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Otolmens is accordingly annoyed.

She prohibits all unauthorized divine interventions that deliberately causally impact Keltham—an intervention centered on Keltham himself, this time, not Ostenso.  Irori is in no position to advise Her otherwise.

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(And a fragment of Nethys sees Asmodeus's successful tactic, watching with continuing interest, with rare fascination...)

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Security Dominates Peranza into quitting, giving Keltham the Sevar-invented story of her having realized her own unhappiness.

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By then Keltham has already accepted Peranza as one of his girlfriends and masochists; he has gone much deeper into relationship with her than he went with Yaisa, who was just fun.

It hits Keltham far harder, what happens to Peranza; but his thoughts show what Peranza must be Dominated to say, to make him accept the unpleasant reality.

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Instructions from Asmodeus prohibit using Keltham's loved ones as leverage over him, or hurting them to affect him; they don't actually say to exempt anyone Keltham loves from their ordinarily incurred misfortunes.

Ferrer Maillol sends Peranza to Hell, with instructions to have a bad time there.

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The Project masters spellsilver, and Keltham does think then to run a stricter test.

But by then the Conspiracy has had longer to prepare, with a larger budget once it became clear the whole incredible concept was going to work; and the Conspiracy has recorded far more of Keltham's thoughts, and understood what sort of tests he might run; they spot his resolve the night before it all happens.  Keltham's wariness is not roused as it was by the eroLARP tropes, by the supposed Zon-Kuthon godwar, by the strangeness of Snack Service.  There are magic items already forged, books already edited.  He is weaker to illusions, without any Glimpse of Truth or even Dispel about himself.

They pass his test.

And Keltham goes on to reinvent more technologies.

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...until at the last a group of Rovagug cultists pass through all Security measures, and kidnap Keltham; and tell him the plain truth about Golarion; and what his hosts have done with the knowledge he gave them; and the questions for which Keltham should demand answers sworn in Asmodeus's name; and also they tell him of Hell.

As for why or how something like that could even happen: it usually makes sense to consider Rovagug as a blindly hungry unintelligent cosmic locust writhing endlessly in Its prison, but every now and then some completely other thing happens instead: like the alghollthus calling down the Starstone; or Sarenrae deciding to smite an entire city in a way that She later regrets and that opens up a rift leading to Rovagug's vault; or Aroden dying, contrary to prophecy and shattering it, before He can make Golarion His divine realm and contain Rovagug more strictly; or Rovagug cultists successfully kidnapping Keltham and loosing him on a world of shattered prophecy.

That is all that a non-Outer-God can say here; you won't understand if your own hunger as a giant bug hasn't advanced to the point of eating worlds.

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In Cheliax, when a fuckup as great as the Rovagug penetration happens, you're not going to get off the hook entirely no matter what you do, if you were in charge.  But it does still help for there to be scapegoats.

All who remain on the Project are interrogated under Detect Thoughts...

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...and one of the Project personnel is determined to have had Rovagug-sympathetic thoughts, as Rovagug might perhaps have seen, used as a beacon.

So—with her protective boyfriend now gone and not coming back, and Cheliax divinely forbidden to use Keltham's women as hostages against him which makes her less valuable—Asmodia is broken in Golarion by Abrogail Thrune, and has her mind read to find her worst of fears; and Asmodia is given over to Cheliax's uneasy ally Nidal, to be tormented again and then maledicted on to Xovaikain.

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And Keltham emerges into a world he has already damned, for by then, Osirion, his god's land, is gone, ruined by Cheliax, and Cheliax is now crushing its way through the rest of Golarion.

 

 

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This Keltham has not seen Ione Sala obtain special book powers after he advanced her romance, the word 'eroLARP' has not particularly occurred to him, he has not thought much on tropes for he has not seen much of tropes.

To him, by now, this world, Golarion, is just reality, and has been for a while, the reality in which he meant to live and raise a family and in time go to Hell together with them.  He had already put aside his thoughts on how real any of it really was, and accepted Golarion for his new world.

His mind questions the reality now, of course it does; but to his emotions, at this point, this is just the world, and he has destroyed it.

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When Keltham makes Early Judgment of himself, as he has not done in some time now for fear of addiction, he finds himself bound for a place of fire and endless screaming.  Pharasma's judgment does take account of intentions, but Keltham was at least a little selfish, in liking the illusory world in which he found himself; and there comes a point of consequence beyond which intentions count for less in Pharasma's court.

And there is also (as Keltham has now learned, now realized) an abortion that he requested of Ione, with Alter Self, of a pregnancy that was allowed to go for longer than a twelve-week interval; he has a child, and that child is in the Boneyard.  Or more than one; Cheliax will obviously have stolen more children from him, and there will have been a few miscarriages.  But Ione's child is the one for which Pharasma will account him murderer.

