She does that too.

He takes Parmida's hand, squeezing it for a second, and waits for her to take Carissa's hand. "I order you not to cast any spells or run away," he says to Carissa, gently, before using a Pearl of Power for his Plane Shift back to the hallway. He walks them over to the waiting area next to his office. It's more comfortable in terms of seating. 

"Iomedae is going to send a cleric to cast Atonement for you," he says to Carissa, and for Parmida's benefit as well. "Before I go, are you willing to do a Sending to one of Mhalir's wizards? I wish to say that you are safe and I intend you no harm, and that I would consider arranging a prisoner exchange, with one of the unwilling hosts, perhaps the cleric. - I am assuming here that you still wish to go back to him, if you are offered the option?"  

What. 

Presumably he means that he hired a cleric of Iomedae and just chose the baffling phrasing that Iomedae is personally sending someone.

They're going to kill her if the Atonement doesn't work so she had better figure out how to get it to work. She - wishes it wasn't the case that humans are inherently useless to Asmodeus? It would be neat if he could use - the thing that Carissa is now. Like Mhalir can. She wishes that the Good gods worked the way Alloran thinks they do, where they will prevent a war because wars are bad, instead of the way they actually work. Probably Iomedae will be unimpressed by this opinion. She wants Lawful Neutral, not Lawful Good, and she's not sure if that's allowed. 

What does 'are you willing' even mean directed at someone magically bound to obey you. "I don't know Sending but I can do it from a scroll."

(Mostly it means he's being polite and also kind of absentminded. Also there are various clever ways she could use this opportunity for sabotage, and he can't currently read her thoughts and thinks it would be unnecessary and rude to yank her hair off again.) 

"All right. Then you can tell him I wish to open communications and negotiate some agreement, here, details to be decided. I and various others are displeased about kidnapping wizards to be slaves and will not let this stand, but it is not too late for him to de-escalate the situation with us, and come to a more cooperative solution. I will get you a scroll." He goes into his office to do that, comes back thirty seconds later with one. "You may cast this one spell from the scroll," he adds, remembering that he ordered her not to cast anything. 

Her headband is working again so it's not hard to compose in her head on the fly. "My kidnapper wants to open communications and negotiate an agreement. Objects to you kidnapping and enslaving wizards," only he is allowed to do that, "suggests you de-escalate and find cooperative solution."

The reply comes shortly. "Received. Interested in talks. Will direct further replies to Carissa." 

This does a little bit to calm all the panicked buzzing in her head. 

Then there's a pop and a woman twice her age in plate armor, carrying a very magic sword, appears in the office.

"Welcome!" Malduoni smiles brightly at her. "I am so glad to see you! This young lady would like an Atonement. I can provide the material requirement for it - just a moment, please..." He ducks over to one side of the office, where he unlocks a cabinet and hunts around in it. 

" - uh," she says, confused, "I - you were expecting someone?"

"It is somewhat complicated. You are a cleric of Iomedae, yes?" He finds a wooden box at the back of the cabinet, and sets it down on his desk. "Oh, good, I knew I had the things for this somewhere." 

"Yes." She turns around to look at Carissa, reaches out and takes the box. "I'd like everybody else to leave the room, please.  You should get anything you might need - the spell can take several hours."

Malduoni doesn't need anything from his office right now, having just gotten here and not taken anything out of his Bag of Holding. He nods to Carissa, with a hint of a reassuring smile, and then takes Parmida's hand and slips out. 

"Would you like a Teleport home, dear, or would you prefer to wait for her to be done?" He wants someone to wait for her either way but he can Sending one of his wizards about it and have them Teleport here if Parmida would rather not be responsible for that. 

"I can stay here. How was Iomedae?"

"Helpful. Frustrated with Sarenrae. Glad to see me. She politely held off on shouting at me for not talking to her but I am sure it is coming, when the timing is better for it." 

"Did she know who -"

"Yes," he says, tersely. "Can tell you later. Not relevant now." 

Squeeze. "Good luck."

"Thank you. I will need it." 

And he takes a few deep breaths, and then steps away and Teleports to Sothis. 

"What's your name," the woman in the armor says. 

        "Carissa Sevar." She doesn't apparently have a truth spell up but it's probably a bad idea to lie to someone who is about to do a ritual that requires your sincere participation. 

"Are you here of your own free will?"

        " - that's very complicated."

"I thought it might be. If you take my hand I can Word of Recall you to Vigil. You would be safe there. You do not have to be Good to be safe there, and you could leave if you wished."

         That's bullshit. Also if she says that she is geased not to run away the woman might take that as impetus to do it without permission. "I don't prefer to leave."

"Okay. I can't do an Atonement for someone who doesn't want one. Are you worried they'll be upset if I tell them something went wrong?"

