Kyeo doesn't remember enough of the fight to know what happened, and his head is killing him, but when he checks he still has his sidearm and also now he's apparently crashlanded on a planet with absolutely awful-looking hostile fauna, wow, and that one's coming his way much too fast and he draws and shoots.
OW his head hurts. Are those swords. These people don't look like they're even from the Ibyatok system, was he concussed through an entire jump? Apparently he was concussed through an entire jump. He flicks the safety on, since he's being dragged around, but maintains a tight grip on his raygun.
Their yelling is still incomprehensible but it sounds appreciative, now.
When both beasts are down there's a lull and someone takes off at a run towards him, and starts demonstratively tugging him towards a - stone fortress, it looks like - that's not too far behind them. There are people on its walls with longbows.
Oh, okay, this is some kind of - intraplanetary fragmentation situation, where Numeria still has technology and everyone else is resisting Numerian authority and has to fight off the acid-spitting megafauna with bows and swords. He doesn't know what an Abadar's cleric is but this doesn't seem like the time, considering he's concussed probably. "I think I hit my head."
"Nah, I just want to look at it, I'm a weapons enchanter, I like learning how different places put weapons together. Does it take a lot of training?" Out of this building and along a dirt path to a different building, where she switches languages to say something reassuring to the people at the door.
They walk into a big circular room, thirty feet in diameter, with a man in robes at the center and a dozen other people in various reaches of the room. She walks up to the center and puts some coins in a box and walks away without speaking to the man there.
"Do you know if it can be recharged with spells?"
Four minutes pass and then an armored man staggers into the room with a horrifying, definitely-shouldn't-be-survivable gouge running from his shoulder down across his torso and taking a chunk out of his leg. The instant he's in the room the man in the center of it chants something and then -
The armored man stands up, totally uninjured. His armor is still shredded. He walks without a limp towards the center of the room and leaves some coin.
Kyeo's concussion is gone.
"We're at the Worldwound. It's a big tear to the Abyss and demons pour through it trying to devour everything. There are magic protections holding them back, but some of them get through. All the Lawful churches and countries have people here to fight them. Neutral clerics - and Good ones, I guess - can channel positive energy, for healing, fifteen foot radius, so they build rooms like those, and you go pay to hang out in them until the next time the cleric does a channel, which is usually on the half-hour but he did it early because that guy was not going to live five more minutes."
Welp he's going to starve after he runs out of charge in another thirty-three shots, then, isn't he, if that's how they've decided to kill him. He should get it over with, the first few days of going without food are the worst ones. Or maybe he should go shoot wildlife a bunch first? So they can't use the gun on his crewmates, wherever they are? He doesn't really have a procedure memorized for being captured by people pretending they can do magic.
Probably this is the part where they torture him and that's going to suck. It may actually suck more if they use weird barbarian torture methods instead of something modern like electric shocks. Oh, it's that thing where the world feels like it's ending. At least it is not distracting him from anything he was trying to do.
"Fine. Whatever. I'm going to stick you in the men's barracks and give you Taldane in the morning and ask around about a ride back to Ibyabek for you." Though she's not actually sure that the place he's from is one she's heard of. It might be somewhere in Tian Xia.
She reaches for the stun gun.
There's someone there.
"This guy has a very impressive weapon and is from some place I've never heard of, I assume a teleportation accident though he doesn't remember 'cause he hit his head, he's maybe not allowed to talk to followers of foreign gods, keep him out of trouble, okay?"
"What're you - doing with him -"
"I want to figure out the weapon. And learn about Tian Xia. That's my assignment, here, learn about faraway places. And if they're not allowed to talk to followers of foreign gods we're not going to have many opportunities."
"Sure."
She waves cheerfully at Kyeo and leaves as Tongues wears off.
Wow, jerky. He will eat it if they give it to him, though he's prepared for there to be some sort of unpleasantness where they kick him in the stomach later, that's the sort of thing that probably comes up sometimes. They already obviously have some way to deliver substances so this doesn't change much.
"Man. Uh, there's elves and orcs and halflings and gnomes and goblins and dwarves and giants and trolls and hags and...titans? and merfolk and bugbears and, uh, tabaxi, there's hybrids of many of those, there's outsiders who are originally from the Outer Planes and elementals that are originally from the Inner Planes and hybrids of most of the kinds of outsider with humans, there's dragons, there's trolls and titans and giants and mind flayers and beholders and algolthulls. And that conceals a lot of - like, dragons are as different from each other as we are from bugbears, there's hundreds of kinds, we just call 'em all dragons and they call us all humanoids."
"- right, sorry, I forgot you don't have divine casters - you can actually do it with a Wish too but I don't know that people would've been confident they had a safe wording, if there were no divine magic - you are not on any drugs, I don't think, and I don't see how that'd cause me to be claiming to you that we can resurrect people while you disbelieve me, drugs don't do that."
Uhhh what's common knowledge that it won't be a huge betrayal to say. "They need a lot of electrical generation capacity, same as what charges the gun, and in-system propulsion is different from what jumps between stars -" And he can explain in the loosest possible terms what the deal is there.
"The gods see things in terms of Law and Chaos and Good and Evil. They're - the fundamental kinds of choice that there are, I think. Law is about order and keeping your promises and doing your duty. Chaos is about doing whatever you feel like and not having responsibilities. Evil is about having goals and being willing to achieve your goals even if there's a cost. Good is about - doing things narrowly and properly and very carefully and never stepping off that path. You get different afterlives, depending."
He is about to comment that this sounds very weird in Ibyabekan, which is when he notices that he has not been speaking Ibyabekan all day. Which, now that he thinks of it, she totally told him, but he ignored her because magic is imaginary, except he is pretty sure drugs cannot make you speak entire languages suddenly? That's very strange. He thinks he's... lawful... good...? except these seem to be made-up categories. That were in fact by her own admission literally invented by aliens! So categorizing himself is a silly impulse.
Well.
"The gods are - they care about better stuff than humans do. They're bigger, deeper, there's more to them, they can see farther, it's kind of like how we'd feel about people who could never want anything that wasn't going to happen in the next five seconds. Or like how we feel about, I don't know, cows. That's not to say none of the gods care about things that I don't think people should bother with. Many of them do. But - it's a mistake to decide you'll just do people stuff and ignore the gods, you'll be ignoring almost everything important."
"I don't think the gods would let someone invent a general version of immortality. They want us to die since this world is kind of mostly a sorting mechanism for them to allocate souls across the afterlives and it wouldn't be a very good sorting mechanism if everyone got to stick around."
Well, yes, they have... swords, which probably means no airplanes or helicopters. "Yes. It takes about eighteen hours to go between Ibyabek and the other inhabited planet in our system, about a week to get to the nearest other inhabited system. Though that's after you've already gotten into orbit above the planet, in the first case, and out of the way of the planets, in the second, both of which steps add travel time."
And if they have to in order to make things work with Ibyabek that would be awful and maybe she doesn't care to tell people about Ibyabek after all. "You might like Osirion or Qadira, though. Women don't have any rights at all there. They can't own property and they don't get custody of their children and their husbands are allowed to beat them and I can't imagine they have the slightest problem with anyone being careerist."
"I'm not upset that you said so I'm upset that apparently even in places that have starships and can go anywhere in days people still think - that it's wasteful if someone could be available to a man to impregnate and isn't, but not wasteful if people spend their whole lives appeasing whoever they happened to get glued to and throwing up a lot."
"Uh, Pheon Naar Am was a philosopher and he saw that the way the people of Sohaibek lived and were governed was bad for them, and he convinced the people of what was then Inner Sohaibek to join together and resist the unjust government, and succeeded, but on Outer Sohaibek right philosophy didn't make it to enough people and they started a war, and Old Sohaibek, in between the two, was melted in their crazed attempt to prevent the Glorious Leader's ideas from taking hold there, but we were able to fight them off in the end and keep Ibyabek as it is now."
"No, no, I understand that, I'll stop bothering you about how to make things, probably our government will seek guidance from yours - I was just wondering, uh, what some of the most valuable things you do are, and for us inventing new magic is one of the most valuable things."
"It's - coin, or paper, issued by the state, you're not allowed to make your own. You get it by working, you have to spend it for food or housing, though not at the Worldwound, when you're an active duty soldier you get fed and housed on base usually. But if, say, you come back to Corentyn with us when this shift is up," he doesn't have a reason to do that but she doesn't want to let this float into more important hands just yet, "you'd pay for a house, and for servants or slaves if you want those, and for food and drink, and then you want some savings for magic healing if anything happens to you, and some savings for new clothes. You pay by giving the coins or paper in the right quantity to the person who owns the house or the food, and then it's yours. There's ten copper in a silver and ten silver in a gold, which is called a gold but we mostly have bills, now." She shows them from her purse. "If you want things as fancy as you're accustomed to it'll be a lot of money probably since we haven't invented all those things you mentioned."
"If you say so." It's a little like being told that if he never sings - not that he can anymore - he'll be able to save a lot of oxygen. You have to fix the air recycler if you have this problem, not take shallow breaths. But he doesn't know how the revolutionaries pulled it off besides that it required a revolution.
"One of those places, huh. I guess if it suits you."
They talk only occasionally as they fight demons; they complain about the demons, the weather, their coworkers, the paladin orders, the food. They make plans for how they'll spend their money on leave; nice furniture, slaves, merchant ventures, magic items, in one case a line of racehorses.
"Uh, I need to tell Captain Hwan Neul Ryung that I, Star Cadet Kyeo Sebe Luk, am alive, and where I am. - in terms that would make sense viewing the planet from space, like, the Nth biggest continent so many miles from which coast. Also this needs to be in Ibyabekan unless the message magic also does translation."
Kyeo experiments with attempting to speak Ibyabekan around the magic; it turns out he can do that okay. "Captain, Star Cadet Kyeo Sebe Luk reporting by proxy via ostensible magic, alive and whole, at the north end of a visible planar portal, 'the Worldwound'. I await pickup or orders."
"Right. A scry is a spell that lets you look at a target over a great distance. Sometimes you can do simple magic through the scry, in which case you can talk to them. It lets you talk for significantly longer than Sending, so it's probably the best way to get in touch with your ship. However, it has a long casting time; if I start now I'll be done in an hour. It might make sense to talk for ten minutes first. It's up to you, though."
"No. People on less civilized planets have to make exchanges to get things they need but on Ibyabek they don't. The farmers grow food, and the truckers bring it to the city, and then everyone gets food, because otherwise people might starve. The farmers do also get things that are made in cities when they need them but it's not a purchase."
"My paladin order is based here. It is the largest city in our country of Lastwall. The main reason I brought you here is because it's safer than most places from Cheliax, which will try to use the contact with your world for evil purposes, if they learn of it. We can get you a comfortable place to stay while you're here."
She bundles him off to a room that is a significant step up from the barracks, furnished with a bed and dresser and table and altar and fireplace, and thanks him, and tells him to just stick his head outside and ask if he needs anything, and then hurries off after flagging someone down to stand guard at his door.
In the morning a whole group of people come to get him. The wizard from before is with them, but in the back.
"Good morning, Kyeo," says a unfamiliar person, earnestly. "I'm Isavel. We're going to start on the scry for you, and we have a couple of other questions in the meantime, if that's all right."
"You're not a prisoner of war," she says very earnestly. "We're trying to keep you from Cheliax because they are Evil and if Asmodeus knows about your world he might attempt to conquer and damn it, too. But we're going to try to get you back to your people as soon as possible, and it's entirely all right if there are things you can't answer for us.
Can you explain - how Ibyabek became the kind of place it is today? It sounds like it's unusual among the worlds you know of?"
"It is, yes. The Ibyatok system was originally colonized under the name Sohaibek and three planets in the system were settled. Pheon Naar Am, the original Glorious Leader, was a philosopher and he saw that the way the people of Sohaibek lived and were governed was bad for them, and he convinced the people of what was then Inner Sohaibek to join together and resist the unjust government, and succeeded, but on Outer Sohaibek right philosophy didn't make it to enough people and they started a war, and Old Sohaibek, in between the two, was melted in their crazed attempt to prevent the Glorious Leader's ideas from taking hold there, but we were able to fight them off in the end and keep Ibyabek as it is now." It is almost exactly what he told Carissa; he has it memorized.
They glance at each other. "That might -"
"Asmodeus wasn't with Rovagug."
"I said it might, let me finish, warrant revisiting -"
"I don't think so, the justification there was that this way's less suspicious."
"I just want to pass it along."
"Fine, go do that."
"Sorry," says Isavel after a minute. "It's a lot to take in. The gods aren't ...limited to swords, in the things they can build, necessarily, so it's scary to imagine they might get their hands on such things."
"Not your fault, we should have explained. Gods are ...people. They are very powerful people. They can do much much more than us. Some of them have goals that are very hard for us to understand, because we are so small compared to Them, or because They were never human to begin with. But while we do pray to them, answering prayers is only a tiny fraction of what They do, and if these weapons were dangerous it wouldn't be because of anything to do with us. Does that make sense?"
"The gods raise people from the dead. I have seen them do it. In the Inheritor's divine domain in Heaven, the forces of Good are marshalled for war, and there are people I knew who are there now among them. And a god died, a hundred years ago, and it was immediately obvious to everyone because storms tore apart the harvest everywhere and quakes swallowed cities and countries drowned and his followers stopped receiving miracles."
