Abrogail: This is clearly IT, but - Abrogail doesn't - doesn't see -

(Cheliax?)

"I cannot immediately see any realistic conditions under which I'd betray You, when I expect salvation from Your ownership and my alternative is Hell," Abrogail states honestly, setting aside all whirlwinds that threaten to roar inside herself.  "Someone would have to convince me that You were planning to send me back to Hell, or that -"

Abrogail pauses, and reflects on whether she'd go obediently back to Asmodeus, if Hell compacted to stay her torment.

...Asmodeus has burned some bridges with Abrogail, in fact, by setting her up for that fate in the first place.  "Hell cannot easily bring me back by offering me an afterlife even more to my liking than Yours," Abrogail states more confidently, "unless there are other strong conditions in their offer's favor.  And if You saved me from Hell and gave me all You've given me, predicting that I'd serve You in this even if given a chance to betray You, then I would not depart from that prediction even to become an archdevil."

Carissa Sevar: "A better answer than you would once have given Me.

I am not fully satisfied.

You dare hope that I am not just toying with you, that Cheliax is not gone; or that if it is gone, I could return you to a moment, or a world, where it lives.  But if so, then in that world Carissa Sevar has not ascended and not saved you from Hell - yet - though you've seen a true glimpse of what it would be for you, when you died again."

Abrogail: Time travel?  That's - maybe it only became possible with prophecy broken, but - and ilani knowledge - but - but - she'd obviously give anything, everything, but -

"Is it permitted that I ask - if You are toying with me."

Carissa Sevar: "You may ask."

Abrogail: "Are You toying with me?"

Carissa Sevar: "Oh, definitely."

Abrogail: Abrogail has always been foolish, never stupid.  "Am I to be sent to a Cheliax that lives, and an unascended Carissa Sevar?"

Carissa Sevar: "The first Suggestion was: 'this is reality, and there is no meaning, for you, in considering any other possibility." 

And as she says it, the curses remaining fall away, the one that suppresses Abrogail's Will save, the complicated fourth curse, and Carissa sits there, plainly more beautiful than Abrogail, more powerful than Abrogail, more wise and dangerous and capable than Abrogail -

- but not a god. 

Abrogail: She can feel Carissa Sevar's mind reading her own, now, and without having to think too much about it, knows better than to dare try to cast her out.  They will be ready, very very very ready.

Abrogail: But Abrogail knows where she is, now,

remembers if not the person she was then still that one key,

gathers her strength of personality about herself,

gathers herself about herself,

and

makes

her

fucking

Will

save.

Iarwain: And she's in an obvious demiplane, the nice kind with grass beneath her feet and dirt beneath the grass, and a bright white aboveness like somebody blended yellow Sun and blue sky together,

Carissa Sevar: and Carissa is there, apparently unarmed, in a robe of the archmagi and draped with a dizzying array of expensive and unfamiliar magic items, crowned in the artifact Dis gave her, watching Abrogail with amusement and curiosity.

Abrogail: There's a lot of thoughts and feelings running through Abrogail, right now, and if no one with the power and temerity to compel her is making her think them through quickly, she will not force them to heel quite as fast as she did when she was more afraid.

"I presume you are ready to swear to me regarding the truth of what would have become of me in Hell, of what you think you know and how you think you know it, regarding that; and likewise regarding that Hell does offer scum better treatment if they bargain for it."

lintamande: And such assurances Carissa can provide, because 'what actually happens to people when they go to Hell' has been something of an urgent priority for her, and by this time they've made secret information-purchases on many, many related questions. She did not deceive Abrogail, as to what would have happened; only as to whether it did. 

She does not know, not for sure, not without seeing it unfold before her, whether she's made someone trustworthy, out of Abrogail; someone who would betray Asmodeus for a goddess who, technically, hasn't ascended yet. Abrogail will have to think about it herself, with the clarity that almost no one in the world could bring to bear on the question, if she wants to ever leave this room. 

Abrogail: "Are you sufficiently prepared to kill me at any instant that I can have some tastier rations and think about it?"

Carissa Sevar: Carissa just laughs.

Earlier:

Pilar : When the Sending comes to her across the planes, Pilar Pineda is resting.

Snack Service has been silent, now, for a long time.  It hasn't even been directing Pilar into trouble; Pilar has found that sense in herself, fragments of knowledge/direction appearing from time to time.

Pilar Pineda hasn't needed anyone else's push, to get her into trouble, she got into all the trouble she made for herself out of her own will.  Pilar Pineda has still not put on her artifact headband, but she's put on her headband of +6 Splendour.  Splendour 26 is an awful lot of will, as willfulness goes.  Pilar Pineda hasn't needed any other push at all to get herself into trouble, despite her increasingly desperate efforts to be more sensible than that.

Pilar : And now Pilar is resting; she is tired, after her last set of misadventures, even wearing a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution that takes her total Constitution to 22.  Pilar has had an unreasonably large number of Events happen to her, in a really unreasonably tiny amount of time; even taking into account the part where Pilar got tossed into the Maelstrom a couple of objective-days ago and time just happened to be running faster there.  She couldn't have been in there more than a week, really.

