"I expect many lawyers will be hired once this Time Stop ends. I want to before that settle non-legal matters; legal ones my Church is competent to negotiate, for the most part." And to Carissa, "if Heaven possesses the means - through Cam or through some other change in the balance of powers - to invade Hell, we would do if we could achieve any of ongoing control of Avernus, denying ongoing control of Avernus to Asmodeus, denying transit through Avernus to the rest of Creation to Asmodeus, or rescuing a sufficient number of people. We would first, of course, tell Asmodeus we were going to do this, and among truly Lawful gods the war would thereby be avoided, as we'd both share our best estimates of how it would go and then agree to skip to the end state. Asmodeus is not, in the framework you instinctively use, such a Lawful god, and would refuse to be legible about whether His estimates were in fact His best, and might spitefully have a war not in His interests. That means that I do pose a threat to everything you care about.

This is a situation that probably will arise eventually, not necessarily with Heaven as a party, because there are a great many entities that object to Asmodeus's rule in Hell and because Asmodeus is not all that interested in avoiding it, if doing so would cost Him his pride or oblige Him to negotiate transparently. Axis is much safer against something like this happening, because Abadar doesn't go around making enemies and if someone had a credible interest in invading Axis He will negotiate reasonably with them for something better so long as something better exists.

Heaven isn't much safer against something like this happening, frankly, but we keep our civilians and our cities on our fourth tier, not the second, because we don't want them to be collateral damage in an assault on Heaven as a military power, and we don't want anyone incentivized to go after them. To the extent there are things precious to you in Dis - and I think there are fewer of them in the real Dis than in the place by that name in your imagination - to the extent that there are, Asmodeus put them there so that some parties that'd otherwise war with Him wouldn't care to, and He doesn't mind if everyone in Dis as a result dies when some party that does want to war with Him does it."

In principle it is not, actually, any information, that the thing a goddess of Lawful Good says to you when She has reason to persuade you particularly is persuasive-sounding.

"Even if all of that is true it's not anyone in Dis's fault that Asmodeus is terrible and you don't - have any right - to kill them to stop him."

"He has, in the case of His devils, stripped them of the capacity to care for their own continuation, because then they'd have motive to oppose Him, and He finds those funny in the powerless but not in those forces that, could they coordinate on opposition to Him, could destroy Him. In the case of the petitioners He has simply hurt them so much that most of them would prefer their destruction to their continuation."

"Now you're lying."

"This is not actually a common point of skepticism about the case against Hell. Most people who have known a great deal of pain know a pain that would not, to them, be worth continuing to endure if the chances it might improve were too slim or too distant.

Most people who can choose Abaddon or the Abyss do."

That she hadn't actually known, and it seems - concrete, more the kind of thing that probably isn't a lie - she could ask Cam to check afterwards -

"They're just - wrong - thinking too much about the short term and not about the end state, which matters far more -"

"The end state is the same thing, for most of them. Most petitioners don't become devils."

Also checkable.

"Why'd you tell your church not to convert me? So you could do it yourself?"

"I had no plans to do this. This is extraordinarily costly. I told my church not to convert you because we had not ruled out allying with Cam to strike at Hell and it would be an injustice to you to use you against your own convictions like that; more decent to treat you as an adversary."

"Is that what you're going to do?"

"I don't know. As long as Hell endures in its present form, I will be unwilling to promise you I won't. But we are currently engaged in trying to, with Cam-aided espionage, find something better. That is the request that caused your...recent dispute."

Carissa is not going to whine about Cam to the goddess of Lawful Good who just admitted to her face she might ally with Cam to assault Hell.

But she feels strongly that the dispute was not caused by Heaven's book request but by Cam saying 'no fuckery' about his shenanigans to fulfill it.

Cam has basically no reason to believe that speaking without being spoken to will at this point help anything. He has his computer out and he's taking notes on what parts of the conversation he can hear. Not for the peanut gallery, just for himself. He was spending cycles on having a personality and taking shortcuts trying not to be inconvenienced and clearly he should have done something different and he is going to try and figure out what. Apparently she's very sensitive about - not being adequately legalistic in the implementations of things, he was trying to save bother on the assumption that their time was valuable and she was trying to save worry on the assumption that it might matter a lot if he could make for-example-books? Is she not aware that he can already make paper and ink, he never actually ran into the limit of the paper and ink permission he was working with - is it going to make her nervous if he makes food, going forward, he probably needs the coffee but he doesn't have to snack, if he needs coffee is it better to make and drink it in front of her or where she won't notice, that could go either way -

"People who are from entirely different planets usually have communication difficulties of this magnitude," she says, mostly to Carissa, mostly gently. 

