Keltham?: "Out of context, given that we're on track to release Rovagug, I'm pretty sure It won't succeed at destroying Pharasma's Creation, maybe Golarion or at worst Golarion's Material plane but definitely not the whole multiverse. Which I would ordinarily be trying very hard not to think about. But, since it's you and your preference ordering is flipped at that end of things, I want to make sure you are still fundamentally okay with our agreement and your oath to me and you getting isekaied to wherever, if the result of all that work is just the multiverse being fixed up a bit and not Rovagug eating everything."
lintamande: "Does being fixed up a bit mean people have an easier time getting out if they wanna, and no more Hell."
Keltham?: "If there's people spending years begging to permadie and not being able to, or people stuck in the Material being unhappy because they can't just kill themselves and get an acceptable deal on an afterlife afterwards, then, yes, this would represent a failure of my plans or a very deep error on my own part about what my utilityfunction is."
"I think we're - pretty aligned at what obviously constitutes an incredibly bad outcome, just, you don't exactly have a lot of training quantifying your desires, so I am checking that what you think is a somewhat-worse-than-nothingness outcome, and I think is a fairly okay outcome, is, acceptable to you. If we get that, instead of this, and maybe Rovagug not being so much of a possibility after that, either."
lintamande: "Well, good enough I'm not gonna call it quits."
Carissa Sevar: "I'm really mad at him."
lintamande: "I'm getting that sense."
Carissa Sevar: "He said 'you own yourself'. Why did he say that, if he thinks I should give him everything of mine he happens to want and threatens to statue me the first time I don't go where I'm told?"
lintamande: "Well, the obvious guess is that he wants you to own yourself, and also wants you to help him and not be his enemy, and was hoping he wouldn't have to pick one or the other."
Carissa Sevar: "He doesn't have to pick one or the other!!! I came here to work with him! I could've just told Rugatonn, told Otolmens, apparently even Iomedae didn't know and I could've told Her - that part I didn't know. I figured She knew and was just okay with it because Good thinks it's fine to destroy people if they're devils and don't really count. Uh, that's a digression. I didn't do that. I figured - I owed it to Keltham, who I thought was a honorable person trying his best, to not have him annihilated, to not let - Asmodeus being willing to destroy the world - be an automatic win condition for Asmodeus - I figured that the world, the way it is, can't last forever anyway, if we can't fix Hell - I thought about it and it was the most terrifying decision of my life and I decided to try to help Keltham do something better! And I came here and said 'I have an apology gift for Keltham, I want to help him not have to destroy the world', and he goes 'I'm not Keltham, don't give me anything except in your own interests', and obviously it's in my own bloody interests to have Banished myself from his fucking demiplane and Gated to Hell, but this is my fault, and I'm trying to fix it, and I'm trying to -
- if there are gods, trying to thread this needle, trying to make sure that between the possibilities 'this gets crushed and everything stays the same' and 'everything gets annihilated', I want to be something they can use, I want to be a tool it's possible to employ to find that space, not just something that drags as sharply as possible in one direction or the other - I think, probably, more worlds get saved, if there's someone who is trying to figure out how we actually win here, and no one else is fucking stepping up."
lintamande: "Have you told him that?"
Carissa Sevar: "No because he wouldn't even admit to me what his plans were or give me any fucking time to rederive it himself!! He said he was going to give me time to think but then instead he threatened to statue me before I'd had it!!"
lintamande: "So?"
Carissa Sevar: " - what?"
lintamande: "You have something it might be valuable for him to know, he doesn't know it. But you could tell him it, and then he'd know it. Why do I care - why do you care - how things got this way? What are you trying to get out of deciding it's his fault he doesn't know it yet?"
Carissa Sevar: "It's -
- I can't trust him to - to only say things he means in anything resembling the way I mean them, or to - give me any space to figure out things I can use to help him, or to appreciate anything I'm doing to try to be someone he can trust, or to not randomly decide to execute me, or to not randomly decide that dealing with me is too emotionally difficult and not worth reducing the probability of accidentally destroying the world - it means that he's internalized none of the stakes and I'm the only person I can trust to be acting like the stakes are real."
lintamande: "It seems like all that makes it more important, for him to know what you're thinking."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't want to talk to him anymore, if I say the wrong thing I'll wake up and he'll have glassed Egorian and is in the middle of unleashing Rovagug and annihilating billions and billions of people and he'll think I'm stupid and unreasonable for being horrified and I can't - come up with words, come up with thoughts, knowing any second might be the last chance anyone in the world has before he murders us all for being uglier than dath ilan -"
lintamande: "Sometimes the best thing to do probably won't work. The - core skill - of working in this world where Asmodeus is a power, where the Worldwound is a thing, is doing the best thing, even though it probably won't work and definitely won't leave the world in an acceptable state afterwards. Just, figuring out something that could matter that you can actually do and doing it even if you're still almost definitely going to fail.
I don't actually know that you need to master this skill, though, because it sounds to me like you have five Wishes that he wants, and if you can't buy the stuff you need to have a functional working relationship with your ex from him for five Wishes then this magic item price deflation is really getting out of control."
Carissa Sevar: "Is this, uh, Good-speak for, 'you're being pathetic'."
lintamande: "Mostly 'you're being pathetic' isn't something I find myself ever wanting to communicate. But 'you have the resource to accomplish your goals and are directing your energy at figuring out why it didn't happen to you already' comes up a fair bit."
Carissa Sevar: "I think that's just being pathetic. Or, well, a flavor of it."
lintamande: "It makes sense that you would have a complicated relationship with Asmodeanism, but from my perspective, there's no baby in that bathwater, and you should just toss it all."
Cayden Cailean: They're completely fucking off-script.
Milani: I find it literally impossible for Myself to mourn this fact, what with being a Chaotic Good goddess of revolution. I'm surprised You are capable of it.
Nethys did warn Us that the divergences would amplify the further We got into the playthrough.
Cayden Cailean: Milani, as much as I'd ordinarily celebrate mortals saying 'fuck you' to the complicated machinations of destiny which a bunch of meddling gods had wrought around them, it seems like NOT THE BEST TIME. Have you never memorized a script and acted in a play, where other actors relied on you to follow your lines? Never listened to instructions from a swordmaster showing you exactly how to guide your weapon?