She made a friend, in the Maelstrom; that friend is dead, in the way that outsiders die, forever and beyond resurrection.  All too obviously in retrospect, that outcome was planned by the same divinities or 'tropes' arranging this whole operation.  For Pilar had known and thought that she would be resurrected, that she was just having an Adventure; she wouldn't have been under enough stress to level, if she'd had only herself to defend.  She needed to open her heart to a friend, which Pilar did because that's been made the key to her power; and that friend needed to be placed under true threat, to motivate Pilar to really fight.  And Pilar almost almost won, but she didn't, maybe because deep in her heart she still thought it was all a story with her victory foretold.

So now Aaeme'nagh is dead forever, slain by its own vengeful slaves who didn't appreciate its mastery at all; and Cayden Cailean would probably consider that end well-deserved and Good on net; and Asmodeus wouldn't care in the slightest so long as Pilar's leveling ended up serving His interests.

Pilar has fought and fucked and casted and fought, and after that last "adventure" it is not feeling as fun anymore.

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So now Pilar Pineda is resting, in her own demiplane that she made.  Her last lost battle and its aftermath, on top of all her previous misadventures - and probably an increasing amount of siphoned divinity in her - has brought her to the eighth circle of an oracle's power, also the fifth circle of wizardry via mystic theurgy.  To create the demiplane she had to take off the Splendour headband and put on an Intelligence headband, for that takes comprehension and not just power; but with that boost she did it, and the Permanency to make the demiplane lasting was strangely easy after.  There's no minimum caster circle to make a demiplane Permanent, you just need an unreasonably large amount of diamond dust; and that, Pilar has.

Also after reaching that fifth circle of wizardry, she went to a juncture of leylines, knocked out a grizzly bear and dragged it over and sacrificed it with a blade bought of Fommok Madinah.  Now there's also Permanent Arcane Sight about her at last, despite her unsaleable soul.  And Permanent Tongues though not non-dispellably so, and Darkvision and Aura Sight and Enchantment Sight and See Invisibility.

And now Pilar rests, in her own permanent demiplane.  It's not very large or decorated, yet, but it's the famous thing that people like her do, once they can.

Aspexia Rugatonn is still mightier than Pilar, if neither of them take the other by surprise and neither can use magic items or allies and both are prepared for battle.  Aspexia Rugatonn is mightier than Pilar, as is Abrogail Thrune wearing the Crown of Infernal Majesty, or Razmir or Felandrial Morgethai, or Gorthoklek, and Nefreti Clepati is her superior in every dimension; but not many others in Golarion.

Pilar : None of these important facts have been communicated to Cheliax.

Pilar has been walking around for some days with the equivalent of an artifact headband she cannot take off.  Days are a long time, at INT 21 and WIS 19, if despite your best efforts to keep yourself extremely busy you sometimes have time to think, and Keltham out of dath ilan once taught you such children's knowledge as might in Golarion make you be relatively a Keeper.

She has understood what she'd been too stupid to see before, for all its obviousness; she knows who "Doomlord" is, and why Keltham had all of his stuff.

There is some vast story winding around her, and she has not grasped its ending or its purpose.  She knows that Cayden Cailean considers it worth dying for.  She knows that this story's meaning is not accomplished by delivering however-many diamonds to the Church of Iomedae, that Keltham out of dath ilan calculated how to synthesize after he donned an Intelligence headband.

She knows not how this story goes, but she has a guess about what becomes of Pilar Pineda in the end.

Cheliax: "Incandescent foil.  Queen assassinated by ilani weapon and kidnapped from Hell, Crown not recovered.  Military moving to defensive posture.  Any advice or aid?"

Pilar : She knew, on some level, and also explicitly, that she might be awaiting some Sending like this.

Pilar Pineda speaks back without much tone.

"Midnight quill.  No advice.  No Snack Service response.  I plan to don artifact headband.  Tell Rugatonn not to trust me afterwards without oaths.  Pineda out."

Pilar : Snack Service has been silent, now, for a long time.  Pilar does not need its hinting nor even any sourceless knowledge, to do as she does now, after hearing the Sending; it proceeds from her own will.  Splendour 26 is a lot of will.

Some time earlier, before her stat increases, Pilar did think to herself that what they all had been envisioning as a "Keeper" might actually be more like one-quarter of a child of dath ilan.  They did mock Keltham's obliviousness, some in Project Lawful, seeing about him the simple pathways of thought that he could have taken to dispel the illusions about himself.  But at the end, when Keltham realized that he was doubting, he made a mildly determined effort to pierce through illusions and put his perceived reality to a real test, one that might actually destroy it, if it was false.  Keltham found no decisive error; only insufficient evidence of the sort that should have been there, to support his reality if it was reality, and a sick feeling that something was wrong; and then he looked back and reinterpreted in the light of small hints about where the problem might be, and destroyed his own world of his own will; and didn't hesitate or try to hold onto anything when it all fell apart.

It's not - Pilar is certain that Keltham would say, if asked - it's not the performance of a true Keeper out of dath ilan, not even close; they would not have been led astray even for moments, by their own hopes and fears.

But it's not something that any of the self-proclaimed would-be "Keepers of Asmodeus" have been observed to do.

There is a dread in Pilar now, an intuitive intimation; she can guess that her own thoughts are winding around themselves in tension and conflict, somewhere out of her mind's willing sight.  Putting on the artifact headband would probably be enough to set it off, the godwar inside her own mind.  But there's a simpler course than that, a lesser trial even than fool Keltham essayed when he tried to destroy the reality about himself.  If she cannot do even this small thing, then she couldn't call herself a would-be "Keeper" or aspire to be one quarter of a dath ilani child.

