"I am probably imagining this as being much much worse for you than it actually was, but I have no idea how I could ask about that, what would be the interpersonal comparison metric of worseness."

"It makes you look better than what Ione Sala knew of the background story, before she left Cheliax, which was all she was allowed to tell me about.  You doing those things, for those reasons."

"It's possible I am wrong about my reasons. People get muddled enough to backfill their own history wrong, it's kind of terrifying. But I'm sure about the question I brought to Maillol that got me put in charge of the Project, and about what I got promoted past him over. I don't - think it was very awful for me. Almost everything I hate, looking back, is what I did, not what happened to me. With a couple exceptions but they're the kind of thing that would've happened more if I hadn't been in charge of the Project if anything."

"I have enough additional questions that I need to start writing them down to make sure I can believe they will not just eventually get lost.  I am going to ask things that I would not have previously asked, and hope that my mind does not require a lot of emotion-severance about knowing the answers as soon as I turn off Splendour 25."

He takes a diary-like notebook from a Bag of Holding, and a fancy magical quill which is still not as good as a ballpoint pen, and writes:

- What drove Asmodia to suicide?
- Are the others okay who haven't been mentioned, like Gregoria or Shilira or Korva?
- What did Abarco and Avaricia and Maillol do to get tortured?
- How was Abarco able to force you into sex if you were his boss?  (Ione didn't know this but said there were many possibilities, dominant one Abrogail punishing you for fucking up.)

"When I left the project I didn't do a good enough job giving it continuity of orders, and also everyone was very uncertain how things were going to shake out without me, and Avaricia decided to make a play for being in charge if I didn't get back, or second-in-command if I did, and started needling Asmodia.

They'd pulled practically all the high-quality Security we'd enjoyed when we had you and sent them to Nidal and replaced them mostly with people who they were maximally confident wouldn't defect on exposure to ilanism, which mostly meant people who just enjoyed being awful people. And who started going after Asmodia and the other girls thought of as loyal to me, in variously plausibly-deniable or not-even-very-plausibly-deniable ways. And Asmodia was - a heretic, and naive - she thought that they'd do what was in Cheliax's interests if she just kept pointing out how stupid it was for them not to - she tried to get Abarco and Maillol to make them stop - and then when it didn't work she killed herself. 

No one thought she'd do that because Hell is worse. But she'd died and gone to Hell already, right, back when Nidal attacked us, and - she came back happier and healthier - she must've gone to the gardens, because Erecura foresaw that I'd bargain for that - so she didn't have anything to fear. So she killed herself. 

At which point Abrogail pulled me out of my punishment for failing with you and I went back and I - knew that Maillol and Subirachs had allowed this deliberately because they thought it'd be good for me to terrorize some people into submission for once - 

- the other students are all okay, I think. Pilar eventually stepped in and started protecting them with her Cayden powers. Meritxell's helping her with training the new candidate-ilani. I own all their souls and they'll get statued if they die.

Iiiii notice myself being nervous about discussing Abarco because many possible ways that conversation could go will make me annoyed at you for things that are completely not at all your fault and are entirely my own."

"My current understanding is that you got forced into breaking that promise and did not - deliberately court being forced to break it.  If that understanding is unambiguously correct, we can pass on."

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, I'm trying to give you the-thing-most-important-to-me-to-know at a higher level of abstraction to make it easier for you to not talk about it, I cannot actually do more than that to protect you while you haven't told me anything at all."

"That's correct, yeah.

- we were running a test of whether it was possible to escape from the facilities and evade Security. Because we wanted escaping-with-Keltham to be a possibility and weren't sure what it'd take for an escape to be credible. The seed of the plan that became 'Nefreti' rescuing you. Security had orders to answer to Subirachs for the day. It didn't even - occur to me as a possible failure mode."

"Accepted.  I model you as explicitly not wanting to hear reassuring things I could say about dath ilani attitudes versus Golarion attitudes, you can pokeback if that model is mistaken.  I pause briefly so you can potentially pokeback."

(Pause.)

"Since you predicted you'll get annoyed if I say anything, I'm guessing all the things I have to say won't actually help. That being the obvious inference from what you said. But I'm checking because I want to say things, if they might help to hear."

"...maybe you could say them but just say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet's way of doing ethics right this minute but I do care what you think."

"No.  I realize I was the one who had responsibility for being able to say what dath ilan was about, but I am sad and bitter about what - people here must think of dath ilan, now, and a whole bright world they never saw, and imagine horrible things about because they've been tortured by Golarion to the point where they cannot imagine an alternative to it -"

"It will not be good for me to accept that instruction."

"Are we still on crying-in-each-other's presence terms?  I'm keeping tears out of my eyes right now."

"I'm mad at Elias Abarco and I wish it hadn't happened to you and I hope you're okay and I'm not mad at you about that and the stuff Carmin said was right."

- okay I think at some point I'm abusing the imaginary Keltham thing. 

"I don't mind if you cry in front of me."

"Okay.  I'm not holding against you - you being forced into that particular thing - though it's part of a much huger pattern of things you got forced into that I can't split off from you because then there's nothing left.  But that particular promise-breaking, I'm not holding against you.  If someday you want to know in more detail why, and what a beautiful sunlit world looks like and thinks like about issues like that, you can ask.  Someday."

I don't want bad things to happen to you. I wish I could have protected you. Elias Abarco sucks.

You could have brought anything out of dath ilan you wanted, to Golarion. You could have ended slavery, if that was what dath ilan's ethics said to do, or made everyone rich, or ended all plagues and famines and wars, you could have made resurrection so cheap that every family could afford it for every child, you could have built whatever bright sunlit world you wanted. 

The thing you decided to bring out of dath ilan to my world is death for everyone. It doesn't matter what else dath ilan has; that is what you chose to give us. 

She doesn't say it. It's not true or fair; it just feels true, and Keltham's - right, about how hard it is to stretch across the gulf, how much trying it takes, and she believes him, that he's trying too -

She nods.

"I would not - actually be okay - with resurrecting Elias Abarco for, reasons directed at inflicting suffering on him, but if that's something you'd otherwise do, if not for me, I can try to pay you to make up the difference."

 " - huh? No, I've tried not to be - personally vindictive about it, what would that help - I own an option on his soul too, and I was planning to make him into the best devil I could, it wouldn't be fair to do anything less -"

I think he might've been trying to say that that'd be an understandable way to feel, thing to want, that if you do want that he wants you to at least have something equivalent in value, so that while he can't give you that he can give you something you wanted as much as that -

" - I appreciate the offer, though."

"Okay.  I keep thinking - that I don't know what kind of person you actually are, when half of you isn't being pointwise shaped by the threat of immediate torture, and half of you isn't an elaborate lie.  And I keep thinking that, it's not like I could actually ask, or you could tell me, because even fully half a day being out from under all of that is not enough time that you could reasonably figure out who you are."

"There are bits I've figured out. Not - the whole thing, definitely. I think - there are instincts I had all along, and was ignoring, but they didn't go away, and I can just stop ignoring them. And there's - it's not like how I got here isn't part of the answer to who I am. 

I figured out I needed to overthrow Asmodeus if I wanted to fix Hell, so I wrote a letter convincing Aspexia Rugatonn to let me sell my soul, rescue all the Project girls, and make things okay enough I could work with you to build Civilization, because I was pessimistic about doing it without you and I, uh, thought we probably couldn't work together if Asmodia and Peranza were being eternally tortured and it was my fault.

I think that's - a decent starting description of who I am."