"The god, Aroden, had announced his plans to manifest on Golarion. Instead, the whole world, places thousands of miles apart from each other, had two weeks of storms and lightning, even in places where such weather was very rare, and five cities were swallowed by the earth, and a permanent hurricane formed and drowned the country that had previously been there below the sea. Two weeks later the storms cleared, everywhere at once. At the same time the god's clerics stopped getting spells from him."
"...I don't really understand the distinction you are making. Things have causes. If the planet had melted with no cause that would be very confusing. Instead, the melting had a cause - a war - so it isn't. Storms all over the world would be very confusing if it happened with no cause, but instead it was caused by a war.
The precise thing we are worried about is that planets melting is the kind of thing the gods might be able to cause."
"Scry's finished," says the person casting it, when they're finishing breakfast. "...not high enough quality to do magic through, though. Damn it. Can everyone else who's going to want to scry this guy come take a look to help with their familiarity -"
"I'll tell them to do that."
"Thanks." She sighs. "Kyeo, do you want to at least have a look? I'm sorry the scry's low quality, I'll try again as soon as this one's expired."
"Well....most countries vary, but they're more or less the same sort of thing? They've got lots of people who are just trying to get by, and then some good ones and some terrible ones. But Cheliax was conquered in a terrible war by devil-worshippers, and Asmodeus directs it, and His aim is to damn everyone there, so He can have their souls when they die. So they make the children report each other for minor things, they punish them very harshly, they read their minds to make sure they're loyal enough to the state, they execute anyone who isn't, and that way they make everybody Evil. And they convince them that they deserve it. We are allied with them, at the Worldwound, to prevent demons destroying the world, but Hell is a menace to Good everywhere and it'd be very bad for them to learn of Ibyabek. They'd try to make it Evil."
"Law is about adherence to a strict code of rules, usually for the sake of making it possible for people to rely on you or negotiate with you. Devils are lawful in the sense that their word is binding and when they make bargains they keep their end of them. Paladins are also lawful. We do not betray our word even when to do so would confer a substantial short-term advantage. Evil is - the ideology opposed to human lives being free and peaceful and happy, and to humans having the chance to trust in and love and honor one another. Most Evil beings are Evil simply out of being self-serving -- they hurt others because they do not care for those others to live - but Asmodeus specifically believes that people should not be free, and Rovagug specifically believes that no worlds with life on them should exist, so some of them are like that..."
"Ibyabekan philosophy is about cooperation under the authority of the state to make sure everyone is taken care of, and I've been glossing that as lawful good, but it's not specifically about promises or being lenient with children or about people pursuing individual preferences freely..."
" - well, Lastwall is Lawful Good, but we're also the only bastion of Good in northern Avistan, we're fighting wars and we need to win them, there are lots of situations where it's necessary to do what is best for the group and not whatever speaks to one's heart individually. A lot of this is about - the ideal state, what we want when the wars are all over; Evil thinks people are nothing in themselves, and Good thinks people are everything, in themselves. Does that - sound closer to right?"
"They don't have a way to get in touch with us. This being the wrong galaxy, even if they knew exactly where it was it would take weeks to get here, and they don't know exactly where it is. There aren't radios on this end. I'm not sure if my ship is nearby and the captain's capture was before the magical event, or if I was the only person affected."
"People marry when they're perhaps twenty to twenty-five, depending, men sometimes a bit older and women sometimes a bit younger. We celebrate the Day of Revolution, the Eve of Revolution - those aren't next to each other, the Eve is when it started and the Day is when it ended, months apart - and the Glorious Leader's birthday and his predecessor's birthday and their wives' birthdays and the anniversary of the first landing on Ibyabek. Those are the major ones. There's a lot of singing and some people get the day off work and there are holiday-specific details for each one. Children often want to be things like pilots or firefighters or architects, though of course a lot of them wind up in less glamorous positions."
"Pilots direct ships - or airplanes or helicopters, it's the same word but different skills. And yes, there is a job of firefighter, to respond quickly to fires. This is important especially in cities where they may spread to other buildings quickly but also in wilderness areas where they may get a lot of fuel and become very big and fast-spreading."
Conflict where two countries both have a history of rivalry that escalates whenever they have the resources and an excuse? Conflict where one is trying to conquer others and others are trying to hold it in check? Conflict where one people is trying to wipe out another entirely? Slavers? Independence wars?
"...I guess we don't let Asmodeans in here," someone says, which makes people look slightly less confused.
"That's because they'd be spies, though, not because we're scared that hearing about Asmodeanism would confuse people - or because Asmodeans have objections we don't want anyone to raise -"
"But," someone else says, "if it did - I know it didn't, I know Asmodeanism is kind of transparently horrible, but if Asmodeus came up with something that was awfully compelling and did confuse lots of people, we'd ban it, right?"
"I guess."
"Seems like a bad habit to get into -"
"You need a counterargument -"
"Sure, some people should study it, but -"
"Nirmathas wouldn't ban it, and - and we could see how that worked out -"
"It's hard to know which of them even believe it, right, because they'll get in trouble if they say anything wrong."
"The ones at the Worldwound could run, though, if they - knew it was a lie -"
"They'd have to also know there's anything better. And - there might be retaliation against their families, right -"
"I thought Chelish people didn't care about their families."
"Aren't supposed to care about their families. Which is different."
"They can run if they decide to quickly enough," someone says. "Because they get mindread regularly and it's dangerous to be thinking about it."
"We're upsetting Kyeo."
"- Cheliax is terrible," someone says gently, "but there have been many victories against it. Half its former territory is free, now. And lots of people are working to make it more. With allies from other worlds, perhaps Hell can be defeated for good."
They seem to believe there to be at least four existential threats to the forces of Good in the world and yet be on the whole pretty cheerful about this; those are the marauding orcs to their north and west, perpetually crossing the border and sacking villages and occasionally amassing far more force than that when a capable ruler comes around, the powerful undead sorcerers of Ustalav, north and east; Cheliax, and Asmodeus who works through it, and the Worldwound in the north. They apparently personally consulted Iomedae about the Kyeo situation and got advice "mostly on timing"; they are debating what they would miss if they had to give up money (the satisfaction of saving up for several years for a nice magic item: "even if you'd get it after the same amount of time, I think it wouldn't feel as earned", the ability to send some of their savings each month to a elderly mother in their home country: "I guess I could send her things but it'd be very logistically difficult and what if I sent something that's not really in demand...""
Someone says that unless the whole world stopped using money she'd still need it to send her baby brother to wizard school; someone says that if one wizard school stopped using money then that'd be enough; someone else objects that that wizard school would quickly get overwhelmed, and probably have stringent entry tests, and so you'd be back to the same situation of not being able to send your brother to wizard school unless he was an unprecedented genius or you had money.
Someone says that he paid his friends to spend their days off building a house for him and his fiancee and he's not sure how that'd work if there weren't money, it's too much to ask as a favor and he can't repay it in kind because he's usually deployed on the border.
A wizard offers that if they weren't getting paid they'd go work somewhere where they were getting paid, no offense, or at least do that ten months of the year; you need money to get headbands and advance as a caster. Someone objects that obviously wizards would still get those things, just not in the specific manner they get them now, to which the wizard says that that's just getting paid in magic items, which is fine, but seems more like changing your currency than like not using money.
Kyeo doesn't know enough about how wizards work to have a specific vision of how they'd fit into the logistics but now he's wondering about it. "Of course people who need something for their jobs can get it, and if for wizards that's headbands then they'd have them, just like a pilot can't do their job without a ship or a helicopter; that's not the same as being paid to be a wizard."
"Cheliax does classrooms."
"It's because they hate any individual relationship - people can trust or care about each other, institutions can't -"
"Sure, but it's also just the best way to get a lot of wizards -"
"It's the best way to get a lot of wizards with a Chelish bent!"
"You can't say they don't train competent wizards."
"I can say that. Name a great Chelish researcher. There are none, because research is the enemy of Evil, you have to be allowed to think in order to invent..."
"There are plenty, they're just - narrow. No opinions on anything but magic."
They get into a heated argument about this.
Eventually someone rolls her eyes and tells the wizards to go argue this somewhere else, if they must - they've gotten into some very technical point about symmetric spellforms as part of a dispute about whether Cheliax deserves credit for the great Andoran wizard Morgethai - and they fall silent, and then someone points out they've run well over the end of lunch and everyone scatters to go back to work. "Do you want to go back to your rooms, do you know how to find them from here," Isavel asks.
This turns out to be characteristic of Vigil, and remains the same for the next few days. There are people clearly assigned to him, but not very concerned if he cares to be alone; there are enthusiastic lunchtime arguments about religion and about money and about the nature of Good. The people chosen by their god and given magic powers are the most important and the most trusted, though they sit at the same tables and participate in the same arguments; the people not chosen by their god generally seem to aspire to it, but not urgently. Their city is poorer than Ibyabek in many ways - it doesn't have indoor plumbing, or appliances of any kind, and magic lights for nighttime are apparently expensive - but there's lots of food, some of it meat or eggs, at every meal.
Kyeo is invited to religious services on holy-day, the seventh day of the week.
There is singing, that can be heard all the way from here, but otherwise it's hard to guess. At dinner, they don't discuss services much, just usual things like deployment schedules and world events and scary fights they were in and philosophy debates. Tonight there is an extended argument about what mistakes the church (and Iomedae Herself, though they know less about which decisions were definitely Hers) made in the early years of the Chelish Civil War; people are divided over whether it was hopeless because Asmodeus is a much older and more powerful deity than Iomedae or whether it would've been winnable if Aroden's death hadn't been such a hit to morale.
He misses singing. But he couldn't anyway.
It makes sense that they're leaving lots of leeway around Iomedae's decisions so they're never committed to the position that she made a mistake. Interestingly suggestive that they're identifying Asmodeus as more powerful but he supposes if these things are real that might just be a fact.
Kyeo sways slightly to the rhythm. Doesn't try to hum along even once he has the tune.
Kyeo's father is - asleep, in the dark, beside Kyeo's mother.
"- can you get a closer look at that object," Kyeo says, pointing, "so I'll know what time it is there and we won't have this problem again?"
"Then it is - really important to us, to keep trying. I don't know what the most practicable way to go about that is. Do you think it is talking to your father? To both your parents simultaneously - that would make it seem less likely to be sickness, right - we could perhaps observe the Supreme Leader and learn the name and identity of an advisor, and speak to them..."
They are indeed intentionally not telling him about that. They're gone, the next day, almost everyone with fancy robes indicating powerful spellcasting, wizards and clerics alike; there mostly isn't gossip about their absence in the dining hall, because gossip about ongoing operations isn't harmless like gossip about world events or religion or who should hook up or whatever else comes up.
When she hears that Kyeo vanished from the barracks with no explanation the first thing she feels is a jolt of terror. If he was telling the truth - and now someone else got him - they'll kill her, for not escalating it immediately. Of course, if he's lying or delusional and from Tian Xia and she had escalated it -
- but that won't matter -
- she spends about an hour staring at the wall thinking stupid unhelpful things like that she still isn't sure what she should have done and she has no idea who took him and she has no idea why and if she'd happened to get called for mindreading in that hour, or maybe even the next day, she would have died of it, but they don't have that many mindreaders, and she has time to think.
She met an adventurer from Tian Xia who claimed to be from a place called Ibyabek, which she hadn't heard of before but which is apparently on bad terms with most of its neighbors so that's not surprising. He claimed Ibyabek was its own world, which must've been the translator malfunctioning or him delusional or lying to impress her, because he was a perfectly normal human, oddly dressed, his gun of unfamiliar make but she's a magic item enchanter and couldn't evaluate it. She spent a little time with him anyway, even though he claimed his society of origin had no wizards of note at all, because she wanted to get to the bottom of the delusional-or-lying question, but she hadn't quite sussed it out when he suddenly teleported off, which conclusively pointed at lying, the person he was representing himself to be was meek and had no allies or interests there.
She did nothing wrong, nothing interesting happened, there was nothing worth escalating, and he got bored or heard of a problem elsewhere and left.
(They'll of course still kill her if Kyeo turns out to be from another world and this has conspicuous effects anywhere she hears about them but - it might not. And he's not from another world, she thought it all through and the only world worth thinking about or planning for is the one where he's not, and over time this turns into 'he's not', in her head, and then sits more comfortably.)
They call her in for mindreading four days later and she goes and answers all the questions and is asked if she's contemplated defecting and says that she hasn't, which is true, even in that hour of panic she managed not to think that she could possibly escape Asmodeus.
She goes back to her normal life. Finishes an artifact, collects the bonus for being early, again. She's got enough for a headband.
And then one morning when she's starting the next artifact someone opens the door, loudly and abruptly enough to throw off her concentration. She looks up, irritated, and then -
- too afraid to be irritated, too afraid in fact to think at all...
There are three of them, in black full plate with visors drawn, faceless, the insignia of a Hellknight order she'd recognize on sight if she were thinking, which she's not.
"Carissa Sevar?" he says. The face mask distorts his voice.
She nods. Which is stupid, maybe, but -
They have handcuffs, glinting with the age-resistance of a magic item. Antimagic, probably. She wants to get a proper look at it, which is the most laughably stupid want in the entire universe. They cuff her hands behind her back and blindfold her and Teleport. She does not try to resist the Teleport, and suspects she couldn't anyway; the handcuffs are doing something in addition to antimagic, something that feels like having been hollowed just slightly.
They ask about Kyeo. When she met him, what she saw, what he said, who she told, who else knows, were people curious about his disappearance, did she report it, did anyone else. She answers truthfully and they don't bother to hurt her yet, even when at one point she has a stupidly difficult time forming words because she's so upset with herself. She wants to know how they found out but she is sure that she'll die without knowing that.