She knows where she might find her doom, there is a place she is more afraid of than other places, a person she fears to confront and a question she dares not ask.  So Pilar will just go there.

Pilar : Pilar draws forth from her storage a tuning fork.

And she Plane Shifts.  She's not sure of exactly where she's going, aside from the general plane, but that's fine since Plane Shift isn't very precise anyways.

ai art

Elysium is as it was before, last that Pilar was here.  She is in some section of winding narrow canyon in which the stony walls are covered in flowers that burn with a warm golden fire, and are not consumed.  The sky is visible, far far above where the canyon-walls of stone cut out.

Pilar : The flowers that burn and are not consumed do mind her of the garden-conservatories that her lover Befutig showed her in the City of Brass, and regret stabs at her heart, for everything that she'll never have, never do.

But she accepts reality, immediately, for that is what Keepers are, and the purpose to which dath ilan made them: to realize not eventually but now.

Pilar looks about herself, but there is no one here to greet her, and this narrow canyon is ill-made for meetings.  So she casts Fly, divine magic in imitation of wizard magic, and rises up up up and up through stony walls and gold-glowing flowers, until the blue sky of Elysium widens in her sight like a mouth opening to swallow her.

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Beyond the sky's mouth, when it has closed around her, lie the tops of many deep winding canyons, like a vast maze, extending out of sight to where haze clouds further vision.  If those lost within were not already dead, and could not fly out nor climb up, they would have to fear starvation or the thirst-death long before they emerged.  Probably someone would come, though, if those within cried out loudly enough in boredom; not because there is a watch laid on this place, but just because somebody would be in earshot, and whoever heard would be friendly.

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Pilar : Pilar reaches deep within herself, then, to the well from which she draws her divine spells, from which Snack Service once spoke and is now silent; and she cries out with more than voice:

"CAYDEN CAILEAN!  CAYDEN CAILEAN!  I CALL YOU, I INVOKE THE DEBT YOU OWE ME BY GOODNESS'S WAY, FOR ALL THAT YOU'VE DONE TO ME AND ALL THAT I'VE DONE FOR YOU!  IF ANY WHO HEAR MY VOICE DO CALL YOURSELVES ALLY TO HIM, BID HIM BE HERE AND NOW!  CAYDEN CAILEAN, CAYDEN CAILEAN, CAYDEN CAILEAN!"

Cayden Cailean: "You don't, actually, need all that -"

Pilar : She turns in midair and drives her fist into his face with all her strength.

Yes, she knows this isn't going to help; she is doing it anyways.

Cayden Cailean: "Ow," He says, as He does every time this happens, having obligingly given Himself a face real enough and with nerves enough that He feels as much physical pain as He still can, for whatever it means to Him now.

(He's sometimes granted an additional cleric circle for that act, coming to Elysium and punching Him in the face, as is common among His more promising priests and even more so among His priestesses.  But saying that won't help either.)

Pilar : "That wasn't even for me," she says coldly.  "We haven't even gotten started on me.  That was only for Aaeme'nagh.  You put fucking Snack Service into my fucking head, and that isn't even the tenth worst thing you did to me.  You've taken literally everything from me.  My family, my career as a Chelish wizard, all my mortal bonds, every part of the mortal destiny I would've had, my one Pharasma-given life, even my -"

How strange, that she can't say it, that last fatal acknowledgment.

Cayden Cailean: The manifestation of Cayden Caylean rubs His jaw, thoughtfully and as if wincingly, where he was punched by a mortal soul so stuffed with power that it now trembles on the verge of least divinity.  "Sorry about that?" He says.

Pilar : She can't even speak.

Cayden Cailean: "Well, I am sorry.  I don't like pulling anybody off a way that they chose for themselves, even if some might call it a favor, if they didn't ask Me to do them any favors.  I'm not a god of compacts, and I'm sorry about putting you in a position where you'd get offered something you wanted enough to trade all the rest of that away.  I am not a god of redemption, and I regret doing that to you."

Pilar : It's strange, how much the presence of Cayden Cailean impacts her less, now, than did the presence of Dispater.  Pilar has now intuited something of the way of gods, from her uneasy dreams when she sleeps; she can guess that no casual splinter of a deity could stand before her bodily manifested, and speak to her in an ordinary tongue.  She knows this seeming man must be, if not all of the true Cayden, a very large chunk of Him.

Cayden Cailean feels no less like a god, to Pilar, than that time she felt Dispater direct His ire at Snack Service.  And yet she is not moved, or moved but too little.  In Dis then she felt like a stone in a hurricane wind, caught in its full force but too heavy to blow away or even tip over.  Now she simply feels like - like the god Cayden Cailean, directly manifested within Elysium in nearly the fullness of His power - is a thing that is large but not overawing, like a castle or a mountain.  You can look at a castle and know it's larger than you, without feeling that you have to address it respectfully.  Even if Cayden Cailean bent His full anger towards her, Pilar can somehow feel, she would be able to withstand it.

"I suppose I can't say," Pilar says, because at Splendour 26 it takes a lot to make you unable to talk, "that I never asked for this.  But I never wanted to end up like this, even if I asked for it after you killed my family and told me to become a Power if I wanted them back.  The old Pilar would have screamed and fled, if you'd told her that she'd end up as an eighth-circle caster talking disrespectfully to a god.  How much is really left of the person I used to be, at this point?"

