"I'm not sure what you mean - it's not my area but as far as I can tell nobody from this world will go to our afterlives as a matter of course. We may prefer to set it up so that our clerics come to our realms - clerics of a particular god come to the afterlife that hosts that god's domain, even if it doesn't precisely match their moral alignment, among our people, but that's not the case for you right now and I'm not entirely sure it can be done without us intervening each time."

"You should announce that before any live humans get any closer to being clerics, let them make an informed choice. Or let them make the choice later, I guess would also work, but a warning still wouldn't be amiss. Also... any information... at all... about what your afterlives are like."

"I'll advise the others to wait on taking any clerics, then. We have favored some people - we were having trouble getting a firm enough connection to this world to come, with just Raafi here - but few enough that we can just ask them."

"Our afterlives are - where to start - there are nine of them, each much larger than the material plane, one for each moral alignment - moral alignment has two components, good-neutral-evil and law-neutral-chaos. These are fundamental magical forces in our world. In the normal course of things, when people die they go to the realm that matches their personal moral alignment - lay worship has nothing to do with it, except that gods generally teach and encourage their followers to adopt their alignment, or at least a similar one - I do discourage extremes of chaos or lawfulness but in general there's nothing wrong with them, and my serious lay followers go to the three good afterlives at about equal rates."

"Once they're there, there's two main factors that affect what things are like for them. One is that the non-neutral moral background magic makes it somewhat harder to think in ways not in line with it, and over several millennia transforms them into beings that are a purer and more powerful expression of that alignment, if they stay - it's possible though not fast or precisely easy to move between afterlives using only natural phenomena available in them, and those phenomena draw people who don't suit the alignment in one afterlife to one that will suit them better, in the relatively rare case that someone winds up in the wrong place for them. The other factor is simply being in a place with others of their alignment, some of whom are very powerful - that's the main thing that makes the evil afterlives unpleasant for the people in them, and the details of it vary depending on who exactly is in control of a particular place."

"I suppose I should mention the wars, too - the phenomena that let people move from one afterlife to another aren't picky about who they move when they happen, and are predictable enough that the evil afterlives sometimes use them to invade their adjacent neutral ones. We in the good realms defend them, of course, and the invasions never get far, but they do happen."

"...okay. Uh, I think you need to get used to modeling the perspective that none of these fundamental forces are operative or particularly interesting. Whether someone internally feels that some people ever deserve harm isn't going to be much correlated with how bad they seem to locals. Like, as described, that runs the gamut from people who really want to get back at their co-workers with stupid office pranks to people who feel really strongly that they'd like to slap anyone who uses a vaccination program as cover for an intelligence operation because it damages essential trust in the locals and delayed the eradication of polio by years. If it doesn't include those things you need a better description going forward. Furthermore, that's a super disturbing amount of mind control and war, you absolutely need to warn anyone you're planning to subject to it, and to my mind it doesn't compare favorably with any of the local options, except Limbo and I'm planning to end this conversation by asking to be dropped off there so I can terraform it and then it won't at all."

"You eradicated polio?"

"Not me personally. They didn't even have me on board for malaria's sendoff. And they got smallpox before I was born. You have magic healing and also polio?"

"We get plague gods sometimes, and the healing domain doesn't give me much direct insight into diseases - how did you do it?"

"Vaccines, quarantines, contact tracing, and the eradication of the carrier mosquito species with sterile males in the case of malaria."

"Vaccines -" he shakes his head. "I'll get one of my favored to explain it. Thank you."

"Like I said, that one wasn't me."

"You can come help us, if you'd like."

"I told you I want to terraform Limbo. Do you have any comments on the appeal of your afterlives relative to these or the interestingness of your technical concept of evil?"

"Mm. Pranks are generally chaotic, not evil - attacks masquerading as pranks are evil, but it's the intent that matters, not the results. The other example could go a number of ways, with that many caveats, and generally wouldn't be decisive anyway - I think you might be assuming that the system is tilted toward considering people evil if they're ambiguous, and it's really not, ambiguity is neutral and even most good people have a topic or two that they struggle with. I'm not sure how to explain that succinctly, though, if it's going to be a common misconception."

"As to our afterlives - I do think there's something to be said for having a place where everyone is vetted for good. But if people are going to assume that they'll be tortured over the slightest imperfection if I try to make the case for that at all, it does seem obvious that I shouldn't."

"...I'm not sure I'd characterize that as a misconception. Or, uh, 'ambiguity is biased toward evil in terms of who shows up as evil according to magic' could be a misconception, but 'this sorting system doesn't filter effectively for things we care about, a topic on which you lean technically-evil is something you should be "struggling" with' could just not be. It seems like a contingent fact about your universe and how its magic works that it sorts these things and not necessarily a way to access ground truth about morality."

    "Struggling with one's worse impulses is an effect of being good, not a cause. But I'm not sure it's worth discussing this right now - you've made your point about how different the perspectives will be here."

"-Sir?"

   "Yes?"

"If you do decide to work with this world about morality, you might want to consult with the Lady of Peaches? I think she might have a little better approach to this in particular."

   "I'm afraid the title isn't ringing a bell."

"The goddess of pleasure, sir. Her main temple is in Greens."

   "Oh - she would, wouldn't she. I'll keep that in mind."

"Is that what it sounds like? ...to be clear since your translation magic is very opaque it sounds like it's about sex."

"Among other things, yes. It's a fairly unusual perspective for a good god, and she's young, so she's doing more explaining than I've perhaps ever had to."

"And what do you mean 'work with this world about morality'?"

"Nothing very specific, at the moment - it would be a long-term project if anything. I do think you'd find the system useful once you had a sense of it. And it would be a good idea for any of you who want to work with people from our world to understand at least the broad strokes of it."

"Yes, I agree that once we're doing anything in your world the cultural competence will have to go both ways."

"So I'll ask her advice on that. Was there anything else?"

"You still need a way to publish, and a what to publish on the topics of Ganymede and whether more gods are going to show up and create huge messes on their own recognizance."

"I think the latter is inevitable, unfortunately, and if I allot too much of my attention to trying to stop it I'll put my own world at risk."

"...right, but people could use more warning. Like, any warning is better than none - the Safe Summoning Authority had a potentially useful response to the press release - and a decent warning is better still than that."

Pelor nods. "I don't know enough about your world to catch everything that someone powerful enough to bother you about it might object to, but I can warn people as I learn about things, if I have a way of doing that. Raafi, are you planning on staying, would you mind keeping me up to date on things?"

"I, ah -" he looks to Cam for guidance. "I hadn't decided, sir."