"-oh, so you think that all of the afterlives involve torture? That makes more sense. They don't. At all. There is no torture in any Good afterlife and very close to none in any Neutral afterlife."

"Mm."

This seems unlikely. He's also not actually in the habit of choosing where he wants to live based on what place has the least torture, not that he's ever really thought about where he wants to live other than Menador.

"I'll get someone in here to do scries for you, though they'll be more useful if you know anyone who didn't go to Hell. I've been to Axis, and to Heaven. I've seen scries of Hell. There is no reason for any Good or Neutral afterlife to ever torture anyone, and so they don't. In Heaven most people live with their families on farms where the crops grow well and there are no monsters and no one gets sick or goes hungry. I have seen it."

There are lots of reasons to torture people, actually. Kantaria on a good day contains all of these things, and on bad days it contains torture and monsters and illness and famine. A scry is hardly very good evidence of the full range of what an afterlife contains.

"I don't doubt you have."

"The reason that everybody in Hell is tortured constantly is that Asmodeus wants people to suffer and be afraid. No other place is like it. I probably cannot afford to take you to Axis and let you wander around there for a few days, but I have, and it does not have any torture, anywhere, of anyone. The difference between Axis and Hell is far larger than the difference between the best day of your life and the worst day of your life."

"I don't really make a habit of comparing most places based on how much torture they do," he says, finally. "With the exception, I guess, of - what religion is Nidal, these days?"

"They worship Zon Kuthon. They do even more torture than Asmodeus, but Asmodeus is much more similar to Zon Kuthon in treatment of mortals than to every Good or Neutral god, and Hell more like Xovaikan than any Good or Neutral afterlife. Why draw the line at Nidal?"

"It seems like a pretty big difference! Asmodeans value pride, ambition, cleverness, strength, obedience, wealth, keeping a complex civilization running, and combing through every part of society looking for people capable of greatness. I would have said before that they were hypocrites about this principle when it came to men with orc blood, but apparently they're more accepting of those than people are without them and it's just that the thing you get without them is indiscriminate slaughter. I have complaints about them, like that they tend to be from the south and therefore a lot of honorless political worms, but they don't act like a church that's cultivating everyone to do nothing but experience pain forever.

Kuthites, on the other hand, act exactly like a church that is cultivating everyone to do nothing but experience pain forever, and I notice that they are not really very much like Asmodeans."

"The church of Asmodeus does not value any of those things. Any virtue, in the end, leads people out of Hell, because people with any virtue will not want to be tortured and destroyed until their shell is something that can be used to make a devil. And it is straightforward to confirm that that will happen in Hell, and will not happen in Axis. It makes sense that the church of Asmodeus would claim that it values those things, since it has to somehow maintain power in this world, but if you look at what happens where it truly rules, cleverness does not help you. Ambition does not help you. Strength does not help you. Obedience, I'll give you that, they value obedience, but the best way to get obedience is to destroy a person so they no longer care for anything else. And no Asmodeans have ever played any part, in our world, in looking for greatness in the corners of society. They might be temporarily forced to embody weak forms of a few of the virtues just so their society does not immediately collapse, but when you look at what they build left to their own devices, all of that is absent.

 ...and people from the south are not honorless political worms, when they aren't Asmodeans. They are virtuous and honorable men."

"Well, I've never been to the South, and I have never been to Hell, so I guess I should avoid saying anything about either of them confidently. I've never met Asmodeus, either, and I couldn't with any confidence tell you what he really wants. I have seen Menador, and I've seen how the mountain orcs live, and I've gathered some idea of how Kuthites live. Neither of the others seems to have collapsed in several hundred years either, despite appearing obviously worse in almost every conceivable way."

"It is widely believed that Zon Kuthon directly expends a great deal on ensuring that Nidal is maintained as he prefers it. Someday there'll be a crusade and we'll destroy it, but not until we can win. 

Does it seem important to you, that in Hell everyone is destroyed until they have no recollection of their life or any of their wants and are a better shell which can be combined with other shells to make a devil by an entity that does not value any of the virtues of men? Does it seem like the sort of claim that would, if it were true, matter to whether you wanted to make that entity stronger and send your children to his torments?"