Cayden Cailean: "Sounds like more of a moral question than a factual one, if you don't already know the answer based on self-observation.  I may be the wrong god to ask, either way.  I became a god while I was too drunk to think clearly."  The materialization of a charming, leather-armor-clad man holds out a hand to Pilar.  "Shall I teleport us to somewhere more comfortable before your Fly runs out?"

Pilar : She cannot find any sane reason to answer 'no'.  Not even saying 'no' just to be contrary, for that itself would be too Chaotic Good and give Cayden Cailean too much satisfaction.

She holds out her hand to the Swashbuckler in wordless response.

Elysium: A moment later they are standing together in a natural tavern, a cave-entrance open to a larger and mostly-unseeable forest in which night has fallen and the colored light of three moons is visible in the negative shadows cast by trees.  Within the natural tavern there is a ledge of stone like a natural bar, and soft-looking mushroomlike growths like natural chairs before it; by each mushroom-chair is a bush that grows bell-like transparent flowers with flat bases, as you could obviously pluck and use for glasses.

Behind the natural bar is a thing that looks half plant and half animal and not particularly sapient, a floating balloon of transparent bark or skin half-filled with liquid, with a nipple at its bottom that could serve as a spout.

It is all lit by a fire that burns in a wall-nook of the cave-entrance, like a natural fireplace.

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Pilar : "I'm not going drinking with you," she says flatly.  At this point Pilar doesn't even know the bounds of what her curse can accomplish if she gets drunk and throws a party, but she sure is not doing that a third time.

Cayden Cailean: The Swashbuckler sighs.  "I know.  It's not easy to get really actually drunk in My true self; and it isn't in My nature to invite somebody to the sort of drinking party where only she will be made inebriated.  One of several downsides of being a god that I did not actually think of before I went for the Starstone on a dare."

"So we'll have some mild alcohol that won't really affect either of us, with your Belt of Mighty Constitution, and agree to just decide to have the sort of conversation we might have if we were both a little tipsy."

Pilar : "What's the entire point of - this whole pretend tavern business, why not a real tavern -"

Cayden Cailean: The form of a leather-armor clad human male, with ordinary sword at his side and leather boots of no magic in particular, does nod to Pilar at this, his lips touched by a brief charming grin.  "It's the dream at the heart of Elysium - that you don't need to hire loggers and carpenters to build a tavern and its furniture, you don't need to grow barley and malt it to make ale, you don't need to be Lawful and organized and get told what to do, or worse, have to tell others what to do, in order to get the nice things that require Lawfulness within mortal Golarion.  You just have to go exploring with some friends and find a cave somewhere that works as a tavern."

Pilar : "How unbelievably sad.  No wonder Rugatonn said she'd take Abaddon over Elysium."  Pilar floats over to the stone-bar, rests her weight on a mushroom-chair, yanks one of the flower-glasses off its stem, and slams it down hard enough on the stone-bar-surface that it shatters with a pleasant tinkling sound.

She plucks another flower-glass, and sets it down more gently, this time.

Cayden Cailean: A gesture from Cayden Cailean sends the shards of the shattered flower-glass flying into the natural fireplace-nook, the fire there flaring as the not-glass begins to burn.  "Tradition," he says, with no more explanation than that.

One of His hands plucks a flower-glass of His own.  His other hand pulls over the floating balloon of liquid, to milk some of its juice into His glass from its bottom nipple.

Pilar : She casts Mage Hand, when Cayden's done, to fill her own glass from the same source; she's a wizard, not a milkmaid.

Cayden Cailean: "Cheers," says the Swashbuckler, and lifts His glass to Pilar.

Pilar : "Fuck off and die," says Pilar, and doesn't tip her own glass to him before she drinks from it.

Cayden Cailean: "If that's all you came here to ask of Me, this is going to be a quiet drinking session," He observes.  "I've done as much fucking off as anyone ought to, and you already know that I've scheduled Myself to die."

Pilar : "Die for the divine crime of vastly exceeding your rights to intervene in Golarion, or die so that I can finish consuming you?"

Cayden Cailean: "I'd dispute that I exceeded any such thing as a right to intervene in Golarion.  I didn't break My sworn word to anyone either.  Long ago I was shown a treaty and told that I'd die if I didn't look like I was predictably going to abide by it, so I abided by it.  The fun thing about that arrangement is that, given the right prompt from a planet of shattered prophecy, you can suddenly decide you're willing to die, and say, 'Fuck that treaty, I'm doing what's right.'"

Pilar : "And I suppose you don't care about the general reckoning that might trigger, with all of the Chaotic gods who can't be trusted any more now that prophecy has shattered?  Or is this entire Keltham and Snack Service business meant to - prevent that godwar, somehow?"

Cayden Cailean: "You're not quite on the right road there, though you're near the right town.  Keep in mind that one of the options that the gods possess, if it looks like they're otherwise headed for a massive godwar - not just a little godwar like in the wake of Aroden's death - is for them to wipe Golarion's solar system clean of life, and declare the whole Rovagug-affected volume off-limits to all deities.  Prophecy still works in the rest of Creation, so long as Golarion-originating events aren't allowed to disrupt it."

"Aroden's death and prophecy's shattering doesn't automatically mean that Chaos gets to have its own way with everything.  The other gods can see the predictable ways that changes the balance, and respond in advance."

