Carissa Sevar: "I still want to know the plan before I agree to give you my headband and fifteen Wishes, because I want the headband on when I learn the plan and because I might not want to help you do it faster. For example if you are going to have Rovagug eat everybody, delaying you a day is more important than anything else I can readily think of."
dath ilani: "Do you know something I don't about the probability of Rovagug successfully eating everybody if Asmodeus lets it out, as opposed to the other gods killing Asmodeus and then successfully forcing It back into a sealed vault and this time giving the key to Abadar or Iomedae like sane people? I admit that Asmodeus releasing Rovagug was not something I'd previously expected as the result of my plan, it is a real problem, and I am currently thinking of what to do about that. I do thank you for pointing it out, for I am still an alien to this world and to Asmodeanism even with lesser augmentation."
Carissa Sevar: "- well, the prophecy is that Rovagug eats everything, so there's that, and also I think the other gods couldn't beat Rovagug and Asmodeus fighting together to destroy the world, they might all be able to beat Asmodeus if they teamed up and they might even without Asmodeus be able to beat Rovagug if they teamed up but they definitely wouldn't be expected to do both.
....I really kind of think you should, uh, hire Osirion's personality-damage-treatment girl, give me the diamonds, and let me handle this. I am not the best person for it but this is my world and I like getting smarter and I won't let something bad happen to your kids."
dath ilani: "I really think this is a conversation we should have at mutual INT 29, that we are wasting time and causing emotional wear to ourselves by having it at INT 24 instead, and that it's ludicrous to claim you'd rather delay one more day on the world maybe ending than to give me one more day to work on Wish phrasings and maybe not end the world at all."
"That said, as a token of why I think there's complicated issues here that we'd obviously be better off discussing at INT 29:"
"Some books claim that only Asmodeus can let out Rovagug. Other books say that any of the ancient gods who cooperated to seal Rovagug have the power to let it out. Asmodeus would just be the proud god who'd rather go down with the multiverse than negotiate if Civilization got the upper hand on him, which is why the prophecy is about Asmodeus."
"Now suppose it were the case that releasing Rovagug would or would probably end with Rovagug being beaten back again. There's an obvious reason why that information would be considered an infohazard and they would not tell you about it, namely, the threat of Rovagug held by multiple gods is a key element of the current divine negotiating equilibrium, that prevents reality from going under what any of the ancient gods consider to be the utility of the world ending. From any of their perspectives, if the true probability of Rovagug ending the world became knowledge among themselves, they might lose that guarantee. Nethys could know but not be allowed to tell anyone. It's not something that could possibly happen with ideal agents, but there's Chaotic gods in this mix."
"I assign this claim a higher probability than I otherwise would, that there's information in play considered infohazardous to gods, because Iomedae cautioned me in a vision that Cayden Cailean was trying to hide information from Her even though she thought it unlikely that Cayden Cailean had betrayed Good."
Carissa Sevar: "- how long am I waiting, if I agree to wait to discuss this until I'm INT 29."
dath ilani: "A week of realtime, two weeks of demiplane time if you opt to stay in here. If anything goes wrong with the diamond synthesis requiring a delay of more than an additional two days before your trip to the City of Brass, or if the trip to the City of Brass fails, we will obviously start talking immediately."
"Assuming, of course, that I don't just make it up to INT 29 and realize I'm an idiot. I wouldn't want you to rely on that, but it sure is the sort of thing that happens to dath ilani in novels, and apparently in real life or whatever this is. I realized I'd been all kinds of idiot after I got a Fox's Cunning and then again when I got the +6 version of the headband."
Carissa Sevar: "We start talking...while you have INT 29 and I have INT ...22?"
dath ilani: "24. I'd obviously lend you my +6 Intelligence headband, my +6 Wisdom headband, my +4/+0/+4 headband, and hand over all of my augmentation scrolls and items. You'd need all that anyways even after you got Wished up to be at INT 29."
Carissa Sevar: "Do you swear that, in your understanding of my interests, it's in my interests to loan you the headband and give you the Wishes?"
dath ilani: "Sell the Wishes. But no. That is - more complicated than I am willing to swear to, right now, though I am still dath ilani and I still do not lie. I see - an argument - for how this is in your interests. It seems probably stronger to me than the obvious argument the other way. But you are an alien being who I never did understand, I think, and there are aspects of this that are genuinely complicated even by my standards. I am trying to think inside the world where I am pretending Snack Service does not exist, which will be easier when I have more Wisdom, and I am very sure that is in your interests, that I get better at pretending Snack Service doesn't exist, but if you make a decision based on that, we're not pretending Snack Service doesn't exist, are we? So you shouldn't take that into account at all. I cannot give you an answer based on reality, or shouldn't, rather, because reality is not the basis on which we need to be making our decisions."
