Nethys guesses, swifter than mortal intellect and based on sight of worlds far distant, that the Game exists in part within the tensions between what Keltham and Abrogail and other key characters believe, and reality; how reality is found to visibly differ or invisibly agree with their expectations.

The Game is not, by its nature, from its beginning an eroLARP; the events which made Keltham think of that possibility, show no signs to Nethys of probability-warping in that direction.

But once Keltham thinks of that, and other characters see him thinking it, the Game's interplay between character expectations and Nethys-witnessed reality (and, perhaps, what is witnessed on some higher level yet by other watchers?) makes those putative tropes key elements of the Game's unfolding, whether in breach or hidden observance.  For the Game does seem to be a thing of beliefs and their subversions.

Carissa tells Keltham fewer lies; she tells herself that she's afraid to try to lie about her sexuality to him, because he's using the Second Law drawn from the plane of 'tropes'.  Carissa exposes more of her true self to him, and Keltham loves all that he sees—

—and Nethys sees a potential grand-strategy, a perhaps-intended Game-path: this Keltham would be more open to the concept that Asmodeus is not wholly inimical to every kind of human being, he might be open to the possibility of leaving Asmodeus alive and with some utility to His utilityfunction remaining.  If all of Keltham's loves can be preserved.

...it's sort of too late to preserve Asmodia, her sanity got injured in Hell while the Zon-Kuthon godwar was going on... Nethys did not guess, quickly enough, that it would happen, did not do the right setup work in advance...

...but Nethys wades on through iteration Keltham-3, probing, testing possibilities.

Asmodia is Chosen of Rovagug, and Creation is almost entirely destroyed as the end result.

...But the Distributed Nethysi have learned from it. And then, for another Nethys, the Game begins anew.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and a Nethys who has seen the futures of four Keltham-Games witnesses it.

This time, He'll bring in Milani, though She won't choose an oracle; and between the two They can try to cripplingly wound Zon-Kuthon just before His imprisonment, so that Dou-Bral will break free from inside Him; or failing that, Iomedae can consume Him and be strengthened during the greater godwar to come.

Crippling Zon-Kuthon doesn't work on the first try.

It does work on the second.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion...  That previous possibility-run, the sixth, went quite well, compared to others that had come before.  Will the Game let Nethys play almost-exactly the same way twice, if Nethys tries that?

...Creation comes literally to an end, Keltham and Pharasma dying together in a fire.

The Game, it seems, hasn't been set up to encourage its player to play it exactly the same way twice.

So then a Keltham appears in a Golarion; and a Nethys decides that (given how the last sight-of-possibility ended) it's worth checking if doing something stranger, newer, and more counterintuitive is the path to a still better ending (as Nethys defines betterness).

What if He leaves Cayden and Milani out of it all, this time, and instead pushes as hard as possible on corrupting Keltham to Asmodeanism generally, and shipping him to Abrogail Thrune particularly?  Is that maybe the key to everything?

It isn't.

A Keltham appears in a Golarion, and more Nethysi are seeing Nethysi, by this time, it no longer resembles an exact stacking of iterations; there are Nethysi visible partway through their Games but not finished in them, though the whole lattice remains well-founded...

...one can't have Snack Service prevent Keltham from having any kids, because then when Keltham reaches Osirion he doesn't feel time-pressured enough to start augmenting his stats; and an unaugmented Keltham can hardly succeed in threatening Creation, or even succeed at concealing his own intentions...

The Nethysi suspected as much beforehand.  But after enough other tries and interventions, you dedicate a handful of timelines to testing batches of obvious-seeming propositions like that one.

Or the proposition that Otolmens will act on sufficiently alarming information Asmodia receives, once Asmodia becomes legible enough to Otolmens and She starts to understand some of what Asmodia is thinking.  Asmodia has to be protected, but not so protected that she ends up staying around Keltham...

...and in time, Keltham appears in Golarion, and Nethys witnesses it, and the Things that watch from orthogonal angles crowd around in numbers far greater than in the glimpsed possibilities, though it takes some time for Nethys's fragments to realize that; just as it takes His fragments time to pass word among themselves and realize Keltham's import at all.

Nethys fragments have sometimes considered the theory that the Things, in observing events, make them more real.

Nethys observer-moments who find themselves observed by few or no Things tend to reject this theory; if it's true, it'd be very surprising to find themselves in a universe with no Things watching it.

Conversely, Nethysi who find themselves in one of those numerically-rare universes which are being watched by great numbers of Things, tend to suddenly reverse course about this belief, and conclude that those numerically infrequent observer-moments witnessed by Things are perhaps the most real observer-moments, after all.

(The Nethysi in other less-watched possibilities, as may witness their neighbor-Nethys come to this conclusion, can only shake Their heads about it; They can see why that rare other Nethys would make the mistake, but really the Observer finds Himself over here, in that Nethys's own experience, where hardly any Things are watching at all!)

This Nethys of the most recent iteration, having spotted the Things, now concludes that this possibility will be one of the most real ones; maybe it is the real timeline and all the other glimpsed-possibilities were only possibilities, real to some vastly lesser degree; implying a hard switch from exploration to exploitation–

But it is already too late (by the time Nethys realizes that much) to take the surest route He can see from here without exactly repeating Himself, which would have involved subsidizing Keltham for three circles from Abadar rather than four.  Nethys is already set upon a riskier path by the time He adds up all His information.

So there's nothing for it but to play the Game with verve (as probably the Things themselves did anticipate), using and combining all of the advantages that Nethys has found so far.  Including moves that haven't been combined previously and whose combined outcomes are not tested, for the Game doesn't encourage trying to play it safely.

Carissa's sexuality, Pilar's sexuality, Yaisa's sexuality, are made known to Keltham.

He is told truthfully that Pilar Pineda came back from Elysium; he is shown that it's possible for a soul to believe itself free and safe, and still come back to serve Asmodeus in Golarion and then in Hell.

Keltham hears from Pilar that a submissive can want, need, something to crush her down like a bug underfoot; that when she feels disgusting she needs to be crushed by something that sees her as equally lowly and degraded, for that part of herself to feel seen, acknowledged, punished...

All to get Keltham to a point, previously reached in only two fully witnessed iterations, where Keltham will be okay with not ripping Asmodeus out of reality, with offering Asmodeus enough of Creation's Future that Asmodeus does not fight to the death or try to release Rovagug; where Keltham will be fine with Pilar telling him of the offer that Milani will convey to Asmodeus after Cayden Cailean is dead - yes, Keltham (Pilar says, in Nethys's vision of previous possibility, in a telepathic meeting of three minds), yes Keltham that's an okay way for a mortal to be, I still believe that, even now that I've come to know myself and all the ways Asmodeus wasn't the best possible god for me -

And the vision plays on, to show what approximately should have happened, if it had all gone as Nethys's walkthrough showed, of the best previous endings He'd reached, interpolated between pieces He was trying to combine for the first time -