Worthless people and impressive people go to the same Hell, she reminds herself, but she keeps crying anyway.
Kyeo is less bored mostly because he is now instead constantly wrestling with the desire to suggest scrying Sarham, even though Sarham can't help at all with anything these people want and the idea of Sarham checking into a hospital over hearing voices makes him want to vomit.
Dragons are enormous flying lizard-like magical beings who can breathe powerful blasts of energy and who are exceptionally deadly when they want to be. There are a few ancient ones and they're not to be trifled with; there are more young ones than that, but not that many, maybe hundreds in the whole world.
Carissa is sitting on the bench with her hands cuffed in front of her, picking at her nails; she stiffens very slightly when Kyeo walks in.
"You can, uh, knock when you want to leave, or yell if anything goes wrong," says his escort, pausing at the door. "You can yell too, if you want him to leave" he adds to Carissa, who glares at him.
" - I mean I assume it's got to be people who they're confident are cleared to know and won't go accidentally mention it in earshot of a Chelish spy, but most of those people are important, so, the retired ones. I don't know why men in particular. I asked one if it was supposed to be an arrangement by which I could delay my execution by offering sexual favors and he got very offended and spent thirteen minutes explaining how Good holds that it's better to kill people than to let them convince you not to."
" - that it's a really big deal. It'll change the wars here, and the wars in the Outer Planes. A lot depends on - who manages to contact your world first, or whether the gods find out about it and negotiate a treaty - and in those negotiations it'll matter who was closest to contacting your world -" Shrug.
"Uh, imagine two people hate each other, and they walk into a room with a powerful weapon. And both of them want to use it against the other, but also if they use it they're pretty likely to get killed themselves, which they strongly disprefer, and it'll destroy lots of the cities, which neither of them really want. And they can - make promises that are magically unbreakable. They might - promise to dismantle it together. Does that make sense."
" - one of the ways the thing they're doing is more complicated is - okay, so if you burst through the door to the room with the weapon at the exact same time, maybe you just agree to dismantle it together. But if one of you is first through the door, and considers it likelier than not that they'll be the one to deploy it first, they don't have a reason to agree to that anymore. So the other one might - pay them, for the agreement to dismantle it - this quickly gets too complicated for mortals to think about, but even if they end up dismantling the bomb the one that was closer to using it will get more concessions."
Shrug. "It's not very important most of the time. I mostly hear it brought up to make a theological point about why the actions of the gods aren't comprehensible, not to make - strategic points about when to tell them things... but I should've thought about it." She sounds like someone who is faintly cheered by the idea that she is in her situation for a reason that is at least kind of her own fault.
"I don't think so? I guess I'm curious what else the handcuffs are doing. They're antimagic but they're also -" Shrug. "That's not important, though, it's just, professional curiosity. ...and how expensive the cuffs are is probably more information than anything they tell you, about how long they'll keep me alive."
This causes people to make faces. "Cheliax really gets to their heads."
"I hate Asmodeus."
"I hate Pharasma."
"What, for not grading on a curve?"
"You know what I mean."
"We don't let people kill themselves especially if there might be strategic intent - having potentially arranged a resurrection, say," Isavel says. "We - don't categorically avoid executing Evil people but we try very hard not to."
"Not an impossible one. You can do it with a geas, but you have to renew it regularly and be sure of your wording. But - I don't think your friend is wrong to believe that we'd prefer holding her to be a temporary solution not a permanent one. Nor to believe we don't want her to go to Hell - where, I do feel it's important to point out, she will promptly be lit on fire for years and years."
"You can ask her! Asmodeans agree that Asmodeus tortures everyone in Hell, they just believe this is fine since - they're Evil."
"I think there are more epicycles," someone says.
"Sure." Isavel sighs. "Since anything Asmodeus chooses to do to people is definitionally right since He matters and they don't and it's gracious of Him to bother enslaving them. Something like that."
"I think...people have a natural longing to be part of a bigger whole. A holy order, a nation, a cause, a religion...there's nothing wrong with it by itself, it's natural and good. But - it can be pointed at institutions that are unworthy of it. And Cheliax is a country designed to point it at a being as unworthy as one can possibly be. And lots of things are convincing, if they're the only thing you've ever heard..."
"The thing we want to do," says Isavel, "is convert your friend, but - if she thinks she has to go along with it to not die then it won't actually work - it's better if it's her idea -"
"I think if you are trying to believe something so people won't kill you you end up....believing something entirely different? I'm not sure. If it gets to the point where we're going to have to kill her if she doesn't convert we will tell her that, but we're not at that point and she'll have better odds if she's trying because she thinks Asmodeanism might be wrong rather than because she thinks it is right but that she'll have to lie to us to live to go to Hell and serve Asmodeus."
"They are certainly people able to talk about that if she's interested but our guidelines for treatment of prisoners prohibit isolating them, even if they don't want to hear about Good at all. It's not emotionally healthy and it makes it less likely they'd have anyone they felt able to complain to if they were being abused."
"Iomedae doesn't pick people who'd hurt a helpless prisoner. But - it's not wise to just rely on that, right, that'd be holding ourselves in some ways to lower standards than we hold the rest of the world, the right way to do it is to have a god who wouldn't pick people who'd hurt a helpless prisoner and have vows that they won't and have someone for the prisoner to complain to if they do and have an inquiry if there's any sign something is up."
"Well, most societies are nice places to live for their elites, whoever those are, and most societies are - all right for most people as long as they work hard and don't get unlucky with a plague or a famine or a work accident - but a society doesn't gain very much by treating prisoners well. So if they do it, it has to be because they care about people even when it won't immediately help them."
"Of course. Hmm, what should you check out if you're exploring - the spire has great views, you can watch the cavalry practice on the south grounds, there's a market just a couple blocks from here where the spiral-road meets the straight one, there's the memory garden...there's the room Iomedae stayed in, once, when she was human..."
"When Lawful Good people die, we go to Heaven, and our souls are transformed by the light of Heaven, typically into angels. The process takes a long time, but eventually we join the warriors of Heaven. And people go back and forth to and from Heaven on business, occasionally, and they'll pass along updates."
"Iomedae ascended while alive. I think it's also possible to ascend after you're dead but ascensions are so rare I don't know much about it."
"Sarenrae started as an angel, though a native one not a former mortal," someone offers.
"There you go."
"There's a sacred rock in Absalom called the Starstone. It is a remnant of the collision of an asteroid with our world. A god died preventing the asteroid from destroying the world, and now the rock has the essence of gods in it, and anyone who touches it and is worthy of it ascends. No one's been worthy in 800 years, since Iomedae."
"No one knows much about how the Starstone chooses. Aroden's the one who put it there, so maybe it was Him choosing, when He was alive - He'd definitely have chosen Iomedae, She was His paladin....but some of the other ascended gods are weird choices, honestly." Shrug. "You have to be very powerful to even get past the protections surrounding the Starstone."
"We're - very small compared to gods, and we can't understand most of how they think, and it is dangerous to us to be in close contact with them, unless they are expending lots of resources to make it safe for us and to explain things in terms that we can understand. And Iomedae is a new god but has lots and lots to do, so She has to be very judicious about how She uses resources."
"It's not that it makes you worse at things, exactly, it's that - when you have a plan that is still a human sort of plan you can explain it fine, but if your plans are now far more complicated than that and involve negotiated agreements with twenty other gods then they can't be explained in simple terms, even though you're not worse at explaining. And you have more attention than a human but still not necessarily enough attention for all the things you are trying to do simultaneously. A god that were trying to imitate a person would be very good at it, but if you just want to be a person, why become a god."
"I know people who spoke to Iomedae during the Chelish Civil War. I don't know if I know anyone who has more recently than that -"
"- I got a pretty specific dream about the Whispering Tyrant, I don't know if that counts..."
"...I think not strictly speaking? It's not talking."
"I think She meets with the Glorious Reclamation people regularly but they don't talk to anyone outside the order, so..."
"The Whispering Tyrant is in Ustalav, it's one of the threats Lastwall was founded to look out for. The Glorious Reclamation is the paladin order devoted to operations in Cheliax. They work closely with Iomedae because intelligence operations benefit a lot from comparing notes from the human perspective and the god-perspective, but they're very secretive, for obvious reasons. We worked with them to arrest the Chelish wizard - Iomedae had direct input on that, she said that if we waited ten days then no one would draw the connection between her arrest and your appearance."
"A lich. It's a kind of powerful undead magic user. They can be nearly impossible to destroy. He brought the orcs of Belkzen under his control and used them as an invasion force to conquer the whole north of the continent, which he ruled for six hundred years, expanding southward. A crusade called the Shining Crusade was launched to destroy him. Iomedae fought in the Shining Crusade, and Aroden's herald Arazni was killed in it. It lasted several decades, and eventually they defeated him and imprisoned him in Gallowspire, in Ustalav. Lastwall was founded to, among other things, be ready - he probably won't be imprisoned forever, and we haven't yet learned how to kill him for good..."
The whole city of Lastwall is much like the bits of it he's seen; not rich, but tidy, and well-maintained, with children playing outside. There's a market with dozens of kinds of vegetables and fresh bread and eggs and chickens and oysters. There's a cemetary, and near it the memorial with sculptures of the dead as angels. There are parade grounds where the cavalry practices. There are churches.
He is followed by a single guard at a moderate distance; the guard makes no particular effort to conceal himself but doesn't stay right on Kyeo's heels, either.
The city walls are tall and unmistakeable, at the city's edges; there are soldiers stationed on them, and a grand gate through which wagons piled with goods pass. There are barracks up against the walls. In a flower garden there's a boy and a girl about Kyeo's age, kissing, and past that some young children whacking at each other with toy swords.
Eventually the bells ring for dinner.
"Maybe. I think Good is specifically hard to explain because - really what's going on is that people are inherently Evil, and if they dedicate themselves to anything except the service of a Good god they will be Evil, but Good tries to be very universalist, 'everyone can be Good!' so they end up having to be in denial about lots of things just so the pieces superficially hold together. It's hard to explain something that isn't even true all the way through. Did they say how long I have to convert in?"
"Magic items require spellsilver. It's a metal, occurs naturally in the earth and the elemental plane of earth, but it's rare, you have to do a lot of mining to get very much of it. Antimagic field is sixth-circle so a magic item with it would be - incredibly expensive. I'm not surprised they only have the one."
"Never seen an arcane magic item I couldn't do myself, even if I'm not powerful enough to cast the spell. There's a way around that, where you lay it in little bits that don't require the same peak channeling capacity. It's much harder, but." Shrug. "I don't even know the trick for preparing spells without a spellbook and I don't know any combat magic at all, but I guess they might figure I could learn."
"As a weapons enchanter. I made friends with adventurers and looked at their weapons so I could learn how to make them myself, and I made upgraded arms and armor for our soldiers, and I mostly used my spell slots for translation and unit discipline. A Fireball can kill one demon; a sword of demon-slaying can kill demons forever."
"The Worldwound attracts adventurers from all over the world, with all kinds of fancy magic items I'd never get a close look at otherwise. Most of them won't come to Cheliax because we don't permit the primary worship of other gods, so I couldn't get a look at work from elsewhere if I stayed home. And units need two wizards anyway, to get enough mindreading coverage, so there aren't any wizards who just get a cushy home deployment their whole term of service."
"Well, Asmodeus is the first and greatest of the gods, and owns us, and when we die will use us for the great plan, and you aren't supposed to lose sight of that, but if while keeping that in mind you want to pray to Nethys, god of magic, for insight into magic, or if you're a merchant and pray to Abadar for fortunate ventures, or a soldier who prays to Gorum, god of battle, that's fine, but you'd get in trouble if anyone thought you were more devoted to one of those. I bet it's the same here, you're allowed to be fond of Nethys or Irori or Abadar or Pharasma, one of the unobjectionable ones like that, so long as it's the Iomedean holy services you don't miss and you give her church more money. And no one's looking for reasons to get you in trouble."
"In Cheliax that wouldn't be enough but here it might be. Worshipping other gods first is a big deal because - gods can see better and act more directly where their loyalists are. So it's strategically important for them to not have people who are loyal to other gods around creating avenues for those other gods to interfere in their plans. People who just don't care about any gods don't invite interference in the same way."
"Maybe? I think not without expending more resources than they'd usually bother with? But they can more clearly see the plausible ways people will act, if those people are theirs, and be less surprised by anything we do, and I think it's cheaper for them to - arrange good luck or bad luck, arrange chance meetings, stuff like that..."
"We're in a building consecrated to Iomedae, She can probably not let the other gods look here even if someone who worships one of them but isn't a cleric or anything is here. Though maybe the handcuffs are doing something too, I wouldn't know. I did try praying. There are more than twenty million people in Cheliax and Asmodeus is not one of the gods most shaped for paying attention to humans, it is not very surprising that He didn't happen to look closely at me in particular. He'd know if I had reported it to one of His clerics, like I was supposed to."
"I have no idea what happens to you when you die, since you're from another world, but they wouldn't have killed you, that's stupid, and they don't light living people on fire, because that's stupid. They do hurt them, sometimes, as a punishment or a lesson, but you can avoid punishments by not being stupid and learning lessons is better than not learning them and continuing to be wrong."
"That seems to be one of the things the old men are for. Though also they're apparently for - complaining to if you don't like your conditions - I asked if that came up a lot and they said Iomedae wouldn't choose people who'd do that, but." It seemed like a sort of evasive answer.