"So no. I do not so swear. I'm not, actually, a devil, but I am not a cleric of Abadar and this is not an Abadaran deal. You decide for yourself if you're willing to take it."
Carissa Sevar: Maybe half a million people, in Egorian. Maybe less than that if the population figures are lies. They'll go to Hell, some of them calling her name, which doesn't matter because she doesn't get Cheliax yet.
Would they want her to help Keltham with an awful horrible plan that he'd have just told her by now if he didn't think she'd violently oppose it? If it saved them? It's not Asmodean to care about that. It's probably some flavor of Good. It's not helpful, either, she has no idea of the answer.
Would she? Little Carissa Sevar, a wizard student, would she want greater-Carissa-Sevar to have less power so that she could live and not go to Hell? If she really understood what Hell was?
No, if she really understood what Hell was she'd want it fixed. She'd want that more than she wanted anything else.
So the only real question, then, is whether this makes that likelier. Whether Keltham, as he stands before her, is someone who she trusts more than she trusts herself, with Hell growing into something she can bear.
It's simple when you think about it like that.
"No."
dath ilani: "Your reasoning?"
Carissa Sevar: "The only thing to consider is the ultimate outcome and you said you don't think this affects that. I trust that my having resources will make the ultimate outcome better more than I trust that you having resources will make the ultimate outcome better.
I would probably consider giving them to Keltham on the grounds that I owe Keltham, but you're insisting you're not Keltham and we're not playing by those rules, and under the rules you chose, no."
dath ilani: "No, I said that I'd try the same thing at some point either way. If this affected only timing then all you'd care about is one more day before, say, on my old plan whose problem I now see, Asmodeus releases Rovagug and destroys the world with some probability. In that case I could not have truthfully said that I thought I saw an argument for this being in your interests and that it seemed stronger than the converse argument. I am - basically expecting that the story is telling me to proceed before my children are ensouled and Cheliax attacks Osirion, I am willing to go along with that plotline rather than fight it and risk the story applying additional incentives to me, and I expect that more high-Intelligence prep time on my side produces better outcomes from your own perspective, because, for example, I can spot more issues like the Rovagug one. That's the obvious argument."
Carissa Sevar: "Uh huh, and I have more confidence that my being smarter and having more time to think produces better outcomes on that front than that you being smarter does, so I'd rather I be smarter for that extra time than you."
dath ilani: "I suspect you're looking for a symmetry between us that doesn't actually exist."
"That said, I'm thinking that Stupider Me has made some mistakes in his handling of this situation, which I am now thinking about how to correct."
"Osirion tells me you have two Chelish corpses in your Bag of Holding, and paid for a third Chelish person to be raised and left him in Osirion's care. This conversation has reached something of a temporary stalling point, I suspect, so I now ask what is the deal with that and if there's anything time-sensitive about it."
Carissa Sevar: "Had to kill my escort to get to you. Or - maybe I didn't have to, but I was worried you'd do something stupid and I'd already tried the move where I do something clever to protect everything you care about so you don't do anything stupid, and at some point the best move, when you're stuck, is just to get out. So I killed my escort. Olegario is mine, he's pledged his loyalty to me, but I can't actually protect him in Hell yet and I don't actually know how he'd take it if I told him I'm going to kill Asmodeus and take His job. So I had to kill him too, but I had him raised immediately.
The other two are Hadrian, who is a perfectly unobjectionable Chelish seventh circle wizard, and Abarco, who I personally dislike though he's not objectively worse than anyone else. Cheliax will probably Raise them both, they need wizards right now, but I can't really think of a reason to save them the diamond."
dath ilani: "Any reason we shouldn't drop them off in Egorian with a note from me saying that I didn't wantonly destroy their utility and I hope they'll take good care of mine?"
Carissa Sevar: "...not a strong one, if you want to do that?" Keltham would've been mad at Abarco for raping her Keltham, in fact, wasn't mad about that, when he heard about it, probably because he had a whole lot more to be mad about.
dath ilani: "They'll probably read through that I did it to confuse them, but probably isn't certainly, and if they're confused enough to start with, they might get more confused. There's several things here that go better if they consider me relatively more open to negotiation, also. Optimizing around Cheliax's response is much more important than causing them to use up two True Resurrection diamonds."
"Come to think, I should have them dropped off with a couple of Raise Dead diamonds."
Carissa Sevar: "I did tell the devils I was complicatedly serving Asmodeus's interests. I figured it was good if they weren't sure, whether I ended up serving Asmodeus's interests or not, though it looks like, in fact, I am."
dath ilani: "Plausibly helps, yeah. Sort of sad where a lot of what it potentially helps with is taking them by surprise about destroying Egorian."
"You've had what sounds like an intense day. Do you, in fact, possibly need some rest time before you could even give consent to complicated deals in a way that you'd feel had come from your real self, or for that matter, some alone time to fail to rederive your memory-gambit-self's plan?"
