"We can fix Cheliax. Just not by destroying it."

"What would you like to do with it?"

"...rule it? Isn't that what anyone would want to do?"

"I guess it seems like an obvious contender but you need policies and a transition plan and advisors and shit, what's your strategy there?"

"Well before things escalated my plan was to over the course of the next five years close the Worldwound and then re-establish Sarkoris there as a country that was very rich because of all your help, and over the course of those five years identify good advisors and minions and so on. Now things have escalated and that leaves me with wildly fewer options. If I were handed the crown in Cheliax tomorrow I'd definitely die of it in short order. Razmir - might be helpful with this, actually? He runs a country, ninth circle wizards are useful allies."

"I do look forward to our meeting. Uh, he runs a theocracy, what are you going to do with respect to state religion?"

"I'm not going to make a country I run worship someone who isn't actually a god. It's not doing them any favors in the actual afterlife they go to which won't be Razmir's because he's not a god. I can be diplomatic about it, though."

"Yes I just mean are you going to do the Asmodeanism thing."

"If Heaven's going to win in the long run then it'd be - a disservice to people - to make them a shape Heaven can't use."

"...I guess that's one way of looking at it."

"Correspondingly, though, if Hell's going to win in the long run it's a disservice to people to make them a shape Hell can't use."

"Well, you can only get me to participate in one of these aims short of mind control. Under what circumstances do you suppose I might wind up mind controlled?"

"If someone with access to Dominate Monster who isn't on your side already and isn't a signatory to the Worldwound treaty gets within range of you."

"Might you wind up encouraging this?"

"If I promised not to, then I wouldn't. Absent that yeah, if I suspected you were smuggling my enemies the resources to fight Cheliax and I didn't have another way to stop you without dying."

"Will you promise not to?"

"Will you promise not to try to give Cheliax's enemies the weapons to overthrow it?"

"I think... you... have been planning to overthrow it... which might get you declared an enemy of Cheliax if you aren't already."

"We can work out the exact wording later, but I want assurances about Lastwall and the forces of Good and I guess also Galt or Molthune or any other neighbors of Cheliax that'd go to war with it if they had enough resources."

"I will not secretly smuggle resources that I don't expect to get better results than a conventional invasion?" he suggests.

"If you have something good in mind you can convince me of it! I don't want you to smuggle resources at all!"

"I don't currently have that much confidence in your judgment of what results would be good."

"Then it sounds like we do not want to make each other deescalatory promises yet. If you made a deescalatory promise, would you exact-words it - would you do things that went against what you knew was my understanding of your promise, but which you could argue was technically a possible interpretation of it?"

"Uh - maybe but probably only if it turned out I'd made the promise under a really important misapprehension?"

"Would you break it?"