Milani: ...no? Very few of my instructors were competent, and none of those very few ever asked me to exactly imitate instructions I didn't understand.
Carissa Sevar has raveled more of the situation around herself, earlier than expected. Keltham is pulling himself together faster. We have carefully played through all of the flag events in Nethys's walkthrough, hit nearly all of them, and now Carissa and Keltham are both doing better than in the possibilities Nethys has seen before; which is why they are, from our perspective, going off-script.
Cayden Cailean: Well, yes, that's very wonderful, except for the part where at this point I'm not seeing how Keltham gets the Wishes and the headband from Carissa, in a way that obeys the decision-theoretic constraints, if Keltham has already refused to allow Carissa to make the mistake of trying to repay him for the hurt she considered herself to have dealt him, and Carissa has already figured out that Keltham is targeting Pharasma rather than Asmodeus.
Milani: Yes, they're off the script, off the trodden roads, and making their own path through the untracked wilderness.
Cayden Cailean: MILANI. We have OTHER CONCERNS than how many Chaotic Goodness points We are scoring, here.
Milani: Cayden, it's not that I can't see Your point, it's that I can't, actually, value things the way You're valuing them.
...which, yes, is why You and not I were put on-point for a lot of these interventions.
Cayden Cailean: I suppose You're going to tell me that We may, at this rate, finally be on track for Nethys's hypothesized Good Ending?
Milani: Of course not. There's far too many plot points We're obviously not hitting. Asmodia is in the Gardens and We don't even know how Broom was supposed to be relevant.
Cayden, I'm not saying We're not in enormous trouble, here. It's just a kind of trouble that I can't help but approve of.
Cayden Cailean: Why is My life like this.
Milani: We wouldn't necessarily see it ourselves, if they were going to solve matters for themselves by virtue of being Lawful. And they are, in fact, both relatively Lawful for mortals.
So now we watch, and hope for the best out of the chaos that inevitably results when mortals try to be Lawful at each other.
Cayden Cailean: There's a difference between getting drunk and breaking some rules, and getting so drunk that you stop thinking it's a good idea to follow the well-trodden forest path back home while you're in that state.
Milani: If you say so, Cayden. As for Myself, once I was clearly not on the path anymore, I think I'd enjoy seeing a bit of the forest, so long as I was there.
Cayden Cailean: ...fair enough, Milani. I'll try to enjoy it despite the TERROR.
Carissa Sevar: When Keltham comes out of Sarcini's room Carissa will be sitting on the floor, making a headband as stress relief.
dath Keltham??: The man who emerges from Sarcini's room has changed to a +4/+0/+4 headband and is not currently under Owl's Wisdom.
He hears out a quick report from Tarnish (who has a nearly halfling-like ability to lean against a wall and promptly have everyone else in the room forget she exists).
He continues on to Carissa, the casual headband-maker.
"Ri-Dul wants to talk Spellcraft with you, at some point," he says to her, on seeing this. "He is, on his view of himself, one of those eighth-circles who properly perfects their Spellcraft, instead of just having absorbed a lot of magic by being in a lot of fights."
"Of course, Ri-Dul would immediately terminate his employment, and possibly break his oath and try to kill me, if you told him you believed I was going to destroy the world. Which... gets us back to the problem where I got excited and didn't have you, make any promises, before you got here."
Carissa Sevar: "I have figured out the conditions I need to be willing to work here, if you want to talk about that now."
dath Keltham??: "Sure. Let's negotiate. It's seeming to me like there's a good chance that I've already shattered what I was supposed to do, here, which was just, not warn you, and accept the Wishes and headband as your apology, because there were so many many things so vastly more important than, how I'd have felt about that, and at minimum I'm going to lose Egorian, now -"
"What conditions."
Carissa Sevar: "One, we're not trading like Asmodeans. The way Asmodeans trade is stupid. The way Asmodeans trade with their prisoners is to hurt them, or threaten them, or use Modify Memory to erase all our interactions up to this point and try again and again until you get me to give up the Wishes and headband. The way Asmodean prisoners trade is to, as I said earlier, at the first opportunity open my Gate to Hell and report everything about this situation to Dispater and destroy you. I didn't do my end of that. I'll explain why in a second. You're not going to do your end of that.
We will trade with each other like mortals with different goals who are, being mortal and hating each other and being in a ton of pain, very likely to end up assuming our goals are more different than they actually are, and who are actively correcting for that by trying really hard to mind the interests of the other and pass up on chances to destroy each other to our benefit even though they're wildly more appealing than continuing to try. I don't know if there's a god of that. I do think if that's not what we're aiming at then we're completely fucked.
Two.
You want to destroy the universe if you can't get it remade to your satisfaction. I, obviously, think that's incredibly horrible of you; I distrust everything I learned from you, and from dath ilan, because I feel very fundamentally that if this is the product of those values then I don't want them inside me and don't want them shaping me. But I didn't, when I first realized that was what you wanted, report you and get you squished; I sold my soul to protect the Project girls and come here with - thirty Wishes, I tried for, thirty Wishes and two headbands. I understand my reasons, now.
There's maybe a hundred billion people? So I should be willing to risk a one in a hundred billion chance of destroying the universe for anything for which I'd be willing to go to Axis, grab a person out of the incredible joyous brilliant meaningful life they've spent the last ten thousand years building, and feed them to daemons while they begged me for mercy. It would take a lot to get me to do that. But - I'd do it to fix Hell.
Don't ask me how many people I'd grab from Axis and feed to daemons to fix Hell. I don't know but it's not many, not anywhere near enough to close the gap between us. But I'm not trying to close the gap between us; I'm not trying to ally with you. I am trying to use you to fix Hell and fix Abaddon and fix the current state of affairs where Asmodeus, and maybe other gods, are holding in reserve an option to destroy the world. I am, I think, feeding some people to daemons, in expectation, when I use you for that. I hate that. I hate you, for being someone I can only use by feeding people to daemons. But I don't have the option of using someone else.
Also I'm really scared at this point that even if they squish you, the universe doesn't have another thousand years in it, in a configuration this unstable. We've got to fix it into something that no one has the power to destroy and that very few value-systems that are floating around all over the place would want to destroy. We've got to build our own Civilization.