Carissa Sevar: From Carissa's perspective it feels like she's being entirely reasonable and the problem here is that Keltham-with-an-identity-crisis is being twisted-into-a-trauma-pretzel while having far more diamonds and riches than any insane traumatized teenager should possess. Which problem will not solve itself if she gets some time to rest and think.
However, she is capable of noticing that probably from Keltham's perspective this is not what it feels like, and that she is going to have to be able to work with Keltham's perspective instead of just smugly refuting it in her own head if she is going to save the world, and also that sometimes when you can identify that from someone else's perspective the situation would look different this is not just a fact about how they're an idiot but is, sometimes, also a fact about the situation.
And she did spend her entire life making incredibly costly mistakes and should probably not assume that she just stopped having that problem forever this morning.
"That might be a good idea. I love you. I'm sorry this is so hard, and I will try to find a way that I can give you this without endangering the entire world."
dath ilani: "All right. Let's head out. You're physically weaker, want to go down first so I can lend you a hand on the rope?"
Carissa Sevar: " - I was planning to just take the fall because it'll make me feel better, honestly."
dath ilani: "I suppose it's good to see, on some level, that you have not changed. I admit I'm also wondering whether INT 29 and WIS 27 would let me put myself back together again, better than this, and maybe be able to feel a sexually sadistic impulse again. Yes, that's emotional blackmail, there's children in Hell and I'm willing to resort to emotional blackmail in the face of that."
"Brain suggested pushing you out of the Rope Trick, maybe as a joke even if it can't be romantic, other parts of my brain are fighting me about it. Sorry. Fall if you're falling."
Carissa Sevar: "There's in fact almost certainly not children in Hell right now? It has happened, across all of history, but, you know, after five years tops they aren't children anymore. I could check, if that's decision-relevant somehow."
dath ilani: "I think if I'm pretending Snack Service doesn't exist I'm pretending that information has positive value to me, if maybe not to you... how would you check?"
Carissa Sevar: "...ask, while doing confidential negotiations with Dispater, which I really believe are an element of a successful plan? Hell's a Lawful place, it keeps records." She jumps.
dath ilani: He climbs.
Tira Shabbar: The Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae has not yet completed the portal.
dath ilani: The man stands with seeming infinite patience, waiting for a lull in the Sarenrite priestess's casting so she can eject them from the demiplane and back to the contingent point of the Material.
He offers Carissa a hand. This obviously is only sensible in case of some minor mishap, so they don't end up separated.
Carissa Sevar: She squeezes his hand. "Do you want the note to Cheliax to be from me or from you. They're more scared of me, at this point."
dath ilani: "Don't take this the wrong way, but what could you possibly have done to make them THAT scared? If it seems wise to say outside the Rope Trick?"
Carissa Sevar: "I'm mostly not proud of the parts of it that were my doing, and the parts that weren't were the doing of the entity you don't want to think about. But also it's just a fact about people, right? You're far away and might destroy them suddenly, and how do they even think about that, what would it even do to fear it? I'm dangerous by their rules. You might annihilate their whole civilization overnight for reasons that wouldn't make sense to them; I might take offense at their stupid face and call them in to my office to answer for it.
People don't - know how to be scared of something in proportion to how bad it'd be, not past their own life. Even I don't, and I'm not sure if it's a bad thing, because I don't know how I'd stand up, under the weight of what's at stake here, if I really felt it."
dath ilani: "Yeah, that's basically what happened to Keltham. You know how he thought, when he got here, that he was Chaotic? Turns out, an unusually selfish dath ilani isn't actually as selfish as, say, a totally average person from Golarion."
Carissa Sevar: "My current theory of people is that they're - not really coherent, they're a bundle of conflicting impulses and the part of them trying to make sense of themselves just has to draw an outline around all the impulses that were recently activated and declare that's who they are. And you're - the desire to get rich and have lots of women and be admired and desired and do cool science and invent clever Prestidigitation tricks and be surrounded by people who really get you and really like you, and also the desire for there not to be kids in Hell, and whatever else, and in dath ilan one set of those got activated, drawn to your attention, and in Golarion...not so much.