Pilar : Pilar frowns minutely, too distracted in this moment to use any of the arts she's learned over the past couple of weeks for having facial expressions that non-Chelish people can read.  She'd be lying if she said that she wasn't feeling a chill go through her, a coldness, a reminder of how high the stakes almost certainly have to be, and how much a tiny insignificant dot Pilar Pineda is within it, weighed up as a person rather than a future goddess or (perhaps greater yet) a trope-girl.

For lack of anything clever she can think of to say, she gestures around at the whole tavern.  "This - isn't the actual center of Your divine realm, is it?"

Cayden Cailean: "I don't really have one, apart from Elysium generally?  When I wandered Golarion I never quite understood the point of wealthy people who owned houses, when one large Bag of Holding can carry everything needful wherever you go.  What would I do with a divine realm?  Buy a lot of fancy stuff and keep it there?  Pen up My followers having one long intoxicated orgy in that particular place forever?  Who'd sign up for that afterlife?"

Pilar : "You're a very strange god."

Cayden Cailean: "Not at all.  I'm a very normal god.  It's all the other gods who are the strange ones."  Cayden smiles as if He's said something deeply wise, and takes a meaningless drink.

Pilar : She takes another small drink from her flower-glass.  It's flavorful and tastes hardly at all like it's tinged with experimental medical disinfectant, but it's not as good as what they serve to favored customers in the City of Brass.

"Well, how about if you break a few more treaties, and instead of my getting pushed around for vague reasons, you just tell me plainly what's going on.  Not after I put on the artifact headband and end up halfway a god myself.  You explain yourself to the little mortal while she's still got some of her mortality left."

Cayden Cailean: Cayden Cailean's manifestation raises His eyebrows.  "That's rather more a Chaotic Good way of looking at things than a Lawful Evil one."

Pilar : "Calculated to appeal to your domains.  Yes, explicitly calculated before I asked, I did not make up the reason afterwards."

Cayden Cailean: "It's not so much the phrasing of the demand as the thing you demanded.  The part where you've come to dislike having your life controlled, rearranged, and moved about by a greater Power, if you don't know the ends to which you're being used."

Pilar : "I think a lot of Lawful Evil people would start to have feelings like that if they were being inexplicably moved around by fucking Cayden fucking Cailean."

Cayden Cailean: "Definitely!  Many other Lawful Evil people would feel the same way, in your circumstances, because sorting Lawful Evil doesn't mean you lack a Chaotic side.  There's a myriad shards of desire, in a human being, and the alignments and allegiances you hold are patterns that stick a few of those shards together, grown strong enough to run your lives for a time.  Even I have a Lawful side, an Evil side, left over from what I was like before I touched the Starstone.  My Good and Chaotic aspects are strengthened, compared to when I was mortal, but not so much as to drown out everything else."

Pilar : Pilar frowns again, trying to track this, see implications.  She didn't think for more than a resentful moment that Cayden Cailean was just taunting her; she knew well that there would be a point.  "Because the Starstone gods are different?"

Cayden Cailean: "Did you know that Norgorber lives in Axis?"

Pilar : She hadn't, actually.  "No, why - what - why would He want to, isn't He Neutral Evil -"

Cayden Cailean: "Because Axis is a nicer place to live than Abaddon and Norgorber is selfish."

Pilar : "And the Powers of Law allow the god of crime to hang around in their home plane because..."

Cayden Cailean: "They are lawful, and proceed by due processes of law.  Nobody has proven Norgorber guilty of any crime in His entire life, either as a mortal or a god, so they can't kick Him out of Axis without breaking their own rules.  There's a reason that criminals worship Him."

Pilar : "I see.  And Iomedae has a hidden Chaotic Evil side and goes on secret dates with Nocticula?"

Cayden Cailean: "Iomedae is almost pure Lawful Good, by Her own choice."

"Touching the Starstone is like consuming the corpse of a god, in terms of the underlying mechanics.  You don't embody some domain to the extent that the universe recognizes you for that and grants you divinity.  You get stuffed with enough power that the universe recognizes you as clearly some kind of god, and you end up with a domain.  Going that route means you get more of a choice, if you know it's coming and plan ahead."

Pilar : "You're not explicitly saying that I have that choice coming," she notes.

Cayden Cailean: "It's a possibility.  Nothing is guaranteed, in the visions that Nethys showed Myself and Milani."

Pilar : "Milani?  Wait, then Asmodia wasn't joking when she said she was Chosen of -"

Cayden Cailean: "Asmodia ended up getting blessed by Otolmens, which is what We were steering for.  There's possibilities Nethys showed Us where Asmodia ends up working with Milani.  In other possibilities she ends up on the side of Rovagug, and that We definitely wanted to avoid."

Pilar : "Look, I'll just ask straight out.  What's up with that entire weird business?  Why are the trope-girls even a thing, why do we exist?  Can I hear the actual truth or at least what Ione knows?  I won't use the information in a way that hurts your interests."

"And yes, I can guess it would be easier to understand after I put on the artifact headband.  I'm asking now anyways."

Once she puts on the artifact headband, Pilar can guess, she will not perceive herself as having any real choices; she will know the way ahead, and do what maximizes expected utility, and it won't feel like much of a choice.  The choice to put on the headband is the last choice she'll make, in some sense; and she wants to know, before she does, what it is she's last-choosing.

