She has absolutely no idea what the takeaway from that is.

"Cheliax does have wildly more Evil people than other places, so it's clearly something Cheliax is doing, but it might be something like - Cheliax is an Evil country so serving it counts as Evil - you didn't sell your soul to a devil in school or anything, did you -"

It's probably a very bad idea to say that she obviously would have if she met the right devil. "No."

"I'm aiming for Axis," says Mahdi. "I've been, and it looks nice, and you can learn magic, start a business, go to the theatre, whatever seems interesting."

Well of course the part they show tourists looks appealing, that doesn't mean that's what you get if you go there. Though probably they can use intelligent spellcasters same as Hell can. And someday Hell will probably destroy them but - "I expect I'd like Axis," she says carefully.

"Can you like, summarize your understanding of what the deal with good is in slightly more detail than 'people default evil if they do things'..."

"Yeah. Uh, Good is this highly specific - vision of how people are supposed to behave and what things they're supposed to be tracking when they make decisions. If you mostly don't do things of significant import you won't run into this, but if you do things of significant import you're practically guaranteed to not be tracking one of the things you're supposed to be tracking, so you'll be Evil. I know some of the things - you're supposed to let your prisoners talk to someone every day, you're supposed to not tell people you're trying to convert them, necromancy is banned, abortion is banned because it counts as murder, which is banned, except killing me if they needed to wouldn't count, except if I were pregnant then it would... you're supposed to oblige people should they care to abuse your prisoners to do it in large groups - I haven't been able to figure out the reason for that one but my best guess was that it's about orchestrating uncertainty of paternity?

- but the larger contours don't seem intuitive to anyone who wasn't raised with them so you've got to devote a lot of your time to studying them and obeying them, and if you fail occasionally you'll be Neutral and if you're just doing things and not spending most of your time aiming at Good at all then you'll be Evil."

"- in large groups - oh, no, Osirians do that because they think it's less likely someone will coordinate a rape or an assignation with a third party than that they'll do it on their own. While not raping people is fairly important that specific implementation is not actually a Good thing, Fazil just happens to be both Good and Osirian."

Carissa doesn't see how not raping people can possibly be part of Good unless they're declaring it to not count if you've acquired property rights first by marrying them but observing this seems like it would not be good for her prospects of getting married. 

"Oh, I see," she says instead. 

"Necromancy is Evil because preventing souls from proceeding to judgment and their afterlife is Evil. Spells like Malediction and Soul Bind and so on are also evil for the same reason. You might like Belmarniss think that this is not morally compelling and that's fair enough but I think the strongest argument for it is that no one has actually as-promised implemented contractually enforced terms of service because the undead isn't going to complain and as a result they often get stuck forever and having power over someone's soul, when they can't object, on the basis of an agreement they cannot revoke or alter or change their mind about, is at best a very sketchy situation and maybe a less troubling implementation would get a pass from Pharasma."

"Resurrection also prevents souls from proceeding to judgment but that's not Evil, so there's precedent."

"We can contest the specific points but I actually feel like trying to help Carissa out by giving her the correct set of rules and justifications for Good is not going to work? Since that is not actually how Good works?"

"Yeah, that's how Law works. Details about Pharasma's questionable sorting protocol in edge cases aside, the basic idea is that to be Good you have to prefer not to harm people. You are still allowed to do it if the people you are harming are themselves people-harmers and your instance of harm will get them to stop that and that's why you're doing it as opposed to just being opportunistic antagonism, and that can get a little crazymaking when you have vast symmetrical-looking wars between Good and Evil that go on for millennia, but the basic idea isn't following a ton of rules or where would us Chaotic Goods be."

"Is preferring not to harm people a different thing from not preferring to harm people."

"I think if you just go around not preferring to harm people you probably hit neutral. I mean, unless you harm people anyway, intent - contextualizes actions but doesn't count for much on its own, as I understand it. So you also have to act on preferring not to harm people - and preferring that people not be harmed, maybe I should have put it that way to begin with, like this is why charity works for Good points because you can just buy some people-not-being-harmed."

"Okay, well, I think that explains what Cheliax does that makes people Evil, it raises children to mostly worry about their own problems and let other people worry about theirs. There are a lot of people, you can't possibly be on top of whether a nontrivial share of them are getting harmed."

"It doesn't have to be a particularly nontrivial share. Random farmers can make Good afterlives if they, like, look after their neighbors and are kind to their families. Osirion has many flaws but their big advantage is that they very seriously study this thing - the aim is getting people into Axis but they still take data on who misses and winds up in Heaven."

"If I tried looking after my neighbors they would find that weird and scary and wonder what I was up to and why I was paying them particular attention and what I wanted in exchange."

"Yeah. It's hard to be Good in an Evil place, and riskier. I had that going on too, drow're generally Evil. What I'm not sure is why it would be having you count as Evil instead of Neutral."

It feels like a dangerous question to even consider but probably picking a bunch of people to defend from harm is giving up less of her than getting married, so it's worth possibly closing off that avenue if she has a real shot at a better one. She is not sure she believes she has a real shot at a better one. 

"Does it work if you are defending people from harm because you want to be Good or are you supposed to have an additional motive."

"It's hard to be sure. All the evidence is from people with enough levels to ping, right, and from random afterlife sampling. If I were making the rules I'd say wanting to defend yourself from harm too shouldn't cost you any points but I am not Pharasma and in fact kind of want to stab her, so."

There is something terribly pathetic about wanting to stab Pharasma, it's like believing you were stolen from birth parents who secretly love you and will come rescue you, or that your boyfriend really loves you and isn't seeing anyone on the side and testing the same lines on her, except - on a scale so much bigger than that she doesn't know what to make of it.

"Well. I guess I can - try to think about it and see if that is easier to work with."

"I hope it helps."

"Thank you. You are better at explaining it than the paladins."

"What'd they say?"