Leareth doesn't answer right away. 

He's trying very hard to listen to Carissa's explanation, and make sense of it, but the attempt is making his head hurt. He's trying to mark out which of her claims are of direct empirical observations, versus logical inferences, versus - value judgements, except that feels like the wrong term for what Carissa is doing... 

"- I feel a little as though you are - pointing out instances of mortal human imperfection, and claiming that is everything, but you are...not acknowledging that mortals sometimes do want things, and have preferences and goals, and effectively work to achieve them and succeed -" 

Leareth is thinking of Urtho. Urtho's Tower, the tallest building ever made by mortal hands, and it wasn't opposed by any god but it certainly wasn't a god's idea either. Whatever one could say about Urtho's flaws, he had strengths, too - and one of them was achieving goals, building spectacular, memorable, beautiful moments to humanity... 

"I...agree that mortals have ever meaningfully succeeded at things? Lots of the time, even." Carissa herself has a plan to become an artifact-making devil and wholly intends to succeed at it.

Carissa is reasonably good at coming up with plans which will work and achieve the thing she wants. Leareth has in fact noticed that. 

He's still trying to make sense of her Asmodean theology explanation, but he's not sure it's made things any clearer to him? He still feels like there's some kind of frustrating, brain-warping confusion going on between 'is' and 'ought'. Which he thinks Carissa is treating as distinct concepts in at least some places, but every time he tries to pin it down it ends up slippery and tangled in his thoughts...

Leareth thinks he would probably be better at picking out specific confusions he has, and asking well-formed questions, if he'd had food and water anytime recently. He's - at least 80% confident that even at his most clearheaded, he would find Asmodean philosophy incoherent? But it would be more productive, if he could point out the incoherent bits more precisely to her. 

None of that is at a level where he can put it into words, yet, so Leareth just holds it up in his thoughts. 

"Probably when we're picked up they'll have food and water." She's not going to risk going out for some sooner; that sounds like how you get captured by Leareth's people and spend the rest of your life under a lot of mind control while everything you know is extracted from your head to use against your allies, and her impression is that this kind of sucks. 

...And for some reason Leareth can't help smiling at that. Even chuckling, a little. 

"- That would be a terrible use of you. Also it seems fairly clear to me that, to the extent you currently consider yourself to serve Asmodeus, it is - an alliance of convenience? Because you believe He is the most powerful god, who will win out in the end over all of the worlds and all of the afterlives. If another agent defeated Asmodeus in some form of combat, would that change your mind?" 

" - yes?" She's not even sure if that's heretical. Possibly it's heretical to entertain the hypothetical but once you're doing that she doesn't think it's heretical to notice that Asmodeanism suggests you should be obeying, and making yourself valuable to, whoever it is that will have eternal power over you even if it turns out not to be Asmodeus.

"If it turned out that -" Leareth frowns, thinking, "- if Vkandis were to defeat Asmodeus in the current war, here in Iftel, would you conclude that you ought serve Vkandis instead? How would you feel about that?" 

"- I would conclude that I'd been wrong to be serving Asmodeus, I dunno that Vkandis would be the obvious person to jump ship to? Someone less powerful but smart enough not to pick a fight with Him, who did have an afterlife, maybe. Dis, the ruler of the second circle of Hell, or I guess there's Zon Kuthon but ugh, or I could look up some of the Lawful Neutral gods if they'd have me." 

"What is so 'ugh' about Zon Kuthon? And - hmm - who are the Lawful Neutral gods?" 

"Zon Kuthon is the god of sadism and suffering. His followers gouge out their eyes and stuff. I could make it work but it would be much worse than my current plans. Lawful Neutral is Abadar, who is allied with Asmodeus and I think broadly in favor of people doing economically valuable things regardless of details?" None of this is legal to discuss in Cheliax, which she suddenly feels mildly self conscious about - it's hard to have a real intellectual conversation about topics you're not really supposed to know about. "And also Irori, whose thing is that his followers should try to emulate Him in mental and physical perfection, which ...I don't know how I'd go about it but I'd try, if I were looking for a god."

- Leareth personally feels that discussing certain topics being illegal in Cheliax is the most negative fact he's heard about the country so far. Values disagreements are one thing, but having an accurate model of the world is critical to making plans that work, and if it's illegal - or even just socially discouraged - to be curious about a certain corner of reality, then that will inevitably lead to a systematic distortion in the population's consensus understanding of the world... 

He's even more suspicious, now, that Asmodeus' claims about His overwhelming advantage and the inevitably of his eventual success are propaganda, rather than an accurate prediction about the future. 

...None of that is the point right now, though. 

"- I agree, Zon Kuthon sounds even worse than Asmodeus, which is - rather impressive. Could you say more about Abadar? What are His domains, in your world - what has He been working on over the last century?" 

"Wealth, trade, law. He enforces the truce at the Worldwound - everyone agrees to help each other, even if our countries are fighting back home - he has his own country, appoints and depending who you ask possesses or merges with the ruler." She's never thought much of Osirion because women don't really have rights, there, but she's suddenly self conscious about mentioning that, what with how Leareth seems under the impression that she cares about women, as a category, which would be super stupid.

