"How so?  Just because Dispater is generically adversarial and smarter than you?"

"Because my side of it is 'give up my artifact headband which is crucial for figuring out what is actually going on here, and my fifteen Wishes which definitely work, now, to maybe get the benefit of the Wishes in two weeks and the headband back in four'. I guess I also get some strength and dexterity and constitution. I don't care about strength and dexterity and constitution, I'm a wizard. This is tempting because you think it might help you not need to destroy Cheliax, and tempting insofar as I want to help you with that at my expense - tempting because we have shared goals."

Carissa isn't going to argue with Keltham about how he experiences augmentation but she doesn't feel cold, just more alive, better at seeing things and saying them.

"Yeah.  From your perspective, this deal is about harm reduction.  My having a greater chance of not destroying Cheliax.  Or, if I have to do that anyways, getting more time to work on the Wish wording for it, as may reduce the chance of a catastrophe there, being able to only glass Egorian and making sure that I don't accidentally crack the planet in the process.  I'd be Wishing about some dangerous stuff."

"The plan there, to be specific, would be to summon a horde of fiends, demons maybe, or daemons though I realize you'd rather I not, to attack Egorian, they Teleport their emergency response teams there and get in a bunch of their best people, bang, no more Egorian.  They'll have a True Rez scroll somewhere to bring back Rugatonn and she can bring back others but it'll take her time.  Hopefully that's enough to let somewhere non-evil come in and take over Cheliax.  I'd probably tip the Church of Iomedae to what I was planning, and give them diamonds.  My current plan is that everything in my harvest that I can't realistically use goes to the Church of Iomedae under seal, and they can use it for whatever, to clean up the mess, if anything permanent happens to me."

"And the plan that might enable you to not have to do that?"

"It's the plan that you get to try to talk me out of, though I expect that to go better if we're both INT 29.  Let's be very clear, I currently intend to do that part whether or not I have your fifteen Wishes.  What you buy is that I am less likely to glass Egorian or Cheliax first, because I am able to do it faster, and I do it using better-phrased Wishes."

"I still want to know the plan before I agree to give you my headband and fifteen Wishes, because I want the headband on when I learn the plan and because I might not want to help you do it faster. For example if you are going to have Rovagug eat everybody, delaying you a day is more important than anything else I can readily think of."

"Do you know something I don't about the probability of Rovagug successfully eating everybody if Asmodeus lets it out, as opposed to the other gods killing Asmodeus and then successfully forcing It back into a sealed vault and this time giving the key to Abadar or Iomedae like sane people?  I admit that Asmodeus releasing Rovagug was not something I'd previously expected as the result of my plan, it is a real problem, and I am currently thinking of what to do about that.  I do thank you for pointing it out, for I am still an alien to this world and to Asmodeanism even with lesser augmentation."

"- well, the prophecy is that Rovagug eats everything, so there's that, and also I think the other gods couldn't beat Rovagug and Asmodeus fighting together to destroy the world, they might all be able to beat Asmodeus if they teamed up and they might even without Asmodeus be able to beat Rovagug if they teamed up but they definitely wouldn't be expected to do both.

....I really kind of think you should, uh, hire Osirion's personality-damage-treatment girl, give me the diamonds, and let me handle this. I am not the best person for it but this is my world and I like getting smarter and I won't let something bad happen to your kids."

"I really think this is a conversation we should have at mutual INT 29, that we are wasting time and causing emotional wear to ourselves by having it at INT 24 instead, and that it's ludicrous to claim you'd rather delay one more day on the world maybe ending than to give me one more day to work on Wish phrasings and maybe not end the world at all."

"That said, as a token of why I think there's complicated issues here that we'd obviously be better off discussing at INT 29:"

"Some books claim that only Asmodeus can let out Rovagug.  Other books say that any of the ancient gods who cooperated to seal Rovagug have the power to let it out.  Asmodeus would just be the proud god who'd rather go down with the multiverse than negotiate if Civilization got the upper hand on him, which is why the prophecy is about Asmodeus."

"Now suppose it were the case that releasing Rovagug would or would probably end with Rovagug being beaten back again.  There's an obvious reason why that information would be considered an infohazard and they would not tell you about it, namely, the threat of Rovagug held by multiple gods is a key element of the current divine negotiating equilibrium, that prevents reality from going under what any of the ancient gods consider to be the utility of the world ending.  From any of their perspectives, if the true probability of Rovagug ending the world became knowledge among themselves, they might lose that guarantee.  Nethys could know but not be allowed to tell anyone.  It's not something that could possibly happen with ideal agents, but there's Chaotic gods in this mix."

"I assign this claim a higher probability than I otherwise would, that there's information in play considered infohazardous to gods, because Iomedae cautioned me in a vision that Cayden Cailean was trying to hide information from Her even though She thought it unlikely that Cayden Cailean had betrayed Good."

"- how long am I waiting, if I agree to wait to discuss this until I'm INT 29."

"A week of realtime, two weeks of demiplane time if you opt to stay in here.  If anything goes wrong with the diamond synthesis requiring a delay of more than an additional two days before your trip to the City of Brass, or if the trip to the City of Brass fails, we will obviously start talking immediately."

"Assuming, of course, that I don't just make it up to INT 29 and realize I'm an idiot.  I wouldn't want you to rely on that, but it sure is the sort of thing that happens to dath ilani in novels, and apparently in real life or whatever this is.  I realized I'd been all kinds of idiot after I got a Fox's Cunning and then again when I got the +6 version of the headband."

