"Cool.  My story has given me a deadline of basically a couple of weeks modulo time dilation, by the end of which I need to either finish up the main plot, turn Egorian into ash, or watch Cheliax attack Osirion, and I am guessing it's supposed to be finish-the-main-plot.  Carissa has Wishes I need to be more intelligent now and the headband I need to be more intelligent now and what she wants to do instead is become INT 29 herself right away which, as much as it is extremely Carissa, is not, I think, going to help, because in fact there are not ways to save the world and especially not quickly that don't involve being willing to destroy the multiverse if necessary, and Carissa has an extreme non-nuanced position on not destroying the multiverse where she can't point to a particular quantitative balance of people in bad afterlives versus people not in bad afterlives and instead is just nope nope nope.  Why is the protagonist allowed to be like this?  It's supposed to be the villain who has the non-nuanced position where they start out thinking there's no point in even talking to you about it!"

"I digress.  What, exactly, am I supposed to do instead of hurting her?"

"Well, I'm not convinced about all this 'this is a story' stuff, and I kind of figure that if this is a story then it will in fact end and everyone'll stop existing regardless so we should only worry about not being in a story, but in a story, you are definitely supposed to talk to her and figure out the stupid miscommunication that is 60% of the problem.

In not a story - well, you can still talk to her. That sometimes works in real life. And if it doesn't, you can either decide you're not going to force her to give you the Wishes and headband, or that you are going to force her to give you the Wishes and headband whatever that requires doing to her, but you can only decide that if there's something you are capable of doing that makes her give you the Wishes and headband, yeah? And you gotta have it in mind before you start down that road."

"Dominate Person would be the obvious thing to try for the headband."

"I could never go back to being a cleric of Abadar afterwards, but it'd be the obvious thing to try, if I wanted to just take her stuff."

"There is, I think, basically no amount of pain you can apply to Carissa that will make her hand Wishes to you.  She would, if she isn't ilani enough to be beyond threats now, yield them if you threatened to otherwise Plane Shift her to Abaddon, and I will Plane Shift myself to Abaddon before I threaten her with that."

"Not that I don't relate to the impulse to Plane Shift to Abaddon now and then but I do not really recommend it, here. So it sounds like you don't, actually, have a good way to get her stuff by force, so you gotta try the 'talk to her' thing. ...you're talking like when you wear your personality headband, but you're not wearing it. Should you put it on?"

"Oh, that's funny.  So the key to still having a personality at INT 24 is having my ex-girlfriend ANNOY ME ENOUGH that my EMOTIONS COME BACK."

"It would be more of a solution to anything if I WANTED TO HAVE EMOTIONS while needing to, on every single plan I've come up with so far, destroy at least one city, which, you know, you are really supposed to leave to the Keepers or at least the Law-Abiding Sociopaths, and not try to do while being a normal person with a normal personality."

"Wellllll, you could destroy the cities and then have the ex-girlfriend annoy you back into having a personality, instead of doing it in the other order?"

"Iiiiiii suspect she has some actual story purpose here which is not that, what with her being the protagonist and all."

"Carissa already, I'm pretty sure inadvertently, talked me into giving up on all my tries at finding complicated alternatives and just releasing Rovagug myself, because otherwise Asmodeus may release It anyways.  I suppose that makes you happy."

"Well, I mean, depends whether He eats the world or not? But I gotta say, it's definitely a move in the right direction."

"Out of context, given that we're on track to release Rovagug, I'm pretty sure It won't succeed at destroying Pharasma's Creation, maybe Golarion or at worst Golarion's Material plane but definitely not the whole multiverse.  Which I would ordinarily be trying very hard not to think about.  But, since it's you and your preference ordering is flipped at that end of things, I want to make sure you are still fundamentally okay with our agreement and your oath to me and you getting isekaied to wherever, if the result of all that work is just the multiverse being fixed up a bit and not Rovagug eating everything."

"Does being fixed up a bit mean people have an easier time getting out if they wanna, and no more Hell."

"If there's people spending years begging to permadie and not being able to, or people stuck in the Material being unhappy because they can't just kill themselves and get an acceptable deal on an afterlife afterwards, then, yes, this would represent a failure of my plans or a very deep error on my own part about what my utilityfunction is."

"I think we're - pretty aligned at what obviously constitutes an incredibly bad outcome, just, you don't exactly have a lot of training quantifying your desires, so I am checking that what you think is a somewhat-worse-than-nothingness outcome, and I think is a fairly okay outcome, is, acceptable to you.  If we get that, instead of this, and maybe Rovagug not being so much of a possibility after that, either."

"Well, good enough I'm not gonna call it quits."

"I'm really mad at him."

"I'm getting that sense."

"He said 'you own yourself'. Why did he say that, if he thinks I should give him everything of mine he happens to want and threatens to statue me the first time I don't go where I'm told?"

"Well, the obvious guess is that he wants you to own yourself, and also wants you to help him and not be his enemy, and was hoping he wouldn't have to pick one or the other."

"He doesn't have to pick one or the other!!! I came here to work with him! I could've just told Rugatonn, told Otolmens, apparently even Iomedae didn't know and I could've told Her - that part I didn't know. I figured She knew and was just okay with it because Good thinks it's fine to destroy people if they're devils and don't really count. Uh, that's a digression. I didn't do that. I figured - I owed it to Keltham, who I thought was a honorable person trying his best, to not have him annihilated, to not let - Asmodeus being willing to destroy the world - be an automatic win condition for Asmodeus - I figured that the world, the way it is, can't last forever anyway, if we can't fix Hell - I thought about it and it was the most terrifying decision of my life and I decided to try to help Keltham do something better! And I came here and said 'I have an apology gift for Keltham, I want to help him not have to destroy the world', and he goes 'I'm not Keltham, don't give me anything except in your own interests', and obviously it's in my own bloody interests to have Banished myself from his fucking demiplane and Gated to Hell, but this is my fault, and I'm trying to fix it, and I'm trying to -

- if there are gods, trying to thread this needle, trying to make sure that between the possibilities 'this gets crushed and everything stays the same' and 'everything gets annihilated', I want to be something they can use, I want to be a tool it's possible to employ to find that space, not just something that drags as sharply as possible in one direction or the other - I think, probably, more worlds get saved, if there's someone who is trying to figure out how we actually win here, and no one else is fucking stepping up."

"Have you told him that?"

"No because he wouldn't even admit to me what his plans were or give me any fucking time to rederive it himself!! He said he was going to give me time to think but then instead he threatened to statue me before I'd had it!!"

"So?"

" - what?"

"You have something it might be valuable for him to know, he doesn't know it. But you could tell him it, and then he'd know it. Why do I care - why do you care - how things got this way? What are you trying to get out of deciding it's his fault he doesn't know it yet?"

"It's - 

- I can't trust him to - to only say things he means in anything resembling the way I mean them, or to - give me any space to figure out things I can use to help him, or to appreciate anything I'm doing to try to be someone he can trust, or to not randomly decide to execute me, or to not randomly decide that dealing with me is too emotionally difficult and not worth reducing the probability of accidentally destroying the world - it means that he's internalized none of the stakes and I'm the only person I can trust to be acting like the stakes are real."

"It seems like all that makes it more important, for him to know what you're thinking."

"I don't want to talk to him anymore, if I say the wrong thing I'll wake up and he'll have glassed Egorian and is in the middle of unleashing Rovagug and annihilating billions and billions of people and he'll think I'm stupid and unreasonable for being horrified and I can't - come up with words, come up with thoughts, knowing any second might be the last chance anyone in the world has before he murders us all for being uglier than dath ilan -"