"No. He does it to discourage failure and to forge them into better instruments of His will. And Pharasma calls this Evil, because Evil is what it is called when you pursue ambitions without specifically tracking what will appease Pharasma."

"Well, then, you have reached a Lawful Evil afterlife."

"What is the non-Pharasma-appeasing constraint you are working under that means you have to do slightly expensive things to be nice to prisoners?"

"Limited budget."

"I'm not asking why these things aren't free for you to do, I'm asking why you have to do them."

"Well, we want people to be happy and have things they want and such, so if we skipped lots of opportunities for that, then we wouldn't get things we want."

(Carissa's thoughts are muddled and her focus is poor when she contemplates service to Asmodeus. Easier to focus on her curiosity about this world, her concerns about soul damage, whether they'll give her a Detect Magic lens if she asks nicely, how comfortable a hot bath might be… Really, anything non-Asmodean that springs to mind.

(For context, this is not a specialized curse targeting Carissa, as much as it may be an effective way to manipulate someone who values cognition to the extent she does. It is a property of any strongly aligned plane that it mildly interferes with cognition opposed to its alignment, and while this can be prevented through various means, mitigating it for a prisoner would generally not be in line with Heaven's interests. Carissa is not in Eritrice's realm, and while even outside of such places manipulation like this is not common, it's generally considered justified and advisable in handling, say, loyal Asmodeans.))

So though the cleric she answers to would consider it a mistake, she asks "Why do you want that?".

"That's a question with many answers. Personally, I'm ex-mortal, and I think during my life I liked myself better when I acted towards the well-being of others? Like it was the person I wanted to be, when I could afford it, and now I can afford more of it. And the Upper Planes are decent afterlives, people strive to come here, and we have to patch them up with the materials at hand, which does affect their personalities, but even before that … it's pretty common, for people to flinch when they see others suffer even when they know what they're seeing won't happen to them, and feel proud and happy about their generosity when they share crops from a good year with their neighbors, even if the norm is essentially a form of insurance and they wouldn't send their spare grain across the continent for free."

Carissa has seen people flinch like that. It's a pattern of stupidity that can sometimes become heresy, if left uncorrected, but it's not that hard to correct when caught early. This usage of pride seems outright heretical, though. …which reminds her, this is probably a wrong line of questioning. Why is it hard for her to focus on things like that?

"Do you know why it's hard for me to focus? I wasn't having this much trouble earlier."

"What is your understanding of planar physics in Pharasma's creation?"

"It's never been an area of focus for me."

(She's not lying. Furthermore, the planes she'd be most familiar with would plausibly be Hell and the Abyss, where 'it's hard to focus on good thoughts' as an environmental constant is, for the typical occupant, utterly swamped by the actions of the local fiends and probably not salient as a planar trait in particular. If that's even how things work in what she calls Pharasma's creation, it might not be.)

"I'm not fully familiar with the conditions in Pharasma's creation, but locally, the situation is as follows: the forces of Hell promote various cognitive hacks, which produce benefits to them as an entangled side effect of their usage. On the Material Plane, this primarily works out to giving them additional power, while enabling people to think in the way that Hell taught them to. The power of Hell is interfered with here, and those entanglements mean that the thoughts themselves are also weakened. It is one of the more blatant vulnerabilities of Hell's teachings, though it is likely that they have given you many excuses for the more subtle ones. A mirror effect does actually apply as well, Hell has to resort to interfering with the otherwise in many ways more effective method we encourage. You are most likely intelligent enough to be able to use techniques that fall under merely Lawful influences, without regards for harm or help to others, neither tyranny nor freedom. For example, you may wish to consider pure math or pure spell design. Not as taught through threats, but as the underlying work that contributes directly. After all, neither threat to oneself nor concern for threat to others is on its own enough to enable one to figure out spells, it merely provides motivation to do what is the core of the work, and that core of the work is untouched, at least here. If you were in a realm like the Abyss, you would find that while the idea of tormenting someone might come easily, both you and your victim would find the math of going through the actual spell quite difficult."

So they're causing a captive whom they know is a wizard to experience cognitive difficulties immediately when thinking thoughts they don't like. And claiming it's environmental and not about prisoners, which would be an insultingly obvious lie from anyone who isn't a celestial especially given that she's wearing a cursed headband, but this is way too competent a use of incentives for celestials.