And - and there are people praying to me.
I think, if there were two universes, and in one of them I fed them to daemons by accident, trying to answer their prayers, and in the other one they came to me in Hell and were safe and found mercy - and I told them that the price of that mercy was that in the other universe I'd fed them to daemons, trying my best - I think a lot of them would forgive me, I think a lot of them would be glad -
If there were ten universes -
- the numbers don't cohere yet. Probably the numbers will cohere when I'm smarter. But that's where I'm at, that's why I haven't killed myself or Banished myself or Gated out or done a Sending to Ri-Dul, because, when my numbers don't cohere, and when I don't get another chance, and I have to just go with my best guess about what I can do here and I lose options every minute, I think I'm supposed to try to fix things, not to try to kick the can down the road until someone who agrees with you succeeds.
And I'm willing to commit to that, I'm willing to promise you that I'll stay here trying to use you to fix the world instead of trying to warn someone you're going to crush it. But I want you to promise me that you'll let me do that, that I'll have the freedom and autonomy to pursue the ideas I come up with for alternatives to destroying the world, that I'll be able to do whatever makes sense for ensuring Asmodeus would rather live in the world we're demanding than destroy it, and Pharasma would rather live in the world we're demanding than destroy it, and that I'll be allowed to make myself smarter, and that I'll be allowed to potentially compact with Dispater and potentially compact with Cheliax and potentially call in Pilar and do the other things I might need to do.
Carissa Sevar: "Three. If you don't own me, you don't give me orders."
Carissa Sevar: "Four. If you don't own me, you don't take my stuff."
Carissa Sevar: "Five. If the universe might have a lifespan measured in weeks I will spend exactly zero seconds of them as a statue."
Carissa Sevar: "Six - and, uh, this one Carmin thought was stupid, she was helping me work these out and explain them and make sure they covered what I actually needed, she thinks that it's not really reasonable for me to ask for this, but.
I think you're Keltham, and I want to call you Keltham, and not get told you're not Keltham, and I think I do have obligations to you, because I hurt you, and I can try to fulfill those obligations to you, by solving as many as I can of the problems I caused, and getting you the things you need to be okay, and not betraying you even though I have at various points been really tempted, and you don't have to agree with me about any of that but don't tell me not to see it that way."
dath Keltham??: "We are in a situation that is decision-theoretically complicated. That's the part you're not seeing. Carissa, I was raised to understand things that are, from a Golarion perspective, insane and twisty and complicated and stupid and turning on arcane points of math, and from a dath ilani perspective, twisty in a simple funny way, like a, not-professional story that an average person wrote for fun and their friends to read, a story where all of the points are obvious in retrospect as soon as you actually think of them, and then, if you're a dath ilani character in that story, you have to try very hard not to think about those points, because the information has negative value to you in a way that threatens to destroy all possibility of an ending better than destroying the multiverse. We can't be equal partners in this, and the reason for that isn't that you don't know decision theory, you have the capability to reach INT 29 from where you stand and then you would understand the ass out of the decision theory, you would see the whole thing immediately, maybe without even my explaining it, from that level, and once you saw it - you would be - forced, by being the sort of entity you are, down a path that -"
"This isn't, the actual problem, but an analogy, would be if you were a sort of entity that responded to threats, and so, as soon as you started having any power, here, Asmodeus would laugh and command you to go do as He said or He'd destroy every paving stone in Hell to spite you, along with Abrogail and Pilar and every soul that ever prayed to you. Except I cannot, even, tell you for certain that it is like that, that I am trying in a way to protect you from yourself. Because you are an alien and maybe, the way you think, it's actually valid that Keltham is something you should just turn in to Asmodeus to be squashed."
"So I am trying to - thread a very narrow needle - a narrow storyline that I wish I hadn't seen, and that I'm worried I've now ruined by telling you, when we met, that I no longer considered myself to be Keltham - nor wanted to be him again, because it's too painful to, to destroy a city, when you have feelings, about that -"
"Carissa. I need those Wishes, and the headband, and once I have those things, I think, I'll be back on track. And there are things that I can honestly trade to you for those, and things I cannot honestly trade to you for those. I can trade making sure that in a week of realtime you get Wished up on all six stats yourself, and giving you all the headbands and enhancement spells I won't need. I can trade you telling you the real story, as soon as I do have the headband and Wishes, and offering you the access to try to do harm reduction on what you see as the harm from my plans. I can trade you that you never have to take my orders to do anything positive, just, promise not to do a lot of things."
"But the one thing I cannot do is give you anything like the power to, call a halt, shut things down, or try to fix the multiverse on your own authority, because we are in a situation where - from my perspective, possibly even from yours though I don't know - you are the wrong shape of entity."
Carissa Sevar: "This isn't a demand but if you shut up about dath ilan it'll require less self-control from me to talk to you like a civilized person.
I think 'try to do harm reduction on the harm from your plans' is the thing I'm asking for. I just want - really broad latitude to do it. Not just talking to you, if it reduces the harm from your plans to me to go close the Worldwound or compact with Dispater or return to Cheliax then I want it agreed I'll get to do that. But I'm not asking for anything that doesn't fall under that. If you can give me that, then we're set."
dath Keltham??: "You cannot - give anything to me, in order to protect yourself from yourself, or we are back in the land of metaphorical Asmodeus annihilating every paving stone in Hell just to spite you personally. We should assume, for these purposes, that we are actually on different sides, and you are not with Iomedae's side in this, let alone mine. As may very well be the case."
"Given that - why would you make that compact?"
"Or - what is the compact? I don't understand."
Carissa Sevar: "Speaking loosely and not committing specifically to these phrasings, you give me a couple hundred of your fucking Wish diamonds and tell me all of your plans, immediately and clearly and in detail with no more fucking around or being deliberately misleading, so that I can figure out how to do harm reduction. I give you these fifteen Wishes, and we can time-share the crown, and I swear not to try to oppose you, or recruit people who will, or blah blah blah I forfeit the ability to steer this by trying to get you deleted from reality instead of by trying to have you implement the best possible version of your plan in the most receptive possible world.
