"...She wouldn't do things that She wouldn't want Her church to know of. Wouldn't want printed on broadsheets, sure, there's plenty that people who don't have context will misinterpret as license to do terrible things, but - She is constrained to doing things that wouldn't damage our trust in Her by being a Lawful Good god in the first place."

"Huh. I'll try to assemble a transcript to send over next time. You probably want to get back with the diamonds."

"We do. Thank you both."

"I have notes and I'll clean them up into a rendering of my part of the conversation for you."

"Thank you." And a genuine smile as they Plane Shift out. "It's very very good to have you on board."

"My pleasure."

"Right. Let's hire some lawyers."

Cam nods because that doesn't seem to require the degrees of freedom afforded by speaking. He'll follow her out to pay for lawyers for the both of them.

Cam is inclined to talk to some cross-alignment negotiation specialists and go from there if they turn out not to be the right folks, and maybe also sign up for an explanation of how Axis works for Chaotic visitors, but he can escort and pay for Carissa's lawyers first given sufficient permission to then strike out alone after that, if she has a first port of call.

She's fine with that. She....thinks she wants the airtight contracts people. No offense.

"That seems fine." It would be wasted if Cam did not himself have any lawyers because he would simply look at the pages of legalese and go "wut" but he does not have to say why it seems fine. Airtight contract specialists.

Pretty much anyone can wander in the door labeled Webster & Stone, LLP and get an appointment in five minutes for enough money. (The front desk staff assure them that this is true of businesses in general and they have no reason to think Cam's preferred choice of counsel would be an exception.) No one ever does, because for most people money is some amount of object. But there exists a quantity of conjuration where that really stops mattering. Carissa can have a lawyer in as little time as it takes to look up a current list of valuable substances.

Right. 

Carissa recently summoned this outsider subject to this set of constraints. Then she gave him some permissions she didn't intend to be as broad as they are. Now she wants to give him permissions to solve a lot of problems in the world such as material scarcity, while absolutely categorically not giving him the ability to destroy Hell, or any other places, or any people he can't already destroy because he can create air inside their bodies because she let him make air. Is she in the right place.

She's in the right place. They can get her in a room with Webster or Stone personally right away. (And also with Cam? The attorney does make sure to advise Cam that this firm is representing Carissa's interests, not his, and for something this important it's recommended that he retain his own counsel. Ordinarily the counterparty would not be present during an initial meeting, but if nothing is confidential from Cam then it's less important.)

Rest of the news is worse.

Which isn't to say a contract can't help. Many people follow contracts even when it's not literally outside their power to breach them, and that's not always just because Axis judges will frown at them. Spelling out what is and isn't agreed to can still be extremely useful for the understanding of the parties. (And for enforcement in Axis courts, to the extent that matters here.)

Their main recommendation is to get an extensive list of things Carissa cares about and would want to protect with a contract, then draft a very strict set of standard permissions covering both physical safety (limits on mass, volume, and composition; probably just rule out exotic types of matter completely; in a defined location in space occupied only by air, etc.) and just as importantly purpose (conjurations not known to Cam to harm Carissa's stated interests in any way not explicitly known to her, with any alleged accidents to be judged by what was known or should have been known at the time, conjurations intended only for the explicit purposes described, disclaiming and forfeiting any use of the permissions outside the scope of that agreement). Ideally, this contract would apply to existing permissions as well.

Once they draft a set of permissions, she can allow conjurations per-occasion with these as usual rules. (Assuming the outsider's binding allows incorporating definitions by reference?) Or by the relevant one of a small number of usual rules, depending on what scale of creation it's meant to be.

Meanwhile, if Cam's society of origin is as described, they almost certainly already have a set of best practice limitations for safety and nothing else. Whatever they have will be biased toward more leeway, of course. If that exists they should ask Cam for a copy, after drafting their own best effort, and use the stricter of each wherever they overlap.

If they understood it correctly, the only part of any agreement that will be magically enforced is the physical limitations on future permissions. Everything else is just a regular contract. And it sounds like Cam would not particularly be deterred by breach of contract damages, if he could just say "sorry your country's army got suffocated in mashed potatoes, here's an unfathomable amount of money." They don't have a proposal for that problem nearly as good as magical prevention, but can at least make sure it's worse for Cam so his incentive is to follow the contract. Their best proposal for that problem is liquidated damages where Cam puts the unfathomable amounts of money in escrow now, to belong to Carissa only in the event of a severe breach and judgment to that effect. Carissa still only has the one threat, and a contract can't undo any breach. But it can mean that if she does need to kill herself (and be resurrected or not as she chooses), Cam would still be banished and her threat becomes that much more credible if he knows she'd be set for life as the next best thing to a Power in Axis.