"Bread and stew. I'd eat better at home but Cheliax is richer than Lastwall, I think it's got to be pretty generous for what they're capable of. I bet there's some Good thing about feeding prisoners the same thing you eat yourself, that's exactly the kind of thing there'd be a Good thing about."
"Richer. Hell gives us what they produce. Most countries only rich children can study to be wizards or tradespeople but in Cheliax every child can. Most countries most people can't read and certainly they can't own books but an average family in Cheliax owns books. A collection, even, if they happen to be into books. And compared to most countries we have much better rule of law, no bandits and pickpockets and beggars, but Lastwall's actually probably fine on that front."
"There are nine layers of Hell. The only part that's on fire is the first level, which is constantly being invaded from Heaven and from the Abyss. Devils can't be injured by fire, but angels and demons can, so it's defensive. But mostly they do books and tools and textiles - people in Cheliax get to own several sets of clothes, people most places don't -- and train warriors, and outfit our army, and advise our leaders."
"Devils can learn magic. It's not like ours, it's more flexible and more finicky and it takes a long time to master, and they don't export their magic items to Cheliax, they need them in Hell, but they have magic item enchanters. I wanted to have a long impressive career doing that and then when I died I could get an apprenticeship doing that, and study magic and build - magic grain-mills, magic looms, magic castles, they have all kinds of things..."
"Why - the universe. Hell. A person in the position to decide who gets to study magic in Hell. Not you personally. I am pretty sure the guards would stop you if you tried to kill me and then we'd figure out what all the Good contortions around punishing people are and that wouldn't improve anything in the slightest. I wouldn't ask it."
Iomedae was born in Cheliax, then part of Taldor, to a rural family in a dangerous area where their livestock was routinely threatened by griffons and direwolves and so on; she was chosen as a paladin at 14, which is young but not unheard of, and had cleared the region of predators and become a significantly more powerful paladin by 20 when she finally showed up at the gates of the nearest paladin order, two hundred miles away. (This was unusual; being Lawful Good entirely on your own is hard and most paladins join an order if they're not part of one already.) The paladin order does not suit her perfectly, and she founds her own, which goes on to be one of the largest and most successful of its era (its descendents are now in Lastwall, the book notes).
And many adventures follow. She apparently spent the next sixty years or so doing all kinds of marvelous and extraordinary things, culminating in the decades-long Shining Crusade against Ustalav; after that, she went for the Starstone, and ascended.
Good, in the opinion of Iomedae's holy book, is described in so many different ways because it is a balancing of so many different things, and how they are best balanced is a consequence of how you talk about them and how you prioritize them and which you conceive of as the core of the thing. Good is about defeating everything broken in the universe: disease, death, hunger, fear, helplessness, cruelty. Good is also about approaching the world in such a fashion that, even if you misunderstand a great deal about it, you will still make things better, rather than worse. Assassinations, for example, make things worse unless you're correct about all of your assumptions and motivations for them; feeding orphans makes things better even if you're wrong about most more complicated things. Many of the precepts of Good are rules against mistakes that humans will often make if not warned off them; they are not intrinsic to Good, but following them will produce more of a Good world than defying them.
Iomedae then analyzes at length many of her own decisions while living, from her new perspective as a god who can see the longer-term consequences of such things; she thinks lots of her decisions were correct in the context of a threat as dangerous as the Whispering Tyrant but would be unwise to emulate in happier times. She thinks she made mistakes, especially while young, by being too ruthless, not noticing the complicated costs of being known to kill prisoners or to having people afraid to admit to disappointing her. Aroden, her god, mostly did not warn her from these mistakes, being lawful neutral Himself, but She thinks Good is more correct, on the whole, now that She can see both of them properly, and She can try to explain some of why, through the lens of explaining her human errors.
Another section is a meditation on her popular understanding as the god of fighting Evil. She refers to it, herself, as being the god of defeating Evil, and She thinks it an important difference. When children are learning to swordfight, they commonly try to swing their sword at the enemy's sword, seeing that swordfighting often involves weapons clashing in this fashion and thinking that to swordfight you ought to clash your weapon in this fashion. But when you swing a sword, you should be trying to kill or cripple the other person. They might bring their sword down in your way, they might not, but a swordfight is not your aim; it is the natural consequence of your aims being thwarted. Iomedae expects that her followers will have to fight many battles, but the battle is not the aim, and must never be mistaken for it.
There's a library if he wants more books. He is welcome to enroll in swordfighting lessons. They are confused about how Ibyabek does the things it is doing, and they are considering confidentially bringing in a cleric of Abadar to explain the case for money and hopefully clarify some of the confusions, if he is interested in that.
Swordfighting lessons sound kind of fun, actually, even if they won't be especially useful once he goes home if ever he does. It'll keep him in shape differently than walks will, at least. He isn't sure what they're confused about but if they want him to talk to more clerics that seems fine?
"Yes, I don't know what they'd have been surprised by at all. Ibyabek doesn't have any giant holes in it full of hostile wildlife, it doesn't have - people dying and getting set on fire, and I guess they could be upset that the people who die don't then go to Heaven either but again that's not a surprise..."
"If I were trying to have a conversation in Cheliax and not be weird and someone asked what I cared about - well, they'd be being weird, but if I said that I cared about Cheliax returning to and then surpassing its former glory and spreading Asmodeanism to all the world I wouldn't be weird. Unless someone thought I was being too wordy and probably covering for something, but you know, stuff like what to say at parties is very contextual..."
"You can probably get him to repeat it yourself if the exact details matter but he said that Cheliax wasn't interested in raising people who could answer that question, and I said well of course not I'm not a noble or aiming at being a court wizard, why would Cheliax bother raising me to answer that question, and he said that - people noticing answers to that question is the thing that happens by default, and what Cheliax is doing is raising them to lose that."
"I don't know! I wish that if they were going to kill people for not figuring out their ideology their ideology would be more straightforward! Mine is! Yours is! Mine is that you should obey Asmodeus, yours is that you should obey Ibyabek. If we were going to kill people for having the wrong ideology at least they could figure out the right one."
"If Good were just about obeying Iomedae instead of Asmodeus I could work with that. It'd seem like an inferior religion because Iomedae is weaker but - you can make sense of it, right, backing the losing side of a fight is a gamble but it means a bigger reward if you end up winning."
"Huh. Well, in general, you can bet on a likely thing for a small return or on an unlikely thing for a large return. But that's not what Good is doing so I'm not sure it is a helpful example, really. I am curious what the cleric of Abadar will think. Abadar's neutral, which is much less confusing."
The cleric of Abadar comes in the morning. He wears fancy magic armor that doesn't impede his range of motion much, and identifying sleeves with five stripes embroidered up them, and he's of a different ethnicity than the one predominant in Lastwall. He seems - very upset, for some reason, by the paladins' explanation of Ibyabek.
"They don't have money?"
"No."
"Do they barter instead?"
"I don't think so."
"How...do people decide what work to do."
"The government tells them."
"And it tells them how much of it to do?"
"I think so."
"And it gives them goods when they have done the amount of work it told them to do? Or regardless of whether they did that?"
"An age-appropriate children's book every month till your children are all grown, copies of everything official, some improving literature a few times a year, copies of the scripts of movies for the blind or deaf, reference books for every household and you can turn them in when they're worn out for new ones or just wait for the next edition."
He looks at one of the paladins. "What has gotten better here in the last five years."
" - we're not really looking for a lecture -"
"I am trying very very very hard not to give a lecture."
"My wife got a new model of spinning wheel that's much faster and smoother. Is that the kind of thing you mean."
"Yes. My brother-in-law is a papermaker and he says there's twice as many papermills as when he started, and they need less repairing, that's the kind of thing I mean. Another brother-in-law dyes things, and tells me every time I see him about how they've imported new dyes, with more staying power. When I was a child the streets of Sothis weren't paved and now they are. There used to be two docks for big ships that need it to be deep, now there are eight of them. You?" he says to another paladin.
"I'm a soldier, like Kyeo, I don't know. We've bred better horses, I guess."
"In the system that Kyeo described - it's like you took a living breathing system where people trade for things they want, and you froze the trades they made one day in a block of ice and then you force them to make those precise trades every day for the rest of forever. With tweaks where the people in charge specifically thought of an improvement, but you can't possibly - a god couldn't see all the improvements, because they're bits of paper mill machinery that don't break as often and dyes that stay better and get people to buy your textiles not your neighbors's and the docks wouldn't do anything without the ships and the spinning wheels don't look any better unless you spin for twelve hours a day and the horses don't seem different unless you ride them and the person who knows what's any better is the person using them. Kyeo does not know any things about how anything is improved because the improving is not being done by the people who would benefit from it and there's so little of it that the people who'd benefit from it can't name any of it. It is a parody of a society, and it cannot get better, because no one is allowed to make it better, because they are all slaves."
"I suppose you let your soldiers desert under fire if they decide this isn't worth the money and your firefighters extort the coughing occupants of burning houses for money before they put them out and if nobody cares to deliver mail to remote farms for an amount of money the farmers can scrape together they'll be cut off from the world and if someone doesn't like any of the jobs that happen to be available they will swear to you that they're so glad to starve instead of going back to school!"
"When people don't like any of the jobs available to them, they do the one they dislike the least. If you randomly picked a job for them and forced them to do that job you would get in trouble because enslaving people is illegal. If they can't find any work there are soup kitchens that will try to feed them anyway. Firefighting is through the church and has a flat fee everywhere in the world that I've heard of. It is...true that if poor farmers can't afford to get the mail delivered very often then they don't get the mail delivered very often? I've never met one who wanted to be a slave about it."
"In Osirion there are two kinds of farmers. There are free farmers, who farm and sell the products of their farm and get money they use to buy things they need, and they can farm more or less acreage as they see fit - more acreage is more work but means more pay - and they can choose which crops they want to farm, considering how well they'll grow and how we'll they'll weather a drought year if there is one.
And there are serfs, who do not own the land they farm, and the products of their labor are confiscated at the end of the year, and they don't gain much from having grown more, and as a result they grow far, far less food, we've studied it, because when you're a slave you just don't pour your whole heart and soul into growing as much food as possible, you just don't -"
"The things you were confused about," he says to the paladins. "The lack of days off?"
"That was one of them, yes. They don't - have holy days - but -"
"But people highly value time off and given the ability to set their own schedule they will take vacations and take weekends and have their cousin cover their shop sometimes, even in places where they don't worship the gods or in Osirion where Abadar does not prefer us to celebrate his holy days by not working. They're - rich, in the sense that they can produce lots of things. They're desperately poor in the sense that they have very few of the things people value. They have lots of stuff but no wealth..."
"Not much - decoration," says one of the paladins, slowly. "The homes all looked kind of -"
"No wealth. Nothing they actually want, just whatever something that isn't even a god assigned them."
"- most people absolutely don't do whatever a god tells them to do, if you've just met paladins you are getting a very unusual sample of people. Most people do what they want to do, what makes their lives and their family's lives and their friend's lives and their city and their country more a place they want to live."
"Please tell me we are going to do something about the slave planet," he says to the paladins.
"We - need to think. Obviously it will be - somewhere on the list of priorities. It's - far away, and confusing -"
"I am not very confused about it at all. And it'd fund other work, they're - they're doing some things we don't know how to do."
"Yeah," she says.
"A planet - that's so many people."
"We need to think."
"Of course. I'm sorry. I can stick around for a week."
Sarham is in a lecture hall, folding his glowing rectangle into its shiny case and stuffing it into his bag, elbowing his friends and vice-versa as they file out of the row. They emerge into rain, put up umbrellas, buy steaming drinks from a cart they pass, duck under an awning to drink them.
In the scry, after finishing his drink, Sarham taps a glowing rectangle against a bicycle leaning against a bollard. It lights up and he gets on it and zooms away without pedaling. They can see a couple of minutes of his riverfront route. There are skyscrapers reflected in the river. He has to go around a portrait artist and over a plywood detour to acommodate some construction.
There is a quiet conversation in the hallway.
He comes in.
"I owe you an apology," he says to Kyeo. "It is - good, and admirable, to look at the world and think - that children should not go to bed hungry because their mother is dead and their father is drunk, that if bakers had to give their bread to the poor then no one would starve. I - don't know if the people who tried that on your world were trying it sincerely, but - but if they were, then with the best of intentions they made a very terrible mistake, and one that won't get better until they reverse it. I think the people of Golarion will want to help if we possibly can."
"Are you - still confused?"
"I don't think so," Isavel says. "I think - it seemed like something was off, but we didn't know what - we don't use money very much within the order -"
"Most churches don't within the church. It's important that if someone doesn't like what they're assigned to do they can go outside the organization within which there's no money."
"Mmmhmm."
Kyeo shakes himself a little. Glances at Fazil. "Carissa - the Chelish wizard who first found me, who the paladins arrested - wanted to know if she could make some sort of arrangement with your church to make magic items instead of sitting around doing nothing with anti-magic handcuffs on."
He looks, bewildered, to the paladins for context.
"It's not easy to hold wizards," Isavel says. "We don't have an immediate timeframe but she inferred we couldn't do it for the rest of her life and we probably can't. We only have the one set of cuffs."
"What circle."
"Third."
"- then just make her expend her spells, take her spellbook, maybe wake her up in the middle of the night every night, and she's not going to be able to figure out how to do anything interesting."
"Third and she's twenty-three."
" - I guess she might eventually figure out how to do something interesting."