"We start talking...while you have INT 29 and I have INT ...22?"

"24.  I'd obviously lend you my +6 Intelligence headband, my +6 Wisdom headband, my +4/+0/+4 headband, and hand over all of my augmentation scrolls and items.  You'd need all that anyways even after you got Wished up to be at INT 29."

"Do you swear that, in your understanding of my interests, it's in my interests to loan you the headband and give you the Wishes?"

"Sell the Wishes.  But no.  That is - more complicated than I am willing to swear to, right now, though I am still dath ilani and I still do not lie.  I see - an argument - for how this is in your interests.  It seems probably stronger to me than the obvious argument the other way.  But you are an alien being who I never did understand, I think, and there are aspects of this that are genuinely complicated even by my standards.  I am trying to think inside the world where I am pretending Snack Service does not exist, which will be easier when I have more Wisdom, and I am very sure that is in your interests, that I get better at pretending Snack Service doesn't exist, but if you make a decision based on that, we're not pretending Snack Service doesn't exist, are we?  So you shouldn't take that into account at all.  I cannot give you an answer based on reality, or shouldn't, rather, because reality is not the basis on which we need to be making our decisions."

"So no.  I do not so swear.  I'm not, actually, a devil, but I am not a cleric of Abadar and this is not an Abadaran deal.  You decide for yourself if you're willing to take it."

Maybe half a million people, in Egorian. Maybe less than that if the population figures are lies. They'll go to Hell, some of them calling her name, which doesn't matter because she doesn't get Cheliax yet. 

Would they want her to help Keltham with an awful horrible plan that he'd have just told her by now if he didn't think she'd violently oppose it? If it saved them? It's not Asmodean to care about that. It's probably some flavor of Good. It's not helpful, either, she has no idea of the answer. 

Would she? Little Carissa Sevar, a wizard student, would she want greater-Carissa-Sevar to have less power so that she could live and not go to Hell? If she really understood what Hell was?

No, if she really understood what Hell was she'd want it fixed. She'd want that more than she wanted anything else. 

So the only real question, then, is whether this makes that likelier. Whether Keltham, as he stands before her, is someone who she trusts more than she trusts herself, with Hell growing into something she can bear.

It's simple when you think about it like that. 

"No."

"Your reasoning?"

"The only thing to consider is the ultimate outcome and you said you don't think this affects that. I trust that my having resources will make the ultimate outcome better more than I trust that you having resources will make the ultimate outcome better.

I would probably consider giving them to Keltham on the grounds that I owe Keltham, but you're insisting you're not Keltham and we're not playing by those rules, and under the rules you chose, no."

"No, I said that I'd try the same thing at some point either way.  If this affected only timing then all you'd care about is one more day before, say, on my old plan whose problem I now see, Asmodeus releases Rovagug and destroys the world with some probability.  In that case I could not have truthfully said that I thought I saw an argument for this being in your interests and that it seemed stronger than the converse argument.  I am - basically expecting that the story is telling me to proceed before my children are ensouled and Cheliax attacks Osirion, I am willing to go along with that plotline rather than fight it and risk the story applying additional incentives to me, and I expect that more high-Intelligence prep time on my side produces better outcomes from your own perspective, because, for example, I can spot more issues like the Rovagug one.  That's the obvious argument."

"Uh huh, and I have more confidence that my being smarter and having more time to think produces better outcomes on that front than that you being smarter does, so I'd rather I be smarter for that extra time than you."

"I suspect you're looking for a symmetry between us that doesn't actually exist."

"That said, I'm thinking that Stupider Me has made some mistakes in his handling of this situation, which I am now thinking about how to correct."

"Osirion tells me you have two Chelish corpses in your Bag of Holding, and paid for a third Chelish person to be raised and left him in Osirion's care.  This conversation has reached something of a temporary stalling point, I suspect, so I now ask what is the deal with that and if there's anything time-sensitive about it."

"Had to kill my escort to get to you. Or - maybe I didn't have to, but I was worried you'd do something stupid and I'd already tried the move where I do something clever to protect everything you care about so you don't do anything stupid, and at some point the best move, when you're stuck, is just to get out. So I killed my escort. Olegario is mine, he's pledged his loyalty to me, but I can't actually protect him in Hell yet and I don't actually know how he'd take it if I told him I'm going to kill Asmodeus and take His job. So I had to kill him too, but I had him raised immediately. 

The other two are Hadrian, who is a perfectly unobjectionable Chelish seventh circle wizard, and Abarco, who I personally dislike though he's not objectively worse than anyone else. Cheliax will probably Raise them both, they need wizards right now, but I can't really think of a reason to save them the diamond."

"Any reason we shouldn't drop them off in Egorian with a note from me saying that I didn't wantonly destroy their utility and I hope they'll take good care of mine?"

"...not a strong one, if you want to do that?" Keltham would've been mad at Abarco for raping her Keltham, in fact, wasn't mad about that, when he heard about it, probably because he had a whole lot more to be mad about. 

"They'll probably read through that I did it to confuse them, but probably isn't certainly, and if they're confused enough to start with, they might get more confused.  There's several things here that go better if they consider me relatively more open to negotiation, also.  Optimizing around Cheliax's response is much more important than causing them to use up two True Resurrection diamonds."

"Come to think, I should have them dropped off with a couple of Raise Dead diamonds."