"Everywhere censors some things. The Church of Asmodeus is banned in most places."

Leareth leans forward a little. "I confess, I am confused about Abadar, then. Do - you happen to understand why, despite the fact that He values wealth and trade, He does not think this is furthered by educating women and granting them equal opportunities? The most economically advanced societies on this planet have generally been the same ones that educated their women." 

"You would think!! I haven't ever asked. It's not -" what was the thing he'd thought - "propaganda by Asmodeus, though. My job at the Worldwound was to meet adventurers from all over the world and look at their magic items and I met lots of men from Osirion, never any women, and they were - the way men are when they don't have any female peers - the only reason I care about this is because it comes up professionally a lot and it's very annoying -"

"Understandable. ...If you had a chance, somehow, to give Abadar advice, is there an argument you would make for why granting women rights would further economic development and trade?" 

"I would argue that Cheliax is much stronger and richer than Osirion! And I assume He'd say that he doesn't care for some reason, He can't have not noticed."

Assuming that's true, not propaganda...

"Why is Cheliax richer, if Abadar is optimizing directly for wealth and Asmodeus is only doing that instrumentally? ...Oh. Is this - some constraint related to the Good versus Evil axis, where Abadar values His people not being tortured when they die, and so is limited in His wealth-building activities by having to avoid things that Pharasma would categorize as Evil?" 

...Leareth is starting to wonder if Pharasma is someone he would have to fight, too, in order to fix things in Carissa's world. He feels very tired at the prospect. 

Leareth should learn from the fact that picking fights with gods got him here and stop doing it, is what Leareth should do. 

"That might be part of it, slaves in Hell make things for Cheliax. And more generally actually trying at things is always Evil."

"...I am not sure I believe that at face value."

Leareth is badly wishing that he had a way of checking Vanyel's alignment. Because Vanyel is, undoubtedly, someone who is actually trying, all the time - but he also seems very, very Good. Carissa might think Leareth is Good, but Vanyel is...something else.

"I - hmm - one theory is that the items Pharasma adds up on Her metaphorical ledger to assess whether a soul is Good or Evil, are - at least partially orthogonal to the kinds of goals that actual living mortals would wish to achieve? And so if one is - trying harder, optimizing more strongly - then more is pared away, more nice-to-haves are sacrificed toward the end goal..." 

"Yes, that sounds approximately right. So if you don't really care about the results of your actions, you can get Good, but if you really want anything, and really take the actions that achieve it, you end up Evil."

"Or Neutral, at least, depending on what the end goal is. The goal of 'conquering the world' seems much more likely to require Evil sub-actions than the goal of 'make sure all of the orphans are fed and clothed and housed.' It seems that even within your world's system for this - if the alignment of the gods is any evidence - conquest and torture are evil, but seeking wealth is not, necessarily?" 

"I'm not sure. Ninety eight percent of people in Cheliax go to Hell, probably there are more than two percent who 'just seek wealth' or something similarly not obviously having Evil subgoals."

"That is one hypothesis. Another is that Asmodeus has - figured out how to rig the system, somehow - make it so that ordinary people are much more incentivized to commit various minor acts of Evil over their lives." 

He's musing about the history of the Eastern Empire. It was, roughly, his personal experiment in optimizing for technological advancement and economic development, while working around the various constraints imposed by Velgarth's gods. It...didn't not work. To this day, the Eastern Empire is more prosperous than almost anywhere else in the world. Thanks to centuries of mages being paid to have children, they have a higher rate of mage-gift than any population save the Tayledras (whose absolute population numbers are tiny.) 

The cost came in individual freedoms. Religious worship is almost entirely banned; the churches and followers of gods offered too many opportunities for inconvenient miracles, often assassinations. (Leareth is still kind of miffed about the time he was assassinated before he could finish introducing the magical printing press design he had invented.) The Eastern Empire maintains stability and peace and rule of law by dint of almost everyone relevant being under compulsions of loyalty to their superiors - and even then, the intrigue under the surface is constant, a relentless desperate battle for survival. Leareth eventually mostly gave up on operating there at all; the Empire might be wealthy, but it doesn't have a lot of slack, not in the sense of resources that can be directed toward world-improving goals... 

He wonders if Pharasma thinks compulsions are Evil. That would explain why he reads that way himself. 

"Enchantment isn't Evil. If you use it to kill people or something then that is. I dunno about using it to enslave people, I think slavery's at least mildly Evil? Voluntary servitude is compatible with Good, paladin orders have oaths."

Not that, then. Leareth has certainly killed his share of people as well, but - he's not sure.

He feels stuck, and like he's still missing something that would make Carissa's picture of the world hold together enough that he could sanity-check it, but he doesn't know what question to ask. Carissa's worldview keeps feeling - inconveniently unfalsifiable. As though no matter how hard he tries to find the centre of their disagreement, he keeps instead bouncing off of some protective shield. 

He wonders vaguely what time it is. Being stuck inside the Rope Trick demiplane all the time, and disoriented from the mind-control and the episode of near-suffocation and the dream with Vanyel, makes it hard to tell.