"And we have a policy against 'wake her up in the middle of the night' type solutions where if someone misses their job for one day a disaster happens. And it might be a disaster, for Asmodeus to learn -" Gesture at the scrying pool. "Might not be. They're very far away. But it might be, especially if we learn how he got here."
"...yeah. I...that's a tough one."
"What would you do, if you'd grabbed her?"
"She wants to be allowed to work on magic items, and says she won't contact Asmodeus?"
"Apparently."
"We'd marry her off. Find a wizard who can contain her appropriately, probably one capable of geas, review a wording that's satisfactory to everybody, marry her to him on the condition that we can have a representative drop by every week and watch him re-cast it."
"...wow." Isavel says. "I - I recognize that to an Osirian perspective that sounds different, but -"
"You'd want to screen for a decent man. But I'd expect if we found a decent man she'd choose it over - sitting here in the dungeon waiting for you to need the cuffs and, what, petrify her?"
"Probably, yes."
"This would let her live an ordinary life."
"It is a spell that can constrain a person's actions. Make them unable to do something prohibited, or obliged to do something in particular. Simple ones last forever, and she is under one of those, to not speak to agents of Asmodeus, but complex ones last a shorter time. We don't have the resources to have someone reliably on hand to cast it every week."
"You probably want a wording you're very sure doesn't have loopholes or ways a clever person can cause a message to eventually reach Asmodean ears, but - she should definitely have friends, Osirian marriages don't frown on having friends."
"My understanding is that Osirian women are supposed to never be alone with a man," Isavel says.
"This permits many friendships, including with men."
"All right. I think we need to pray and then we might want to discuss Ibyabek more once we've heard from Iomedae. We'll let you know if we are interested enough in the ...marriage ...option to consider the confidentiality reconsiderations it'd require. - thank you for coming out here. I think it was clarifying."
"We got a new ambassador once, and he brought his son, and I was assigned to show him around. And he stole something from his mother that would let him show me things from - the interplanetary information network, it's called the skylace. He showed me some pictures before we got caught.
I thought they were fake."
"My father is a merchant. And he's pretty good at it, so he's rich. And some people try their hand at merchanting but they don't have a good sense for when prices will rise and fall and which seacaptains are competent and which will make mistakes and which will try to scam you. And they don't do very well, and lose money, and eventually they learn or they quit and do something else, I suppose. And it seems like maybe if there's nothing to tell them they're not very good at it they'll - go on being not very good at it. I guess."
"I don't think it can be a person, what, is there someone whose job it is to calculate how well all of the merchants would have done if they used money, and tell them, because if you've got lots of people doing jobs like that instead of working then no wonder you're poor. Also I think there's plenty to scam about with no money, you can siphon off the goods, or just not work very hard, or not handle stuff carefully so it arrives broken..."
"That's not what makes the difference between a good and a bad merchant, though, it's picking what to ship, and when, so that there's not a surplus in the port you're sending it to, and making sure you don't spend much time delayed in port anywhere because you have arrangements all the places you'll be passing through, and funding speculative ventures sometimes when they look good but not so many of them you won't stay afloat unless one pans out, and then unexpected things happen like terrible storms or a charybdis in the strait or whatever and a good captain will still lose the ship sometimes but not nearly as often, which adds up, if you're funding ten of them..."
"Then even if they're technically not being threatened with starvation I bet the general state obtains where women don't have good alternatives to getting married and the people in power, who are men, do not want them to have good alternatives to getting married. Except prostitution, that is the traditional allowed alternative because it also involves being sexually available to men...I admittedly don't know how that one would work without money, maybe you haven't got it."
"Please don't tell him that, just tell him I'm maybe interested. - if I say 'well it's better than dying' then I get the population of men who specifically want to marry someone who thinks that, if I pretend I just think it's a good idea then I maybe have a shot at the population of men who don't specifically prefer the thing where I am a prisoner. More than all Osirian women are."
"- in Aktun more than half of people work for pay at least ten hours a week," he is saying. "About ten percent work more than eighty - adjust that, obviously, for them not needing to sleep, so eighty is still only about half of your time..."
"The people who don't work for pay, what are they doing?"
"Hobbies, I think mostly. Writing, reading, drawing, dancing, drinking, competitive sports - those pay but only at the highest levels - if you had that on the Material plane I think you'd see something more like what you see from retired wizards. Studies of areas of interest, exploration, time spent with children and parents..."
They have so many rules about how to let other random people enforce their rules! It's weird! They're not even saying "Kyeo, it's illegal for you to not report it if he tries to rape her", they just want people in the room and aren't assigning them any tasks! It's bizarre, is what it is. He doesn't say this.
"It's not impossible but it requires - pretty intensive supervision from someone who is themself an experienced wizard, to know whether you're studying magic that'd let you escape, and whether you're burning materials by accident at a suspicious rate, and whether you're siphoning any off for other projects and saying you got into an accident -"
"- you are pretty new at being a wizard! You're a very impressive one but I bet there are all kinds of mistakes you haven't made yet and will eventually, and sometimes people just get unlucky! Anyway, even in Osirion, intensive supervision from a wizard who we'd trust with a secret like this and who can also - make sure you get to learn things and not just make the same artifact every day for the rest of your life -"
" - okay. Anyway, I am not sure that this is a service you can buy, because - we couldn't have lots of handoffs, we'd need the wizard to commit for the long run and be willing to work with the government to ensure it was still working, and there'd be up-front materials costs that existing loan programs aren't a good fit for. And so if you were Osirian I think what a court would do is find you a wizard husband who was willing to do all those things. There wouldn't be a lot of selection but I do think there'd be a way to make it work."
"I only have Kyeo's account and the things the paladins noticed seemed odd, but I think they tried to abolish money while not really understanding all the things money does, and then they tried to replace all the things that they understood money to do with other, costlier, systems, and as a result even though they have fabulous manufacturing techniques the likes of which we haven't dreamed of, people actually have a harder time having nice lives than they do even in Golarion which is much poorer."
"I think it is several things. One of them is that people do better work when they choose for themselves what work to do. One of them is that people have happier lives if they get to decide where to live and what things to buy, even if those choices are very constrained, because it is good for people to get to choose things, and it can motivate them to be inventive and find solutions no one thought of. One of them is that people take risks and invent new things because they expect to get rich, and if they won't get rich no matter what they do they won't take risks."
"Probably not. Anyway, adventurers who make fifth circle can Teleport and Plane Shift and Break Enchantment and Raise Dead and Permanancy and those are very very economically valuable so people take lots of risks to make fifth circle. If they weren't allowed to get rich they mostly would just stay home."
"I was in it! Whatever your complaints about the state of my knowledge about paper mills I went through training and served on a ship. We have to police a three dimensional border against smugglers and spies from a planetful of hostile people right in our own system, and we do it."
"We've been travelling together for eight years. He's a conjuration specialist and plans on retiring as soon as he hits fifth circle and selling teleports and spending almost all of his time at home doing whatever's interesting. He's lawful neutral and doesn't particularly hold by any gods and goes to holidays at the temple to Nethys mostly to see Clepati show off. He's not Good, which I thought might be - a plus, considering - but I have never known him to treat anyone unkindly. I think he does want a wife he can take to fancy parties but you can take mysterious foreign wives to fancy parties. He is not married. He would probably eventually want a second wife, unless you two fall in love or something."
"I don't know that we have a concept specific to men, both married and unmarried, who don't desire women in some persistent way, but men who aren't attracted to their wives is a - thing that comes up in marital counseling, and if you know in advance you can head off the problem by finding a girl who'd prefer a husband who hardly touches her."
"Some people will never be very interested in men no matter how much their surrounding society encourages it but for some it does depend, I think," Isavel says. "That said if your society strongly discouraged it and you turned up with it anyway then I don't think yours is likely to be very much the kind that goes away when you leave the army and there are girls around."
He seems totally undisturbed by it. "I guess it would also be inconvenient to be exclusively attracted to men because it'd complicate finding a wife but the attraction to men isn't the problem there, it's the lack of attraction to women, which sounds like the part your hospital doesn't have a fix for..."
Today's topic of gossip is Osirion, since there's a cleric here to swap stories with. Osirion really is full of enormous stone pyramids where the ancient pharaohs are buried; the less well-defended ones have been looted but the better-defended ones are still intact; there is still a pharaoh today, the god-king Khemet the Third, an aspect of Abadar; Fazil says it's kind of complicated but Khemet is to Abadar as the human Iomedae is to the god Iomedae, sort of. He was not born like that and got transformed into it when his grandfather died. The pharaoh's palace and most of the important government buildings in Sothis are in the hollowed out carapace of the giant beetle Ulunat, one of the spawn of Rovagug, which some people say the first pharaoh of Osirion fought, seven thousand years ago. It reflects all magic and renders the inside unscryable and impossible to teleport in and out of.
Fazil is busy contributing to speculative plans to help in Ibyabek and scrying for contacts in Outer Sohaibek though they're going to be very cautious about actually contacting people, this time, until they're sure they're not missing an important element of the situation. He is also trying to arrange for confidentiality agreements to be signed such that Mahdi can be told about things. The paladins are very understandably paranoid. They also have reservations about this proposed solution to the wizard; so does he, really, but he also has reservations about the backup plan of leaving her chained up underground until they need the handcuffs and killing her then.
His terse Sending to Mahdi mostly said he should come to Lastwall and maybe meet a girl, long story, very confidential, very important, and even though it's going to be harder to convince the paladins to bring them in too he's somewhat relieved when Mahdi teleports in with Hagan and also Belmarniss.
"They are not making an excessively big fuss. The fuss is appropriately sized."
He hauls out the confidentiality agreement, which forbids them from discussing with anyone including the gods anything they learn in Lastwall or anything they learn downstream of that, for example by exploring the site where Lastwall found it or talking to people they learned about here, without the whole leadership of Lastwall agreeing in writing, or (should they be unavailable) Iomedae's personal approval, communicated through a manifestation or her herald. They are also forbidden from implying that they have interesting information they can't share, writing it down in an insecure fashion, doing things that are likely as a consequence to draw peoples' attention to it, etcetera, and from being around anyone likely to be reading their minds. And from going to Hell.
"A human landed here three weeks ago from another world. With just humans, and no magic, or nothing they call that but they've got - ships that travel between stars, so they've gone to lots of planets. It was an accident on one of those ships that dropped him on the Worldwound, and they don't really know how."
"There is a lot we don't understand about the question but the slave planet understands there to be no gods and prohibits worshipping any and the ...flavor's all wrong...Ibyabek decided that people wouldn't be poor if there wasn't money, so they banned it, and the government picks a job for everyone and forces them to go do it all day, and then distributes food and supplies to everyone based on what it imagines them to require."
"No! I was trying to be open minded about it but it's a nightmare. He's in their military and he looked - very thin, I thought at first he was sick, or had been until recently - and the ones we scried, too. I asked him how many days they work in twenty, and the answer is twenty. And I asked if there was anything that was newly available, or much improved, in the last five years, and he couldn't think of any - you would expect it to discourage innovation if no one gets any rewards for their labor and no one gets to choose their job, you'd expect there to be shortages of things if the demand for them changed over time, since the numbers the government was using wouldn't - and that's what it looks like. It's just awful. Tragic. - I want to fix it."
"Yes, but spider-silk wasn't invented recently. Spiders have been around for much longer than five years. Still. Skinny humans without days off, we have some of those but we don't have billions and ours can hope for better luck next time as long as they don't stab anybody..."
"Not yet. We'll need a Gate, for one thing, and secondly I think the paladins want more of a plan of attack. No, you are most proximately here because of a secondary problem created by the world-hopping man. He - didn't land on us. He landed on Cheliax. And after they stole him out from them the paladins went back and stole the Chelish agent he'd landed on, and they think Asmodeus doesn't know, they think she hadn't told anyone yet. But now they have her, and she's a wizard and hard to hold, and they can't let her die and go to Hell and warn Asmodeus."
"They haven't mentioned that particular constraint. They are planning to petrify her if they can't hold her anymore but they are shopping around for improvements on that. They ask what Osirion would do if she were our problem and I said, well, we'd get her married to someone who could contain her, so that is now an angle they're exploring."
"I'm sure that as marriageable Osirian men go you are top percentile in all the Osirian-husband-ly virtues," Belmarniss assures Mahdi. "Buuuut she's Chelish. It's hurting us kind of a lot here that we can't openly advertise, I can think of places I'd try asking... church per se wouldn't want her?"
"For us geas is sixth circle, not fourth, there's a lot fewer people who can cast it. And - they're going to be even more in favor of the marriage plan, on the grounds that it's also better for her. - I don't know that it is. But most people are certainly going to think so. It - sounds a lot better, right, married and studying magic with her husband, compared to in a cage making magic items every day..."
Carissa smiled at the first female guard she saw and asked if they'd mind doing her hair nicely, unsure whether this was the sort of thing you get Good points for or not; the guard agreed, so probably it is, and now she looks nice and hates everyone passionately.
She turns when they walk in and - a smile is a hard sell, and looking right at them probably isn't being meek enough - very shy smile, looking at the floor.