Cayden Cailean: "It's genuinely not easy to explain.  It's the sort of thing that even gods can understand only in metaphors, and you don't have those metaphors."

Pilar : "This does not surprise me.  So, are we all inside an 'eroLARP', or -"

Cayden Cailean: "Dath ilan's eroLARPs, according to Keltham, have paying player characters and paid non-player-characters, both assigned background stories.  The player characters act freely not knowing the story's possible ends, and the non-player-characters act in secret conspiracy to keep overall developments on course for a satisfying ending."

"We're not inside one of those.  At least, not so far as I can tell.  What we're inside instead -"

"In some worlds, according to Nethys, there are games that are like magical books, books containing choices.  You go to the store - a metaphorical store, because books like that aren't physical enough to be contained in a physical shop or handed over when you buy them - but you go to the metaphorical store, and you buy a metaphorical novel-game.  You metaphorically read it, and you get to the point of the book where the novel-game offers you a choice, and you choose an action at that choice-point, and then new pages appear in the novel-game and you keep reading."

"In some worlds, the artistic idiom of the novel-game is manifested in their versions of dath ilan's 'computers', with illusions of people's heads talking and text flowing, and players who 'click' to make choices.  In other worlds, a novel-game enchants the player into feeling like they're inside the world it describes, and if the novel-game is cursed you might die there for real."

Pilar : "And we're inside one of those magical books?"

Cayden Cailean: "We're not actually in one.  It's just a metaphor that you can understand without putting on the artifact headband.  Or to the extent you could say we're inside one, it's because the idiom of the novel-game is one that's repeated in many different forms across many worlds Nethys can get information about, which is part of why Nethys guesses it might be a good fit for something that's happening around and above us."

Pilar : "And the gods are the game's players?"

Cayden Cailean: "The metaphor starts to break down at that point.  A novel-game has only a single player, who is also its reader, who is also the customer who bought that copy of the novel-game from the store that decided to stock copies.  That's not what Nethys thinks is happening with us."

"Milani and Myself did most of the carrying out of actions, at the choice points that Nethys told Us about, according to options and instructions that He left to Us.  In the game we're all inside, Nethys is the closest thing to a player, because Nethys is the one who can see the game as a game - view the alternate possibilities and decide which one to go down.  But what He saw was not exactly the one true future, and reality has been getting further and further away from any of the possibilities that He told Us about."

Pilar : "So Nethys is the player.  Who's the reader, if that's not the same Person?"

Cayden Cailean: "I did not understand that when Nethys tried to tell Us about it, and I would advise against you asking Him even if He could answer in mortal speech."

"One aspect I did understand is that the metaphorical book-readers - the Things that watch us, who are probably watching us right now and here - are responsible for making the novel-game real; or rather, the novel-game would be real to some tiny degree no matter what, but the Things watching over Pharasma's Creation make it more real.  In one sense, the answer to any question that asks why we're here, why we find ourselves here, gods and mortals alike, is that it's a kind of event that's interesting to Things who in observing those events make them more real."

Pilar : "Well, that's disturbing.  If I know too much about this do I go mad and start trying to summon Yog-Sothoth into Creation?"

Cayden Cailean: "According to Nethys, the Things-That-Watch are much vaster than Yog-Sothoth and flatly wouldn't fit inside Creation.  Any one of Them is larger than the entire greater universe that contains Creation and all of the Outer Gods we know as a tiny bubble.  The Things are not small enough, weak enough, or comprehensible enough to be the sort of entity that mortals can successfully glimpse and go mad about.  The most familiar thing Nethys could identify in His glimpses of Their continuum was an alternate universe's version of Aroden, who managed to make himself look useful enough that one of the Things copied him out of his native world and made him a fragment of the Thing's own mind to be a voice in Its deliberations.  If one of Them wanted to interfere in this realm, nothing we did or didn't do on our side of reality would make the tiniest bit of difference as to whether They could."

Pilar : "Very reassuring, good to know, I'm sure I'll sleep better knowing that."

"So those are the metaphorical readers.  Are they also the ones who bought the novel-game at the shop?"

Cayden Cailean: "Nethys isn't sure what bought this novel-game at the store, in the sense of Their being the entities with 'economicdemand' whose 'utilityfunctions' determined that a novel-game like this one would be stocked at the metaphorical store.  In one possibility Nethys saw that had a stat-boosted Keltham reasoning from things Nefreti Clepati was telling him, that Keltham said there was more than one Customer and more than one 'utilityfunction', combining their buying-power and trading with each other."

"At least one Customer wanted Keltham to have a romance, and is responsible for Keltham appearing in a place and time and possibility where tropes could happen around him.  At least one Customer probably isn't happy about the direction the future is currently headed for the mortals in Pharasma's Creation, and wants to disrupt the future that would otherwise come about for us; or, rather, is acting on behalf of other Entities that feel that way.  But the Customers' mode of action is complicated by how changes in Their 'purchasingbehavior' also redirect the Things' attentions from one novel-game to another."

Pilar : "The - Customers - want Keltham's Civilization to get built here?"

Cayden Cailean: "We can guess at least one Customer prefers the result of throwing Keltham into the mix, to whatever would have happened otherwise, or whatever the Things would have paid attention to otherwise.  They may or may not care whether or not the outcome is Civilization; They might be trying to avoid an unusually bad-to-them outcome rather than trying for an unusually good one.  They might be buying something much stranger or more complicated than that.  Nethys can't see centuries ahead with prophecy shattered, and We have little evidence about the possible long-run outcomes of the novel-game."

