way to achieve that, unless he's missing something.  It's not even - obvious - that it would be an especially good idea for him to take off the headband - her headband, Carissa's headband, for which she sold her soul - while he is sleeping.

...he'd tell him to get lost, but Carissa has surprised him before; she is stronger than he.

"How's it going."

He will lay out the situation: he needs INT 27 not INT 25, he could probably benefit from more Wisdom but bouncing Wisdom up and down is likely to be bad for his brain, dropping to Splendour 19 isn't likely to be good for him either, bouncing abilitystats up and down in general seems plausibly to have not been good for him.  Possibly very not good for him.

Here are some expected utility calculations his INT 25 self tried to do from the Carissa / Pharasma point of view, double-checked for a few minutes of INT 27, though this is more of a Wisdom-laden task and he has not dared to augment Wisdom yet.  The primary point is that he can in fact get to INT 27 using his +6 Intelligence headband, and get work done that way, and would have to do that, and would do that, to get the basic capabilities he needs.  He would just, probably, damage his emotional and mental stability in the course of doing that.

He will keep his voice very dispassionate and his face expressionless, as best as Splendour 23 can boost a dath ilani doing that.  Showing any emotions to Carissa would be emotion-bombing her, under the circumstances.  The underlying extent to which he is holding his sanity hostage against her, even as not technically a threat, is horrible enough already.

"You want the headband."

For the foreseeable future, which is now less foreseeable after extending their intended work time.

He has a complete set of individually +6 headbands, a +4/+0/+4 headband, a +2/+2/+2 headband, he can pour any non-project-torpedoing or non-hand-tipping amount of resources into acquiring more scrolls of Owl's Wisdom or Eagle's Splendour, Carissa Sevar is not as restricted as himself if she wants to try renting the Pharaoh's +4/+4/+4 or finding somewhere to buy a +6/+6.

"Okay, some considerations. One, I want to show up and encourage my cults in Vudra and in the Kelesh Empire and in various other places, I suspect it improves the odds of Pharasma working with you or the odds I don't get squished mid-ascension or something in the genre. I think I need to be wearing the headband for that for maximum credibility. I could conceivably do that right now and give it to you later today after 20 hours of cult-cultivating, or I could conceivably do it while you sleep if you're all right with me having it while you sleep, but it'll be bad, I think, if I don't get to do it at all.

Two. I do think things will go better if you're smarter. I also think they'll go better if I'm smarter and separately from benefits of me being smarter I think they'll go better if I, uh, am someone you respect and listen to? And I think we're kind of already on the fringe on that front and if you're notably lots smarter than me you won't in fact listen to me at all, and I'm scared that'll make things overall go worse. 

I'd agree in a heartbeat if you'd agree not to go ahead with the overall plan without my say-so - not expecting you to agree to that, just, trying to figure out sufficient conditions and might as well name the obvious one. 

I think I'd agree if you agreed to - let some worlds live that seemed not quite worth it to you but close enough you weren't sure, some marginal ones - I don't know what agreeing to that would look like -

- and, uh, most of what I'm using Wisdom for is not getting really mad at you every time you open your mouth so if you were able to do that on your end maybe I could just do the headband of intelligence and it'd be fine, but I know it's hard on you when you feel like you're the only one reaching across the divide, and I really wouldn't be able to do much of that, without the Wisdom headband, it's hard even wearing it."

"I could do the marginal thing.  Don't expect to run into many marginal cases, but - if I do - sure."

"It's funny how, now and then, and despite a lot of things, I get the feeling that you are in some deep sense a better person than I am.  I mean, Carmin probably wouldn't even think it was funny, she'd just say, sure, Carissa would have grown up to be a much better person than you, given better circumstances, and now that's starting to shine through."

"I - would not be very surprised if a good solution here, ends up looking like, my staying mostly out of your way, for the next ten days subjective, pending a trip to the City of Brass where you get your baseline Wisdom wished up.  After that point we'll both be INT 29 and it will be quite a subversion of my expectations if we - end up talking to each other the same way, after that."

"I don't trust my brain to be okay while I sleep, if transient scaffolding for my cognitive reflectivity gets erased while I'm doing that.  Let's frontload the Vudra and Kelesh visits."

"Do you expect to be okay with 6 points of sudden Wisdom loss?  I can try to locate a +4/+4/+0 artifact headband on an emergency basis while you're touring the local meetups of your fan club, but you'd be at less than max Intelligence so I don't even know if you would."

"I think I'd rather have Intelligence. Wizards usually go much harder on Intelligence and it works fine so long as you can also be kind of an emotionally insensitive jerk, and you generally can, if you're a powerful wizard.

I'm not - trying to be Good, here, I'm just trying to survive. I'm just in a weird situation where they're the same thing."

"I'll let Carmin be the one to call bullshit on that.  You'll probably believe it more coming from her."

"Okay. I'm going to go do cult cultivation, then. ....I'm going to burn something like 50,000gp in scrolls on looking cool and you are not allowed to complain about this at all."

"Wasn't even slightly considering it.  Off with you, you need to talk to some of the people correctly relying on you for salvation, non-Good person."

(Notably missing from Carissa's compact with him: a specification saying that, if he does release Rovagug, Carissa shall not at this time be prevented from escaping to Elysium or the Maelstrom.  Both of those planes are supposedly infinite, and the Maelstrom in particular is supposed to ultimately head off into the chaos outside Pharasma's bubble; which would make it much more likely that you could escape Rovagug, starting from there.)

(He's not suggesting this clause, if she hasn't thought of it; because Carissa might, at that point, demand that clause in order to not fight it out with her own self-image, which clause would then potentially hamper her actually saving the multiverse and also force her to think of herself as a worse person.  It's just funny because, Carissa's real emotional priorities being what they actually are, she hasn't thought of it.)