"Works for me."

"Great. See you later."

Griffie heads to the backyard area, transforms into a bird, and flies through the too-small space at maximum speed until exhausted. Ey lands, detransforms, catches eir breath, orders a cup of honeyed glowing tea that tastes like the sun ey won't see for a very long time, and heads to the infirmary to look for Jim.

"Hello again. Griffith, right?"

"You've got it. I got the impression you think I exist, which is a quality I turn out to value in conversational partners. Want to talk shop?"

"Actually, I'm uncertain about personal identity as a concept and don't have a model more detailed than 'a good plant-creature may have asked some questions about my trustworthiness' and that's not even distinguishing."

"Oh. Uh. That model feels more confident and correct than Saira's model, I think I accidentally got her to be annoyingly paranoid and she's not confident I'm not, uh, a weird dream, or an appendage of Bar, or whatnot."

"And you want to talk about how we're not in a state of perfect Cartesian doubt, or have you got something else in mind?"

"I was actually really curious about your rejection of goodness, because that in combination with the thing where you don't seem to be being maximally evil at all times seems weird and like an important hole in my understanding of ways people engage with ethics."

"Was there ever a time in your world where there wasn't evil?"

"There is no documented era in my world in which evil did not exist. However, intelligent mortal life and deities are speculated to have co-evolved, with more intelligent lifeforms emitting more quintessence that formed gods which were generally invested in the existence of useful mortals, and presumably before that evil did not exist. …arguably we would expect evil gods to be the later-evolving gods, the ancestors of lifeforms today probably spent more time on things like agriculture and sleep and than they spent on mistreating each other, so you'd expect things like 'a courtship proto-deity that's also okay with kidnapping people' than a straightforwardly evil one in the early era? That's pure speculation, though."

"Oh, cool, your world's very different and I want to hear all about your moral philosophy at some point. Possibly now if you're up for it."

"I can try to give a summary of thoughts I have about ethics and then you can ask me questions, how about? I don't have a neat writeup."

"I think it's bad when people are tortured or murdered, uh, not counting consensual application of pain and consensual death, both of which are either acceptable or a complicated mess. I think it's good when people do things they enjoy, such as presumably in your case reading books, or cause good things to happen, or prevent bad things from happening. I have more opinions about specific things being good or bad but I'm trying to gesture very at the space. I think that being the kind of person it's predictably safe to give information to and the kind of person who looks like a safe person to interact with are pretty useful for doing good things? I think that … hmm, that a lot of the time if someone who isn't literally made of pure evil is doing bad things, that they have some kind of reason and it can often be productive to talk things over, and even if their reason is something like 'see, I wanted to be really rich and I thought that murdering people would help and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you', sometimes they can still be talked into being less evil especially if they don't have opportunities to do the thing again."

"Does your world have the thing where there's an underlying factor of propensity to do good or evil, and if you do a good thing then you become more prone to do other good things, in a way that at the extreme ends is basically just mind control?"

"That's horrifying. No, no it does not. The way that normal people in my world end up turning into aligned outsiders is … your soul is falling apart, after you die it falls apart faster, and after you die usually some god ends up with your soul. If you're an evil god and you get a bunch of souls, you aggressively turn them evil in a way that's an extreme case of mind control. If you're a good god and you have a bunch of souls, you try to keep them together as much as possible, and you offer them replacement parts when they decay, and the replacement parts you have available to offer do eventually turn the people into embodiments of goodness, but … if you win you'll try to fix the problem where people's souls fall apart, and then if you want more embodiments of goodness than you have ideally you'll take less coerced volunteers or build them all from scratch or something."

"Well. Sounds like a very different sort of situation.

"We used to not have anyone who wasn't what you'd call a good outsider. And I helped put an end to that, because I couldn't stand it, and so now there are two alignments you can be mind controlled into. One of them sucks slightly less."

“So when you say you’re rejecting goodness, you mean whatever horrible mind control your world has, not necessarily some better version that doesn’t have mind control built in?”

"In some sense, I haven't particularly interacted with the sorts of relationships to morality people can have in other worlds. In another sense, while working on fixing my world, I could have chosen to make other people happier in the mean time, and instead I have chosen to hurt them for my own amusement. If I definitely couldn't ever do anything to improve morality back home, and still had to go back for some reason, I would not want to be an angel."

“Are you aware that sometimes people find being hurt amusing and it may be possible to filter for that?”

"It's more complicated than that but I do get anything at all out of masochists. Sometimes."

"I am curious why, out of the possibilities for amusement, you went with hurting nonconsenting people at least sometimes. I assume you're aware of the thing where if you do that then people get mad at you and try to stop you?"

"People trying to stop me is also fun."

"Huh. Do you want to spar at some point? My world has very good nonlethal-attack options and by default if I claw you that'll either induce fatigue or do nothing, and I can prepare stuff like lightning bolts that way too. Or if you're resilient and would find it entertaining I can cause actual injuries, you do do infirmary work and fight people so presumably you'd be able to manage your health on that?"

"That might be fun." It might be a ploy to get experience that'll be useful in a real fight later on, but that wouldn't make it any less fun.

"Alright, we can do that sometime, I'm not in a sparring mood right now but whenever you next feel like it you can have Bar send my information-device a message, or if you have something like that I can message you. Could you tell me what your world is like? What the local thing called 'good' is and what the additional alignment is?"

It may be getting increasingly clear from Griffie's tone that ey's rather skeptical that Jim's world's "goodness" could possibly be the quality of goodness which Griffie is used to.

"Good is - you probably recognize it. Selflessness. Protecting and caring for others. A thing that mortals tend to try to echo, if not very well, by singing hymns in church - I think they recognize that a victory for good looks like celebrating things, trying to be good at things, trying to make other people look good, although I'm not sure sometimes whether they're sure how metaphorical 'it's good when people live together in harmony' is. I have a better definition but Milliways tends not to be able to reliably translate concepts people have never encountered before so I don't bother giving my better definition to mortals, generally, but I can if you think you're unusually likely to be able to get it or unusually interested in studying the background reading."