"I didn't! He intercepted a letter for someone else!"

"Contacted parties behind my back in a way that caused us to come to Razmir's attention!"

"There is never any point in being indignant if someone has a bad understanding of you; you can either invest in their having a better one, or pay the costs of their having a bad one. Cam not thinking it was possible to be trustworthy to you is just as much of a problem for you if he thinks that wrongly as if he thinks it rightly, and declaring he thought it wrongly isn't solving it."

"I figured we couldn't start out trusting each other but we could build towards it over time if we just kept extending little bits of trust and not betraying it because it wasn't worth betraying in any individual case, until we had something valuable enough it wasn't worth betraying even for higher stakes. Except it turns out that every time I had extended a little bit of trust, I was giving him more power he could and would use to knock me unconscious and invade Cheliax."

"I was trying to develop - rapport? A - shared sense of what was possible? - but it kept looking like we were inevitably going to have some kind of insurmountable values difference, that absolutely everyone I could conceivably want to help with anything was going to clash with Cheliax or Hell or both."

"I think that was a very understandable tradeoff to make, and also the inevitable result of Carissa catching on to it was her deciding to commit suicide."

"Mm, that was one reason I was holding on to the way I had to knock her out, but then we wound up in Aktun which seemed like a good idea at the time..." He trails off.

"You had few appealing options once you were in a situation where Carissa to whatever degree she became more correct about the situation would want to kill herself. The strategy I proposed, of disclosing adversarial intent or not engaging adversarially at all, would've had some significant downsides, but one of the advantages that to my mind frequently outweighs those is that it wouldn't have put you in a situation where learning a more accurate picture of the situation would make your summoner attempt to kill herself and where being in a place with adequate law enforcement was incompatible with your contingency plans."

"- that's not actually obvious to me at all? I mean, I don't know how it would have gone, but if she operated under some misapprehension about how successful I was at my adversarialness or something learning more could make her decide actually she wasn't cut out for it and commit suicide even if she knew I would be adversarial to begin with. And if I wasn't doing anything behind her back at all I would have had - so little information about anything, we'd have had to operate much more conservatively, I think she'd have been kidnapped and then it wouldn't have mattered what she thought of my cooperativeness."

"I'd have approved you asking your friends in your world for help, if you'd asked me about doing that! I would've agreed to contacting more churches, I did agree to you talking with various entities like Lastwall and the Abadarans and Razmir and so on, I'd have kept agreeing to that! And I really really don't want to die, I would never have done that if there was the possibility I could just move out and contact you through lawyers!"

"Well, I didn't know that, and every time you learned I'd been talking to someone things immediately got worse so I formed the belief that you were somewhat sour on the idea."

"Are you really unable to understand the difference between 'oh, yeah, I used the permission you gave me to make myself something to eat to drop letters the contents of which are secret from you on Lastwall' and 'hey, Carissa, I propose we contact Lastwall'?"

"It is certainly becoming crystal clear to me that the exact order of operations according to which I contact Lastwall is not a trivial detail to you."

"To the extent that that isn't being willfully obnoxious on purpose I have absolutely no idea what it is."

"It seems to me that the situation here is that the two of you are enemies with quite a few common goals, should not be in the same room as one another, and should probably just, in the future, communicate through legal counsel. There are things that are better than that, but they are not really attainable unless everyone involved wants them more than they want to have been in the right all along."

"I'd be happy to have been wrong if I knew where, but I'm not feeling enlightened so far. I can wait upstairs till you need me to pay lawyers." Cam gets up.

"I have pointed out half a dozen things you were wrong about in the last thirty seconds alone."

Is there... anything helpful he can say to that... no, there are satisfying-seeming things but not really helpful ones. She listed things out that he didn't know, didn't guess, nothing that would have let him figure it out when he needed to. And it won't help to litigate that. He pauses on the stairs but then keeps going.

"It makes sense to me," Iomedae says calmly, "for you to want event-markets on the destruction of things valuable to you within Hell, and if you don't end up persuaded that it would be a legitimate objective then I will enable you in setting those up. Though I will also point out that such event-markets would permit me to go through with plans to attack Hell were I sufficiently confident Asmodeus will negotiate. I think you're fine with that, but I wanted to make it clear as a consequence, so that if that did happen you wouldn't be unpleasantly surprised that your precautions hadn't protected against it."

"You are welcome to have negotiations with Asmodeus that Axis thinks are very unlikely to result in war."

"I do want you to persuade you to not have such a market operative - or to not plan your suicide around it - for the Thrune monarchy on Golarion. For one thing it's a ...very small thing, on the scale that you ought to at this point be thinking on. People don't like hearing that about their home countries, but if you want to be doing important things this is an important part of growing up to do that. The expected reign of Abrogail II is not all that long; her predecessors didn't reign very long. It is going to be hard for you to do anything important or interesting on Golarion, including straightfowardly important things like closing the Worldwound, without affecting the expected duration of her reign. The Worldwound closing will be geopolitically destabilizing. It'll free up Cheliax's forces, but also free up those who oppose Cheliax and have been refraining from invading it in the expectation Cheliax would leave the Worldwound to hang, under those circumstances. I do not specifically know what that market will settle to, it wouldn't be a good use of my time to calculate, but I think it's fairly likely that even if you took only actions you presently want to take, they'd see Abrogail II's reign end early. Not necessarily in a massive and destructive war; she may lose power about as bloodlessly as she came to it.

But it's not worth your life to protect her."

"I just don't want - my country run by people who hate us and -"

" - see us the way Cam does -"

"Cam is an extremely confused alien from very far away. Did Lastwall possess the resources to conquer Cheliax it would be run by Chelish defectors and expatriates and the Church of a Chelish god, though as you have correctly noticed that doesn't have all of the meaning that some people would automatically ascribe to it, because I don't care about people in my homeland more than people in other places."

"They still think we're brainwashed and - pitiable and -"