"I did tell the devils I was complicatedly serving Asmodeus's interests. I figured it was good if they weren't sure, whether I ended up serving Asmodeus's interests or not, though it looks like, in fact, I am."

"Plausibly helps, yeah.  Sort of sad where a lot of what it potentially helps with is taking them by surprise about destroying Egorian."

"You've had what sounds like an intense day.  Do you, in fact, possibly need some rest time before you could even give consent to complicated deals in a way that you'd feel had come from your real self, or for that matter, some alone time to fail to rederive your memory-gambit-self's plan?"

From Carissa's perspective it feels like she's being entirely reasonable and the problem here is that Keltham-with-an-identity-crisis is being twisted-into-a-trauma-pretzel while having far more diamonds and riches than any insane traumatized teenager should possess. Which problem will not solve itself if she gets some time to rest and think. 

However, she is capable of noticing that probably from Keltham's perspective this is not what it feels like, and that she is going to have to be able to work with Keltham's perspective instead of just smugly refuting it in her own head if she is going to save the world, and also that sometimes when you can identify that from someone else's perspective the situation would look different this is not just a fact about how they're an idiot but is, sometimes, also a fact about the situation. 

And she did spend her entire life making incredibly costly mistakes and should probably not assume that she just stopped having that problem forever this morning. 

"That might be a good idea. I love you. I'm sorry this is so hard, and I will try to find a way that I can give you this without endangering the entire world."

"All right.  Let's head out.  You're physically weaker, want to go down first so I can lend you a hand on the rope?"

" - I was planning to just take the fall because it'll make me feel better, honestly."

"I suppose it's good to see, on some level, that you have not changed.  I admit I'm also wondering whether INT 29 and WIS 27 would let me put myself back together again, better than this, and maybe be able to feel a sexually sadistic impulse again.  Yes, that's emotional blackmail, there's children in Hell and I'm willing to resort to emotional blackmail in the face of that."

"Brain suggested pushing you out of the Rope Trick, maybe as a joke even if it can't be romantic, other parts of my brain are fighting me about it.  Sorry.  Fall if you're falling."

"There's in fact almost certainly not children in Hell right now? It has happened, across all of history, but, you know, after five years tops they aren't children anymore. I could check, if that's decision-relevant somehow."

"I think if I'm pretending Snack Service doesn't exist I'm pretending that information has positive value to me, if maybe not to you... how would you check?"

"...ask, while doing confidential negotiations with Dispater, which I really believe are an element of a successful plan? Hell's a Lawful place, it keeps records." She jumps.

He climbs.

The Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae has not yet completed the portal.

The man stands with seeming infinite patience, waiting for a lull in the Sarenrite priestess's casting so she can eject them from the demiplane and back to the contingent point of the Material.

He offers Carissa a hand.  This obviously is only sensible in case of some minor mishap, so they don't end up separated.

She squeezes his hand. "Do you want the note to Cheliax to be from me or from you. They're more scared of me, at this point."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but what could you possibly have done to make them THAT scared?  If it seems wise to say outside the Rope Trick?"

"I'm mostly not proud of the parts of it that were my doing, and the parts that weren't were the doing of the entity you don't want to think about. But also it's just a fact about people, right? You're far away and might destroy them suddenly, and how do they even think about that, what would it even do to fear it? I'm dangerous by their rules. You might annihilate their whole civilization overnight for reasons that wouldn't make sense to them; I might take offense at their stupid face and call them in to my office to answer for it.

People don't - know how to be scared of something in proportion to how bad it'd be, not past their own life. Even I don't, and I'm not sure if it's a bad thing, because I don't know how I'd stand up, under the weight of what's at stake here, if I really felt it."

"Yeah, that's basically what happened to Keltham.  You know how he thought, when he got here, that he was Chaotic?  Turns out, an unusually selfish dath ilani isn't actually as selfish as, say, a totally average person from Golarion."

