"I'm not at all sure I'd take instantaneous over gradual, even if something ended up more powerful at the end of the instant.  There's not much point if the thing that becomes the god gets changed so fast that there's no continuity with the old you.  Are there non-Starstone gods?"

"Irori reportedly ascended by achieving mental and physical perfection, which is definitely gradual. I think his holy books probably have a fair bit of detail, but I don't remember it." Because they're illegal for her to read. "He's big in Vudra- across the continent from here - but my mother was always fond of him, she said he was a good god to have in mind for - having high standards for yourself. Presumably someone can get you a book if you ask."

"Huh.  Not sure if I'd go that route, but it's not an instant no.  What's different in other afterlives besides Hell?"

"Abaddon's the one that eats souls. The Abyss is infinite and the one the demons at the Worldwound come from, and reportedly you start out there as a sort of grubbish, larval demon, and if no one kills you first mature into a demon eventually. The Maelstrom is full of energy and magic but nothing reacts in a consistent way to external forces - I guess the laws of logic would still apply there but you couldn't really do any inference - and eventually it turns people into chaos beasts, which aren't possible to interact with and which can't interact with the world, not the physical world or magic or anything else anyone has tried. They are by all accounts happy and think this is cool, but it seems awful to me. Elysium - Chaotic Good - is an infinite wilderness. The kind of people who go there seem to like it? They just wander around exploring. Usually never run into anyone else. Nirvana turns you into an animal, as part of a journey towards Neutral Good, which is very - non-partial? Not caring more about you or people you know than about anything else? And somehow being turned into an animal helps with that. Heaven makes you an angel, like Hell makes you a devil. Devils are perfectly Lawful Evil and angels are perfectly Lawful Good. I guess there's nothing wrong with it but I don't want to be perfectly Lawful Good, you know?"

"That's missing - Lawful Neutral, Neutral Neutral?"

"Right, sorry. Neutral Neutral's the Boneyard, it's where Pharasma sorts everyone. It's, uh, overrun with babies, because like half of people die as babies, and most adults have alignments but babies generally don't. Abaddon used to sneak in and eat the babies but now Hell defends it, so they don't. I have never heard anything very good about the Boneyard. Once you start demonstrating any inclination towards an alignment you get kicked out of it to there instead. 

Lawful Neutral is Axis. It sounds ...fine? It's a big city, unimaginably big. The thing you turn into is called an....inevitable? And they're just pure Law. Axis has a lot of trade with Hell, their gods and ours get along."

"I'll take a closer look at all this someday when I've got time.  How hard is it to improve stuff up at that part of existence?  Not sure any of that sounds Keltham-optimal... and I have a god who should theoretically be about people doing their own stuff without stepping on each other.  Do gods carve out their own sections of the afterlife, or is it strictly nine to all customers?"

"Gods carve out their own sections which can vary some from the general scheme. There might be a spot for your god that's perfect for you that I just haven't heard of, if your god doesn't talk much. I ....think improving the afterlives without buyin from the relevant gods would be hard, and improving it in a way the relevant god likes is a highly encouraged way to spend your afterlife."

"I wish I could talk to my god, or even any of my god's other clerics if they exist.  I'll mark it down for now as something that is not known to me to be imminently on fire, though - the whole setup you're describing - in dath ilan you could take any large object or institution made by intelligent people, and ask exactly why it was the way it was, and get a sensible answer about the ways it was optimal.  To the point that I found it annoying.  Why is the city eight miles across but not nine miles?  Because the property prices in the core would increase like so and the benefit at the edges would decrease like so, market forecasts et cetera et cetera, therefore this way was optimal.  The thing with the afterlives seems - not that."

"I think it is not that. Maybe parts of Hell and Axis are like that but no one's told us about it if so."

"But the gods are smart, or at least are supposed to have very high measured intelligence compared to a human in whatever system you're using, and it sounded from other things you said like they had some coordination.  Is there a metagod with even more alien desires who built the afterlives?  It doesn't sound like that either, and it doesn't sound like the afterlives are as simple and non-functional as mountains, or rivers.  There's something the afterlives are doing, but I can't think of anything a smart entity could be trying to do, such that those afterlives are doing it optimally given their resources.  That kind of halfassedness can be a signature of hereditary-selection - the process I was talking about that built humans, systematic accretion of errors according to a fitness metric which in biology is reproduction - but it doesn't quite sound like that either..."

"You asked if my trying to situate my lectures inside of - everything - was a dath ilani thing or a me thing.  It's both.  We're used to knowing where we are inside a larger reality and where all of the order is coming from and why it's there.  There's pranks that get played on us as children which try to teach us to operate when we're wrong about things, when we don't know why things are happening, so we won't end up mentally fragile and unable to deal with confusion.  But the fact is that I'm used to knowing to within 0.1% exactly how old my universe is, and the names and qualities of every kind of tiny part of reality that we haven't reduced to tinier parts.  Not knowing that does feel quite disorienting, like I'm walking on air constantly trying to figure out what's holding up my feet."

"Whereas I am not used to having the slightest idea why anything is happening unless it's a magic item."

"You're stronger than an average dath ilani would realize from a first glance, aren't you.  It's not that you don't know those things because you're not curious, but because the answers simply aren't available to you, and you take for granted that you can operate in that hostile cognitive environment."

"Well, it's - how did you put it. The organisms that can't operate in their environment die, the ones that are around are the ones that happened to be better at handling it.

You're handling yourself pretty well, for having lived all your life in a place so - much safer than this one."

"Safer, yeah.  But also much less full of opportunity to be the person and take the role that I wanted.  I wouldn't step into a portal back if you opened one in front of me.  Neither a Good dath ilani or an Evil dath ilani would do that, in the end, only a weak one, and I don't aspire to be weak."