And I'm - wanting to be safe, wanting to be strong, wanting to live forever, wanting to not be trapped and helpless, wanting to have lots of incredibly powerful magic items, wanting everyone else in the world to live forever, wanting to get to steer who I have sex with, and I'd probably be fucking Good, if I'd grown up somewhere where my own immortality was certain and safe, and Abaddon was the only thing that ever struck at something deep and core to who I am. I'd probably be one of those angels that guards the River of Souls. I don't wish I was, just, I think it's the same bundle, poked differently."
dath ilani: "And there's probably something that you learn in dath ilan, if you're this much smarter than I was - or something that they'd obviously teach you, if they knew you'd have to half-ass Keeper disciplines for yourself, because your world suddenly needs that of you - whereby - all the people who actually do, go coherent enough to have sorta utility functions, don't just - all end up as the same person. Who is, in Golarion, more or less dath ilani Iomedae. I, alas, was not taught such an art; maybe at INT 29 I could rederive it, and it wouldn't be too late."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't immediately know how to convey it, and maybe I'm doing it wrong. But - when I have the headband, I notice more of what's in the bundle, I'm doing less - hiding parts of it because I can't reconcile them with the rest of me - and even if, I'm deciding to ignore a lot of parts, right now, because saving the world is the only thing that matters - when I decided to kill Olegario it hurt, and I could feel better than I could've if I was stupider how much it hurt, and why I was deciding to do it anyway - instead of choosing blindly -"
dath ilani: "I'm aware of how much I'm hurting you. It's not, actually, helping me be Keltham, because the thing that Keltham does, is stop hurting Carissa, and I am not doing that, because of all the other things I am now aware of."
Carissa Sevar: "...and that doesn't feel, to you, like - Keltham always was a lot of pieces, and one of them is to not hurt Carissa, who he loves, and another is to protect his kids, and another is to not let people go to Hell, and now some different pieces are the ones that pull the strongest, but - they're all you -"
dath ilani: "It'd be more persuasive if you didn't think the lemure was me."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't actually know much about lemures and absolutely have a pile of rationalizations about everything to do with Hell because it was going to happen to me and I was scared! But I think you're Keltham. You're Keltham in an astonishing amount of pain and mostly using - completely new rules for decisionmaking because your old ones worked out so badly, which, well, I can relate to, but you're not -
- look -
When I'd erased my memories and went to Dispater, He asked me what might make my soul less valuable and I thought of Asmodia and Peranza, how I cared about them. And he asked if I'd take 15 less Wishes - I'd asked for 30 - for them to be safe. And I - wanted that - very badly - but I said no, because I was an Asmodean, and I figured I could feel what I felt but I could decide not to use it for making decisions. Thankfully He didn't let me fuck that up, and from my current perspective I was an idiot because Asmodia and Peranza were far more important than the Wishes we were just going to squabble over like a couple of children" while we waited for your diamonds to ripen, she doesn't finish the sentence because the Sarenrae cleric might be listening.
"But - it's Carissa all the way through, right, the same impulses, it's just a question of which ones I'm choosing to ignore because something else is more important. I wish I could say that was some fucking stranger I have no resemblance to, but it wasn't, it was just me, with a stupid goal."
Tira Shabbar: The Grand High Priestess of Sarenrae, having reached a lull in her casting, approaches. "Erased your memory and sold your soul to Dispater for 15 Wishes, hm. Young man, I congratulate you on having somehow found, somewhere in all of Golarion, a woman to court who is even higher in drama than you."
She kicks both of them out of her demiplane without giving them a chance to respond.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is too Wise to get defensive about her life and her choices.
....well. She's close. Maybe if she Wishes on five more Wisdom. Maybe if she does that and takes up meditation.
dath ilani: They're in a different area, now, than the one they Plane Shifted out of, but it's also inside the permanent Mage's Sanctum and just outside a Forbiddance, now with a glowing red transparent curtain to show its presence for people without arcane vision, again with only a single door visible beyond the Forbiddance. "Bitter black bananas," the man says, heading towards the door. "I'm going to go ask a couple of harm-reduction questions of our resident oathbound Iomedaen, you're welcome to follow."
Carissa Sevar: " - I would actually love to talk to a priest of Iomedae, if there's one on site."
dath ilani: "Wizard, and sure, once we get some things out of the way. It's occurring to me that you might also need to do the thing where you finally get out of Cheliax and hit up a real library, which... is not incredibly easy to do directly, here. But you could follow Ri-Dul by scry to Absalom, and tell him to buy books for you, I guess."
They'll pass through an underground hallway with four mysterious numbered doors, go around a bend marked by a curtain that looks yellow from their direction and demarcates a new Forbiddance with a different password "purple petulant petunias", more hallway, more doors. The man knocks at one near the end, labeled 17.
lintamande: The woman who opens the door is perhaps fifty, with short pepper-grey hair and a bat familiar snuggled in the front pocket of her robes, apparently asleep.
dath ilani: "Two questions, I'll ask the lower priority first. It's been purported to me that there's probably no children in Hell because early damnation is very rare. I think I'm obliged to pursue learning whether that's true. Include Boneyard kids. Is that answer already known to you?"
lintamande: "I know a little bit about it. The Church of Sarenrae probably knows more, really. 'no children in Hell' sounds wrong. It might be incredibly rare for children to be damned at trial - probably is - but they can be Maledicted. I've heard of a case of people tracking down and Maledicting a paladin's family. There were children, there."
