"Make it really hard for them to bear children."

"I think addressing the vicious propaganda campaign one way or another will actually help a lot."

"That makes sense."

"Wouldn't do the whole thing but it'd give any other method of amelioration a fighting chance."

"How much of a win is it if you get them up to neutral, the Maelstrom sucks too."

"That's the going understanding in Osirion but it has its partisans, actually."

"Huh! I expected Osirion to be propagandizing us but people in Absalom also figured it was 'like doing a lot of drugs' and 'you lose track of your physical form eventually' and so on."

"Some people are into that, they figure having a physical form would be tedious after a few centuries and they wanna find out what's next."

"Huh. I guess."

"I mean, it wouldn't be my choice either, but it's not straight up bonkers like the people who wanna go to Hell."

"Where's that on the list -"

"Oh, abolishing evil afterlives is priority one."

"Cool."

"I think so too, thanks."

"How do you decide when you're ready to try for the Starstone?"

"I'm not sure yet. I don't think it's now and I'm stalling, but I don't have a milestone in mind. Suggestions?"

"What level was Iomedae, do we know?"

"Pretty sure we don't. Not much advantage to advertising it, once you're up there, and a paladin's not like a wizard or cleric where it's pretty easy to say whether anyone saw them cast a ninth level spell or not."

"There's any reason to hurry but I'm really not coming up on death by old age any time soon and - I don't know if I should put any weight on this but my intuition is that I might have to do it the first time. I've scheduled seriously re-examining that for ninth in wizard."

"No one's ever made it on a second try. Small sample, though."

"It's a very small sample but seems like the sort of thing that might have fate bullshit going on."

"It seems plausible that there's something more than lots of magic challenges guarding the Starstone and it might care about whether you've been there before. Or that it's intelligent and adapts..."

"Something like that, yeah, or it's not actually a sure thing by itself and it relies on some level or other on the consent of existing deities - the people who fail don't remember it, right, so maybe they did touch it, and just didn't pass some other filter -"

"Yeah. Hard to imagine what filter, exactly, but the internal politics of the gods don't make sense to me."

"I'll explain 'em to you when I'm a god if you want. Unless there is some important god reason I can't."