"We have been discussing whether there is anybody we can safely ask about you at all who would be able to keep you and would only want magic items out of you as opposed to needing the deal sweetened. Mahdi is known to us as a lovely person, at least if you like stereotypical Osirian wizards, and signed the nondisclosure on Fazil's say-so, which gives him a big leg up in the general field of competitors here, but it has occurred to us that if you can't stand his nose you might not tell us so we're trying to be very clever. - Geas is higher-circle for clerics but would the church of Nethys maybe go for it, they're often wizards too, they have that side hustle with the wine and could probably move some items too if they don't already -"
It is sort of promisingly candid, though she's mostly trying to not have feelings, which won't help; the kinds of people who prefer to buy crying slaves are generally precisely the kind you don't want.
"I'd like that, if it could be made to work," she says evenly. "I think I can definitely make it worth someone's spell slots.
The problem as I understand it is that I have no real means to object if someone, having made that deal, decides to make it any sweeter, so Fazil thought I should get ahead of that and sign myself over to one who will have thereby acquired an interest in keeping others off. And who I can pick."
"I don't think we'll get anywhere if I lie to you," she lies. "This isn't what I wanted a month ago. I am still a little worried that we have wildly different concepts of how it'd work, somehow. But - I want the chance to be safe, and worth something, and it makes sense that the way to do that in your society is marriage, and I would be really happy, if there were a way to make it work."
"You aren't in fact in Osirion at the moment. If some other society would do for the constraints at hand there's no special reason you have to go to Osirion. I'm not going to propose we sell you to my great-grandma, here, but by all means speak up if you... have vampire friends in Geb and want to go be a vampire, I don't immediately know that wouldn't work."
Mindreading for Her Majesty's Eleventh. "I'm a weapons enchanter. I got down every style I'd seen in Corentyn but that's mostly just the basics, I wanted to see - demonsbane arrows and vicious swords and plate armor with spell resistance and so on. And the Worldwound draws adventurers from all over. So I went and I didn't fight, just hung around and talked people into letting me look at their swords and armor." Does that make her sound like a slut. Probably. She hates Osirion. "I wanted to open my own shop, eventually." She wanted every soldier in Cheliax to have the best weapons and armor in the world, you can get materials free if you're making things for the crown.
"I can lay enchantments for spells I can't cast, if I ended up stuck at third circle it wasn't going to affect my business any." They're adventurers, probably it'd be offensive to say that Fireballing things seems like a waste of time when you can make flaming swords that'll work forever.
Oh good. "I think anyone can do it, just, most of them mess it up and burn their materials enough it's not worth it. I can't do divine spells, obviously. But I've done spell resistance, I've done withstanding, I got a good look at a sword of Ghost Touch once and I'm pretty sure I could do it even though that one's spell base is Etherealness. - I can do most magic item enchanting at double the normal pace but I can't reliably do double the normal pace and a spell I can't cast, unless the item's very simple."
"There's a jeweler in Sothis who can do that. She's not even a wizard," remarks Belmarniss. "I considered going there when I wanted my anklet but she only works in jewelry, the guy I went with was a touch cheaper since he was only buying spellsilver and not gold and I can cast the spell myself, so I don't know much else."
That's good because it'd be appealing to him to have someone on hand who can do it and bad because he won't have the context to appreciate when she's particularly clever. Or forgive understandable mistakes but she's already realized she's going to have to never make any. "What do you specialize in?"
Snort. "The other option floating around is if you get an Atonement. Those don't work if you don't mean it, so it'd be pretty credible - probably it'd be advisable to keep an eye on you so it'd be apparent if you began corresponding with Asmodeans and they tried to convince you the other way again but I think maybe you wouldn't have to be pinned down so airtight. Of course there the sticking point is you have to mean it, whereas Mahdi is easily fooled if you smile politely."
She's not tricking anyone; they're playing a game with her and one of the rules is that she has to smile the whole time. "The paladins mentioned - well, not directly - but I wouldn't really know where to start. I don't want to report anybody to Asmodeus, but I - don't think that's the thing that Good cares about, or more people would count as it."
Belmarniss shrugs. "You don't have to come around on literally everything. I ping chaotic good and I would eat a baby if I went to a dinner party and somebody put it in front of me and I strongly suspect Pharasma's full of shit on her assessment of undead though I haven't yet done a research project to check. And I don't think you have to get all the way to Good, though if you're seriously considering trying the Atonement we should clear up with relevant parties how much they're holding out for in that department just to be sure."
"I have never - eaten or otherwise disposed of - any babies, and I don't contest Pharasma's right to do as she sees fit with people. I wouldn't be stalling about an Atonement if I were clear on a specific opinion or action I am supposed to atone about, the problem isn't so much that I haven't got enough as that I have no idea what I'm supposed to do at all."
"So maybe you are actually lawful neutral except Cheliax does something to make a startling number of people count as evil even if they're just, like, I don't know, florists, so that probably got you and they probably checked but before anyone breaks out the incense and starts yelling 'Iomedae she's super sorry we promise' we should follow up on that... Drow also have an awful rate of people being evil but I think it's probably just all the murder, did you murder anybody?"
"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 -"
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"No. But if He's going to do it eventually, then I want to be something He can use, and if He's not going to do it eventually, then whoever is, I want to be something They can use. Because - that's five million years, five billion years - it's the difference between everything and nothing -"
Belmarniss snickers. "I kind of get the sense that - you want to be on the winning side and this consideration so dominates your preferences here that you're not really considering there to be a separate fact of the matter about who's right or who's better besides who wins - but that's not all you have going on, if it turned out that your church had been bullshitting you and actually some people are useful to Asmodeus only as snacks would that change anything? I don't specifically expect that, just trying to tease it apart -"
"- yes, that matters, it's important that in Hell even if you're - weak and broken and bad at things - they'll use you, if they instead destroyed you for that - it'd be important to make sure no one was weak and broken and bad at things I guess, it would not change the feasibility of fighting a god -"
"Let's say you'd spend a whole gold on it, that's a hundred souls. Do you suppose it's likely on balance that even if you didn't follow up on that one of 'em would ever make a gold in their ensuing existence and also be like 'that was pretty cool, I'll do that too, till the novelty wears off' -"
"Sure, all right, if it's that cheap and it's a one-off maybe people get helped for the novelty. But - it's an ongoing cost, sustaining a divine realm that other people can live in, and it's not cheap, and if you get nothing out of it eventually you'll stop. That's - the whole problem I have now, right, is that it's not very cheap for me to continue to exist so everyone has to try to figure out if there's a way to get enough out of me to make it worth it."
"I think it is not that expensive to create and defend spaces where people can figure out good lives. Elysium is infinite and Desna is not to my understanding actively doing maintenance, and it's lovely, and the inhabitants defend themselves and intervene elsewhere on behalf of others as suits them."
"Yeah. They feel that them killing us is fundamentally different than us killing them. I guess it is, in the sense that Asmodeus isn't the god of fighting Good, He has actual goals, we're about things and they're about destroying us...
I don't think Cheliax has ever kidnapped a paladin out of their room at the Worldwound under false pretenses to stop Heaven learning something. We don't need to because we're not weak."
"He has actual goals which you assume don't refer solely to the suspiciously symmetric-looking warfare, you don't know what they are, you just assume they're important because a god has them? - also I don't actually expect that if for some reason a paladin was known to have learned something very destabilizing Cheliax would hesitate to kidnap them about it, do you actually expect that -"
"They probably would if it came up. And Good would be very outraged about it and point to it as proof of how Evil we are. But I don't think it has come up, because Hell mostly isn't pretending anything, and we're not so weak we can't achieve our goals unless no one else even gets a shot at convincing people of theirs.
I'm not even sure the warfare is symmetric, people go to Heaven specifically because they want to fight Hell and people go to Hell specifically because they want to sell magic items in Dis or serve Moloch or get that job where you talk people condemned to Abaddon into coming to us instead, I've never heard anyone say 'I want to go to Hell so I can fight Heaven', I don't think we raid them and they raid us all the time -
- Asmodeus had goals before there were even good gods around to oppose Him so I don't think it's a strange supposition He still has them. It ...doesn't matter if I think they're important? I can declare the sun unimportant, too, if I want."
"I wish I knew what they were doing! She has a stupid philosophical position but that wouldn't send her to Hell by itself, it's just making it hard to Atone her, there's something else, and I vaguely imagined it would become obvious if I talked to a Chelish person long enough and it's not at all!"
"It makes a lot of sense to have a policy against selling your prisoners into slavery even if there are weird edge cases where it is actually a good idea! It also makes a lot of sense to not have a similar policy for marriages and evaluate them on a case-by-case basis, if you trust you can filter for the ones that will be good for both people, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to suppose that sometimes you can. There are genuinely fewer incentive issues on their end with them paying Mahdi to take her so it is possible they'll consider that, which doesn't mean -"
"Guess you'll be able to afford a mysterious foreign breadwinner wife and also a normal one with better parenting philosophy." She shakes her head. "Maybe I'll get somewhere with her - she got more combative toward the end and I don't know if that's actually a good sign or just a bad one but it did make it more frustrating."
"Sorry. It went - fine, I guess. They had another go at explaining Good and made more sense, I think, though I'm still worried I can't actually be it. Their account was that Good is about preferring people not be hurt and generally acting like that, except when you're stopping them from hurting other people, for a broad definition of hurting other people that includes -" Vague gesture about her present situation.
"I mean, if I got released I'd try to explain myself to my command, which would interfere with whatever they're planning, and I guess that counts as hurting people enough that they're allowed to kill me to stop me. ...I found it kind of unconvincing on that front in particular. You could ask the drow girl yourself, she was the one who was doing most of the explaining. - Drow means purple."
"Yeah. I hadn't met one before and had to clarify that I am not Evil because I eat babies or something after she asserted that she would, if babies were served, but aside from that she made more sense than people mostly have. Maybe because her society is Evil too, so she's a little skeptical of the whole thing?" Shrug. "The one who might want me is Mahdi and I still don't know much about him but he did think I was hot so I guess that's a hopeful sign."
"They cast a powerful spell and appeal to Iomedae personally and ask Her to - realize, on the level that matters for judgment, my change of heart and rejection of Asmodeanism, and if She thinks I'm sincere then I stop being lawful evil and I'll go somewhere else when I die and they won't have to kill me. I can maybe ask for Abadar to be appealed-to instead, I'm not sure, because it's so expensive they'll be really mad if I ask for it and then I don't count as sincere enough."
"You kneel, ideally at a church or altar or something dedicated to the god but I think in principle anywhere will do, and you close your eyes, and you clasp your hands and you think about the god and imagine everything that they are, seeing you, and choosing to notice you, and then you think whatever it is you wanted to think at them."
Carissa tries to think what she knows about Abadar. Lawful neutral. The founding god of Axis. God of wealth and commerce, shows his favor with successful voyages. This is not even definitely treason, though - it feels terrifying.
She conceded, in the argument earlier, that it seemed plausible that Axis was better at inventing things than Hell.
She tries to reach for - what does it mean, to give yourself to the god of wealth and commerce, what does Abadar want from the people in his shining city -
Nothing.
Law. She believes in Law. In - rules, that you are punished for disobeying and not punished for obeying - in it being possible to do things right. She's mad at herself now, for not having a better articulation than that, because she knows that's not it -
- I want to do valuable things. I might want to do valuable things for You, if I understood...
And then there's a brief sense of brushing against something overwhelming, like sticking your head out of a car while it's going at its top speed -
- and a sudden blur of a hundred things that don't fit into the format sending them or the format receiving them -
- stores full of products, their proprietors patrolling them, looking at what people choose so they can adjust the prices, order more, keep things on the shelves and guess what new things people want -
- a thousand conversations, in restaurants, in taverns, people value this and that's important in itself but they're doing more than that, they're trading ideas, trading wants, trading dreams, growing each others' dreams bigger -
- a woman in Osirion learns how to make magic items without being magic, starts selling them at much much cheaper than the usual price, hires apprentices, trains people in what she's doing, and from a gods-eye view there's a ripple cascading out around the world, making things better -
- another woman, tinkering with a spinning-wheel, another ripple -
- a man working on magic, a ripple, a man at a paper-mill, a ripple, a group of people with some kind of mechanical loom, a ripple, until the world is awash in them -
- two people, speaking over a shabby wooden table. 'If I work extra hours for six months,' he is saying, 'we'll be able to afford a place across town' - different people - 'if I take in some laundry we could do without his income, send him to my uncle' - 'if we put aside a copper every day' - 'if we plowed an extra field' - and their dreams realized, gloriously, a place across town, a son who is a master craftsman, comfortable new furnishings and new careers, glass bowls and metal tools and dresses and feasts -
A hundred refinements making a better way to do a shipping manifest making a better shipping manifest, there's so much detail, a thousand experimental spinning wheels discarded, one that works, dozens and dozens of restaurants, people throwing themselves into the sea of what other people want and finding it the fastest teacher in the universe, the purest teacher in the universe, the teacher that has more to teach you the more you are ready to learn -
And then Kyeo is alone on the floor with a headache.
If Fazil had just said "it works by adding two and two to make five" this would not actually have been a good explanation but maybe the process of saying it that way would have made it clear to Fazil how hard explaining it was going to be.
Kyeo drinks his tea and attempts to nap.
"He's a lovely person. He took a lot of offense when I was upset about his slave planet and I don't know where to start explaining things to him but he's perfectly nice.
But we've had two interactions, the getting upset about the slave planet and then talking to Carissa, where she told me that he was - some Avistani word for men who don't ever care for women and then he announced that actually he'd been cured of it and then everyone was kind of bewildered at each other about that."
"Everything about the interaction was very bewildering! There was some treatment he was clearly very distressed by, and he insisted it had worked at making him not attracted to men, but it hadn't done anything about attraction to women, and the point of it was to get married, though also he says no men sleep with men on his planet, which I suppose makes sense if they treat it medically as soon as anyone tries it, but, why would you bother?"
