"Oh? What're yours?"

"I've heard 'stickybrush' and 'moregrass' but there are probably others, we don't exactly have the best name standardization."

"Yeah. We've got a set of standard terms but I haven't been using them. Our mortals mostly use local names for things, even if twenty places use the same name for twenty different things."

"Even with standardized terms, huh. Axis would be so disappointed if not actually all that surprised."

"What's Axis's deal, anyway?"

"Axis values order, which they pursue via conflict-prevention. The behavior I consider, perhaps unfairly, to be characteristic of Axis is to notice that Charon is trying to kill everybody, and basically everybody else is trying to not die, and this creates a messy conflict which disrupts things, so instead of that, they should estimate how they expect a war to go, and everyone should agree to an amount of death reflective of that estimate and not have the war."

"And that philosophy doesn't end the world because you don't just have two possible valuesets that everyone will end up wholeheartedly endorsing eventually and that are the exact opposites of each other."

"My Axiomite-model is saying 'well, if that's the state of your world, then it's probably doomed with or without us and at least we should do a tidy controlled shutdown' … actually I think it's saying that ratios matter, but that's less of an expression of values. They … do promote this approach to two conflicting factions and get rejected by both, sometimes? They keep telling Heaven and Hell that they should just let Axis divide the universe between them and work with Axis to make an orderly world where some people live in a lovely utopia maintained by Heaven and some people are tortured by Asmodeus and his servants, and both Heaven and Hell reject this, they're not willing to accept that kind of compromise. And Heaven and Hell are the most Lawful of non-Axis major factions, if anyone was going to be sympathetic to the full fulfillment of Axis's approach it would have been them."

"It'd be hilarious but I don't expect anyone involved is optimizing for me thinking that."

"Wow. I heard there were people who had humor-based interplanar policy opinions and also thought Axis was more hilarious than other options but I didn't … actually expect to meet one. …no offense intended. Anyway, even though Heaven and Hell aren't willing to put up with the other's eternal existence they work together on some things, usually also with Axis, because they both agree on things like 'it'd be useful if people existed and time and space worked'."

"I guess time and space are useful for a lot of things. I don't even know that that deal would be as funny as I'm imagining, I don't really know what your Heaven and Hell are like. The translation in here keeps pretending the second one is where I live but I'd know if we'd ever had a negotiation like that."

"Heaven is the parts of the Upper Planes, that's the … major coalition of gods which I would call 'good' except that the way it translates to you is wrong, that favor Lawful approaches to things, they're one of the places that dead mortals' souls can end up and they're one of the ones people usually like as a possibility. Hell is Asmodeus's plane, I can call it that going forward if that helps. Asmodeus's plane is also a place dead mortals' souls can end up, usually one of the ones people don't like as a possibility, and it's basically … so, the main thing Asmodeus seems to want is to impose his orderly and tyrannical rule as far as he can reach and torture everyone who defies or fails him in a way which produces incentives he likes and such, that's probably enough information to have a rough model of what goes on in his plane."

"I wouldn't say it is but now I know you're not much of a connoisseur of dystopian hellscapes."

"I gave you enough information to distinguish it from Abaddon, which is less orderly and not very much about torture and more about death, or the Abyss, which is a chaotic heap of everyone hating each other and flailing to be on top and not managing to coordinate. I'm sure Asmodeus has plenty of publications if you're curious."

"Maybe I'll look those up. You seem like you might have more fun talking about Heaven, anyway."

"I don't think of Heaven by … appearance or whatever it is one would value if one were a connoisseur? I mean, it's pleasant … it actually at least if you aren't fighting it tends to make you feel like every change between environment that you're traveling through there is an improvement even when you return to stuff that was the same as where you were earlier, that's a thing that doesn't obviously naturally result from their goals? I guess you could say that Hell having a lot of fiery parts is that also, it's not really clear to me why Asmodeus likes fire more than acid or such. Heaven has good libraries, a systematic process for analyzing moral claims, the markets are full of expensive high-quality stuff, there isn't one god in charge of it and different gods' domains are different?"

Jim visibly makes a face at the first part of that.

"Does one of the gods really like taxi drivers?"

"It doesn't tempt you to spend time constantly in motion or anything, much less hire carriages? One of my coworkers also found it concerning. Probably there are parts without that, though possibly the parts might be 'the more freedom-oriented sections of the Upper Planes' and not classified as Heaven."

"Makes sense, I guess. What's it like to have freedom or something reasonably glossed as freedom as a moral stance?"

"The most freedom-ish parts of the Upper Planes are Elysium, and they're characterized by willingness to take provocative actions and covertly violate law in order to help others, possibly particularly slaves, though none of the Upper Planes is a fan of slavery. In what seems to be an unusual trait of my universe compared to others, a lot of law is related to the fundamental functioning of reality, and so any place full of people who are defying law is, if they're capable enough, also going to include exotic magic that 'shouldn't' work, more dramatic space-warping than other areas, et cetera. It's … I'd say that a major difference between Heaven and Elysium is willingness to break things in the way of their victory and hope that they can fix things afterwards if they were actually important, but … I think it's a difference of degree not kind. What I was told of their philosophy when I sought it out … not that long before coming here … was that the incompleteness of a victory was not a reason not to pursue it but rather a reason to continue to escalate afterwards until one has truly won, and to shut up and do the impossible."

Griffie sighs. "And, I suppose, it is advice I can take, but I still feel as though it does not properly generalize."

"It's appealing. I think it does generalize, or at least it should, or at least it would if I'd created the thing I wanted to create... why doesn't it where you're from?"

"It strikes me as a deeply heartless thing to say to people. Sometimes people just do not have the power to prevent outcomes they do not want, no matter how hard they try. And you might notice that a creative-but-allegedly-weak person can win against one 'stronger', but creativity is also a characteristic people vary on and it does not to my knowledge fundamentally privilege those acting justly! And of course there are numerous cases of escalation going wrong, and people correctly judging that they ought not escalate even if that meant allowing a thing they deeply dispreferred."

"And here I thought you'd have a less zero-sum view of things than me."

"Could you elaborate on that?"