Carissa Sevar: "This was - recent?"
lintamande: "About a decade back. But the youngest was two, so - still in Hell now, if that was specifically the question you wanted answered.
And I've heard of at least one cleric of Asmodeus who, if he's prepared Malediction and not used it, stops by an orphanage. So as not to waste the spell, right."
Carissa Sevar: "Thank you. I should've thought of - the second, at least, being something someone'd do."
dath ilani: "Is this an extant cleric of Asmodeus, or has somebody already taken care of him? Also, Boneyard-child damnations? That's half of Golarion's soul output."
lintamande: "Oh, we killed him and trapped his soul in a rock at the bottom of the ocean. My understanding is that Boneyard kids lean Chaotic pretty hard, it's just pretty easy to be Chaotic Evil there and kind of hard to be Lawful Evil, what with how Hell doesn't, in fact, control the laws. But I assume they get the occasional one, there are a lot of kids in the Boneyard."
Carissa Sevar: "But those are the ones who, with tons of choices, are choosing Lawful Evil because it appeals to them, yes?"
lintamande: "Because Lawful Evil appeals to them? Yeah, presumably. Because Hell's going to work out for them? Fuck no. Even if you're Lawful Evil to your very core, Hell doesn't actually value that, and it won't actually work out for you in the end. Not for Abrogail Thrune, certainly not for some Boneyard kid."
Carissa Sevar: "I know that. I'm working on it."
lintamande: "Well, if you work on it, one thing I'd keep in mind is - if you kept every kid out of Hell, that'd be - a fraction of a percent. It'd be great work, absolutely the worthy work of a lifetime. The man who identified and killed that particular Asmodean cleric is one of the greatest men I've ever had the honor of knowing.
But most people in Hell kind of suck, and, turns out, being on fire doesn't hurt any less if you kind of sucked, or if you were a grownup, or if you knew what was coming. It burns the same. It destroys you the same. I don't want there to be innocents in Hell. But if you got them all out, I'd have, you know, 99 percent plus of the issues with Hell that I have right now."
Carissa Sevar: "I didn't just mean I was working on the kids."
dath ilani: "Extreme priority question, moderate urgency. This deals in what are now, I guess, my previous plans, which Carissa Sevar has not yet been read in on, so don't mention info about that in front of her."
"In the version of the story where only Asmodeus has Rovagug's key, instead of all the gods who cooperated to seal Rovagug, there was a supposed prophecy about some threat that Asmodeus would let out Rovagug to consume, hoping Rovagug would consume the threat, instead Rovagug consumes everything."
"This obviously makes no sense as a predictable divine error, and it would make more sense if the prophecy was about Asmodeus facing a decision-theoretic threat such that Asmodeus's reply was 'die in a fire'. Asmodeus, not the other gods, because Asmodeus has more pride than other gods and will burn down more branches of reality in which some other god would accept making a concession."
"Carissa, who knows a lot more about Asmodeanism than either of us, worries that if I corner Asmodeus he'll release Rovagug."
"I'm not authorizing you to reveal my prior plans to the general Church of Iomedae over this. But if you have reason to believe that's not going to happen, given the plans I previously had, I need to know about it. Presumably Iomedae already had plans for cornering or extinguishing Asmodeus without Rovagug getting released as a result. Can you find out how that would work? Is it evidently something that would apply only to Iomedae or not to me? Is it something that would evidently apply to both Her plan and mine?"
lintamande: "I expect Iomedae would, when She moved against Asmodeus, have a coalition of the gods that She was confident was sufficient to either prevent Asmodeus releasing Rovagug or beat Rovagug back when released. I don't think She has such a coalition right now."
dath ilani: "That's... not really a great answer, from what I model to be your perspective. Further details requested if you can get it by any means short of reading the Church in on my plans, you have basically unlimited budget but ask me for approval of anything above a hundred thousand gold pieces."
lintamande: "It's not a great answer! But if Iomedae has a secret plan I doubt She's even told Her church. I'll see what I can do all the same."
dath ilani: "I'd say thank you, but, you know."
"Carissa, with me."
He heads off towards the next bend in the hallway.
Carissa Sevar: She ignores him.
She's pretty sure that the part of her which wants to ignore Keltham is a stupid part but if you squish a part every time because it's stupid then you might not notice if it ever wasn't stupid.
dath ilani: He turns back to look at her.
"Is there a reason you're not following?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yeah, I didn't feel like it."
dath ilani: For a second the man smiles. It looks to be involuntary. He looks like Keltham, when he does that.
"TARNISH!"
Carissa Sevar: She's not going to resist punishment, or anything, but she's going to continue not moving.
Tarnish: "Dare I hope that I'm here to hold her down while you hurt her?"
dath ilani: "That would have been a relationship outcome far above my expectations. No. I need you in position to disable Carissa if she tries anything."