Pilar : "Does it makes sense, in the metaphor, if I ask who runs the store that offers games for sale?"

Cayden Cailean: "Those would be the Entities that contain the branching and latticed realities within which Pharasma's Creation is a tiny bubble and Outer Gods swim like pet fish in a courtyard pond."

Pilar : "And mortals like me, I suppose, are just - not even pet fish, not even gamepieces, but just tiny letters on an enormous page?"

Cayden Cailean: "No, actually."  The man in leather armor smiles slightly.  "You, Pilar Pineda, are the novel-game's author."

Pilar : "'And then, a +6 Belt of Physical Perfection materialized within her hand'... nope.  Didn't work.  Nice joke, had me actually going for half a round, but what's the actual author-Entity like?"

Cayden Cailean: "I'm not joking.  Selecting a book to carry in your shop, reading it, even playing it like a game, isn't the same as writing that book.  Who determines which pages of the book will follow, after Nethys advises Us of His choice and Snack Service carries it out?  The player can choose the option to have Snack Service tell Pilar Pineda about the Osirian adventuring party that's going to appear in the Skymetal Sword inn.  But what actually happens after Nethys advises that choice?  How does Pilar Pineda respond?  What does she think, feel?  Who writes every word that she speaks, composes her lines of dialogue?"

"Pilar Pineda does."

"The Customers have desires about the novel-game which determine that this novel-game is a good one to carry for sale, in the store stocked by the Shopkeeper of Golarions; Nethys advises Us how to make the game-player's choices; strange vast Things watch it play out, and in watching make these events more real.  But as for the one who writes the novel-game, who crafts Pilar Pineda's every thought and word, who determines which choices by the game-player lead to which outcomes, she indeed is none other than Pilar Pineda.  And Carissa Sevar, and Keltham, and Asmodia, and Ione Sala, and Peranza, and Meritxell and Yaisa and Abrogail, and Elias and Ferrer and all of the others."

Pilar : "It seems to me that these larger events had a designer who wasn't me.  None of us chose the way that - that our choices fit together to make all of this happen.  The novel-game's author had to - at the very least, some author had to arrange for particular people to end up in Ostenso wizard academy - even if I didn't get a vision myself, somebody had to -"

Cayden Cailean: "The Shopkeeper does not start with a Golarion, and put carefully chosen people together by sending visions - or so I'm told.  It selected a potentiality that would become a novel-game when Keltham got added to it at a particular place and time, which then caught the Things' attentions, and the Customers care about what is made more real as a result.  You are all the authors of your own lives, but there are vastly many possible books that can be written that way.  The shopkeeper's role is to select a few of those many possible novel-games, collectively written by authors like you, to be carried for sale in its store."

Pilar : Pilar thinks about this for a bit.  Not for very long.

"It's... strange.  I've been told these vast secrets, larger you say than the entire greater cosmos containing Creation, and yet I feel like I have learned absolutely nothing of use."

Cayden Cailean: "One of the great truths of existence, or at least our tiny part of it, is that the deepest, highest, most hidden secrets of divinity, are completely fucking useless to everyone including the gods."

"Possibly not the part where, if Keltham's right, people blotted out of existence in one place will continue, a few myriadfolds less real, somewhere else.  That would be important if it was true.  But seeing Keltham materialized here tells Me nothing about that, however convincing the evidence may feel from Keltham's perspective.  There's only one way to find out for real, and it'll come to Me shortly."

Pilar : "You're not afraid to die, die for real like outsiders do?"

Cayden Cailean: "Being a god isn't much of an adventure, is the thing.  My mortal self thought like it would be a fun adventure to try for the Starstone, but he failed to consider what sort of adventures a god might then have if he succeeded.  Once you've daringly risked your divine social life on trying to score Desna and Calistria for a threesome, there's not much else courageous you can personally do that won't get you immediately extinguished or turned into Zon-Kuthon."

"I made the world a better place just by being there and choosing clerics, and it wasn't like I was suffering, so I stuck around.  But if I can do more good by dying, and possibly going on to a next greater adventure, it's not in My nature to regret that.  You don't go for the Starstone on a drunken bet if you're the sort of person who holds the same horror for true-death that Carissa Sevar holds, or Iomedae for that matter.  Nethys's notes say there are more distant Golarions where Carissa ends up as Her cleric, can you imagine?  I'd regret not seeing the future of this world, how it all ends up; but wherever I end up, it'll be someplace that can see this Golarion, so with any luck I'll still find out how it all went."

"And even if I don't go anywhere - there's so many souls every day that go to Abaddon, not just in Golarion but in all the Material planes; and so many more than that, who suffer for a time in the Abyss and then perish again.  It's not, really, like a god's true life is worth so much more than theirs.  There's more consciousness in Me than in a hundred mortal souls, maybe, but not ten thousand."

"So if by sacrificing Myself I might be able to put an end to Abaddon as it is now, the Abyss as it is now, and above all Hell as it is now - then fine, good trade."

Pilar : Her throat seems to have swollen shut; she cannot speak.

Cayden Cailean: "Which brings us to the real topic from the beginning.  You're here to hear your last temptation."

"Even though you already know what it is, and you already know your answer."