Carissa doesn't keep trying to pray to Abadar after Kyeo leaves; clearly that was a sufficient duration of praying to Abadar and He doesn't care to talk to her right now, which is ridiculous to be offended about because she's never even heard of the thing that just happened to Kyeo. Priests get visions and dreams sometimes. Maybe Kyeo is ironically a perfect cleric of a god of wealth once he understands what wealth is.
She spends the evening waffling between despair that the Osirian doesn't want her and she'll be put to death and go to Hell in ten thousand years when her statue crumbles, if she's lucky, and despair that he does and in two days she'll be signed over to him with lots of people around smiling thinking this is a happy ending.
She sleeps poorly, which she has been lately, and it doesn't matter because she's not a spellcaster anymore.
"Hi. I have located in my notes index some old questions I had in mind to ask an Asmodean if I ever had one who'd hold still for me and I can de-etherealize the books to see what they were but if you actually do not feel this would be a good use of your morning I can save the spell slots I'd use to put them back again, use 'em to spar with paladins or something."
She looks at her index, appears a book in her hand, turns to the correct page. "So some of this is obviated by my having not known much about Asmodeanism at the time and basically treating it as a black box of 'why would anyone be on team Asmodeus, I guess that's just one of the mysteries of life', it might take me a bit to find anything that still applies." Flip flip. "Anything much on your mind?"
" - I assume they're lying and you're lying and everybody's lying and checking whether everybody else's lies are persuasive enough only apparently Atonement runs off some level of conviction it is hard to access just from lectures. I am trying to believe the locally correct thing but it is pretty confusing even figuring out what it is and figuring out how to believe it is harder than that."
It is so profoundly unfair that she is going to die if she can't win this game and absolutely no one seems willing to acknowledge they're playing it.
"Lots of things happen. People pick which things they are going to talk about and which examples to bring up and what to imply and what to consider on topic, and they do that so they can continue having their ideology and not listen to other ones. Truth spells do not object to this at all, they're for things like, did you murder that man. People also lie about that but it's not - the thing that is going on in schools, and in paladin orders, and in holy books and at the Worldwound and when you are a prisoner and people are trying to convert you to their religions."
"I don't have a religion, I just think it'd be a terrible pity if you wound up having to marry Mahdi, neither of you would really like it. I guess I cannot claim to not be... exercising decisionmaking power over what I say... without losing my hat, but I'm not sure how you come by any of your beliefs if you have this outlook actually?"
"There have been worse marriages, I'm sure, but keeping you a safe distance from all the parenting decisions would be hard even if all the kids were some future second wife's. And also normally the extent to which Osirian wives are serfs in pretty earrings is disguised considerably by the wives agreeing that the earrings are terribly pretty because they grew up in Osirion themselves, and you are not actually doing that. What... do you mean you backfill with - what the heck is your brain even doing."
"Identifying the beliefs that you have to have or people will kill you. Then figuring out what other things would need to be true so you can have the beliefs you're supposed to. Then - the worlds that aren't like that aren't worth dwelling on, since you'll just get killed if you can't figure things out, so you may as well focus your attention in the worlds where you're basically holding it together right and you believe the things you're supposed to. And then you do that."
"It does seem like people here are working with different concepts which is why their explanations don't work well for me. What would work well for me is a list of the beliefs I'm supposed to have, and then of some heresies so I know what amount of divergence is too much, and then some time and - usually other people are doing it too and that helps..."
"Me neither. Which is why I was looking for another plan - his worry is that I'll be bad at parenting? Why would you - I don't need to be allowed to interact with the rest of his life at all - and if he does want me to do that I can learn -" This is pathetic too but she's so tired.
"If I go to Shazeun - drow country under Osirion - with Hagan pretending to be my slave because that's what's legible in Shazeun, then in front of people I'll boss him around and make him carry my stuff and whatnot, and he will in reality do what I tell him and carry the stuff, and if he suddenly broke character in the wrong place at the wrong time I might actually backhand him to try to salvage the illusion so we could both keep doing whatever we were doing, and - do you see the sense in which there is a meaningful difference between 'we're pretending so we don't get much attention' and 'actually, he's my slave for as long as we're down there and then I just set him free with very little ceremony when we hit surface'?"
"I guess I could in the middle of our shopping trip decide to rent an apartment there and move into it and not give him a minute to go 'what the fuck' without making it conspicuous to third parties but our friends would at some point come looking for him. But that's also true of slaves drow acquire through ordinary kidnapping, that someone may come looking for them."
" - it matters a lot how likely it is? And how - I don't know. If I'm sparring with a friend, that's pretend. If we go to some country where murdering each other in duels is legal, and we're sparring, that's pretend. But I don't know for sure it's pretend because he might at any moment decide it's real, and then it would be, his deciding would make it so. I think if someone else's deciding would make you a slave it's not entirely pretend anymore."
"So I guess it's kind of a spectrum of pretend and the thing you described sounded kinda too pretend. Presumably you have less-pretend beliefs about, like, what the word 'potato' means, even though you also have only everyone's say-so to go on there and a sufficient conspiracy could have fooled you, or... how many siblings you have, so you'd be genuinely surprised if your dad were hiding a second family with a bunch of extra brothers somewhere even if that's probably happened to somebody at least once and you wouldn't have said you were certain-sure your dad would never..."
"He has three acknowledged children? It wouldn't actually be surprising at all if there were others he has nothing to do with. A secret family would be surprising because I've lived with him and I know how he accounts for his time. I guess it wouldn't be surprising if it was recent. If I've directly observed things then reality is going to be consistent with what I directly observed, obviously counting that people might've been trying to trick me."
"Bleah. - I don't think Good people are in general anti-divination, that's just a me personally thing. Uh, anyway, the kind of belief that I think is not pretend is the kind where you would be surprised if you found it was false. Doing this with moral beliefs is hard mode because so little of them is - empirical -"
"Gods don't actually exist? Ihys is alive and well? Norgorber is secretly an azata filling the niche so someone worse won't. All politicians are sincerely motivated by a desire to do right by their people and every election is legitimate in places that have those. Taxation has no effect on consumption. Political assassinations are rare and monarchs are just really bad at labeling their decorative arsenic."
"I guess I would be surprised if gods didn't actually exist, not by the next two, I'd be surprised by...all politicians having a desire to do right by their people...because any time all people turn out a way is surprising and that's not a psychologically plausible way for humans to be. I don't know anything about how taxes work. I don't have expectations about how often people get assassinated. Probably poisoning them would be rare since they can just get raised and now they're mad at you."
"Drow princesses get poisoned all the time, usually when their enemies control the church or the diamond mines or when being assassinated is such a bad sign for her competence that it'll ruin her anyway." Sigh. "Mahdi had the idea that you give a day-by-day rundown of what you normally do so we can see if any of it is sneakily evil, does that sound workable?"
"Sure. Uh, at the Worldwound I wake up, I attend morning prayers, I - pray to be shown Asmodeus's will and to be worthy of it, I eat breakfast, I work on my existing enchanting project for the bulk of the day, with a lunch break, I finish my enchanting project for the day, I go to dinner, I randomly select and interview eight of our soldiers, I go socialize with adventurers and try to convince them to tell me about all of their magic items and where they got them and what behavior they exhibit."
"If the interviews turn up someone planning treason or desertion I have to report them, and I have done that sometimes. It's my job and if I didn't do it they'd catch it anyway the next time it was a different wizard on duty, and kill me too for joining in on it, but - maybe that's irrelevant?"
"It's not! Osirion has most people hitting Axis and religiosity makes a difference, mostly in Law, but not a huge one and not markedly toward Evil - drow are mostly evil but I could not think of any besides me who were adults and had definitely never been so much as complicit in a murder when I tried!"
"People...watch executions? It's frowned upon to not show up to them. Lots of people have had abortions which I know is Evil but I haven't and that shouldn't get the men. Lots of people own slaves but I know lots of Osirians own slaves too and Cheliax doesn't actually permit enslaving humans, just halflings. And lots of wizards sell their souls but that's just - common sense, right, you're powerful enough to know you're already Evil, you would rather your soul be the property of a specific devil who can use it than join the general rabble flooding Avernus, it's a consequence not the original thing..."
"Osirion has found that slaveowning is a risk factor for Evil, actually, but it won't do it all by itself in an otherwise unremarkable life. And men being married isn't even though the pretty earrings shouldn't change it as much as all that, so it's probably just that people with slaves are likely to abuse them and spousal abuse is less typical. What's - what's the youngest someone's made a high enough circle to determine they're already Evil, that you know of, in Cheliax -"
"I was 22. That's not literally a record for wizards but it's rare, and I don't know anyone who was younger ...the Queen took the throne at 17 and was already Lawful Evil - she's a sorcerer - though that's not a remotely typical case...I had a classmate who committed suicide when we were 15 and I scried him once, he's in Hell, but the suicide explains that all by itself..."
"Does there seem to you to be - like - a fact of the matter about how much of a dick someone is depending on what they do in various situations? Like, somebody who makes his slaves work all day versus someone who does that and then also - what wouldn't affect their productivity - shaves their heads because they would prefer to have hair and this makes them cry, is the second one more of a dick or does it cash out in some other terms for you?"
"Playing games with people." Like everyone here keeps doing. "Expecting not just that people will do what they're told but that they'll - entertain you with how they'll do it. Putting people in a position where they'll obviously do something pathetic, because you think it's funny. Betraying people when you don't even get anything out of it."
Like saying that to keep you in a box making magic items they have to marry you and you have to try to filter for people for whom the powerlessness isn't actively the entire point by acting like you might want this. Like requiring you to convert but not telling you so. Like having lots of rules about who you can complain to, because it's so important to treat you well, while planning to deny you an afterlife.
"I dunno. Sometimes punishing people for being too standoffish and sometimes for being too chipper. Setting them tasks they can't succeed at so you can punish them for failing."
"Torturing someone because you want information they might have is just common sense, it's not being a jerk to try to accomplish your goals. Torturing someone as a punishment for breaking a rule they knew about or should've known about is not being a jerk. Torturing someone to teach them a skill or lesson that for some reason they can only learn by being tortured is not being a jerk. Torturing someone because you need to practice your torture skills for one of the above uses is not being a jerk. Torturing someone for no reason at all is being a jerk, I guess, but in real life it's almost always one of the above cases."
"N..no? Most peoples' goals are not my goals and my goals are not their goals but I wouldn't say that this makes them a jerk, having their own priorities. Why would I expect them to have my priorities. You need some consequence for rulebreaking and torture's nicer than - imprisonment, or maiming, or execution..."
"People have different priorities all the time but in different ways. If somebody wants to build a very tall tower of their own drinking glasses I can think that's stupid but not be remotely invested in stopping them. If I am playing sports with some people they will have the goal of winning and I will have the goal of them losing so I can win instead, but that isn't the same category of opposition as if someone wants to torture me."
"I guess I don't think of not liking being tortured and not liking losing games as different in kind. I guess you like games enough to choose to play them even knowing you might lose them? But mostly people get tortured because they, I dunno, decided to be a spy, or decided to worship another god, so you can say they liked those enough to chance losing. Maybe that's why it feels like more of a jerk move to torture someone for no reason."
"It feels a little silly to apply judgments like 'a jerk' to gods in the same spirit as it feels silly to apply them to hurricanes but if I think of a human-scale equivalent of that I'd think it was - sort of tragic. I'd hope we'll go after Heaven and the Abyss, which keep attacking us, and then Abaddon where they eat people, and just work out some kind of terms with Axis."
"I'm not offended. We're generally told that no matter what we do, Pharasma is racist because Rovagug got some kind of spiritual ick on us so we're going to the Abyss no matter what and ought to be in good with the management, and then it's hard to be lawful around chaos because there's nobody to cooperate with and if they get as far as neutral they get their choice of doors and probably pick the one where maybe their buddies are waiting, but that's not really a case for the philosophy per se."
"I guess I can see why, given that, you'd just try to be valuable enough to have some cover.
If it were untrue that - Hell mostly makes use of people, or that Good is in significant part about fighting Hell, or that Asmodeus was a powerful god - or that Cheliax was a good country to live in - those feel like things that'd make me feel like I was wrong..."
"Delete all your memories? All at once or piecemeal, take your pick. Directly affect what you care about, like a heavy duty Suggestion? In case they don't want to do you the courtesy of presenting a list of beliefs and heresies and giving you a while. Enchantment-type effects in general, really. I guess being enchanted is sort of like having an experience but it isn't just an experience."
"I think you can make a case that while they are actively putting new thoughts in my head it's not me but once they stop it's me, just with the experience of having had the thoughts put in. If the paladins want to cause me to suddenly believe they're right and then take the spell off but now I know how believing they're right works they can absolutely do that. I think if I didn't have any memories at all including memories that are like - knowing how to do magic - that probably wouldn't be me but I know petitioners lose some when they die because you don't have the body that was part of your system for recalling them, and I have never been too upset about that. I guess I would trade a lot of money or time to avoid it if that were an option."
"I mean, I think effective sales in this situation probably looks like lying about the accommodations, what I'm trying to get at is do you think it's in the soul's best interest by its own lights to keep existing even in Hell and the ones who choose Option Mustard are just confused somehow?"
