"The... Worldwound?  I'm not particularly aware of what goes on there; I know we have some treaty obligations there, but so far as I know, those are not relevant to real conditions on the ground."

Carissa is going to chalk that up as more evidence for her theory that people can only really think if demons are trying to eat them. "I see. Thank you. I will speak to the other sects, and decide who, if anyone, to announce that I back. The most decisive consideration will probably be who is committed to going to Hell."

"I do believe that I am the only leader in question who currently, actually pings alignment detection and registers as Lawful Evil.  The splinter groups, if they ping detection at all, tend Lawful Neutral or, in the case of the Iomedaens, Lawful Good.  The Mathematical Sevarists in particular openly reject that being currently Evil should be a condition for high rank in a Sevarist organization, because of some nonsensical reasoning about incentives.  Of course the post-Sevarists and This Part of Taldor, as don't even pretend to owe you allegiance, would presumably lean Chaotic."

"That seems silly of them, and is certainly a compelling point in your favor! I will see if I can get them straightened out."

He'll wait until this... thing is out of hearing range, and then ask, "Would you like to pay me to kill him?"

"Bit hasty, isn't it? Maybe everyone else is even worse!"

"Well, in that case, would you like to pay me not to kill him?  It would be somewhat of a default action for me, here."

"No murdering my loyalists for personal reasons, we're on an important mission here. I assure you that if all goes well and he comes to me in Hell I will very patiently rewrite his entire personality."

"I had been thinking that I did not quite see the point of any of this.  And now, suddenly, I am thinking of people whom I would pay to Maledict, if by doing so I could send them to you and pay you to rewrite their personalities.  Painfully."

"Oh, there's an audience I'm not yet serving!! People who would Maledict their enemies if only Hell took more specific service requests! We should start some rumors about that, though probably not yet, if anyone jumps the gun I won't get their offering. Maybe when we make rounds again in a couple of weeks. 

Where's this wizard who runs the maybe-not-hopeless Sevarite cult?"

This situation (as is so often the case in Taldor) is only going to look even more and more complicated as Carissa Sevar investigates it further.

...possibly a lot of the problem here is that Sevarism in Taldor does not have a clear agenda that lines up with anybody's personal incentives?  In Vudra, at least, there was something of a map onto Lawful Evil Irorism and there being a place for those people to go that wasn't Asmodean Hell, and a daily activity of self-refinement that the monks there could readily recognize.  In Taldor, the closest thing to a clear agenda that makes sense in terms of anybody's direct goals, is Iomedaen Sevarism, which doesn't want anybody in Hell in the first place, and therefore would like Carissa Sevar to conquer a country as soon as possible.

What does Carissa Sevar think her followers in Taldor are supposed to do?  People will ask her this question with the air of somebody who never thinks to question, for a fraction of a second, that Carissa Sevar must have built this whole cult for herself on purpose and had some purpose in mind for it.

Ahahahaha yes absolutely, that's what happened. 

Carissa Sevar wants her cult in Taldor to sell her their souls. ...can she get away with that, though, or is it pushing them too far?

It would help if there was some account of why, a larger plan into which this fits, a reason why this would be in anybody's self-interest (or other-interest, if Good).  People in Oppara are inclined to ask 'What's in it for me?' about as often as people do in Cheliax, but without the sense that defying orders will get them immediately lit on fire.

She's going to ascend in - don't tell anyone, she tells them, knowing they'll immediately tell everyone - between four months and a year, depending how long it takes her to make some arrangements that'll be easier to make as a human than as a god. She expects that at that time, her cult will swell enormously as people realize it was real all along. As a new god, she'll be limited, but those who she owns she'll be able to easily work through, grant cleric levels, send visions, and command in her glorious conquest.

People who seem willing to strongly believe this for purposes of shouting about it, will seem to sort of... suddenly back off, when it comes to selling their souls to Hell, on the basis of the promise that Carissa Sevar will be there to take care of them afterwards.

One gets the impression that a lot of Sevarists would sell their souls to her in exchange for large amounts of money, if they could be certain that Carissa Sevar would be there to receive them, and hammer them stronger.  Not all of her cult, not even half of her cult, but a quarter of it, maybe.  But - without that certainty - people are afraid even to go Lawful Evil, let alone sell their souls.

(The Mathematical Sevarists hold that this is a totally reasonable way for somebody to act given their current incentives and the payoff matrices.)

...she can find at least some people who think they're going to an Evil afterlife anyways, given their past decisions and realistic unlikelihood to do enough Good to work their way out from under.  Some people who'll sell out for a couple of thousand gold pieces, so they can at least live in wealth they never imagined for the rest of their lives, and maybe maybe maybe there'll be Somebody who cares about them, when that life ends.

It would probably be somewhere around five percent of all her followers in Taldor, if she had time to hunt more of them down.

She really only needs, like, two, to ensure spies conclude she's sincere about the Evil, and Keltham doesn't in fact have infinite money so fewer is better.

The rest she'll charge with spreading the word. It might be the hopelessly muddled word, but probably whatever the best lie is to spread among Taldane people, that one will spread the farthest.

Taldor is absolutely on spreading whichever hopelessly muddled or even completely imaginary version of Sevarism has the highest rate of people thinking it's cool to talk about or more likely derogate!

In fact, there's a fair number of Sevarists on board who came to join up with the imaginary decade-old version of Sevarism that post-Sevarists criticize, since that's the version that the greatest number of Taldorians have now heard about!  They're patiently waiting to get into the hidden inner circle where they'll be taught to replace their emotions with numbers.

- you know what? Fine. If they want into the secret inner circle they need to listen to this lecture and then tell her what they learned from it.

She delivers the lecture she gave PIlar's ilani candidates about how to stop being muddled and made up of internal contradictions you're not looking at properly and adds some extemporizing about how to do things because they actually achieve your goals instead of just because they make it easier to look away from your own weakness.

This probably works a lot better with an additional 6 native Intelligence points and some sort of, you know, artifact headband to wear on top of that.

People are very enthusiastic about this message.  Able to tell her what they learned from it, in their own words?  Give a valid example of somewhere in their previous life where they could apply it?  Not so much.

Well, it was worth a shot. They should recite it to themselves every night before they sleep and when it makes sense to them they should come and tell her and then they'll be admitted into the inner circle.

Several talented wizard apprentices have now heard about her harem of submissive mathematicians and would like to join that or at least, uh, try out for it.

Do they have any actual mathematical talent?

...possibly this one does?  Second-circle at eighteen is relatively impressive for Taldor where they don't ever torture the students or at least not seriously.

Sure. Do they have the spells on hand to Petrify that one and Shrink Item them into a small statue she can keep in her pocket until a more convenient time to induct him as a trainee ilani.

...he doesn't actually have Shrink Item prepped but can fit a whole statue in his... personal storage.

He is not commenting on anything so hard right now.