"Carissa. There's a lot of entry processing we didn't do with you. Most people here have sworn oaths not to oppose my plans, as a condition of being allowed to possibly reduce harm from them, with a few exceptions like Tarnish who consider themselves more aligned. When I was - wearing a Splendour headband instead of Intelligence - and finally meeting you again - I did not - want to confront you over things that - might not have turned out to be necessary."
"But it is not actually something I will permit, that you use your Wishes on yourself, and keep your headband, and go around being INT 29 while I am INT 24. You've already made an observation of vital importance to reducing the chance that I destroy the world, and I'd like you to make more of them, but the level of danger you represent without serious constraint is unacceptable."
"My 'best-alternative-to-negotiated-agreement' is statuing you at least until I am fully augmented with Wishes of my own. Possibly until I've obtained at least a +6/+6 artifact headband of my own. Do you want to offer me an alternative to that?"
Carissa Sevar: "It took me five minutes, not knowing your plans, to notice a way they were going to destroy the world. Your reaction to this is that you don't want me to be smarter, because then I'd be too good at preventing the destruction of the world?
I won't use the Wishes. I wasn't planning to until I'd at least rederived my original plan, and I'm not actually entirely sure we want them used for augmentation rather than some situation where a Hell-Wish is safer interpreted than a genie-Wish, if we're not going to be short on diamonds.
But I do want to register, Keltham, that I think you are making really terrible decisions, decisions that are in expectation going to kill millions of people, and that if what you discovered about yourself, deep down, was that you aren't that selfish, then you have to be unselfish enough to, if you notice a decision is going to in expectation kill millions of people, not make it. I don't know what unselfishness is for, if that's not it. If there's any real true shard of the Light anywhere in dath ilan, it'd be that they have fewer people who'd in expectation kill tens of millions of people as their first pass at solving a problem they could solve with, like, a conversation."
She turns back to the wizard's door, to knock on it.
dath ilani: "Go ahead."
Carissa Sevar: Knock knock.
lintamande: The woman opens the door again.
Carissa Sevar: "Iamhavingapanicattackandneedsomeonetoremindmetobreatheforthenexttwominutesareyouavailableandifnotdoyouhaveareferral"
lintamande: " - yeah, hey, it's okay, come on in. Sit down." She shoots a baffled glance over Carissa's head at the other occupants of the hallway.
dath ilani: "Tarnish, follow her and make sure she doesn't, like, suddenly kill everybody and escape. We have to assume at this point that tropewise she's now the story's protagonist and I'm the villain. Be silent otherwise."
"Carmin, sorry. I let myself get excited about meeting Carissa, I was - trying not to do the thing that obviously isn't going to end well, or rather, is going to end even worse, of suppressing too many emotions, not making any concessions to excitement - didn't ask her to swear any oaths in advance, and - just now told her that it was looking like I needed to turn her into a statue for a week, if she didn't want to offer any promises."
"Carissa, Carmin and Tarnish are cleared to know all I told you."
lintamande: "Breathe in," Carmin says calmly. "That wasn't really much of a breath - there you go. Breathe out. Breathe in. Out.
In. Out.
In. Out.
Do you want to talk about this, or just breathing assistance?"
Carissa Sevar: "What I want is to go to Hell where people aren't so fucking awful!!!"
Saying that had not been in her plan. It just sort of happened. Also it got her behind on breathing and it takes her most of the rest of the two minutes just to catch back up.
lintamande: "People, uh, don't threaten each other, in Hell?" Carmin says quietly, once she's calmed.
Carissa Sevar: "Probably they do. Probably nowhere's safe. I - sorry. I said two minutes. I'll leave now."
lintamande: "I am skeptical that's a good idea and don't mind if you stay longer."
Carissa Sevar: "Abrogail Thrune tortured me to death once. By turning me into a statue. I - told Keltham - told him it was, it was what I'd always been most terrified of - uh, before Abrogail, not because of her, that's why she did it -"
lintamande: "- wow. It makes sense, then, that you panicked, when he brought up statues."
Carissa Sevar: "Didn't panic then. Said something. Don't know if it was enough. Panicked - after - when I was trying to think of what - to say - that could possibly be enough when - he wants to destroy the world, he wants to kill everyone, that's the fucking plan, that's what convinced me to sell my soul, it's not overthrowing Asmodeus, it's overthrowing Pharasma, and may the beasts of the Outer Dark consume us all, that'll just make this corner of reality prettier, to a dath ilani. I hate him. I don't understand how I ever -"
lintamande: "I don't want the universe to be consumed by the beasts of the Outer Dark. I think with these resources, we can do a lot better than that."
