“Oh boy. Uh, Elysium is translating as…analogous to the very best afterlife in an old mythology which is generally in the modern day not considered true,” unless you’re a neopagan??? She knows there are neopagans who adopt all kinds of gods into their personal pantheons but not if any of them believe in Elysium, Specifically…well, no, there’s billions of people in the world, someone must. “Where you could only go if you were, like, a big hero, or had lived virtuously for several consecutive reincarnations, or maybe both? I am not an expert. Uh, and then the others mostly sound really fucking ominous.” Wait how old is this person. Should she have censored that swear?

Profanity Filter is: [OFF]

She waves it away. No, she does not want the Game to censor her swears for her.

“Huh. No, Elysium is a Good afterlife, but it’s not better than Heaven or Nirvana.”

“So…Heaven, Elysium, and Nirvana are good, the Boneyard is for babies specifically, I absolutely have to assume that Hell is bad, I wouldn’t guess anything too favorable about Abaddon either, and then the Abyss and the Maelstrom and Axis…?”

Sad sigh. “The Abyss is bad too. It’s where the demons come from.”

“So, Heaven Elysium Nirvana good, Hell Abyss Abbadon bad, Axis Maelstrom in-between, and Boneyard babies specifically?”

Nod. “More or less. Technically the Boneyard is in-between like Axis and the Maelstrom.”

“Babies should go to one of the nice ones.”

“Well, everyone should go to one of the nice ones.”

“Definitely for sure! But, like, thinking bad people shouldn’t get nice things is a more normal mistake to make—at least where I’m from—than thinking babies shouldn’t get nice things.”

“That’s true. I don’t know if gods make the same kinds of mistakes as people or not, though.”

“Mm. If there are any gods in my world, they haven’t done anything in a long time.”

“That sounds nice.”

“I’m not a fan of the part where we don’t know if any of the afterlives posited in any of our philosophies are real or not.”

“Couldn’t you find out with wizards?”

“Oh, we don’t have those either. Actually, we don’t have any magic, that I know of.”

“Oh. That part does sound less good.”

“I don’t know enough about the gods situation to know if it’s good that we don’t really have ‘em.”

“They’re like people. Mostly they mean well, but they make a lot of mistakes, and some of them are hurt too badly to admit to themselves that people hurting is bad.”

“I don’t think it’s only about hurting. If you do something that hurts other people but advantages you and your children, then you end up with more surviving descendants, so over the generations a lot of cruft accumulates that obscures the one obvious and important truth.”

“…That makes a lot of sense.”

“It’s something I didn’t understand when I was younger, because I got lucky enough to be born without a lot of the cruft. But my mom and brother have it, so they could explain it to me.”

“I think maybe I used to have it. I’m not sure, I was really young.”

“That’s kind of concerning? I’m kind of concerned.”