Pilar : Her throat seems to have swollen shut, or so it would be convenient to believe.  She cannot speak, or rather, would like to not be able to, she knows she could speak but she doesn't and her thoughts are winding into a tight frantic loop of horror, no no no don't say it don't make it real let her go on pretending pretending for longer even though she already knows she knew when she came here...

Cayden Cailean: "You can't speak the words, because if you speak them they'll become real.  No, I'm not reading your mind; Dispater sealed it against even gods, unless I put in enough effort that He'll notice.  Some part of Nethys sees through that, but it's not talking to Me right now.  A different piece of Nethys knows what a possible Pilar thought, Nethys told Me of it; but what Nethys sees in advance of it happening can only be a possibility, and sometimes it's not right."

"Still.  This is what, according to Nethys, Pilar Pineda in one possibility was thinking, or rather, not letting herself think:"

"That your sin and flaw from the beginning, is that you thought it would be better if the people who want to go to Hell, could go to Hell, and the people who want to go to Elysium could go to Elysium."

"You wish that Asmodeus were different from how He is.  You want to also know your master's affection and caress, and not only be crushed down by correction and punishment."

"You were kinder to the other students at Ostenso academy than you should have been, and in your secret heart, even now, you don't feel that was wrong.  You feel like a bad Asmodean for having done it, but feeling that you were wrong to do it, isn't the same as feeling that the deed itself was wrong.  You've never truly felt that a single act of kindness you carried out was wrong in itself, only regretted that you were being a bad slave for doing it."

"What lies in your secret heart isn't even the respectably edgy kind of Good where sometimes you feed an unwilling paladin to locusts to protect other people.  It's worse than hidden Goodness; you, Pilar Pineda, deep down in your heart, are nice."

Cayden Cailean: "From the beginning, Snack Service was made out of a piece of Myself, a bit of Nethys, and Pilar Pineda's own not-actually-very-repressed best wishes for everyone."

"You actually started acting less nice, once that voice in your head was outside yourself, and you could call it Snack Service, and say to yourself that it wasn't you, you weren't that, you were a proper Asmodean being tormented by a voice of kindness talking inside your head.  Taking that excuse away from you is why the voice is silent, now."

"The truth is that your 'curse' was mostly you, all along.  Throwing surprise parties for people isn't My domain.  It's not Nethys's domain.  It's what Pilar Pineda would have done if she'd grown up somewhere other than Cheliax.  And deep down, you've always known that."

"You'd give every sad person in Creation a hug, if you could."

Cayden Cailean: "It's not exactly what's on offer.  There can't be any absolute promises, either, because by now we're off the track of any exact possibility that Nethys has seen - or at least, any that Nethys told Us about.  But the main stakes still look to be in play, and Snack Service wasn't lying when it said that you were being used for your own interests, not against them."

Pilar : "All right, you fucker.  Tempt me."

Cayden Cailean: "See, now you've gone and asked for it."

"One temptation, coming up."

The dying Swashbuckler drains the last of His flower-glass and pitches it into the pseudo-fireplace, where it shatters and begins to burn.

Elsewhere and not exactly at the same time:

Ione Sala: Ione Sala, sixth-circle oracle of Nethys and still but a second-circle wizard, does now walk the planes once more, again in company, not quite the same company she had last time.

She sends a thought through a Telepathic Bond, one that can slip through a Sevar-modified Mind Blank spell made to be permeable to only divinations that Carissa Sevar has cast.  (It is still an eighth-circle spell, and not one that could be revealed to any outside eighth-circle-wizard; so it is cast each time via Wish, by an increasingly shocked efreeti who did not realize quite what service she was agreeing to in Golarion.)

What is it with you, ships, and fire? she sends.

Prince Fe-Anar: Fe-Anar has of course never in his life encountered a ship before, much the less a ship on fire, much the less caused problems thereby. He doesn't bother pointing this out. Nefreti Clepati is just like that too. She has enough of a handle on it - on what is real here and what is real somewhere else Nethys can see -- that she's only annoying on purpose, but Ione doesn't even have that much of a handle and might well be annoying by accident.

Just throw some diamonds at them and let's go find a new ship, he sends back.

Ione Sala: ...while keeping firmly in mind, this time, that we are in the Elemental Plane of Fire and if you encounter a ship that is already on fire, it is probably supposed to be on fire and you should not try to put it out.

In Ione's defense, Nefreti only warned her to make sure that Fe-Anar did not set any ships on fire, without making it clear to Ione that there was a generalizable issue there.

Prince Fe-Anar: All right, but if somehow that works out horrendously it's entirely your fault.

Ione Sala: Ione will pay over a small amount of platinum to pay for the damage caused - no diamonds being required, here; Fe-Anar does not seem to have a strong grasp of concepts like "negotiating the price downward, even if you currently have more money than that, rather than appearing conspicuous by throwing money at a problem until it goes away".

City of Brass: Then they'll go on looking through the City of Brass -

Prince Fe-Anar: Fommok Madinah. Some people don't speak Ignan but everyone Fe-Anar's been interacting with recently has Tongues and so no excuse. And even if you were to insist on translating it, 'City of Brass' is a horrendous one, and the popular supposed close-translation, 'Devouring City', hardly better. It's Fommock with an ɤ, not an ɤ̞ -

Fommok Madinah: - for anything resembling a planar ship that could sail the Maelstrom, keeping an eye out for quintuple-Wish-sequence sellers along the way.