"My current theory of people is that they're - not really coherent, they're a bundle of conflicting impulses and the part of them trying to make sense of themselves just has to draw an outline around all the impulses that were recently activated and declare that's who they are. And you're - the desire to get rich and have lots of women and be admired and desired and do cool science and invent clever Prestidigitation tricks and be surrounded by people who really get you and really like you, and also the desire for there not to be kids in Hell, and whatever else, and in dath ilan one set of those got activated, drawn to your attention, and in Golarion...not so much.

And I'm - wanting to be safe, wanting to be strong, wanting to live forever, wanting to not be trapped and helpless, wanting to have lots of incredibly powerful magic items, wanting everyone else in the world to live forever, wanting to get to steer who I have sex with, and I'd probably be fucking Good, if I'd grown up somewhere where my own immortality was certain and safe, and Abaddon was the only thing that ever struck at something deep and core to who I am. I'd probably be one of those angels that guards the River of Souls. I don't wish I was, just, I think it's the same bundle, poked differently."

"And there's probably something that you learn in dath ilan, if you're this much smarter than I was - or something that they'd obviously teach you, if they knew you'd have to half-ass Keeper disciplines for yourself, because your world suddenly needs that of you - whereby - all the people who actually do, go coherent enough to have sorta utility functions, don't just - all end up as the same person.  Who is, in Golarion, more or less dath ilani Iomedae.  I, alas, was not taught such an art; maybe at INT 29 I could rederive it, and it wouldn't be too late."

"I don't immediately know how to convey it, and maybe I'm doing it wrong. But - when I have the headband, I notice more of what's in the bundle, I'm doing less - hiding parts of it because I can't reconcile them with the rest of me - and even if, I'm deciding to ignore a lot of parts, right now, because saving the world is the only thing that matters - when I decided to kill Olegario it hurt, and I could feel better than I could've if I was stupider how much it hurt, and why I was deciding to do it anyway - instead of choosing blindly -"

"I'm aware of how much I'm hurting you.  It's not, actually, helping me be Keltham, because the thing that Keltham does, is stop hurting Carissa, and I am not doing that, because of all the other things I am now aware of."

"...and that doesn't feel, to you, like - Keltham always was a lot of pieces, and one of them is to not hurt Carissa, who he loves, and another is to protect his kids, and another is to not let people go to Hell, and now some different pieces are the ones that pull the strongest, but - they're all you -"

"It'd be more persuasive if you didn't think the lemure was me."

"I don't actually know much about lemures and absolutely have a pile of rationalizations about everything to do with Hell because it was going to happen to me and I was scared! But I think you're Keltham. You're Keltham in an astonishing amount of pain and mostly using - completely new rules for decisionmaking because your old ones worked out so badly, which, well, I can relate to, but you're not -

- look - 

When I'd erased my memories and went to Dispater, He asked me what might make my soul less valuable and I thought of Asmodia and Peranza, how I cared about them. And he asked if I'd take 15 less Wishes - I'd asked for 30 - for them to be safe. And I - wanted that - very badly - but I said no, because I was an Asmodean, and I figured I could feel what I felt but I could decide not to use it for making decisions. Thankfully He didn't let me fuck that up, and from my current perspective I was an idiot because Asmodia and Peranza were far more important than the Wishes we were just going to squabble over like a couple of children" while we waited for your diamonds to ripen, she doesn't finish the sentence because the Sarenrae cleric might be listening.

"But - it's Carissa all the way through, right, the same impulses, it's just a question of which ones I'm choosing to ignore because something else is more important. I wish I could say that was some fucking stranger I have no resemblance to, but it wasn't, it was just me, with a stupid goal."

The Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae, having reached a lull in her casting, approaches.  "Erased your memory and sold your soul to Dispater for 15 Wishes, hm.  Young man, I congratulate you on having somehow found, somewhere in all of Golarion, a woman to court who is even higher in drama than you."

She kicks both of them out of her demiplane without giving them a chance to respond.

Carissa is too Wise to get defensive about her life and her choices. 

....well. She's close. Maybe if she Wishes on five more Wisdom. Maybe if she does that and takes up meditation.