"...surely many living people care for babies. I guess maybe it's more Good if you adopt them?"

"Yeah, it has to be altruistic, if you just like your babies and want them to turn out well I don't think you get any Good for that. But if you're like 'ah, poor suffering orphans, I shall save them' - Good."

"Does Pharasma publish a rubric or something, I haven't run across one."

"No. But, like, murder's Evil, infanticide's Evil, abortion's Evil, torture's Evil, devoting your life to serving the poor or the sick is Good, fighting Good is Evil and fighting Evil is Good, and most stuff you do in the course of trying to achieve life goals is at least a little Evil, enough it adds up if you're not serving the poor or the sick. Maybe that's less true in the Boneyard since there's not much scope for ambition."

"Huh. I feel like I'd benefit from talking to more broadly educated people on this but it's not super urgent. How long would you like to stay on the moon?" He's taking photos now.

She’s staring at the sand grains. “You could be lying to me, of course.”

"Yeah, I don't think the binding prevents that at all. There are ways to restrict summoned daeva to being truthful, but it involves complicated finagling around concepts of task-relevance and shit like that which I assume you will identify as tricksy and suspicious if I try to explain it?"

“Seems like if you’re lying in the first place you can probably lie about those too. There are spells, of course, but - not wizard ones.”

"Are there magic items about it? Not here on the moon, presumably, but we could go back down and shop some more and you could wave a magic item of it at me and I could tell you that as far as I know the piles are accurate representations of the thing I said I was conjuring for modulo concerns about how my powers interact with other magic and stuff."

"I bet there's a bunch of loopholes in that. But I'll - try to figure out a phrasing that wouldn't have a bunch of loopholes.

It - you have to be lying because if actually Hell is weak, and built on lies, they'd know that, and they'd have just had me killed."

"Do they kill everyone they might have an interest in killing? I think a lot of people are alive I wouldn't expect on that model."

" - well, I'm sure they can't get everyone, but they could get me. I'm not - the latest emperor of Galt, or Felandriel Morgethai, or something well-defended -"

"You're on the moon," he points out. "And before that you were traveling very fast in a conveyance unknown to Chelish agents. Also they did try having whatsherface talk to you about being Chaotic Good with me, maybe they can't make that square with assassination attempts if it's a coordinated strategy?"

"- maybe. Or maybe they told me to be Chaotic Good because Chaotic Good is weak and stupid - 

- can you spy on them, with your little figures, or does that get sight and not sound?"

"It gets sight and not sound unless you do ridiculously elaborate things I have no expertise with. Or plant objects near them. I kind of expect that they don't go around saying 'pity we're so weak and pathetic and unable to kill people we want dead' even in private meetings? That would be weird even for very paradigmatically weak and pathetic sorts of people."

"They'd be discussing whether they want to spend a Wish on it; because that's probably what it'd take, if I were on the Moon.

- I'm being an idiot, aren't I. You can get their - correspondence, their contracts with Hell -"

"Sure, if you can specify it enough, would that be informative to the question at hand?"

....some things that you are very much not allowed to think, in Cheliax, some things that are very dangerous to think if you might die soon -

If Hell is in fact the losing side, then she isn't on it. And if anyone knows that about her, then they will probably want to do something about it and she can't assume it'll take them very long.

If Hell is in fact the winning side, then checking if it was the losing side is a very dangerous thing to do.

"You realize that lying to me about this won't work for very long and won't get me to do - whatever it is you want me to do -"

"...I hadn't especially considered it in those terms enough to realize that, but okay?"

"What happens to you if I die."

"I go home."

"Do you want that?"

"No! That would lose me all opportunity to do stuff here! Home is boring and I have had all the boring I could stomach for the last century and a half."

" - as far as ways of being Chaotic Good go, I can work with that one. All right. I want to - buy a favor from someone very powerful without getting mind controlled or murdered, and figure out if you're lying to me, and I'm going to assume you are lying to me until proven otherwise because I'm probably going to die, here. Can you drop a message on someone from this far away?"