“I mean, if there is some really Evil side effect to breaking divine treaties maybe it takes the combination of Chaos and Evil to go for it.  …Or if there is a long term disadvantage I could imagine most demons, even Demon Lords not properly considering it and making short term treacherous decisions.  Or like you said the priest could have just been deluded or lying, that’s always an option…”

“Does Milani’s church take donations?”

Maybe it would make up for his Evil faster to donate to the Good God focused on Baphomet, but he’d feel better knowing his money was going to the fight against Asmodeus.

He’s taking the headband on and off alternating between doing so slowly and quickly, trying to feel the exact threshold it activates at and to feel the exact difference in his thoughts.

He interrupts with his own question.  “What’s Elysium like?”

Nod. "Milani's church takes donations. Mostly in money, but they'll also take magic items — I think that's true of pretty much every church that takes money."

She pauses for a moment.

"So, I've never been to Elysium, most of what I know is what I've heard from other people, and people say it's impossible to give a perfect description if you haven't seen it for yourself, so some of this might be wrong.

In Elysium everything people do is by choice, you can do anything that you want as long as it's not hurting the other people there. And no one needs to eat or sleep, and no one ever gets sick, and you have forever if you want it, and people do so many things when they have forever. If there's ever been a project you thought would be cool, but it would've taken a hundred years to finish it, so some people do, they'll make mosaics the size of cities or design complicated games that take years to play or do complicated magic experiments with the kind of magic outsiders can learn using spells that don't stabilize right on Golarion or write plays that are really a hundred different plays all performed at once, each focusing on one of the characters, where you'd have to see every one of them to really understand it. But if you don't want to do anything long and complicated that's also fine, Elysium still has normal things like drinking, or games of chance, or dancing, but they've gotten rid of some of the parts that suck, like supposedly in Cayden's realm there's a type of beer that never gives you a hangover.

Most of it's wilderness, but without the parts that suck about the wilderness, like dangerous monsters or insect bites or bad weather — or, what people say is, there's all kinds of weather but if you don't like the weather you can just be somewhere else with different weather without the part where you spend an hour walking through the rain. But if you don't like the wilderness there's cities too, but without the bad parts of cities either. And there's lots of parts that are just weird, like waterfalls that run backwards or forests where everyone can fly even if they couldn't normally. Everyone who lives there is Chaotic Good, or was brought there by someone Chaotic Good, so you don't have to worry that someone you meet is secretly planning to do something horrible to you, and if they tried anyway you could be somewhere else instead. And if there's a specific type of person you're trying to meet, like you need someone else to work with you on a new project, and there's someone like that who wants to meet you, and you both set out looking for someone like that, then you're a lot more likely to just happen to run into them, you'll never have the issue of them just happening to live in Tian Xia or something. 

And if you want to keep fighting Asmodeus, there's lots of ways to do that in Elysium, there's people who learn the kind of magic outsiders do and go to try to rescue people from Hell — I've heard it's more common to try to rescue people from the Abyss, and maybe safer, I don't know if that's true, but if what you want is to rescue people from Hell it's not like anyone in Elysium is going to stop you. Or if you want to fight Asmodeus but you don't want to risk dying for good, there's people who learn the outsider ways of making magic items, or go become a lawyer for afterlife trials, or take summonses from adventurers, things like that."

"I've heard there are different parts with different rules. If you want to live somewhere with rules you can live there with other people who wanted the same rules as you. And then if you don't want to live somewhere with rules you can go to one of the parts with no rules."

"I've heard people say that it's possible to leave for the Maelstrom if you hate it there, but I don't know how hard it is.

I don't know how true this is, but I've heard it said that the Chaotic afterlives are places where almost anything is possible, and the main difference between them is which possible things people are actually trying to do. So in the Abyss almost anything is possible, but if a demon figures out how to change into whatever shape they want or transform the landscape they'll mostly use it to enslave and torture people, and then the Maelstrom is usually fine but sometimes someone makes it there who mostly likes messing up what other people have made, and Elysium is pretty much always fine."

"I have occasionally observed Scries on the parts of Elysium where divinations function correctly. It's difficult to draw any conclusions from that with certainty, but the people I have observed there typically seem happy, and are never undergoing torture. I have observed several azatas with wings patterned like those of a sleeping-nymph butterfly, but I do not know whether that is inherent to the variety of azata they are, or whether it was more akin to a fashion statement."

"Was there anything in particularly that you were hoping you'd be able to do in the afterlife?"

"Beer with no hangovers sounds great." 

If he's letting himself dream, there are a lot of magical beers he can imagine up he would like to try.  Beer that makes you smarter.  Beer that actually makes you more splendid and not just feel splendid.  Beer that lets you fly.

He appreciates Sinashakti giving strict observations, it makes it easier to be sure this isn't all just nice propaganda (a lot of it does sound too good to be true).

"I guess practice magic in peace.  Maybe if I have all my needs covered, study math that isn't even useful to wizardry, there are probably all sorts of neat things that aren't obviously useful."

