"Pity is an emotion but 'brainwashed' is mostly a claim about reality, do you think it's incorrect? If it's true, I should hope they think it; they are charged with believing true things."

"Everyone everywhere is bent into whatever shape the nearest gods see fit. You're going to claim the ways you bend them aren't the same as the ways Asmodeus does it but I don't really see the difference."

"Most Chelish wizards defect once they can Teleport, if they haven't sold their souls."

"So your claim is that you're ....better at mortal-twisting than Asmodeus is?"

"Oh, I am unambiguously wildly better at it, per unit of effort. I would argue that this is because 'everyone should live forever in paradise and learn and grow and shape the world by their principles' is an inherently more appealing proposition to mortals than 'everyone should be ground down into Asmodeus's slaves, because this serves Asmodeus, and it doesn't serve them but they'll be punished for thinking too hard about that', but even if you disagree with my diagnosis of why I'm better at it I'm clearly much better at it."

"Asmodeus's claim is that He'll make you stronger than Heaven would dare to."

"There are many, many soldiers in Heaven, Carissa, who would suffer anything if it would make them stronger.

It mostly doesn't.

Getting stronger mostly requires thinking clearly and accumulating resources and training and executing operations. High stakes, but not specifically torment.

Also I'm not even sure Asmodeus claims that, though He claims many things to many different people. I think you may have made that up to have an account of yourself you could live by."

"Lawful Evil is disadvantaged by other powerful Lawful Evil entities, because such entities are selfish, and not nearly as pleased with worlds ruled by the other; Lawful Good isn't disadvantaged by other powerful Lawful Good entities.

Heaven wants you to be someone who can overthrow Asmodeus. Asmodeus does not want that."

"Fine," says Carissa with tremendous irritation. "Fine. I'm going to do some vetting, but if you're not lying about any of that, you win, I'm Lawful Good, Asmodeus sucks, I hope you can cut a deal with Him, I don't think Him sucking entitles you to murder His victims. Happy?"

"I am not the kind of being that has experiential correlates of achieving my objectives, and in any event did not set myself the objective of converting you, though it did seem like a plausible consequence of even slightly unconfusing you.

- but in a sense, yes."

"What do I say to Cam."

"It seems strategically acceptable if the two of you communicate only through attorneys! If you insist on trying to talk with him more, I would repeat a lot of variants of 'it makes sense that from the information you had access to, it wasn't obvious you could have treated me any better and still achieved your objectives'."

"You would've -"

"As a human I would've gambled differently because I was a human who had invested heavily in skill with Lawful cooperative strategies. As a god I would much less have been importantly gambling. If you go around comparing everyone you have to work with to Me you're going to be very bitter and very useless."

There is a part of Carissa that wants to kill herself just to spite Cam for having decided to pursue a strategy that only worked so long as she didn't know enough to kill herself. It is, to be clear, not going to win out, but -

"A lot of human impulses towards Law take that form and are triggered regardless of whether it's a situation where the decision procedure they constitute is actually a winning one. Which isn't to say that being willing to kill yourself and go to Hell out of spite is never a winning decision procedure, but - I think certainly nearly everyone who has actually done it was making the wrong decision.

Nearly all instances of cooperating with aliens feel like magnanimously forgiving them outrageous behavior while they throw an incomprehensible tantrum over a completely trivial misunderstanding. If you want things that can only be had by cooperating with aliens you are probably going to want to internally label it the 'cooperating with aliens feeling' rather than the 'being outrageously wronged by barbarians' feeling."

"He was furious with me for not letting him make bags for the famine relief in Bachuan."

"And do you prefer to feel outrage about the barbarians, or curious about what process produced that, which you evidently failed to predict?"

....outrage about the barbarians. She knows it's pathetic. Iomedae, presumably, chose a question to which Carissa's answer would be pathetic, on purpose.

"It is sometimes a useful rule that you only actually start winning once you care about winning more than you care about anything else. It's good to know, about yourself, if there are things you care about more than winning, because then you know not to make plans that involve winning."

"Is that the official Lawful Good terminology for 'you're being pathetic'."

"Indeed."

"Fine. I'm curious. Why'd he care so much about the bags."