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She is carried swiftly and uncaringly through places of flame.  When her living form chokes once too often on the air, despite a fire resistance she was given early on, she's hauled aside to some unfamiliar higher devil who bothers to lay a more comprehensive protection on her.

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She wishes that someone would undo the curses on her.  She does not ask it aloud; this is Hell.

There - cannot have been a way that this is all part of some other plan by Keltham and Carissa, can it - the mysterious fourth curse laid on her - maybe she's set to explode curses should really not be able to do that and Keltham has no reason to so offend Hell.

The thought that the pit fiend actually violated a compact, by taking her, that this could be Keltham's plan, is mulled for only a few moments before being rejected as utterly impossible.  Mortals may make mistakes like that; greater devils whose actions reflect fully on Asmodeus simply would not make that mistake.


It's only as she's thrown into what seems to be her final destination, a slave's holding cell of that fortress, where a mortal could live for a time if for some strange reason they were not being killed, that the thought finally occurs to her:  Discern Location remains a thing in Golarion, Mind Blanks are expensive, and fighting Gorthoklek is risky.  If the goal is to take Abrogail Thrune out of the game for a time - then arranging for her to be held in Hell, while Keltham seeks an arbitration, could be superior to placing her somewhere that you'd have to pay to defend from Hell.

...if that's all Keltham is doing, it will be good news, so she had best not hope it.  She wishes, in fact, that she had never thought of that plan, so that it could have come to her as an ironical surprise.  But her thoughts are less controlled, now, and now it is too late.

She needs her Wisdom back, and her Intelligence, and enough Splendour that her mind stops fucking whining.  If any devils nearby are reading her thoughts and are annoyed about all this fucking whining, Abrogail understands if she gets hurt about it, but the whining will only actually stop when somebody dispels these curses.  She is possibly the leading expert in Creation about whether you can quickly and easily hurt low-Splendour mortals for whining inside their minds, in a way that makes their minds stop whining, without just completely breaking them, and the answer to this is no.  Obviously she'll have to be hurt too, for whining, you can't get out of hurting by needing special treatment instead; but she doesn't want her mind doing this either, and her own best judgment is that the mortal's mind will keep whining until somebody dispels the low-Splendour curse and then presumably hurts her for requiring special treatment like that.

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The horned guard at the door turns, irritably, after a bit of this, and says, "that, done by Hell, is an intervention in Golarion should you return to it, which Hell cares not to pay for; get a grip on yourself, or don't."

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She tries, and doesn't particularly succeed about it, with Splendour too low to cast a sorcerer's cantrip.  She hates herself and knows that this too is probably annoying the devil.  It would be nice if Abrogail was one of those relatively more tolerable people who do stop mentally whining when they're hurt, but she's not, Abrogail is the sort to never whine in the first place because she accepts it as her place to overcome adversity or die, and everything that makes her that Abrogail has been crippled by losing 18 Splendour her mind is fucking doing it again.

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The horned creature, without even any visible irritation, says to another "it needn't be conscious", and then there's an excruciating stab of some long, needled claw, and then darkness.

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....and then, elsewhere, a more luxurious elsewhere with screaming faces writhing at her from the floor, with both her custodian and a different senior devil present, there is consciousness again.

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She realizes within moments, taking stock of herself, that she's at +4 INT and +4 WIS relative to her pre-Crown baseline, the recognizable feeling of the standard spells or some minor infernal variant of them.  There's a thin headband on her skull that's likely giving her +6 Splendour back out of -12 cursed and -6 Crown-lost.  She could cast lesser sorceries like this, if not Teleport.  Knocking her unconscious didn't exactly give her the equivalent of a good night's sleep, and her body feels stiff in a way suggestive of having been left in a heap for longer than one night, empty in a way that suggests hunger magically fed.

The senior devil is a Bdellavritra, a three-headed worm that by reputation is intelligent, wise, charismatic, and excels at cruelly manipulative schemes.  With some lesser part of her wit restored, it takes little time for Abrogail to deduce that this meeting must concern Keltham.  Also somebody's thrown a black cloak around her, which implies that either Cheliax or Keltham might see her; no devil would care.

"I'm functional," Abrogail reports briefly, and awaits requests or explanations.  She has lost far too much pride already before Hell.

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And the devil gestures, and with the gesture takes down an illusion concealing a scrying mirror, a very nice one. "Your testimony on some matter is required, and my oath as to what your testimony is."

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At +4 INT and +4 WIS, Abrogail Thrune would probably figure out which matter, given a minute, if she were just given one minute to think.

She's not told in advance what she's to be questioned about?  So somebody can see her reactions, so she doesn't have time to invent a story, according to negotiated conditions?  But even at this little Splendour she can control herself.  Does that imply that it's just her testimony to be transmitted and not her thoughts?  How would that end up relevant to a bid by Keltham to have her returned to him?

"Required under what authority?" she says, making her voice and expression empty, for at this Splendour she will not essay an active deception.  "Few compacts with Keltham were signed by me or in my name; and my compact with Asmodeus does not require me to obey all Hell's orders so long as I serve Him well through Cheliax."  Will it violate an oath if she lies?

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"If I command you to answer, answer." Implicit, of course, is that one would answer truthfully only if that were commanded.

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"I'll obey."

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Then they'll put through the Greater Scry.