"I would be grateful if you tried to explain because I don't know how."

"If you are a god," she says to Cam, "you find yourself frequently in situations where verbal or even written agreements of the kind that it is possible for mortals to make with you don't, actually, describe the space in which you can take actions very well, or meaningfully limit what you can do. Different gods handle this differently, but the Lawful Good way is to - try extremely hard at separating out adversarial interactions, in which you accumulate advantage at the other party's expense, and optimize over their information state in ways other than trying to convey the truth, and harm them to advance your interests -

- and collaborative interactions, in which you categorically don't do those things and if you accidentally accumulate some advantages refuse to use those in future adversarial interactions and if you harm them accidentally pay them back for it.

And then you be very clear about which are which.

I think this has some resemblance to the thing you and Carissa were trying to do, but - neither of you had a good formal description of collaborative-interaction rules, and particularly of the most important part of them which is what you do if you accidentally gain an advantage during a collaborative interaction."

"Usually on summons," he says, "I can't talk - or, well, I can say 'yes summoner' and 'no summoner' but nothing else, not even particularly semantic gestures. If something seems like a bad idea I just don't do it and have to let them take it from there. On occasion I've done something specifically because I was summoned unsafely and if I didn't do it the next person they tried might have taken advantage. But usually I have no possibility of getting unfiltered information about the situation except insofar as I have more context about the state of the world I'm in, which turns out to matter a lot. I used to teach summoning from the other end, but that was mostly about designing written bindings with lots of time and not accidentally uttering affirmatives. I'm trying to figure out - where I lost hold of the situation so badly? I'm not sure it was about the books, although I guess it's possible that the books thing was such a grievous procedural violation that it wasn't recoverable without divine intervention from there no matter what, I think it must have been - earlier - but if I'd asked her I really don't think letting me talk to people would have come in the form of letting me send letters to Sothis and Lastwall on Kofusachi's advice, I think I freak her out enough that I would have gotten exclusively filtered information except insofar as I communicated with people without her knowledge. I guess maybe I could have told her early on I was writing to the other apsels back home but if she'd wrecked my computer and didn't let me replace it I'd get markedly less useful at a lot of things..."

"I think it was correct and appropriate to engage with Carissa on adversarial terms and the only mistake was letting her believe you weren't doing that. In your place I would have said to her very early on that I intended to try to accumulate independent allies and information sources and that I was not advising her with the aim that she successfully control me.

I don't think that this should have been obvious, I think a great deal of why it would have helped has to do with cultural context you didn't start out possessing, but the - general principle which might be applicable in other places you might eventually find yourself, would look something like.... the decision to let someone believe that a relationship is not adversarial, because one hopes it might not be in the future, because there's a lot of latitude one can win from the other party's hopes that the interaction isn't adversarial, is ultimately itself the kind of adversarial action that mostly forecloses future cooperation."

"I mean, if I'd told her I wasn't advising her with the aim that she successfully control me it seemed likely that I'd wind up mind controlled."

"By her? Or do you mean that you would not successfully have departed Cheliax?"

"Either, both, I had a lot of uncertainty. I needed to keep her alive and retain the ability to think and gather information."

"And it felt like those were all such high priorities that it didn't make sense to do something like committing to Carissa that you wouldn't use resources accumulated in the course of getting her out safely against her, or alerting her that you did intend to so use them, because both of those would be handicaps in a situation that already felt like you were underresourced to face it?"

"- it might have made sense if we'd had more time before we had to flee the country? But I apparently read Chaotic so I'm not sure she would have believed me, I keep getting the impression that she thinks I should be unshakably convinced that she is fundamentally Lawful and will never jeopardize that status no matter what and doesn't trust anything short of that as a way to - bound expectations of someone's behavior? Also 'against her' happened to be not just, would I harm her specifically, but also, would I address the single most obvious geopolitical problem on the planet."

"I didn't assume you couldn't be trusted until you made it clear you'd contacted Razmir behind my back!!"