I explained why I'm making this compact, it's because my alternative is trying to recruit some force to squish you and I don't actually believe that squishing you produces a world that lasts the next million years let alone forever. Also, I think you're a wreck and not thinking very clearly and might benefit even by your own lights from an additional pair of eyes on your plans. And maybe this actually isn't what you want to do, and if it's not, I want to be in a position to notice.
So between trying to squish you and trying to reduce the harm done by your destroy-the-multiverse plans, I'm picking the latter. I know we're not on the same side.
But I was never on the same side as Asmodeus, and I served Him for twenty-five years. I am pretty well prepared to do harm reduction for alien forces fundamentally opposed to mortal flourishing."
dath Keltham??: He leans back against the wall and puts his hands over his eyes.
"You are kind," he says.
Carissa Sevar: "Thanks. Got it from you. Do we have the outlines of a deal?"
dath Keltham??: "We do."
"I propose that we - go time-dilated, if the portal is up, now, or plane shift if it's not, you promise not to banish yourself or kill yourself or do anything to torpedo my plans while we do that, interpreted, kindly, and then we work out terms, and - possibly we should use your Wishes immediately, depending on what kind of deadline you think we're on, about Hell getting word that you left - and to be clear, I would not be putting on your headband immediately after that, I'd be, trying gentler boosts first, and that time making sure I had maxed Splendour while I did that."
Carissa Sevar: "I swear I won't banish myself or kill myself or torpedo your plans for the next subjective hour while we work out details. Time dilation and Wish use immediately sounds good, I take it I need to move fast to find a way for you to not destroy Cheliax and I'm rather fond of the place."
dath Keltham??: "I think just Egorian, on the default trajectory if there's no deal, but that unleashes a lot of chaos onto the world, just like a Chelish invasion of Osirion would."
Carissa Sevar: "I think there's an opening here for me to assassinate Abrogail, Raise her, and then immediately present her with a contract in which she agrees not to invade Osirion, but details might depend on the rest of your plan. How best to handle Cheliax depends a lot on what we're angling for in the final negotiations.
That scaffold-board you were making, is that meant to be an assistive device for casting from specific scrolls like my series of boosts to headband-making is for Spellcraft?"
dath Keltham??: "No, it's meant to be a structure with a visible substructure that behaves isomorphically to magical physics including the parts of magic that aren't usually visible, for purposes of pinning down magical physics, doing de novo spell design, and, ideally, it will help with Wish phrasings."
"- to be clear that is not particularly close to working, yet."
Carissa Sevar: "Thaaaaaaat is so cool that it's an immense tragedy you're trying to use it for something horrible and I will not help you with it at all."
Tarnish: Tarnish taps her lips, having been told to shut up some time ago.
dath Keltham??: "I'll try out allowing you to speak, once."
Tarnish: "He was much less of a wreck and thinking much more clearly when he wasn't around you," she says to Carissa. "I think that what Keltham's actually trying to do is more aesthetic, but I'd consider it both beautiful and deserved if you distracted him enough with your constant sniping, which he permitted, that he accidentally destroyed the multiverse."
Carissa Sevar: She'll just ignore the person who she's been specifically told is trying to hurt her. "The way Cheliax is going to learn I betrayed them is by raising Hadrian and Abarco, but that's a True Rez right now and they may instead have gone to Hell to question the devils. I went to the one fortress in Avernus I know of, and the Most High knows exactly which it is. If that's so, they know already that I ambiguously betrayed them, though I don't know how rapidly that'll be conveyed in Hell, nor do I know how much doubt they'll be in. With Glibness up I can maybe bluff a pit fiend about who I'm working for, even if they've heard otherwise, or we can depart if they seem suspicious and that tips the calculus about whether it's worth it."
dath Keltham??: "Wow, you can bluff a pit fiend with Glibness up? That makes an entire one person in this conversation who could bluff a pit fiend with Glibness up. I expect I will put Glibness up and use it to try to be completely quiet and expressionless throughout the whole thing."
"But we're wasting dilated time, let's head out of the Forbiddance and get this done."
Carissa Sevar: Then she'll follow him out of the Forbiddance, and take his hand for the Plane Shift.
Tira Shabbar: (The Grand High Priestess will at some point interrupt their negotiations, within the Rope Trick, to say that the portal is up; they need to take down that Rope Trick and put up another one right by the portal, so Tira can cast a Forbiddance covering the demiplane except the portal. After which Tira can finally head back to Kelesh.)
Carissa Sevar: Carissa is actually deeply curious about Sarenrae, now, but it seems like not the time and also like Keltham's minions might be something of a hostile crowd.
(She has no idea why! She's the one who is trying to prevent everyone being murdered, of the people in this room!)
???: The portal is finally up! Everybody wants to go see the temporary demiplane, even if they're not in a time-dilated rush! Some unusual-looking people will soon become visible wandering around outside the Rope Trick.
Carissa Sevar: Carissa Sevar is paying a very tiny bit of attention to things outside her negotiation with Keltham, monitoring for threats, because she was at the Worldwound for two tours and some habits don't die easily. However she has more or less concluded at this point that Keltham's staff are not the kind of people she can work with, except possibly impressing Ri-Dul enough he'll let her copy all his fifth-circle spells. Mostly she is focused on getting this contract agreed-to with Keltham so she can be briefed on the plan and get to work preventing it being a catastrophe.
dath Keltham??: They'll work it out, in time.
Carissa Sevar: Great. Pleasure doing business with you.
dath Keltham??: Does she want, like, a ten-minute break, maybe, before he dumps the real story on her.
Carissa Sevar: "I'm sure I haven't given you an overwhelmingly encouraging impression of my emotional resilience but if you don't statue me, stroke my hair, or announce you're Maledicting my family to Abaddon I actually don't have feelings I can't conceal perfectly."
dath Keltham??: "I have entirely failed to understand what that had to do with anything whatsoever, but it sounded like you wanted me to go ahead?"
Carissa Sevar: "Yes. Go ahead."
dath Keltham??: "All right. I don't expect you're going to like this no matter how I frame it, but I'm going to try framing it anyways."