So the main question for Carissa is the details of what her interests are. Absolutely not destroying people or places is a good start. They can suggest other kinds of harm aside from direct injury: sabotaging projects of individuals or groups, equipping enemies of states, creating Chelish air at scale could effectively steal Cheliax's weather and they might have to get things like that with a general prohibition on knowingly causing statistical harm... They can go on like this for a while.

Anything aside from people and places? Causes she's committed to or existing promises she needs to keep it consistent with? If there are more things than avoiding destruction they might have to get into how to handle tradeoffs. But if she thinks there aren't and is wrong, those tradeoffs will inevitably come up at the worst possible time.

(If they want all existing prior art on how summoning negotiations normally work it is all available in the First Vault but possibly not in a convenient format for them. Also this is an incredibly bizarre situation by Earth summoner standards and there very likely is no prior art on "you have an apsel, you can dismiss him but can't summon a replacement, your summoning circle was intended for a totally different situation, and you want material objects so you'd rather not dismiss him".)

Carissa is so relieved. This is in fact precisely the thing that she wanted and she should've just insisted on it immediately but there's not a lot of point of being angry at herself for that, or for anything else. She doesn't think Iomedae would bother. 

...she's not sure what she wants, aside from 'everything not getting destroyed'. She thinks she prefers, you know, that children go to wizard school and that the Worldwound be closed and that famines and bad things end? She'd like the people she personally sent to Hell to be compensated for this? Probably she wants a lot more things she hasn't thought of because until yesterday she had exclusively encountered Asmodeanism as a philosophy of wanting things. 

She likes the idea of contracts where if Cam is being enough of a menace to the universe that she has to kill herself she gets enormous damages in a vault in Axis. That sounds pretty good.

If Carissa's sure she wants to go with these Cam can put down a retainer for them and go find his own lawyer to look at whatever they settle on?

Yes, these are who she wants. 

Then he can wait while they hammer out an agreement that looks like it will let him pay for these guys and his guys and then drop some material objects and go find his guys.

Payment agreement is easy. They can reference known items listed in a specific catalog, and show off some extensive safety clauses that don't matter at all if Cam is just paying them but could matter, if he were to suddenly turn any of certain specific varieties of hostile, and honestly it's probably there as much for the demonstration to Carissa as Cam. (Most annoying is definitely the contractual obligation to think for at least one minute about any ways this conjuration could be harmful that he does not know them to be expecting, which predictably comes back negative.)

Carissa's stated interests are a pretty good starting point! Ideally she'd be able to spell out everything she wants all at once, but most people can't actually do that and make do with amendments. These particular goals are also pretty convenient; having a lot of them shared with Cam suggests that there are many more possible agreements they could make. In particular it opens up more options for remedies-- perhaps in the event of a breach that violates an agreement's intent, Carissa should get to declare that they're going to stop what they're doing and go make a random country rich, or something else that serves both of their prosperity-related goals, and save the extreme option of moving to Axis for a breach where she reasonably believes Cam to be a direct threat. But this is separate from all the safety issues and is going to take a lot of drafting in its own right.

...there is, actually, prior work on compensating people who spent a short time in Hell. Not very much, of course; people don't often get out at all, let alone happen to have an identifiable responsible party with both of them being in Axis. Estimates of what it would take to compensate them approximately fairly are very large, especially in a case where the main resource is money. But there is a number. Would it serve that interest of Carissa's to just...pay them.

This would also result in anyone Iomedae resurrects being wealthy as Axis counts wealth which could make them personally a geopolitical power on Golarion. Whether she wants to do that with vaguely Chelish-aligned people, or for that matter people who might now be explicitly hostile to Cheliax, is. Well. It seems like the kind of point where some of what she wants might diverge.

...yeah, giving a few random returnees from Hell more money than the Queen seems. Probably like a stupid thing to do. Especially if she can't do it for other people who are in the exact same situation but were on assignment to a different fortress - this line of reasoning is how you end up just being Iomedae, isn't it. Carissa appreciates that Iomedae did not just make her into Iomedae and is going to be kind of annoyed if that's where she ends up at the end of the day anyway.

