"Uh, lots of stuff. They did a bunch of claiming to prefer not to hurt me which seemed like a real waste of all of our time but which is easier to contextualize if that's required for Good, we talked some about how Cheliax - rewrites its history a lot, and about how it's not a place where it's smart to complain, which would've been more convincing if I were suddenly now in a place where it's smart to complain, which I'm not...we talked about whether torturing people is effective. They believe that it is not."

"If you want us to shoo Mahdi so his opinion of your eligibility will not be affected by your complaints about his nose we can do that. I actually think you could probably complain about your lot in life all day long and the paladins would - I guess maybe reassess their estimate of how likely you are to reform your evil ways? But not, like, hit you, I'm not sure what you're expecting. Torturing people might be effective in some situations? I kind of doubt that paladins checked, so I wouldn't take their word for it, but I'd expect Cheliax to consider it effective at something even if it's not effective at any of the things a normal person would want to do."

"They did not check. They were very sure despite not having checked. Also when they kidnapped me they wore the armor of the Hellknight unit that arrests dissidents and troublemakers and they showed up in our camp and blindfolded me and chained me up and took me away without saying anything and then asked all their questions while I thought they were my people, which was a very reasonable thing to do, I'm not objecting, but I don't see any kind of distinction between that and kicking someone."

"Did you ask them that? I don't know, like, the text of the vows of this particular order."

"I asked. He said that hurting a prisoner is a bright line in a way that everything that causes a prisoner as much distress as hurting them isn't, and the latter's unworkable as a rule, so they're not allowed to hurt prisoners, but you could just as easily say that the latter's unworkable as a rule so you should just give up on the idea that there should be rules about how you treat prisoners."

"I mean, you could, but they're paladins, they're Lawful and have rules about things. If you're going to keep prisoners at all - and you have to if you don't want to just execute people without even questioning them whenever it comes up - then you can't keep their chipper moods as a very high priority, since they're going to object to being kept prisoner even if you put them up in a nice hotel with fruity pastries and floral soap. But you can still care about it at all, and one of the things that you can care about quite a lot without making it that much harder to keep prisoners in the first place is not smacking them around."

"So it's like - they get the Good points for picking an element of the situation to care about, even if it doesn't matter? Can you be Good by caring very much about ...whether people get an afterlife, and not about other things about them?"

"Uh, maybe? If you... travel to one of the new planets with a wand of Malediction and start damning people because otherwise they don't seem to have an afterlife, then no, I bet you that would not, but if you... found some way to defend the river of souls? Went and did a term of service at the House of Oblivion and did this specifically because divs eat souls and that's fucked up? Got really offended at the grubs in the Abyss being gobbled up and resurrected some random dead drow? Might work."

"I guess I would be interested in doing those things, because people shouldn't stop existing... why does it not count in the Hell case, just because anything you do for Hell can't be Good?"

"Malediction's an evil spell, for one thing, and you can make a case that it shouldn't be if the person's otherwise going to vanish, but - actually you know what we should do is ask the person, whatshisface, for the name of somebody recently dead, see if we can scry 'em - but even if you construct the case for it, for practical purposes you need Pharasma's buy-in and that wouldn't be the way to bet. There's probably things you can do for Hell that wouldn't be evil. If you anonymously sent Asmodeus a nice cask of tea that would probably be more Chaotic than anything. But contributing to the general Hellish effort to do Hellish things is going to tend to be Evil since the Hellish things are."

"Sure." Sigh. "So once Asmodeus has conquered the whole world everything'll be Evil because it advances Hellish aims?"

"...I guess? I don't know, I'd kind of expect somebody to start threatening to let Rovagug out before it go that far."

"Probably that's why He hasn't done it yet but someday everyone that awful will be out of the way."

"You seem very confident in his long term prospects of success here."

"If any of the other gods could stop Him they would've done that when He took Cheliax. They couldn't, and didn't, and every year Hell is in a stronger position and everyone else isn't. ...the Abyss will continue being around on account of being infinite, and I guess the other chaotic planes too."

"Have you tried asking a paladin why they didn't stop him then?"

"They were kind of shifty about it but they agree that He's much stronger than Iomedae because She's a new god and had a lot invested in Aroden's plans which Asmodeus foiled."

"I didn't know Asmodeus took credit for killing Aroden."

" - who did you think did it?"

"- I have no idea, I just didn't know that Asmodeus said it was him. Which does at least suggest it is not widely understood to be the case."

"Asmodeus mostly lets the other gods be - they're not pursuing his goals, but gods are - the kind of entities that matter. He'll destroy them if they get in his way but not otherwise. So He's killed Ihys, for giving mortals free will, and Aroden, for his scheme to rule Golarion or whatever it was."

"The Ihys one I'd heard before. Uh, how central to your Asmodeanism is Asmodeus's personal badassery and his history of assassinations?"

"Well, if He were going to lose then it would be stupid to follow Him."

"...it'd still make local sense for all the same reasons if he were going to lose in five thousand years but still at this time controlled Cheliax. It's not like he'd say 'public service announcement, I'm expecting to go down like a ship made of sharkbait'."

"I don't - care about five thousand years, not really, or - I do, but it's a mistake of the kind humans make, and I am not going to decide my life with it."