"First. On my model of reality, the souls who get consumed in Abaddon end up somewhere else, and we will eventually debate how nice or terrible that place probably is, and the souls in Hell and the Abyss and possibly the Maelstrom are more of a problem. On your view, the problem is the souls from Awaiting-Consumption being raised like cattle and being consumed in Abaddon, and those mortals who sort Neutral Evil and are terrified enough of Hell and the Abyss that they choose Abaddon, which, on the best statistics I've been able to find for Golarion, is around five percent of the non-Boneyard-baby population. I haven't, yet, been able to find out whether fifteen percent of Boneyard babies are choosing Abaddon, for example, which would bring the Golarion's real average up to ten percent of all souls born being destroyed there; I hadn't put a priority on knowing, before now, because it didn't matter much to me. You are able to command my resources if you want to find out from Sarenrae's Church what the actual figure is."
"I don't know what the statistics are for the larger multiverse but it would not surprise me if, Pharasma being Pharasma, it's around one-ninth sorted to Abaddon and then, maybe, half of those not going to Hell or the Abyss."
"Your stance that you would only accept a very tiny risk of destroying the multiverse, in order to save souls in Hell, may perhaps be valid given your view of things. That you should not, in general, accept a tiny risk of destroying the multiverse in order to fix it, does not strike me as equally valid. You want to minimize that risk but you should in fact be willing to go to some extreme lengths to fix Abaddon."
Carissa Sevar: " - agree. Fixing Abaddon seems like it should not in fact involve incurring much particular risk of the destruction of the multiverse. I expect that with unlimited Wishes and twenty years as Golarion counts them I could, in fact, just conquer it, and Hell wouldn't object, and Good wouldn't object, and even Pharasma wouldn't object because She hates Abaddon too."
dath Keltham??: "I'm not sure how you'd do that, exactly, but whatever it is, I expect it works only if you're the only one with unlimited Wish diamonds. Which, once the Scientific Revolution gets going, is maybe not going to be true a single year from now, let alone twenty years."
"Also unlimited Wish diamonds is not at all the same thing as unlimited Wishes, especially right away, because you need casters for them. The City of Brass will start to notice if Golarion begins buying thousands of Wishes per day from efreeti."
"What I expect, mostly, is that the gods notice and shut it down. Unlimited diamonds is a disruption to a status quo that the gods don't ultimately object to. It would never have been allowed to happen in the first place, if prophecy were not broken here."
Carissa Sevar: "That sounds about right but They do let important changes to the world happen once in a while and I'd just have to get Abaddon in before They shut it down.
...I do see why you'd be deeply unsatisfied with trying to build Civilization in a world that works that way."
dath Keltham??: "Calistria. Asmodeus. Sarenrae. Dahak. Erastil. Gozreh. Abadar. Desna. Etcetera."
"All of those gods - I think, it is my over-50%-probability-estimate - either have the power to release Rovagug if Pharasma's Creation starts to have less value to them than nothingness, or have executed a logically binding compact with Pharasma, such that Pharasma's Creation, from their standpoint, is never allowed to fall below the utility of nothingness."
"To at least those gods, the world will always fundamentally look, in a certain sense, okay. Not as good as it could possibly be, maybe, but okay. Noticeably better than okay; they would not be receiving a fair share of the gains from sealing Rovagug, or keeping it sealed, if reality, to them, was barely better than nothingness. I doubt that Sarenrae particularly likes that Hell exists, but while Nirvana exists and is full of redemption and healing, Sarenrae, who is goddess of those domains, thinks that on the whole, the multiverse contains a whole lot of the stuff that She likes."
"No guarantee like that exists for mortals, for slaves sold in Absalom, for miserable people who wish they could suicide to Axis but know they'd go to Hell, for people who suicide out of misery and end up in Hell or the Abyss, the millions of mortals raised like cattle in Awaiting-Consumption and consumed in Abaddon."
"They don't get a seat at the gods' negotiating table. Why should they? They have no power. They are not dangerous. Why should the gods concede anything to them? They can do as they want with mortals and the mortals just have to take it."
Carissa Sevar: "Lots of the gods are ascended mortals."
dath Keltham??: "None of the important ones. None of the ones who get to say, sorry, the world doesn't get to be like that. Abadar and Asmodeus are, I think, I get the impression, spread across all of the planets and all of the Material planes, Iomedae is just here and maybe a dozen or so other planets. Asmodeus is allowed to export huge numbers of textbooks into Cheliax and buy souls by the hundreds. The older gods are allowed to intervene substantially more per planet than all of the younger gods on that planet, or at least, that's how it seems to be in Golarion. I would guess that's because the older gods set the intervention budgets and see little reason to give the younger gods more than scraps."
"There's also the incredibly suspicious fact that nobody else seems to have managed to do exactly what Irori did, despite an awful lot of Irorians trying, with a greater knowledge base developed over time about how to advance along that pathway and much better institutional support than Irori had."
"I mean, I say it's suspicious, but in fact the very obvious and essentially known explanation is Achaekek. Which I flag as maybe hiding other traps, but still, there's an obvious explanation if you take the obviousness at face value."
Carissa Sevar: "Nethys is powerful. Aroden was powerful. Iomedae does all right for Herself, I think, for as new as She is. Cayden Cailean apparently is powerful enough for whatever His current batshit plan is, and He's pouring more effort into that than I've ever witnessed or heard of Asmodeus spending on anything."
dath Keltham??: "Nethys is suspected, and not just by me, of being a special case."
"Aroden seems to have somehow ended up dead, you'll note."
"And neither Cayden Cailean nor any other ascended mortal have ever done anything like what seems to be happening now, as best as my full-time historical researcher can determine. I suspect that Cayden Cailean, and possibly also Nethys, are putting Themselves into a position where, if I don't pull this off, they are caught and executed by the ancient gods for intervening beyond their allowed budget."
Carissa Sevar: Seems like maybe they should put all that effort behind someone who doesn't want to unleash Rovagug, Carissa refrains from saying.
dath Keltham??: "Every ancient god who really got to shape the multiverse, Gozreh, Erastil, Calistria, Asmodeus, all of them got there by having the ability and willingness to destroy Pharasma's Creation, or risk its destruction with some noticeable probability, unless that Creation looked noticeably better than nothingness to them."
"I expect you're not particularly fond of that fact, but on my model - my epistemic model, Carissa, not as a question of values - on my model of how Pharasma's Creation works, that is fundamentally a requirement to be seated at the grownup bargaining table and have opinions that matter about things like Abaddon."