"I would like to learn some magic that doesn't require studying math or having noble blood."  Or sucking up to a God.

He'll ignore that little verbal jab.

"So... odds of getting caught versus odds of getting those scrolls into the hands of a repentant former priest who can use them to undo a malediction?  Saying it like that I guess it is probably rare enough we should just burn them."

He's kind of disappointed, undoing a malediction is probably worth a lot of Good and he would want someone to try to save him if he was ever maledicted.

He was being genuine.  He could work quite hard at magic as long as it was practical practice and not staring at books.  You don't get as skilled as he is with glaives or wrestling just coasting on the strength you get from doing dangerous stuff.

They could also just sell the scrolls to an unrepentant evil priest, but he can obviously tell none of the Andorans will like that idea so he will keep his mouth shut about it.

"It's hard to be sure, it's not like repentant former priests are exactly advertising that fact. But it's probably not worth the risk."

"Even if they cannot locate someone immediately, they could retain the scroll until they find someone who can use it."

His first moral conundrum.  He'd been told Good people often tie themselves in knots, it is somewhat surprising it happened to him so soon.  Hopefully it is a sign he is on the right path to Goodness?

He's worried he is biased in favor of saving someone already maledicted over some future person that might be maledicted... maybe out of personal bias?  Except really from an abstract perspective either the already maledicted person or the future to be maledicted person could be him, so he's not sure why he thinks that.

"I'm going to try on the other wisdom headband." 

It doesn't give him any immediate ideas or even help sort through his doubts.

Ha, Good people really do pathetically stress over minor decisions.  …He might be one of them himself if he ends up in Elysium.  Well, that is one of the many things alcohol is good for!

"Scrolls aren't especially durable or anything are they?  Carry the malediction scrolls with some of the explosive runes, and if we're about to be caught, well, we would want to read off the explosive runes in that situation anyway.  I could do it, but I might be up close in the fight and not have a free hand.  And even if one of us can't read it off, it might get the scrolls when they searched us for stuff!"

He may not be good at wizard math or whatever, but he has picked up a thing or two about solving puzzles.

...Now he feels a little foolish. "Now that you mention that, it occurs to me that I could ward the scrolls with Explosive Runes and remove them in Andoran — I could cast one from my bonded object today and prepare another one tomorrow. It would be nearly impossible to use the scroll for its original purpose without activating the runes."

Clearly the solution to moral dilemmas is having the right spells to throw at the problem!  He feels kind of dumb not seeing it sooner.

"So... with that out of the way, any ideas what the rest of the loot does?  I think the iron bar turns into any tool, yeah anytool that's what it is called."  He picks it up and demonstrates by turning it into a shovel.

"The pearl allows a spellcaster to reuse a spell.  The goblet I mentioned creates water... I think its probably limited to only a few gallons per day?  One of the intelligence headband has a curse or drawback or something that messes with the wearer's wisdom.  The other one is complicated, some sort of conditional boost to intelligence, keyed off conditions, and also it inflicts pain.  And then there is one extra wisdom headband besides the one you are wearing."

"Oh yeah, I think I heard about some of that stuff before.  The wisdom cursing headband we got off an Asmodean wizard we killed.  He was probably trying to teach himself to craft better headbands but screwed up and wasted it and the Leader was trying to fix it.  And the torture headband was his own personal invention.  Slap it on a wizard and it tortures them for thinking against Baphomet, and makes them extra smart when they focus on being loyal to Baphomet.  If we wasn't gonna maledict you he probably would have stuck it on you.  Good thing you met these people and I was there to help you, ha!"

He actually meant the last part as a friendly reminder of his contribution but it still comes out with kind of a sneer.

Asshole.  If Fernando hadn't defected first, you would still be stuck with the cult and doomed to the Abyss.  Actually, this idiot is probably still doomed to the Abyss, no way he has the self discipline to actually make Good.

Fernando isn't sure of a Good way to say any of that, so he'll keep his mouth shut. (But he does a poor job, by Chelish standards, of hiding his glare.)

Well someone looks ungrateful!  A sixth-circle wizard getting a spell off could have turned that whole fight around and even with numbers and surprise it would have been close.  He had been trying to be friendly, but now he doesn't regret it coming off rudely.

This is a stupid argument! They don't have to be Chelish anymore!

Wow, someone really needs to calm things down.

"It's good to have both of you working with us." She looks at Mateo. "It was a brave thing you did, standing up to someone who might have Maledicted you if things had gone a little differently, and I'm glad you were there to help stop him. I don't think we could have done it without you." She turns to Fernando. "And I'm glad you chose to join us. It's not easy to leave your entire life behind, and of course we're always happy to have another wizard." 

...And now she's going to change the subject back to something she thinks they'll enjoy more. "I think I could get good use out of the Anytool if no one else really wants it. Apart from that... a nicer Cloak of Resistance would always be nice, or a Bag of Holding, but if anyone else is particularly attached to either of those I'm not going to fight about them. The rest of it is mostly the sort of thing I'd be trading with someone else to get something that's a bit more connected to my skillset."