Maybe she can give them what seems to her to be a reasonable amount of compensation, like a really nice headband and a lot of spellsilver. She would personally forgive being tortured for years if she got a really nice headband and a lot of spellsilver out of it. And then they can gradually get more things over time but in a noncatastrophic way. 

Carissa thinks she has most of her interests in common with Cam, really, and yet they still ended up in a situation where they were furious with each other and didn't trust each other and he was secretly communicating with Cheliax's enemies and she didn't have anything to do about it but kill herself. Her highest hope of this whole legal situation is that they can just do something less stupid than that. That's also - she doesn't know how to articulate it precisely, not in terms of 'what she wants', but Axis existing is better than Axis not existing, even if she personally owns none of it - even if she'd personally gone to Hell - and Cam being here is good in that way, it is the kind of good that Axis existing is good. And she wants to enable it, so long as the world doesn't get destroyed and the Outer Planes don't go to war.

- she's not sure that 'figuring out what you want' is what lawyers are for. Possibly in addition to a lawyer she needs a - mother? Wow, that'd be pathetic, she is twenty-six. A priest? The problem is that Iomedae's won't live up to the god. A headband. She would like a priority of early contract-signing to be enabling the deal with Razmir (or with someone else, she's not picky) where she gets a really nice headband.

It's not mostly what lawyers are for (she'll be answered if she says that part out loud), but it does come up. Especially in this office, because nailing down exactly what you want in enough detail for a contract to protect against malicious opponents is actually just hard. Even in Axis. There's a sense in which everything you are glad of being true, or would approve or disapprove of if it happened, anything you notice at all with more than indifference, is "an interest of yours." That sense doesn't usually matter, but it does if you're doing things like making hopefully-ironclad contracts with powerful entities. Only letting through things that are genuinely unimportant if they go wrong no matter how wrong they go can get uncomfortably close to listing off literally everything you care about.

But achieving something less stupid than giving up and banishing Cam, that's easy.

A contract would in fact have helped there. Agreeing on what types of actions and benefits-derived are within the scope of what conjurations would have prevented most of the problems that were likely to come up, including the ones that did. Obviously Cam was not behaving like a very contract-following type of person, but the other benefit of a contract is that it's at least more undeniable what is and isn't agreed to. "No fuckery" is not actually specific enough to call the kinds of things he did a breach.

And they do have more options for remedies, now. They've talked about liquidated damages and veto power over projects, but options other than suicide range from "just operate on separate continents" (if this breaks down in a way where Carissa is sure she wants to enable Cam but they can't stand working together for whatever reason) down through "comfortable cell where Cam can't do much except favors for vetted visitors" (if he is a threat to the world but would rather agree to confinement than be sent home). Everything is still ultimately backed by threat of Carissa's suicide, but in the kind of way where it's obvious there are other things both sides would rather try first.

Razmir. It sounds like most of the problems there have been with inability to trust Razmir, more than with Cam. (They can absolutely still get contract terms promising that Cam will not attempt to get Carissa Dominated or similar, of course.) Going for a headband early is a straightforward investment in resources, the kind of thing counterparties negotiate about all the time. That can start at the top of the list.

....would it help if they drafted a contract for dealing with Razmir? Safe conduct and usage restrictions on items from Cam are both simpler than the Cam situation. It sounds like Razmir and his people were already on that, but if you're worried about loopholes it's safer to be the party putting words to paper.

(And if she wants to undercompensate resurrectees from Hell, that's even easier. A footnote. Very good off-the-shelf magic items can in fact be found on shelves, and ones even better than that just mean buying more of Razmir-or-whoever's time.)

Carissa finds all of this very soothing and would be delighted by a contract for deaiing with Razmir and a contract for future negotiation-breakdowns with Cam and some undercompensation for people retrieved from Hell whose pathway there involved Carissa particularly. She hopes that Cam is having as productive a time with his own lawyers and was an idiot for not coming here first.

Cam is finding his guys. Hello, specialists in cross-alignment negotiation, he is a Chaotic Good outsider from even farther away than Elysium and he is under some constraints from an until-recently-lawful-evil-now-???-after-talking-to-Iomedae human.