Carissa Sevar: "Only if Keltham wants to!!!! He could - he could just give all the diamonds to the Church of Iomedae and you'd- handle it from there, wouldn't you -"
lintamande: " -we would be able to do a ton from there. I don't know that we'd be able to do everything."
Carissa Sevar: "He's not going to do everything!!! He's going to destroy the world because he can't be bothered to fucking think for five fucking minutes because he's - selfish stupid cruel horrible - this is why you're not supposed to fall in love with people, it's because it makes you fucking delusional, why didn't anyone say that instead of 'oh it's unAsmodean', it makes you think that they might be worth saving - I should've just told Otolmens, right away, to crush him -"
lintamande: "I don't actually think that you should have done that, even by your own values."
Carissa Sevar: " - you don't?"
lintamande: "No. I think you made the right decision, to come here, even though it was terrifying, and will probably get even more terrifying, and might all end in ruin."
Carissa Sevar: "Why."
lintamande: "I'm not, actually, cleared to talk with you about Keltham's plans."
lintamande: "I don't think it gets easier from here, for you, but I do think we will win."
Carissa Sevar: "Destroying the universe isn't winning."
lintamande: "No, it isn't."
dath ilani: The story's now clearly-designated villain heads over to room 3, walking at a normal pace.
He knocks on Sarcini's door.
lintamande: She opens it.
dath ilani: He steps inside and closes the door.
Keltham?: "Carissa Sevar does not like the thought of me taking possibly any risks of destroying the universe and I told her that it was looking like my best-alternative-to-negotiated-agreement was turning her into a statue for a week and she had a panic attack and I thought she was over that she told me before she was over the statue thing and the story is making me a villain and I do not want to be a villain and I do not like being a villain especially to her this was not how I wanted to finally be the villain to her and force her to do something for real the way she wanted to be forced for real and our relationship is over I need a hug."
lintamande: - she hugs him. She's taller than him, with a build that's not entirely human; she says she's half-something, but what the something is changes every time.
"I am just absolutely bursting with advice but possibly this is not the time."
Keltham?: "I think this is, in fact, a pretty good time to be reminded of - things my people would think were common sense -"
"I suspect it's a time."
lintamande: "Okay, number one, she's Chelish, if she ever said she doesn't have trauma, she was lying. That's on her, not on you, but so far as knowing what to expect goes, yeah, she has trauma, she's fucking built out of it. Cheliax is awful, yeah? That's why we have to end it.
Number two, like sixty percent of relationship problems are, 'we had that conversation and got wildly different things out of it', so maybe have someone have her write down what she thinks her major takeaways were, just so you can compare and marvel at the mortal condition. I don't know how anyone reads their own past notes, or two different records of the same conversation, and doesn't want to dissolve the whole universe in a vat of acid.
Number three, you also have trauma, dumbass! From her, specifically, lying to you and manipulating you! From her trying to get you to hurt her!"
Keltham?: "None of that hurt at the time. All the trauma was at the end and - therefore I am not hurt, which is completely logical, right -"
"Yes, I realize none of that made any sense, however, what you don't realize is, that's not the issue, the issue is that Carissa is completely unreasonable about ending the universe."
lintamande: "Everyone's completely unreasonable about ending the universe. That's the other forty percent of relationship problems that aren't miscommunications."
Keltham?: "Is there a reason you're not just, telling me that I'm valid, which was sort of, why I was here? A reason such as for example my not being valid."
lintamande: "Honey, I have no fucking idea what happened from your description. You told her you were going to statue her, she had a panic attack? Sounds to me like you're valid, and also she's valid, kinda? Probably if you tell people that you're going to statue them, then solidly eighty percent of the time they'll have a panic attack. You know I think you're if anything trying too hard at avoiding destroying the universe and that she's batshit insane about that."
dath ilani: "Everyone in Civilization would try pretty hard to fix any universe, even this one, rather than destroying it, they'd just, have the maturity to accept destroying a universe if they had to, if the universe was one where a third of souls hurt forever or die if they're lucky, and Carissa Sevar is an alien whose views are sort of internally consistent at least but I don't understand why everybody who isn't Carissa Sevar is, is, this reality is like an insane parody of arguments against negative utilitarianism, is what it is, it's a giant straw reality because nobody who argues against negative utilitarianism would say that you shouldn't even destroy Pharasma's Creation and people here are in some kind of bizarre state of not thinking about Hell because they grew up with Hell always being there and it's like this whole, insanity, is trying to crush in on me like the Evil planes weigh on your spirit if you go there without protection and I need you to say the simple sane things first and put the complicated relationship advice later."
lintamande: "There are billions of people in Hell and they're suffering horribly and pointlessly.
You couldn't ask them, 'hey, want me to destroy the universe', because they'd assume it was some cruel trick that was going to hurt them worse.
Every day more people are born who'll end up in Hell.
No one has a plan that will solve this any time soon.