"I want to be a god because I want to promote the flourishing of all sapient beings - I mean, insofar as that's internally consistent anyway - not for kicks. ...okay, not just for kicks. And my style of thinking is very hardcore anti-mind-alteration. And if the devil resulting from all the unpleasantness likes magic and wants to subjugate the population of someplace from an unholy throne and also enjoys pears and classic literature, uh, so what? I'm sure if you look around enough you could find someone who likes pears and classic literature and magic and unholy thrones already out there somewhere and that is not me."
"I still don't think a fate can be meaningfully worse than annihilation, even if it makes a person who isn't you that's not worse than you just getting eaten. And we don't actually know if we are right about approximately what it's like to become a devil, maybe no mind control or other transformations that make you think you're not you are involved. Also I don't think you can change how many people go to a nice afterlife, in the long run, because Asmodeus is just going to conquer the nice afterlives."
"I guess but if mercy killing someone didn't just get their soul to its next destination faster but made them not exist faster in exchange for another person not getting to exist at all that doesn't seem like a very good deal and - there's always the chance that you're wrong that the devil isn't you, there's no way you're wrong about Abaddon eating you -"
"They are like mortals except - closer to the way things were before free will, I think? They don't tend to be fundamentally dissatisfied with life, they have goals and are pursuing them and enjoy successes and regret setbacks and don't - wander off....they seem very sure of themselves..." Shrug. "I don't have a hard time imagining a devil who is me. I - before I fucked everything up I wanted to have a very impressive career enchanting magic items and then make arrangements to do the same thing in Dis. This wouldn't not involve being tortured but just to make me less - wiggly at the core, you know, not in a way that would change who I was or what I wanted..."
"I think that while formation in Hell involves pain it is not actually just inflicting pain until whatever the problem is self-corrects and is way more elaborate than that. I think it also tends to involve both kinds and degrees of harm that mortal human bodies don't withstand well so if you tried you'd just kill someone instead of improving them."
"That said Chelish people seem more okay with hurting living people than the paladins and I think it's not unrelated? If you think that sometimes hurting people is good for them and in the average case it's entirely fine for them then you're not going to tie yourself into knots as much about avoiding it."
"I expect Abadar has more eyes there than She does; they do commerce and do not do any evil-defeating by and large. I did Mahdi's schedule idea, and it's possible that prayer, alone, can make you evil, but that's not actually my understanding, and there's not a lot else there!"
"Yeah, it was a long shot. I do really want to find out, though, I think if we don't know what specifically Carissa needs to repent of I have to convey an entire working implementation of Good to somebody who thinks that torture is fine as long as it's for a reason like nonconsensually turning people into devils. Today we got as far as 'maybe not if they'd rather not exist instead'."
"I think the idea is that over time being in the monastery you not only stop doing bad things but also stop having most of the thought-patterns that go with being a criminal, like noticing opportunities to do crimes or to conceal crimes or to hurt people and get away with it. I don't know if that's the actual mechanism but the assumption isn't that only action matters, but that - shaping actions tends to also shape thoughts."
"Yeah, it's dressed up better that way but it being dressed up better that way is dependent on buy-in from the wives that we are not going to get, here. In theory I could get a place in Shazeun and keep her there but I don't have sixth circle spells and even if I did I'm shit at enchantments, mostly because they skeeve me out... also in Shazeun someone might, like, steal her, or her materials."
"I mean, we agree with the paladins that I will marry her, if I have her consent, and that in the meantime I'll keep her supervised and geased and making magic items, with you all checking up that I haven't touched her, and that I am bound to keep doing that even if she refuses the marriage, and see if they'll release her to us under those conditions."
"It seems pretty cosmetic but it might - free her up to not be trying to optimize on several axes at once? If she doesn't have to appeal to Mahdi she can do other things with that energy and that - presentation surface area; if she doesn't have the statue thing hanging over her head she can have a little more space to breathe?"
"The slight variant idea is they set everything up like he's going to marry you but then he doesn't actually do it until you say so, which could be never, and he still does the geas thing but his friends check up on him to make sure he isn't touching you. The purple one thought this might give you more space to think or something?"
"I would prefer to marry someone who is excited about this and feels like they got incredibly lucky to have me interested in them and cries with joy and calls on all their friends who are all jealous and is, you know, shy on our wedding night but not mostly thinking about how favorably it compares to death."
"I, uh, I want to marry someone who likes me, and who wants to be married to me. It seems really petty to let you die because you don't like me, but, my preference, for a wife, is definitely someone who likes me. So if I can keep track of you and marry some other person who likes me, then you don't die and I get what I want here."
"...sometimes people are doing their best, but they're not perfect, and sometimes their judgment might slip, and if they know there'll be consequences then that's much less likely, so they set up the consequences sober in order to protect against mistakes they might make when they're drunk except I am not exclusively talking about literal intoxication. And from the inside it feels really unlikely that my judgment would slip on this, actually, but in my reference class it often does, and people often end up justifying it to themselves, so I shouldn't assume that feeling from the inside like I wouldn't is very much information."
"It's unmarried women, right, if we're letting her do magic she could Alter Self and I could marry her if we can get in and out of a temple of Nocticula without my great-aunt noticing and then you can still marry her later if desired because Nocticula's cool with divorce but I don't see how that helps anything."
"It might be the reporting people to be tortured to death for heresy? I'm hoping it's that. That and the active discouragement from doing things altruistically. But - I don't know. It doesn't quite add up. She might be lying to us about there not being anything worse though it admittedly doesn't seem like she has much reason to do that."
Belmarniss keeps visiting Carissa. "They're having some awkwardness about trying to find a legal framework under which Mahdi can keep you as an affianced captive," she says. "There's probably something but something might be stowing you in Katapesh. But, like, I assume you'd still rather just walk out of here safely neutral or better and do whatever you want, so I can keep trying to explain, if you think that might help."
"I make jokes about Good points too and Pharasma's not exactly systematically discouraging the outlook with clearly written pamphlets. But the point - buried a few miles to the left of where Pharasma thinks it is, like how magnetic north isn't the geographic pole - the point's about trying to buy some people-not-being-harmed, with whatever you've got, and you don't in that sense 'got' random other people's well-being. Sacrificing third parties to save other third parties is sort of like committing burglary to enable a greater act of Law, like, you could imagine winding up in that situation but you should not go around thinking 'what about that place, is that one positively Lawful in expectation if I go down the chimney and make off with the silver and fund streetlights to deter future thieves'."
"It is a stupid waste of resources if random people have to be worrying about self-defense all the time instead of expecting they can sell things and the things won't get stolen and they can take money to the bank and not get mugged and they can go out drinking and not get raped and if something does happen the stuff will be gotten back and the responsible party will be prevented from ever doing it again."
"I mean, I don't think you should jail people, that does sound like a waste of resources, you should execute them. Some places sell them as slaves and that's also valid. I...wouldn't expect that people murdering each other all the time does make them stronger and self-reliant, I'd expect that it just interferes with them doing anything with their lives that isn't about avoiding murder. I guess if there were more impressive drow businesspeople and wizards than you'd expect from their numbers that'd make me reconsider whether they're just wasting their time. Also the Abyss is bad though, and the Maelstrom and Elysium don't sound great either, so I'd still want to be Lawful."
"I'm not sure what you'd expect from the numbers. We do throw lots of wizards, though. Lots of families don't let their daughters live if they can't pick up a caster level in something. You're kind of bouncing between arguments. Is rule of law important or does it just get you the best afterlives?"
"I think it's important in this life but even if it weren't it vastly improves the next one. Threatening people with death isn't a very good way to get them to learn magic but I guess killing them is a good way to get high wizards per living person. It seems kind of wasteful, though, they might be perfectly fine at some other thing. I guess if you have no need for any work that isn't high-intelligence."
"I guess that makes sense. Well, I would rather live in a lawful society even if I level slower because I can have more goals that aren't about avoiding getting murdered, or murdering people, and that's worth more to me than levelling faster, but I can see why you'd take the other side of that trade."
"I would expect it to be to his advantage for people who are trying to make themselves useful in Hell to know how to do that, and also I've talked to devils, I've talked to people who've been to the great market in Dis, I know how Hell works and I know there is a place in it for the skills I wanted to have and the things I wanted to do."
"Yeah but you're reasoning a little circularly, I think? You're evil for mysterious reasons, you can probably still Atone in the right headspace, only you seem impaired in getting in the right headspace in part because of your psychological architecture all built around it being inevitable, only why bother, because you're already evil for mysterious reasons."
" - that's fair. I think I can probably work out how to go to Axis if I want to. I might want to. It does sound comfy. I expect Asmodeus to conquer everything eventually. Using only facts about the world that the paladins and I both agree on, He is one of the strongest gods and probably the strongest goal-oriented one, the other gods wanted to stop Him from taking Cheliax but couldn't, and He's considerably stronger now that He has it."
"Fazil's been to Axis and talks it up real good for a guy aimed at Heaven, if that would help, I don't know if it does. You said a while ago there was a case to be made for not fucking with Axis, or something, didn't you, that seemed specific to Axis but that's where you'd aim, sounds like. It might be that the other gods could have stopped him but only at costs or risks they considered too much? Especially risks, this was shortly after Foresight got wrecked and they may have had lots of ideas that would or would not have worked but they couldn't tell and were regrouping, acting conservatively to consolidate what they had instead of gambling, again, right after Aroden lost on his sure thing."
"Uh, the decisionmakers are all Lawful and do not want to illegally hold you under geases, and the nice way they have of legally holding you captive is marrying you and the mean way is declaring you a slave but the second thing is a no go for paladins but they don't have a policy about culturally questionable marriages. And now they're figuring out some hacky thing that satisfies their consciences. If I had somehow as a solo operation or with just Hagan acquired custody of you under the same strategic conditions otherwise, I'd - well, I can't cast a geas, Mahdi doesn't outlevel me but he does outcircle me, but supposing I had a Staff of Geas that recharged off cantrips and bits of string. I'd skip the hacky legal rigmarole and the consultation of policy and just be like 'well we have here somebody who cannot walk free lest she supply intelligence to her dread master but she wants to churn out items, let's get a storefront in Absalom and not get bogged down in labels'."
"Well, he's not Good, and if he wanted to be... he could dump a lot of gold on a church. But I think the reason Osirians are like that is they have, like, a thing that can't be allowed to happen - infanticide and abortion are both Evil enough to damn you if you never compensate for them, so you have to make sure all the babies appear where babies belong, and you can make a rule against fucking in baby-unfriendly situations but that... doesn't work well, even in a largely lawful neutral population, because of, like, people who get off on rape, and stupid teenagers and drunk people. And so they make a rule that not only can't you fuck, you can't go off unsupervised. Because even if you are a rapist or a stupid teenager or drunk, and have friends who are like you, it's an inconvenience, you have to plan not just a rape but a gang rape, you have to drink with voyeurs or make friends with teenagers who won't suddenly have pangs of better judgment. And on top of being an inconvenience it gets to be mortifying to break the rule, because why would you do that? As long as you plan nothing untoward you can bring a chaperone. They don't have to listen, they just have to be able to see you, whisper if you must. Anybody whining about how they can't hang out alone in private with their buddy of the opposite sex is suspicious. Anybody asserting that they definitely have the strength of character not to need this silly rule is suspicious. Anyone who requires reminders instead of just automatically going yikes about forbidden privacy is suspicious. So they - go yikes, and what you see is the yikes."
"I respect that they're doing empiricism about how to accomplish their goal of making it easy for everyone to get to Axis. And I kind of like that most people you meet have taken an economics class. But yeah no it's not how I'd design a country and I wouldn't even want to go there if I weren't a caster and exempt from some annoying sexism."
"I think if I were somehow in this situation I would find Mahdi's reaction to being asked to do something exasperating but reasonable when he has the opportunity to suggest getting someone else to do it instead very informative but if the information isn't worth the downside risk to you that's your call."
"Sure. So let's say you hire someone to, I don't know, carry firewood. You value about them that they can carry firewood. You don't care whether they are composing poetry in their head while they carry firewood, you don't care whether they are gossiping with each other, you don't care whether they're studying magic on the side.
And if you're a god, and the only use you have for people is carrying firewood, they probably won't get to do any of those other things, because it's kind of wasteful, to let them spend energy on things you don't value. So belonging to a god who only wanted people for their firewood-carrying would be very bad.
A god who wants people to run a shop is better than that, because running a shop requires lots of skills, even if you get narrowed down to only your shoprunning that's still lots of you left. A god who wants people to befriend mortals in Cheliax and teach them magic and persuade them to achieve the god's goals wants most of you, it's not narrowing much at all to become about that."
"I think they don't live forever. Five thousand years sounds like a long time to me now but that's because I'm human and not good at thinking about large scale things. Also they'll get destroyed when Asmodeus gets around to it, or when the Abyss gets around to it, or when people from other worlds get around to it."
"It's sort of hard to tell! Sometimes it seems like there's progress, but it tends not to keep feeling that way and she definitely hasn't gasped in amazement as all her corrupted epistemics fell from her mind like a broken enchantment in one fell swoop, y'know. I think it'll help if we can get her more space." Shrug.
"Zana Armadi, a transmuter in Absalom who I am vaguely acquainted with, came up with the idea of little pets that, at a command word, turn to stone, so you can take care of them on your schedule not theirs. Big upfront effort but the idea was that it'd breed true. It didn't breed quite true, though - the next generation did have the ability to turn to stone at a command word, but it was a different command word for each one, and no way to tell what it was. So the guy had a thousand hamsters that were totally normal unless you happened to somehow guess, and he was giving them away to anyone who'd take one."