"Especially if you want to have opinions about how Abaddon works across an unknown number of inhabited planets across however many planes, and not just opinions about how the Golarion-adjacent parts of Abaddon work. Which is, I suspect, the most that a Wish-based assault would be able to buy you before that got shut down."
Carissa Sevar: "It seems to me like it also ought to work to be willing to kill other gods unless those bits of Creation under their attention looked noticeably better than they'd be unsupervised."
dath Keltham??: "It's not enough to have the willingness and ability to kill gods, you also need the ability to not get killed by them. 'Anybody can kill anybody but they probably shouldn't', goes the saying, and what it means is, the existence of an asymmetrical offense with no defense, doesn't mean you get to have a lot of power yourself, because other people also have that power."
"There's also the point that I don't, in fact, have any particularly workable schemes for destroying Asmodeus particularly and not the entire ninth layer of Hell plus whatever I had to do to get through the first eight layers. I mean, maybe it would be a better scheme to just assassinate all the Evil deities except three, one from each afterlife, who we'd bargained with, but I don't know how I could do that."
"I do suspect I could destroy the entire multiverse, given some work. I never did give Project Lawful any knowledge I considered actually dangerous in the presence of magic, but there's a fair amount of it and I just need one of the top three obvious methods to work."
"Incidentally, one of the several ways in which I realized I'd been stupid once I put on a +6 Intelligence headband is that having a Scientific Revolution around Golarion is really not at all a stable situation and we are heading into some major divine intervention quite shortly once They actually realize how much of a problem it is if anybody figures out real physics. I expect that the gods themselves don't know, except for Pharasma and maybe Otolmens."
Carissa Sevar: "And you don't want to destroy the entire multiverse per se but you think that the fact that you could - if you're right, if the gods couldn't just easily shut you down - means you get to make demands. But if everyone goes 'haha, no', then you will, actually, destroy the multiverse."
dath Keltham??: "Well, yes. I'd rather fix the universe than destroy it, and would rather destroy it than let it stay unfixed. There's a lot of people in Evil afterlives who feel very strongly that they'd prefer to stop existing, one of whom explicitly screamed that out loud in the Vision of Hell that I cast. Given how strongly they feel about it, I think their vote wins. I also feel, with increasing passion after spending some time around two sides that strike me as equally and oppositely crazy, that a sensible and nuanced position on this issue consists of having some fraction of people being eternally tortured above which you'd prefer a multiverse disexist rather than exist if those were your only two options, and not just being, like, 'destroying the multiverse is good' or 'destroying the multiverse is bad'."
"You, Carissa Sevar, can 'threaten' to destroy the multiverse," he uses the Baseline word, not the Taldane, where the technical meaning is unambiguous, "but of course the only reason you'd do that would be if you expected them to give you what you wanted in response to the 'threat'. And of course the ancient gods would ignore your threat, even if you modified yourself in a way where you would do it and exhibited the fact to them. If they were the sort of beings that gave into threats, they would, in that case, be better off being inert lumps rather than gods, because if they were inert lumps nobody would go around trying to destroy large amounts of their utility in counterfactual branches in order to force actions out them; and it is a Law-fragment of coherent agents that they do better for themselves than inert lumps."
Carissa Sevar: "The overwhelming majority of people don't want to be destroyed. The ones who do probably think they'll stop existing and might well feel differently if they thought as you do they'd just show up somewhere else."
dath Keltham??: "I don't consider the set of all people outside Evil afterlives to be an 'overwhelming majority'. And I think any time spent debating the population statistics of Greater Reality will be spent much more effectively if I, we, have INT 29 first, to the point where I'm just kicking that to my future self."
"I suppose the smart-aleck reply would be that I know of two worlds, dath ilan and Golarion. By the same visual / combinatoric reasoning used to figure out the Law of Succession, dropping a new billiard anywhere 'nicer than dath ilan, between dath ilan and Golarion, worse than Golarion' is 2/3 probable to land somewhere nicer than Golarion. That's not actually even faintly valid, it just, I don't know, illustrates that there could be an argument about it."
Carissa Sevar: "Most people in the Abyss don't want to die and if they do it's not hard. The problem had by most people in Abaddon is that they do die. And Hell is - what, ten percent? And I don't think most people in Hell want to die. Devils certainly don't. People like me don't. As far as I know practically no one in Good or Neutral afterlives wants to die."
dath Keltham??: "Cheliax may not have been totally honest with you about a number of things, Carissa. My understanding is that most of the sentient beings in Hell want to die, or would probably want to die if they could still think coherently about that. Devils get shaped not to want to die but they don't, particularly, as I understand it, want to live."
"Most of the petitioners who go to the Abyss do end up permadying, as I understand it, over time. Which would include a very large fraction of Boneyard babies - actually I should have mentioned that earlier, I'm just, not thinking at my clearest, right now. I'm not used to thinking of the Abyss as a problem exactly because most petitioners who go there do end up permadying and I currently model that they get less twisted and damaged first. Golarion people also habitually talk about Hell as the problem."
Carissa Sevar: "....most people talk about the Abyss as the problem, actually, at the Worldwound, where I've spent most of my adult life. I know it's a problem, it's just not really a problem you can solve short of conquering it, or I guess letting demons immigrate and they make terrible immigrants.
Even if I take at face value your 'understanding' that most beings in Hell want to die, that'd be 10%. If I were going to pick a ratio of people wanting to live to people wanting to die before you destroy the world, the strongest ratio you could possibly convince me of would be 1:1. Maybe it's worth dragging one person away from ten thousand years so far and infinite years to come of joy and fulfillment and hope and happiness in Axis or Heaven or Nirvana and feeding them to daemons to end one person in Hell who wants to die. It is not worth doing that to nine.
My own intuition is kind of that it's worth doing it to none? It's tragic but acceptable to kill the person in Hell who wants to die, I guess, if you can't change the circumstances that made them want to die. Which we can if we overthrow Asmodeus. But the fact this person wants to die doesn't make it right to kill some other person with a wonderful eternity around them and ahead of them."
dath Keltham??: "Yes, I expected you'd say that. It's not, actually, a very widespread intution, as best as I've been able to determine from some hired quick surveys. That I landed on somebody at the Worldwound with that worldview is not, I think, very much more probable than Pilar Pineda being in that particular class of wizard students in Ostenso."
