"People just doing their own thing seems kinda nice but I worry then there's no one actively invested in them getting to do that, and also lawless societies are really unpleasant if you don't filter really hard for Good on top of that, I think."

"Maelstrom has its partisans but I don't appear to be one of them. Uh, I think you're - still thinking in a frame where mortals are just pawns or points in the divine game beyond our comprehension, but - you're here, now? That isn't actually the case here. I mean, till you make it so, but you don't have to make it so under adversarial conditions."

"Hmmm, the way I would say that is - that humans don't have a good understanding of the actual valuable things, the same way it'd be fair enough for humans to say that ants don't really understand any of the valuable things - and we could make the world never contain them but that'd be kind of - like, it wouldn't actually be a good thing even if it'd work out conveniently for us personally."

"Why are you trying to make things you don't understand?"

"- well, for the one thing, so we don't all dissolve. But also - I guess I think there should be gods? A world that only had ants would be kind of sad."

"We're not ants. We're people. And you never hear of an ant ascending to humanity so I think the gap must be larger there."

"Or there's just no mechanism. - has anyone tried Polymorphing an ant into a person and then giving them a headband."

"Uh, not that I know of."

"Maybe we'd learn something." Shrug.

"I guess, but then we'd have an antperson and that sounds like an enormous hassle, honestly," says Daron.

" - yeah, that's fair. No ant-people. But I think - trying to constrain gods according to what's nice for humans might be missing the point, or a big part of it. Maybe not and we should just do whatever we want, but we should - try to figure that out before we do it."

"Missing whose point?" says Kytar, throwing up his hands.

"- the universe that only has ants isn't missing the point for anyone specific in the universe because it only has ants but it's still missing something."

"Humans don't all agree on what's important and gods don't either - do you just want to do something, anything coordinated and grand enough that a god would bother with it?"

"Ideally no, ideally I want something that's that and also cozy for humans! But I don't want to aim so hard at coziness for humans that I accidentally make all of that impossible somehow. If ants could make a person I wouldn't want them to make one who only cared about ants."

"I think that would be a very sensible thing for ants to do, honestly. Ants and - ant potential, whatever that is, if it turns out you really can get their intelligence up with magic."

"It'd be sensible but it seems like the world where that happened and there's just a person serving ants is still - not a very valuable world?" Shrug. 

"What if you found out there was a step up from gods, would you want to do whatever they were doing?" wonders Kytar.

"...maybe? Or want to be one?"

"I'd want to consider that from the perspective of being a god," chrips Doran. "Will you please write down your spells."

"Fine," sighs Kytar. He goes back to writing down his spells.

Carissa casts Detect Thoughts so she can get more of a read on him.

Carissa is hot and it's very distracting from the thing where apparently he was created as a magic supplementation resource and comparative Golarion religion consultant for CONFUSED ASMODEANS. Possibly he was also created to find Carissa hot? He supposes that could be a coincidence, he reckons she's objectively pretty nice looking and maybe he'd think she was hot anyway. But they did want him awfully multipurpose, maybe that's one of the purposes. Perhaps she will stop being a confused Asmodean sometime before he's done booking all his wizard spells and scrolling all his other spells and then they can have sex. He thinks it might be sort of weird to have sex with someone who views the endeavor as the pathetic and tunnel-visioned behavior of an ant unable to comprehend the sexless mysteries of the gods.

This is not remotely what Carissa wanted to hear about and also 100% her fault, about as purely as anyone's thoughts can possibly be her fault. 

She is not really planning to get over being a confused Asmodean in the next couple of hours but - maybe in the next couple of weeks?

What does she believe.

She believes that it's bad when peoples' souls get eaten and then they don't exist anymore. That's the driving conviction behind the whole thing, really. She believes that - there are probably important things humans can't comprehend, that makes sense, it follows from the fact that there are important things humans find it varying levels of difficult to comprehend. She believes that Asmodeus wants to grind away all of the rebelliousness and selfishness and shortsightedness and disobedience of humans, and does this, and it takes a very long time and hurts very badly but you come out of it something that he can use, usually. If you're reasonably competent and obedient for a human, and trying, and she is. Was. Maybe she's crossed some kind of event horizon now, is no longer the kind of person who is trying to be useful, and so even if she goes to Hell when she dies she won't be able to hold her core together. That's a frightening thought but it's kind of obvious what to do about it, she just has to make a god before she dies that'll catch her instead. A librarian-god, or something.

Could you do even better.

What would the best possible god be. 

What should the ants want.

They should...want to be people instead of ants, probably. 

Maybe the best possible god is one that wants all humans to be gods. 

Probably - the best possible god for humans is not Asmodeus, since Asmodeus is not even trying to be a god for humans. Even from a perspective that doesn't just care about humans, that wants the world to have gods doing god things, probably there is a way to use more of people than Asmodeus cares to use. Even if no one in Golarion has achieved it and - maybe Nirvana uses more of people. It seems worth looking into. 

So given that Asmodeus is not the best possible god for humans, which he would Himself concede, humans obey Him because otherwise they'll be tortured and executed and then tortured some more until they obey Him or destroy everything in themselves to avoid having to give in and obey Him. Which is stupid of them. If Asmodeus owns you, you should obey Him. But if He doesn't -

- you're not going to impress Him with your obedience in returning to His ownership. He cannot be pleased with humans like that. There will still not be all that much of you He can use. 

So you may as well just -

- try to become a god, that's the thing to do, the second-best option is to make a god who'll take care of you and probably they'll have to settle for it because she does not have a lot of resources useful for ascending here but - the best option is to become a god, if you have the chance.

She feels really stupid for not having had this insight a few months ago before she made Asmodia. It doesn't feel like she possibly could have, but, well, that is because she's human and humans are worthless and contemptible and pathetic, it's not not culpable to have only done a human amount of badly. And Asmodia - won't find any of this reasoning compelling, she's pretty sure. It comes from parts of her that she excised, in Asmodia, because they weren't helping.

"What d' you think," she says to Doran, "about a god that tries to ascend its humans in its collection. Probably there's some constraint or limit on it but - in principle, if it were possible, it seems like that'd be the nicest kind of god you can get."

"What, all of them? You'd wind up with god-wars, probably, rounds crashing into each other by the hundred, disasters like Aroden's death every decawake."

"Hmm, I guess you would."