"I want to sell Teleports. Make 900 gold once a week, spend the rest of my time picking up a literature hobby or something -"

"You'll get bored."

"Nonsense. Boredom was made up by rich people so poor people wouldn't be jealous of them."

"Writing the literature or just reading it?"

"I think the fashionable thing to do is to say you just read it, and write things in secret and tell your descendants to burn it, and then they'll read it and obey your wishes if it's dreadful and publish it only if it's so good that it was worth defying you for the sake of Art."

"You'll mess with their alignment," he says disapprovingly. 

"We're getting a little ahead of ourselves."

"Oh, Hagan doesn't want to tell us his retirement plans, drat."

"Maybe I shan't retire. I hear Chaotic is hard to maintain retired. Maybe I will adventure until I've started calling everyone 'foolish youngster'."

"Could aim for neutral good, when you retire."

Shrug.

"I've been working on it in my spare time! The people teaching those econ classes they give out for free have no idea about the depth of my scheme to cunningly only ask questions after raising my hand and being called upon."

"Sure you want to join us on a piracy-related adventure? Fazil's clung on to lawful but only by stepping up his prayer habits, Mahdi dipped into neutral."

"I have time. And Nirvana's plan B anyway. Praying is lawful, or is it only if the god is or only if you do it regularly?"

"Structuring your life more can be lawful, and praying to lawful gods is. I don't think I was actually very close, but it'd be more disastrous if I hit neutral than it is for Mahdi so it seemed prudent to take no chances."

"I will drop my tentative plan of repeating 'hey there Desna you might be vaguely acceptable' for an hour every day."

"Well, far be it from me to discourage anyone from religious observance but if that makes you lawful I'll eat my holy symbol."

"I don't want to overshoot, see."

"Heaven's so bad even lawful good people don't want to go there."

"That's not why."

"No? I'm curious, actually, the church talks up Axis, you're planning to professionally talk up Axis..."

"My family'll be there. Of course I'd like to make Axis. But - I think people ought to do good, if they can, and have faith that it'll work out however it's meant to. Maybe I'll end up down to neutral once I've retired, or someday need to do something counted Evil, or maybe they need me in Heaven, in which case I don't want to try to arrange to be unavailable."

"Do you have particular reason to think there's that much micromanagement going on, even of clerics? Especially with prophecy broken."

"I don't know. I think there's some, at higher levels, with the sort of complicated stuff we're getting into. Abadar has part of himself in Osirion, right, reading policy papers and listening to debates and all that - I don't think the gods make arrangements with a specific destiny in mind, but I expect they know what tools are available to them."

"Yeah, all right. It does seem a little odd to be sitting yourself in the heavenly toolbox when your own very god receives his worryingly literal mail in Axis but I suppose the philosophy could hang together."