         " - probably. I told them I wanted it. And that's the only thing that can go wrong."

"No, it's not. I can get called away on urgent business before I finish, and promise to come back in a week or two."

           Carissa looks kind of startled at her. "I would appreciate that. It - doesn't seem very lawful?"

"Different churches have different concepts of Law. Well, I would come back in a week or two. And I do have urgent business elsewhere."

           "You can go to your urgent business."

"It is not that urgent. The Church of Iomedae holds that part of our Law is that people are safe, with us. And keeping people safe requires flexibility. The flexibility does not undermine the Law; the Law is about the result, not the methods."

           " - my understanding is that Good is very - you can't torture people even if it's useful."

"It would be pretty hard to torture people in a way that produced the result that people who are in our power are consistently safe."

            "You can only have one thing. If you're going to be like that. You can say 'we do whatever produces people in our power being consistently safe', but if you've got other things and you can't let them trade off then you can't do anything that isn't dumb and - constricted -"

"Yes. If you were trying to kill me then you wouldn't be safe. If you were trying to kill someone else then you wouldn't be safe. If today were a day when I had even more urgent business then you'd have to make a decision very quickly because I couldn't stay to talk."

            "I don't want to go to Hell so he thought I should get an Atonement and I thought he was going to kill me so I told his wife that I wanted to atone but I don't actually think not wanting to go to Hell is wanting to atone I think it's just a normal way to feel about Hell."

" - probably. I am not sure how Asmodean people usually feel about Hell because it's not usually safe for them to talk to us about it."

            "Or vice versa, right, don't you get hit for Good if you hang around Evil people?"

"No. We get hit for Good if we do Evil things and some peoples' motivation to do things has a lot to do with the values of the people around them but also often the best ways to reduce Evil involve being around or even working with Evil people."

            "You've got very smooth answers."

"Lawful Good is a challenging alignment and requires spending a lot of time thinking about what Law is and what Good is. I know people who have abandoned it for that reason."

            "No kidding."

"They usually end up neutral good and it is not a failing. It is a decision that the things they care about are easier to achieve if they trust themselves more and the systems around them less. This is often a correct judgement so everyone should be prepared to make it if they need to."

           Carissa doesn't say anything. Everything about that seems wrong but she's not sure where to start with it. "I don't want to be Lawful Good," she says. "If you could do Lawful Neutral I could maybe want that though there's still the problem where - I don't think I am actually very atoned and I want to go back to Mhalir, who is Evil, and that'll just sink me again."

"Why's he evil?"

            "Uh, enslaving people. But he's trying to stop. And the guy who kidnapped me plans to make him stop. He did it because he was scared that this other, uh, tribe of people was going to slaughter his, so he needed more power to stop them. I think this is very reasonable but I think the Good thing to do is probably to lie down and die."

"The Good thing to do is rarely to lie down and die because then you cannot improve the world at all. It is admittedly also not to enslave people. Why do you want to help him?"

            "He's very rich and pays me well and it's obvious what he gets out of having me alive and I think I'm too disloyal to go back to Cheliax and also they think I deserted."

"Did you?"

             "No! I was kidnapped. But now I can't go back."

"If there were someone else who was neutral and paid very well and - also got the same things out of having you alive - would that solve this problem?"

            "Hypothetically, sure, but I think there is actually no one else who can pay as well." Maybe the mysterious ninth circle wizard who just kidnapped her but he plainly does not get nearly as much out of having her be alive. Also she'd be upset to abandon Mhalir but she acknowledges this is stupid and wouldn't be decision-relevant. 

"That does sound like a very Lawful Neutral worldview though I don't know if it's sufficient for atonement. Probably you would need to regret - helping someone enslave people?"

             "I mostly haven't. We were doing voluntary recruitment. All the enslaving people was before I joined."

"What changed?"

            "I think the guy I work for had a change of heart? He might actually want an Atonement, maybe."

"Well, we would be happy to help."

            "You get Good points from it?"

"- that is not actually how Good works."

            "Sorry, sorry, helping people atone is a metaphysically Good act, right?"

" - helping people atone seems pretty likely to make the world a better place. Doing things because you correctly think they're pretty likely to make the world a better place is usually a metaphysically Good act. I think the distinction is important. Not helping people in order to be Good, helping people because you want things that are achieved by helping people, which is a Good set of goals and priorities to have."

             "Can we stop talking about Good, I am trying to think whether I can come up with the right thoughts to atone but I don't think I will get all the way to Good and it's distracting trying to figure out what's confusing there."

"Of course. What thoughts do you imagine would be the right thoughts to atone."