"That you might, in any sense, be on board with this, was based on the prospect of fewer people exiting this reality from Abaddon and the Abyss, if all goes well. Not on anybody being rescued from their current or prospective eternal torment in Hell."
"Though, of course, you cannot in any sense try to use me as a tool to that end, and have any significant impact about it, because then Pharasma ignores your 'threat-by-proxy' and looks past me and says 'Sure, let's die in a fire together, Carissa Sevar.'"
Carissa Sevar: "I do want people rescued from eternal torment in Hell! It is what I have been focused on since almost the moment I met you, my hope was that if people were better Asmodeans then less pain would be necessary, and once I realized that Hell isn't fucking using the necessary amount of pain I arranged to become a Power in Hell that could fix that! I am very serious about solving eternal torment in Hell, I just think it's a solvable problem without threatening to destroy everywhere else! For one thing you could just threaten to destroy Hell! - I also disprefer that very strongly, to be clear, but it's about 90% less bad!"
dath Keltham??: "I actually kind of have a problem with Pharasma's treatment of mortals, not just Asmodeus's, and I think current mortals are mistaken if they're okay with the division of gains that Pharasma imposes. You know, the one where Pharasma doesn't actually give two shits about mortals or try to divide gains with them at all, because She thinks they're tiny helpless things that lack the power to endanger Her however She treats them. This entire multiverse can never be a place where mortals get a fair share while Pharasma is permitted to go around acting like this."
"This, incidentally, is the point in my explanation where Tarnish pledged total unconditional obedience to me so long as, when I negotiated with Pharasma, I told Her that Tarnish specifically said 'fuck You'. This, I understand, is not your own outlook, but it's one I find incredibly understandable myself. Like. Pharasma just can't be allowed to get away with this shit. You know?"
Carissa Sevar: "If Pharasma hadn't created this universe, I wouldn't exist, and so I regard myself as in Her debt, as do, probably, many of the 90% of people who are not in Hell even if I take all your claims at face value about the 10% in Hell. I'm not even sure She's splitting the gains from trade particularly unfairly! She's not especially getting anything from my existing! I'm getting a ton from it!"
dath Keltham??: "Yeah, we've got multiple differences here. Not just about the relative importance of the people in Hell, but also, like - if 90% of the people in the room get a nice large share of the gains and are happy, and 10% of the people say they're not happy, this is, like - not an okay situation because 90% of the people are okay with it. There's the question of whether Pharasma built the equivalent of a, slum, inside Greater Reality, or if this place is relatively nice, a thought I find absolutely horrifying which of course doesn't make it false. There's a lot of further complications about what we would, in dath ilan, call 'average utilitarianism' versus 'total utilitarianism' where basically everybody in dath ilan is an average utilitarian for Reasons and you are trying to be a 'total utilitarian' who thinks it's helping to add more realityfluid to the slum, even if that drags down the average quality of life across Greater Reality and everybody who can possibly exist already exists somewhere."
"We are not going to solve any of that before it would be a good idea to use those Wishes."
"I am not going to persuade you to be upset with Pharasma, and you are not going to persuade me to be grateful to Her, definitely not in the next hour but probably period, is my guess."
Carissa Sevar: "That seems likely. Okay.
- I do find your plan upsetting, but I had already been moving my expectations downwards and downwards off how much you were avoiding telling me it, and it's about in the middle of how upsetting I was, by this point, expecting it to be."
dath Keltham??: "We're now past the first of three things I expect to upset you."
"Second is the part where I don't see any equally reliable way of getting to the Starstone, and surviving what I expect to be Achaekek's subsequent attack, without denotating two major explosions over Absalom that I expect to kill everybody there. Possibly I can negotiate with Pharasma to bring them all back, possibly not, but if all goes well, I expect that nobody there goes to - the bad parts of Hell, Abaddon, the Abyss, because I'll be able to clean that up afterwards."
Carissa Sevar: "- the prophecy."
dath Keltham??: "Prophecy?"
"WAIT is this a Snack Service thing, or a Cayden Cailean tavern rumor, because if so I need to not know about any of that. I'd have mentioned that earlier but I was - dropping things mentally."
Carissa Sevar: "That is not how I encountered it but that seems like a likelier-than-not explanation of its origin. I am observing that this is a fairly crippling handicap in planning and I hope someone in your organization is allowed to think about Cayden Cailean."
dath Keltham??: "You are. Once you understand the basic structure whereby anything that looks to me like it's making my path easier, enabling me to do something I could not do otherwise, risks Pharasma looking past me and seeing Cayden Cailean and saying, 'Let's die together in a fire, Cayden.'"
Carissa Sevar: "Great. Fantastic. In that case never mind about the prophecy, I've encountered no direct evidence He had anything to do with it but I'd still bet on it. You don't currently have a better plan than killing everyone in Absalom; we might think of one once we're smarter, or we might not.
Do you want me to do it?"
dath Keltham??: "Shouldn't reasonably make any difference. Probably does in real life. Sure."
"I'm - not seeing any realistic way to do this without becoming the god in question, myself, because nobody else is going to be able to improvise multiverse-destruction traps fast enough. I see this as largely equivalent to suicide. Even more suicide than I've done already. Sparing me that - is something else I'd ask you to look into."
Carissa Sevar: "I suppose it can't be me because of the thing where I won't improvise any multiverse-destruction traps at all because that might destroy the multiverse."
dath Keltham??: "I mean, it could be be you if we've got some way for you to execute a self-modification that causes you to do the same things I'd have done, but there's three major problems."
"One is that from Pharasma's perspective I could be modifying you to do things I only mistakenly think I'd have done, making you my own threat-by-proxy."
"The second problem is if even at INT 29 I can't, in one month of accelerated time, actually cause you to know everything I do about physics. Or can't do that without taking enough time that we can't successfully work out good-enough Wish phrasings for the large explosions this plan requires."
"The third problem is that I don't know how to modify you in a way that's guaranteed to persist through you becoming a god, especially if you ascend as the Goddess of Nobody Permadying."