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It doesn't shatter anything in Keltham that wasn't shattered already.  Casting aside your Law is not hard.  He decides that he will, after some preparation, just shift himself to Neutral Evil.  It'll break his bond to Abadar, but he wasn't planning to keep it anyways.  If "Abadar" did not care to pay a little more and save him from this fate, he owes that god nothing; It intended to make use of Keltham, was all.

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You cannot easily break a dath ilani's deontology just with ordinary trauma.  They are not made, do not choose to individually make themselves, to be easily broken; for most ordinary traumas they could just decide not to break, instead.  To call someone from that culture "traumatized" is scarcely more useful then calling them "insane", for purposes of filling out a detailed careful predictive model of precisely what they'll do next.

But there are sufficiently extreme and prior-improbable life experiences which will cause a dath ilani to reconsider whether their previous set of ethical injunctions are appropriate to their new environment.

The Project has not prioritized corrupting Keltham to evil, with Carissa Sevar not in charge of it; he knows what masochism is, and submission, but Carissa Sevar was instructed by authority not to push him into it and risk triggering his suspicion.

There's no plausible version of the story, in this iteration of the story, where Keltham's mistake as evaluated looking back was his being too tolerant of evils and short-term harms.  His mistake must have been—not even being Good, so much as, being himself.

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The foundation of Civilization's second-order utilitarianism, as taught in their schools, is that—among other things—being cautiously nice isn't supposed to result in your loved ones being shattered in Hell and you having helped an endless-torture dimension to conquer your host planet.  Being cautiously nice isn't always supposed to result in the locally best outcome, maybe not even a good outcome, but it's not meant to result in that.  If it does, surprising you, maybe you were wrong about something.

(Though this Keltham will still, to the end of his mortal existence, never break any explicit oath that he has made.  He will never stab anyone personally with a knife, will not harm anyone in any way that would be effective for somebody inside a physicalist universe and hallucinating.  Just in case he's in dath ilan and insane and dreaming all of this as his brain's excuse to violate deontology.)

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Carissa Sevar is less watched, on the Project, with Keltham out and gone.  There is less Security on the archduke's villa.  In time she has her mid-night revelation of her own folly...

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...but this Carissa does not think at once of how Keltham might destroy Creation.  There was no Vision of Hell and no godwar and Zon-Kuthon has not been a subject much discussed; nor whether Civilization would delete itself to end Xovaikain if it had no other options.

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(The thought of erasing her memory and selling her soul to Dispater doesn't even occur to her.  You need to have lived in a visibly trope-influenced universe for that to seem like the sort of thing that people get away with, and this Carissa Sevar hasn't been there.)

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Her escape from the archduke's villa is more harrowing than in other timelines.  Osirion is already ruined and conquered by Cheliax, and anyone there with high Wisdom who could not flee chose to wisely die in battle; escape is not as simple as praying to Abadar and then killing herself to await resurrection.  This Carissa Sevar does not hold commanding authority on the Project, does not have Securities personally loyal to her in hopes of a kinder Hell.  She has not been tormented twice by Abrogail Thrune, and is not fifth-circle.  She did reach her fourth circle, in time, for she was casting and crafting under peril deeper in some ways than the Worldwound; but she cannot Teleport under her own power.

Carissa Sevar escapes anyways.  Irori does not bestow His attention lightly.

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Keltham is not easily found, but he has taught this Carissa Sevar of blind-coordination focal points.  There should be a place that Carissa Sevar would think of after relinquishing Asmodeus, that Keltham would also think of.

Her first guess doesn't work.

Going to the ruins of the Iomedaen temple nearest to Keltham's arrival point by the Worldwound does.

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From there, Carissa goes to meet her Keltham.

Of Wishes and artifact headbands she has none, nor the souls of those he once employed or loved; there was no visible way to obtain those, in this branch of reality.

All she has, is all she is; and if she doesn't offer Keltham that, it means offering him nothing.

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And Carissa Sevar finds her Keltham, and falls to the floor at his feet; and offers up all she is, in sorrow and in penance, to help him in his plan against Asmodeus.  For she is sure, knowing Keltham, that he has a plan like that, and that he is not content to wait in despair.

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By then Keltham has scryed Peranza and Asmodia's fate, knows that Peranza is already shattered in Hell beyond all hope of repair, that Asmodia in Xovaikain still remembers something of herself as she screams and screams and screams and sometimes calls his name.

Keltham of the latest iteration found it necessary to proclaim that he'd been effectively killed, destroyed, by his experiences.  The Keltham of the zeroth iteration doesn't have any need to say anything like that; it's just true.

Carissa returns to a man that she has already destroyed, whose love for her is shattered along with everything else about him that she loved.

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This Keltham warns her not at all.  He accepts his fate, to betray her as she betrayed him.  Carissa didn't want to do it, but did; and Keltham does the same, because he has children in the Boneyard and sometimes Asmodia screams his name.

He binds Carissa by geas to honesty and promise-keeping—for he still has great sums that Cheliax by compact owes him, though he negotiated less aggressively in this timeline.

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Carissa Sevar accepts that binding as part of what she thinks is her penance.

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