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Keltham appears within the mirror, glances at the apparent camera location, and casts from scroll a Greater Scry of his own.  His eyes within the mirror focus then on the two devils, and don't particularly seem to see Abrogail - not in the fashion of ignoring her, but in the fashion of Abrogail not being visible to his scry at all.

"Is the living mortal Abrogail Thrune II, who was born to that name and compacted with the god Asmodeus and once signed a compact with myself, present nearby and ready imminently to be interrogated by you, in accordance with that agreement made between myself and Hell one hour and thirteen minutes earlier in the mortal realm?"

...there's only stars and blackness visible behind him, in the mirror, in the scry radius around him; and there's something wrong with those stars, they are too many and too bright in the blackness for him to be standing silhouetted against ordinary night.

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"Yes," says the devil, bored.

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With enough INT and WIS she sees those too-bright stars and makes the connection, where Keltham must be, what must be below him, and her heart almost stops; she knows then, she knows the question which Keltham is going to ask of Hell, and why he expects that Hell might answer, and she knows he'll demand they read her thoughts and swear to it -

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"I plan to ascend to godhood shortly, and expect to succeed about that plan.  I am checking whether there exists a mess in the mortal realm that I need to clean up first."

"If the matter I speak of is not resolved to me with surety, I will use knowledge out of Elsewhere to utterly destroy the entire territory of Cheliax, as my default action in ignorance; as I would have done simply to be sure, had there been no way whatsoever to confirm the matter from Abrogail Thrune or Hell.  You are now being offered an opportunity for an outcome which is not that."

"The blood of dath ilan is adept at finding creative paths to destruction, in a way not fully captured by measurement spells for Intelligence and Wisdom and Splendour.  If anyone has stolen children from me, they will when grown present some additional danger to the continued existence of Golarion and perhaps larger regions than that."

"I suspected Cheliax of having stolen children from me by way of substitution plots of Abrogail Thrune, Willa Shilira, and Jacint Subirachs, all of whom I have already slain.  I am concerned that perhaps more children than that have been stolen from me."

"If Asmodeus's instructions sent by vision to Ferrer Maillol, not to take hostages against me, have been obeyed diligently rather than cleverly and dancing around the edges, those instructions interpreted generously should have covered that contingency, for any child of mine permitted to be ensouled might be hostage against me.  I have taken Maillol and read his thoughts under interrogation and confirmed that this would be in the uncertain edges of Asmodeus's instructions; more hopefully, from my perspective, he recalls no such question being asked of him, as any sensible person would surely have done.  However he also recalls his mind being read by Carissa, and I cannot rule out the event that he was asked this question and then had his memory erased about it.  Nor, for that matter, can I rule out that Abrogail was enough of an idiot to not ask him, or to dance around the edges of Asmodeus's instructions, as she certainly did with respect to many other potential hostages that she claimed were not really hostages."

"I therefore ask you to read the mind of Abrogail Thrune and confirm to me that I have no children of Cheliax remaining and known to her nor in the least bit suspected by her, now that she, Willa, and Jacint have been killed.  Or, if there were other children stolen of me, I would have Hell and Cheliax swear satisfactory oaths to see all pregnancies ended swiftly before they can be ensouled.  I will pay for costs incurred there, as a salve to Hell's pride, though it would be greatly in your interest to do so even if I paid nothing."

"I will see this matter on an oath-assured path toward satisfactory resolution, or else burn all Cheliax to ash, before this scry ends."  Keltham holds up a lesser mirror to the scry-node, angling it so that it shows the land of Cheliax far far below him, upon the curve of Golarion where it floats in space.

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no no no no no NO NO NO NO

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"If we are inclined to give you this assurance, we will do so before this scry ends," the devil says, and turns to Abrogail, looking, now, substantially less bored. "Have you assurances of interest to this Keltham, your majesty?" The title is, of course, mockery; they weren't using it when they thought she was the Queen of a powerful and capable Cheliax.

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"I have not -"

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"I am unassured by her words and only satisfied by what you swear in Asmodeus's name were her thoughts."

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Her thoughts?  She tries to bend them, of course she does, she has never given Keltham any children other than the one she held within herself, now slain by him before it could be ensouled -

(Scattered his children wide, priestesses and wizards and noblewomen; a few where not even Church or Crown knew where to find them, peasant women taken anonymously and returned anonymously and told to keep silence, and some of those beyond Cheliax's borders -)

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"Do the means exist to identify all those in Cheliax, or all those in any specific duchy of it; or who would that question be asked, if not you."

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Yes, of course, they kept records -

(But not complete records, for they wished to ensure that the story would be irrevocably a tragedy according to dath ilani tropes, so that having ensured a dath-ilan-unhappy ending they could then work further to make it the specific kind of dath-ilan-unhappy they wanted; they tried to make it impossible for Keltham to retrieve all his children no matter how hard he tried, impossible even for Cheliax to retrieve them, leaving no pathway or possible twist of the story by which it would all have a dath-ilan-happy ending after all -)

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"Who kept the records?"

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The task was delegated to a fifth-circle of Asmodeus by herself and Aspexia; records would be within the Palace Forbiddance in Egorian, probably in a section that deals in secret project records.

(nothing written down or recorded about the extra babies, they weren't that stupid)

(doesn't think about how Aspexia Rugatonn thought it was fine, because there are no excuses, no defenses, but there sure is a pre-thought about how that is a defense she's not trying to offer Hell)

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