Even outside Hell most people have awful coerced painful lives where they're scared and suffering practically the entire time.
Having kids in this world is horribly immoral.
People only do it because they don't have a choice, or have never thought in their life about whether anyone should exist, or are making sure not to think about the Evil afterlives."
Keltham?: "Okay, see, that still isn't what I was looking for because the people outside of Evil afterlives, if you ask them, will say not to kill them, whereas the people in Hell say to please kill them, I literally heard somebody say it when I cast Vision of Hell, and how am I the only one who thinks that yes you destroy the multiverse because the people in Hell explicitly want that very intensely and there are lots of them, however, I have at least now heard both sides being crazy instead of only one side being crazy so I still feel very alone but not like some kind of massive social group hallucination is trying to choke me with its ghostly bare hands."
"You may proceed to relationship advice."
lintamande: "Assign someone who is not you to keeping the chick out of trouble and punishing her if she acts up."
Keltham?: "That's terrible advice. The 'chick' has an artifact headband more powerful than mine and is very likely now this story's protagonist and if I try to casually leave her to my minions it will not end well."
lintamande: "- okay, point taken, but the thing you're doing is incredibly, incredibly doomed. You and her have a history where you hurt her 'cause it's hot. Now, you broke it off, and you're doing the exact same thing except it's for real, and both of you fall apart when it turns out that in real life, hurting people hurts them."
Keltham?: "Cool. My story has given me a deadline of basically a couple of weeks modulo time dilation, by the end of which I need to either finish up the main plot, turn Egorian into ash, or watch Cheliax attack Osirion, and I am guessing it's supposed to be finish-the-main-plot. Carissa has Wishes I need to be more intelligent now and the headband I need to be more intelligent now and what she wants to do instead is become INT 29 herself right away which, as much as it is extremely Carissa, is not, I think, going to help, because in fact there are not ways to save the world and especially not quickly that don't involve being willing to destroy the multiverse if necessary, and Carissa has an extreme non-nuanced position on not destroying the multiverse where she can't point to a particular quantitative balance of people in bad afterlives versus people not in bad afterlives and instead is just nope nope nope. Why is the protagonist allowed to be like this? It's supposed to be the villain who has the non-nuanced position where they start out thinking there's no point in even talking to you about it!"
"I digress. What, exactly, am I supposed to do instead of hurting her?"
lintamande: "Well, I'm not convinced about all this 'this is a story' stuff, and I kind of figure that if this is a story then it will in fact end and everyone'll stop existing regardless so we should only worry about not being in a story, but in a story, you are definitely supposed to talk to her and figure out the stupid miscommunication that is 60% of the problem.
In not a story - well, you can still talk to her. That sometimes works in real life. And if it doesn't, you can either decide you're not going to force her to give you the Wishes and headband, or that you are going to force her to give you the Wishes and headband whatever that requires doing to her, but you can only decide that if there's something you are capable of doing that makes her give you the Wishes and headband, yeah? And you gotta have it in mind before you start down that road."
Keltham?: "Dominate Person would be the obvious thing to try for the headband."
"I could never go back to being a cleric of Abadar afterwards, but it'd be the obvious thing to try, if I wanted to just take her stuff."
"There is, I think, basically no amount of pain you can apply to Carissa that will make her hand Wishes to you. She would, if she isn't ilani enough to be beyond threats now, yield them if you threatened to otherwise Plane Shift her to Abaddon, and I will Plane Shift myself to Abaddon before I threaten her with that."
lintamande: "Not that I don't relate to the impulse to Plane Shift to Abaddon now and then but I do not really recommend it, here. So it sounds like you don't, actually, have a good way to get her stuff by force, so you gotta try the 'talk to her' thing. ...you're talking like when you wear your personality headband, but you're not wearing it. Should you put it on?"
Keltham?: "Oh, that's funny. So the key to still having a personality at INT 24 is having my ex-girlfriend ANNOY ME ENOUGH that my EMOTIONS COME BACK."
"It would be more of a solution to anything if I WANTED TO HAVE EMOTIONS while needing to, on every single plan I've come up with so far, destroy at least one city, which, you know, you are really supposed to leave to the Keepers or at least the Law-Abiding Sociopaths, and not try to do while being a normal person with a normal personality."
lintamande: "Wellllll, you could destroy the cities and then have the ex-girlfriend annoy you back into having a personality, instead of doing it in the other order?"
Keltham?: "Iiiiiii suspect she has some actual story purpose here which is not that, what with being the protagonist and all."
"Carissa already, I'm pretty sure inadvertently, talked me into giving up on all my tries at finding complicated alternatives and just releasing Rovagug myself, because otherwise Asmodeus may release It anyways. I suppose that makes you happy."
lintamande: "Well, I mean, depends whether He eats the world or not? But I gotta say, it's definitely a move in the right direction."