"You know, it's very rude, saying things like that when you still haven't worked out a payment agreement with our government so people can fuck you."

More direct than he's used to, but - not unpleasant.  "Embarrassingly, I think I'm blocked on figuring out how to calculate the actual benefit to your breeding program of tossing in a huge batch of new intelligence alleles, given that you do already have people as smart as me.  There's a theorem about how the speed of improvement goes as the covariance of reproductive variance with the variance of the quality selected on, and that means I need to figure out how adding a batch of different alleles increases the variance, it's not as simple as adding on some more intelligence.  I - also feel a need to know something about how my kids would grow up?  It's not the Good answer because my kids would be displacing other kids that would exist and I don't see how my kids would be expected to lead worse lives than the stupider people who'd otherwise exist, in terms of how that affects total utility, but I think I feel some Evil attachment to my own personal kids."

He can't come right out and say this next part, it just feels too weird not to put some level of indirection in it where he doesn't come straight out and become the petitioner for sex.

"Dath ilan has also figured out some alternatives to reproductive sex besides the standard methods of contraception, and even people with contraception have been known to use those alternatives.  For much the same reason that wizards here fling themselves off cliffs or have sportfights with - ostriches?  I know it wasn't ostriches but I forget which animal you said it was."  That gives Carissa an out if she doesn't want to reply directly to the line of conversation about non-reproductive sex.

"Bulls. And I bet we've invented more of those than you have, what with being under the much stronger constraint of not having contraception."

"I don't know if I personally know enough to take on your civilization's collective knowledge by myself.  I don't have much actual experience of variants, and it's considered mildly unwise to let your reading get too far ahead of your experiences there.  But I bet at strong odds that dath ilan generally has invented more sexual variations than Golarion.  Because we have more total people, with more free time that they see nothing better to spend on than sexual variations, who have access to better-aggregated repositories of information about what's already been tried.  Unless you've got gods specifically of variant sexuality, or magic opens up whole new spaces there that we can't access at all, in which case all bets are off and also I should like to know more."

"I hope you meant me to take that as a challenge."

She's pushing hard.  It's clear that she's decided on Keltham.

Has Keltham decided on Carissa, becomes the question.

Part of him is scared, but it's the kind of fear where it's a reflex thought that the correct action is probably to overcome it; Keltham has never aspired to be weak.  He has no intention of going around never actually having sex for the rest of his life.  Having just jumped worlds, there are all kinds of reasons why it'd be wiser to have sex with a relatively older woman first, before getting involved with the younger women in his research harem.  Carissa is attractive on a purely physical level, part of him is quite clear on wanting her physically.

He doesn't know Carissa all that well.  But he feels any respect for her, which is probably a good sign?  She was at the Worldwound, in the face of danger, and then dropped that to come here right away, in the face of uncertainty.  You could make the case for her as a strong, risk-taking woman with goals.  But he doesn't quite know what those goals are, or how her career was advanced by being at the Worldwound... they don't really know each other that well.  Quick flings can work, or so he's been advised, but only when both sides know that's exactly what it is, as he's also been advised.

"Oh, it's a challenge on at least some level.  What level exactly, that's the question.  I suppose, among other things, a potential challenger might wonder what his new world would make of a stronger challenge like that being issued by him and taken up - whether his new world saw any implicit promises as being issued, in either direction.  Even implicit promises like somebody having already decided that there's a real chance of something longer-term, because that decision would require more information than I have right now to make one way or another.  I don't default on debts, and that means I need to know when I'm taking them on."

He's - 

- asking whether he would be making a commitment? Because he wouldn't want her to think he wants more than he does?

That's adorable. 

It's also completely ridiculous but she's not going to laugh at him. 

"Where I'm from, promises are made explicitly, and sex isn't one. People do what they like, and if they like it a lot they might do it again, and if their wants are conditioned on the other person's attitudes then they'd better ask about those." And be good at telling if they're being lied to, but somehow, she expects Keltham would be distracted by the revelation that in Cheliax people lie to get laid. "I do not, in fact, want you particularly conditionally. But the flip side of that is that if you have conditions you're going to have to figure them out."

"Conventional wisdom for some totally other world that's not this world has it that people our age, having fun with each other, sometimes find that spiraling into further events.  Sometimes it means they have more fun than they expected, sometimes it means that they've got to deal with some stuff that didn't work out or got unexpectedly broken, and then move on.  It is said, there, that this is one of those cases where there's a big ol' residual chance even after you've reasonably estimated it to be unlikely.  I'm hardly going to be against young people being reckless investors and plunging into exciting new projects without total and complete information.  But another world's conventional wisdom seems to hold it important that people both be on the same page about being like, yeah, we both know we're being young here, we'd rather plunge ahead and deal with the residual chance of unpredictable consequences, than spend our youth being timid and passing up on chances."

Carissa is pretty sure that getting heartbroken is a thing that can only happen to you if you make the mistake of caring about other people or at least about what other people think of you, and that dath ilan didn't suggest the obvious solution of 'don't care about other people or expect them to care about you' because they're Good. She suspects, though, that this is an unsexy thing to say. 

"We're young," she says. "And we're playing games with very high stakes, such that this isn't, by comparison; I wonder if the warning seems more necessary, in a world where it's not true of everything you do that it might hurt much worse than you expected. But I'd rather live in this world than in yours, just like you would, and I'd rather have you than not, even though I might get hurt, on any given occasion, and almost definitely will get hurt, looking out ahead over all of them."

The words - hit harder than Keltham expected them to hit.  It's the kind of thing you might hear in a dath ilani science fiction romance, spoken on a spaceship in assorted plot jeopardies; but the words hit a lot harder when you are in an impossible scenario, and a woman is saying those things to you.

"Consider yourself challenged, Carissa Sevar."