Getting out of the habit of thinking Asmodean thoughts is a trap. Developing a flinch every time she tries to think one is also a trap. It's not obvious how the latter can go that much more wrong than causing the former, though.

(And of course celestials mistakenly think that the celestial way is better. This is barely worth noting.)

She really wants to inspect the headband. (The thought that it might be useful for figuring out how to make cognitive boosts conditional on intent of cognition, which the military could really use, is slightly frustrating to think through. The thought that she didn't know this was possible and it sounds really technically interesting is not.)

"Understood."

Maybe scourging herself will help her to focus on Lord Asmodeus's will? She'll try the weird hollow tube scourge.

This is the worst scourge she has ever used. It's incredibly lightweight, so it's hard to apply much real force with it, and the handle is excessively narrow and smooth, which becomes particularly salient when it slips out of her hand. It's hard to characterize the effects of it as painful at all.

This has not helped her to focus on Lord Asmodeus's will.

At this point she's now curious about the other objects here, and this is as good an excuse as any to check if the knife is actually workable, which realistically would be hard to do discreetly.

The knife looks plenty sharp and can cleanly cut her hair, but refuses to even scratch her, which suggests it's generally useless as a weapon. The tub water ranges from bracingly cool to luxuriously warm, and she can't access whatever heating apparatus it uses. The water and liquid soaps actively refuse to get near her mouth or nostrils, and the solid soaps are utterly tasteless, which displays some significant control over the elements. (The water refusing to go in her mouth is confusing until she remembers the claims that the elements here aren't actually compatible with her physiology.)

Scratching herself isn't really the best method but she does, at least, have a cleaning item, and even if the angels let her give herself some disease they clearly aren't inclined to let her die of it, since they're not letting her die of … whatever's up with the air. She didn't feel like she was suffocating before she fell unconscious, this could all be a lie, but it's a complicated stupid lie at least by the point where she's in a specialized containment facility with a bunch of magic conspicuously going around.

She does a thorough self-cleaning, which is not as dramatic in its effects as it could be, probably because someone was prestidigitating her clean while she was restrained. And then she gets to work.

It's slow, and tedious, and not as effective as if she was working with proper implements, but it does, actually, work, her fingernails are not incapable of injuring a cooperative subject.

Pain is painful, if not actually amazingly so; tools are useful and she doesn't have them. It does not allow her to focus on the majestic will of her lord Asmodeus as much as she might have hoped, but this is about what she expected.

This situation is a mess. She doesn't, actually, have a plan for what to do if held prisoner by Heaven or some incredibly wealthy organization impersonating them. They're confusing enough that it's unclear what to signal to them for the best outcomes here. They want her to believe that they can just hang onto her soul, against her will, indefinitely, while keeping her conscious. Which is quite a claim, and she can see why they would make it, if she believed it it'd be useful to get her cooperation, there's a reason Cheliax is so conspicuous about its use of Malediction, but also this is just not how death works.

Not how death works in Pharasma's domain. Which they're claiming she's outside of. She didn't spend very much time having expectations about the outside of Pharasma's domain but if she had it wouldn't have involved humanoids and beds and lantern archons and Asmodeus. The beds might be telepathy but she did, actually, personally observe some humanoids and a lantern archon and cacodaemons. Though possibly those memories should be discounted due to mysterious fainting and the, uh, mentions of memory alteration even within the scenario, though she doesn't think removing those would be that hard.

If they wanted her to be maximally eager to believe the claim about her being stuck with them they wouldn't be claiming that death inevitably involves soul damage no matter what she does, they'd bring up an offer that if she's incredibly useful she could pursue lichdom or such even though they're normally against it. Letting the prisoner sit around being terrified of inevitable doom, then offering them a conditional path out is in fact a valid tactic, it just doesn't really mesh with Heaven.

Eventually, her contemplations are interrupted by the usual ambient voice. "Are you in a good position to discuss medical results?"

"Now's as good a time as any."

"What's your understanding of soul anatomy?"

"Not great."

"You appear to have some personality damage, as well as some memory loss. Neither of these look targeted, and they appear to have been a one-time event, not an ongoing condition. You don't appear to be experiencing accelerated aging either."