             "I regret serving Asmodeus. I actually want Asmodeus and his servants to be destroyed. I regret not pushing harder for Mhalir to stop enslaving people. I regret not asking him why he didn't offer any of the other prisoners the freedom he offered me. I regret reporting people to the Chelish secret police for disloyalty. I regret ...not spending Mhalir's money on orphanages and cripples?"

"Do you actually believe those things?"

             "I don't think so but usually I can believe things if I need to."

"Do some of them feel more believable than others?"

            "I guess so. I don't want Asmodeus and his servants to be destroyed. I'd be really upset about it. I - kind of do wish I'd asked Mhalir why he wasn't treating the others better. He wouldn't've been offended and - and I could easily have been in the batch he found less interesting, if he'd come here a couple years ago or something. I do kind of feel that spending all the money on expensive magic items reflects...some trait that I would not really admire another person for. But I also don't want to spend it on orphanages and cripples, I know it's a Good thing to do but I don't really get what it would feel like to be motivated to do it other than for Good points."

"I think the feeling is - that someone is hungry, and you could change that, and it's better when people aren't hungry."

             "Yeah, that thing is the thing I don't really have, I don't think I directly have goals that are about how many people are hungry."

"What sorts of things do you have goals about."

             "I want to stop being kidnapped and forced magically or otherwise to make myself satisfactory to random powerful strangers."

"That is a very reasonable goal and also it is not surprising that if that is your top goal you would not have a lot of room for goals about how many people are hungry."

             "I don't know what you mean by that."

"Well, usually our goals are a product of our experiences. If you grew up hungry, or a friend grew up hungry, or you watched a starving child die, you might care about people not being hungry. If mostly you get kidnapped and forced to comply with random powerful strangers then probably even your goals that are not about your immediate circumstances will be about - what things make life tolerable under that set of circumstances."

            "I don't think that really happens to other people more than once, I think it's mostly just me."

"Slaves that are sold repeatedly often have similar experiences, I think."

             "Sure. Do you want me to - regret slavery - I don't think I even have very much to do with slavery -"

"I am trying not to have goals for this conversation aside from providing you with context for the things you're talking about which your background might have not provided."

           "I am not clear on why you're doing even that, really?"

"One of the goals that I have is that people know what Good is so they can decide whether to choose it. If I only tried to explain what Good was in the context of getting them to choose I think my explanations of it would be worse. Shopkeepers trying to sell things are worse at explaining them than - craftsmen, say. I want to be a craftsman of Good not a shopkeeper of it."

          "But presumably if you could - magically make me be good, if Atonement changed how you think and not just how Pharasma assesses you - you'd want to do that, right -"

"The forces of Good disagree on under what circumstances this is an acceptable or desirable thing to do. My personal thinking is that it is a great wrong to you but justified under the same circumstances as, say, the circumstances that'd justify murdering you. Certainly it seems much worse than you deciding to do good things for your own reasons that are part of who you are."

          "- worse in what way?"

"Well, do you want it?"

          "I am not sure. Maybe it would stop all of the changing the shape of person I am because I'd be stuck with a single shape of person and have to work with it."

"So normally I would say that the ways it is worse is that there is lost information, because the things that you non-magically care about are part of what Good is and if we move you towards a more central kind of what Good is we lose the things specific to you, and that it is a violation of something you want, and in general it is desirable that people get things they want, and that it is a strategy that works just as well when you're making a big mistake and it's a good idea to employ strategies that work better when you're not making a big mistake, as a hedge against big mistakes. If you want it that changes all three of those, in complicated ways."

          "I kind of feel like you should talk to Mhalir. I think you two would have interesting conversations."

"You can tell him where to find me."           

          "Well, I can't actually talk to him right -" She realizes that maybe her microphone and tracking device will work as soon as she's out of this shielded room. "-now. I think that was all of my questions for you. Thank you."

"Of course."

Sothis is much bigger and much louder and more crowded than the last time Aroden saw it. It is just as hot and dusty.

He lands two blocks from the temple to Nethys. He could have arrived in front of the doors, of course, but he needs the walk there to clear his head and brace himself for this.

- on reflection, being kind of traumatized about the concept of interacting with gods is inconvenient and maybe he should have dealt with it decades ago. Oh well. It’s not like the undercurrent of scaredscaredscared is doing anything to change his actions, right now, it’s just there being kind of irritating.

He reaches the temple. It’s very big, and beautiful. Impressive. He’s never seen it before. He looks around for someone to talk to.

Someone at the front door starts towards him -

And then there's a pop and she's there. 

The person at the front door looks startled and backs away. 

He looks her in the eye. "I - am sorry, about everything, but if you could bear with me and save the shouting and watching me grovel until later, I would appreciate it very much." 

"I actually think we should go kidnap a bunch of Andalites right now and am willing to delay interpersonal conversation until we're done with that."