Carissa Sevar: " - they can if they want to - Asmodia wanted to, and I offered it to her - I just - don't think they'd want to, if Hell was run more competently. But of people who want to have forever really, truly getting forever -
- I don't know, it sounds Neutral or Good and I probably need to be Lawful Evil to take Asmodeus's job. Maybe I could give it to Dispater who is sufficiently obliged to me but that just seems like it has a lot of ways it could go wrong."
dath Keltham??: "I did get this far in my reasoning myself, as an obvious possibility, and people who know actual rather than Chelish theology were pretty sure a Lawful Evil goddess's domains could include 'nobody permadying'. It's kind of a loose whole system, really."
Carissa Sevar: He was thinking of her, some very stupid part of her thinks.
"...I'll keep that in mind.
Are you at all worried that Pharasma's going to look beyond you at whatever dropped you on Golarion and made sure you met me and Pilar and whoever else is an important element of this plan ...and say let's die in a fire together?"
dath Keltham??: "I... don't meant to sound flippant, about our enormous values difference, but... if that's the punchline of the story, when Pharasma tries to look past me at my Senders, I'll be pretty unamused with Whatever sent me here. But I won't regret having put in a hard day's work to destroy Pharasma's Creation."
Carissa Sevar: "Murdering billions and billions of happy people with wonderful lives when we could've fixed Hell anyway."
dath Keltham??: "How? Maybe this is the part of the story where the whole plot shifts, it's not likely but you shouldn't assume it's impossible."
Carissa Sevar: " - what I originally thought you were working on, killing Asmodeus and taking His job."
dath Keltham??: "Yeah, uh... how."
Carissa Sevar: "I just flatly do not believe it is a harder problem than destroying the entire multiverse, though I admit in the very distracted two hours I've had to consider it I haven't solved it yet."
dath Keltham??: "Destroying only a part of something is often much more complicated than destroying all of it, and in real life, complicated plans usually do not work."
"But - you can look. Out of context, of course, it would fuck over everyone in the multiverse, if you found a solution like that, and convinced me that it was better than destroying Creation, with a solution that didn't also fix the Abyss or the Maelstrom. But that's all the more reason why you ought to try, and I ought to let you."
"We're not here to make 'threats', after all, and it's very important that we do not look to gods like we were doing that. Which, non-Keeper mortals being what they are, means I have to never at any point start thinking like it's all okay because I can get a fixed multiverse from Pharasma because She prefers that to destruction. I'm telling you to do this, not because it's better than the outcome I expect out of context, but because maybe you'd find something better than the total destruction that I must constantly think as if I will get."
"...I hope that fancy headband is enough that you're tracking all this, because, if you aren't, you might want to step back from things before you accidentally destroy the multiverse. On my end, of course, I've read like a dozen novels where somebody has to deal with weird decision theory twisting up all their reasoning into a pretzel, because, like, novels with straightforward decision theory are boring."
Carissa Sevar: That's obnoxious but it's also Keltham, her Keltham, recognizable and clear, and her heart is doing something funny in her chest.
"It's a very fancy headband," she says flatly. "I follow you."
dath Keltham??: "Right. Well, third part you're not going to like, and I want to emphasize that I do take this seriously and am not just - playing relationship gotcha, at you - is that you have, unfortunately from your standpoint, and I'm sure unintentionally, convinced me that Asmodeus is likely to be more of an issue about this than Pharasma. That even if Pharasma nods along, Asmodeus will say, sorry, I have My pride, even if that wasn't technically a threat, we can die in a fire anyways."
"I was trying to think of distractions for all the gods, while I ascend, that would actually command all Their attention sufficiently well away from me, even if They noticed Achaekek being destroyed, which They probably would."
"My new plan, which I fully expect you to try to talk me out of, is to give up and go with my obvious original plan of releasing Rovagug as the distraction, so that all the gods including Asmodeus will fight It together, instead of the gods having to fight Rovagug with Asmodeus on Its side when Asmodeus releases It later."
"I think that's all of the major things you're likely to be upset about."
Carissa Sevar: "Rovagug will eat Golarion. Even if they stop it. They won't stop it in time."
dath Keltham??: "Possibly, yeah. I realize you have family and friends here and that this is, from your standpoint, not okay even if we try to get a few particular people into Axis or Nirvana or wherever."
"I will obviously see about My exploding Rovagug if the fight is ongoing after I finish ascending and rigging the multiverse for destruction, if It's a kind of thing where exploding It can help. Though, also obviously, I would demand that Pharasma have signed a compact with Me first."
Carissa Sevar: "I don't think She can!!! I don't think that's the kind of thing She is! She is - from limited angles possible to get to change things, like, it did happen somehow that people going to Abaddon get a choice, there's not zero flexibility possible, I wouldn't think it was insane to go for 'Malediction is banned now', and I even have a shadow of a hope that if we set everything up right we can get Her to say Asmodeus is not the legitimate authority over Hell. But that only works because Hell cares who Pharasma says is in charge there. Most things you could say to Her She actually can't do and probably can't even comprehend you saying them!!"
dath Keltham??: "I... am not at all sure that is how anything works inside Pharasma's Creation, and one of my concerns is that She is vastly underplaying the degree to which She can potentially intervene in events, such that She can fiat-nope all My attempts to rig the multiverse to go pflomp."
"But if Pharasma is intrinsically noninterventionist, I'd be fine compacting with a sufficient supermajority of the other gods to get things done. I mean, I do not see any way around the conclusion that Urgathoa dies or gets put in a box, for example, and then We're going to have to take and defend a lot of the Abyss's surface, the parts contiguous with Material planes and mortal planets. We either need much better conditions in the Boneyard or we need a lot more clerics around to stop half the kids born from dying before they're sortable, preferably both. There needs to be a first-circle divine spell for reversible contraception and enough clerics for that. I'd imagine that Pharasma has a lot more cleric-juice than any other god, maybe more than the rest of them put together, and could do all that if She had to... but if not, well, I can negotiate with the other gods too, if Pharasma will let Me fix things and stay out of My way."
Carissa Sevar: "That She can just stop you destroying the multiverse seems quite likely! If you try to bite off too much you might well get nothing at all, instead of getting just - Hell fixed and the Worldwound closed, and we can take Abaddon in the next century, if we get that -"