Twenty hours later Carissa is prepared to declare - no, she's not declaring anything. That's how the tropes get you.
It went well, though. Pilar's selectees are smart, and motivated, and they in fact have better habits of thought than people who grew up in Cheliax, which is awkward for whoever designed the present Chelish educational system but Carissa doesn't care much about that person.
The headbands are useful for - well, they're concretely useful for grasping concepts more quickly and noticing muddles more quickly and connecting ideas more quickly, and they're less-concretely useful for making people feel like the kind of person who can do mystical things from an alien planet.
Carissa increasingly suspects that an essential ingredient, with Keltham, was that he wasn't just delivering the lectures, he was delivering the treasured lore of a powerful impossibly distant civilization, he was delivering a story in which they would master a new Art, and - as a fact about humans, maybe also a fact about devils - that's more motivating, more powerful, it makes it feel possible to achieve anything and it makes it actually possible to achieve more.
Putting on an artifact headband delivered directly from Hell serves the same purpose, anyway. The kids -
(half them are older than she is)
- the kids are doing well. At this rate in a few days she'll be able to explain her work on corrigibility and one of them will have a useful insight and she'll have something to show off to Aspexia Rugatonn while she makes a fuss about how the Church should let her say, truthfully, that you might come to Carissa Sevar in Hell if you cry out for her.