"I suppose I might bother changing some of my opinions if it turns out that only hell can be described in anything like this way and that Heaven doesn't really turn people into cats."

She relaxes very notably. "Oh good. Then that's just - an ordinary disagreement over what happens, not over whether it's an acceptable thing to have happen. ...Heaven doesn't turn people into cats. Nirvana sometimes does that. I understand it to be temporary, but it does seem like a very important consideration against Nirvana. I have not been to Nirvana.

But men of Menador, when not ruled by Asmodeus, go to Axis or to Heaven, because men of Menador keep their word."

More often than southerners, anyway. "I see."

"If you went to Heaven and walked around and talked to people, do you think that would persuade you on this point, or would you be suspicious that Heaven was for some reason pretending to be a pleasant place where everyone lives happily with their families while not being that?"

"I am not entirely sure where I am now, I have no idea how I would tell if I was in heaven."

"So, if you went somewhere, and it was full of angels and archons and Good outsiders, and everybody insisted it was Heaven, you'd consider yourself to have no more information about Heaven than you'd started with? ...I cannot imagine this is how you reason about things that might kill you, if it were, one of them would've killed you."

He didn't say he'd have no information. He doesn't know how to reason about how possible it is for people to be pulled seven hundred years into the past and then shoved bodily into Heaven by Iomedae, is all, or whether if one impossible thing happens to you it should affect your impression of any further improbable things that happen after.

It seems pretty possible that he has already essentially gotten himself and eight other people killed today.

"Oh?"

"You see tracks, you think about - all of the things that leave tracks like that, right? And if some of them are something you can handle, and some aren't, you're really very curious which one it is. You probably look closer, try to guess how big it is from the damage to the brush. If a man comes running in the opposite direction shouting 'it's a hippogriff', well, maybe he's an idiot, or maybe he's lying, but you have more information than you had before, and if it's important maybe you stop him and demand more details. I do not understand right now what kinds of observations about the next world you would look very closely at and have more information than you had before."

Goddess, when an unknown monster threatens Kantaria, then yes, I have in the past had a pretty good idea what precautions to take and who to tell and what the likely suspects are and what kinds of damage I may want to have available so that I can kill it dead. When someone or several someones transport me seven hundred years into the past, convince my cleric to desert his post, arrest me for having my cleric desert, suggest that they will very likely kill all of us for things we did ten years ago in another country, clearly try very hard to adhere to some kind of code of negotiating how to arrest people that I can only just barely understand well enough to not immediately break my half of, claim to me that they asked the gods and they said to tell me that everyone and everything I care about that I have not already failed in all of the above ways is gone forever and cannot be recovered, such that the only responsible response is to stop feeling anything at all, and then immediately afterwards asks me to go about developing religious convictions that I do not have so that she can go about dismantling them and asking a lot of pointed questions about what I would like to have happen to me, without giving any helpful information about which answers get you killed or letting me consult the only people in the world I still know, then yes, you're right, we've determined that in this situation I am kind of shitty at answering theology problems and shouldn't be given any theology-problem-specific command posts that require it.

He's slightly better at noticing dangerous counterproductive whining than he is at working through theology problems. "I have more experience with one of those than the other."

It's the same skill. There are only two skills in the world, figuring out what's actually happening and politics. But it would not be constructive to argue the point. "Thank you for speaking with me. I think that answers all of my questions that it is reasonable to pose to you. Do you have questions for me?"

He's morbidly curious what her unreasonable questions sound like, and also doesn't actually want to hear them right now.

"What happens now?"

"I want to talk to a couple more of your people to get more details about how your world came about, and I want to talk to some of the gods about what amount of being vaguely sympathetic to or possibly willing to take orders from Asmodeus poses a threat to our mission here, and whether if captured by the Enemy you are catastrophic in any other respect. Unless I learn something major that is surprising from my current state of knowledge I'll then release you, but where might depend on how much of a risk you pose."

"I am not actually particularly interested in taking orders from Asmodeus. I suppose I can't speak for the others."

"That significantly improves matters! I don't expect I will get truthful answers if I just ask everybody one by one how interested they are in taking orders from Asmodeus but the less likely you are to work for Asmodeus the more options I expect we will end up having. You should probably also think about where you want to go next."