The portal is finally up!  Everybody wants to go see the temporary demiplane, even if they're not in a time-dilated rush!  Some unusual-looking people will soon become visible wandering around outside the Rope Trick.

Carissa Sevar is paying a very tiny bit of attention to things outside her negotiation with Keltham, monitoring for threats, because she was at the Worldwound for two tours and some habits don't die easily. However she has more or less concluded at this point that Keltham's staff are not the kind of people she can work with, except possibly impressing Ri-Dul enough he'll let her copy all his fifth-circle spells. Mostly she is focused on getting this contract agreed-to with Keltham so she can be briefed on the plan and get to work preventing it being a catastrophe.

They'll work it out, in time.

Great. Pleasure doing business with you.

Does she want, like, a ten-minute break, maybe, before he dumps the real story on her.

"I'm sure I haven't given you an overwhelmingly encouraging impression of my emotional resilience but if you don't statue me, stroke my hair, or announce you're Maledicting my family to Abaddon I actually don't have feelings I can't conceal perfectly."

"I have entirely failed to understand what that had to do with anything whatsoever, but it sounded like you wanted me to go ahead?"

"Yes. Go ahead."

"All right.  I don't expect you're going to like this no matter how I frame it, but I'm going to try framing it anyways."

"First.  On my model of reality, the souls who get consumed in Abaddon end up somewhere else, and we will eventually debate how nice or terrible that place probably is, and the souls in Hell and the Abyss and possibly the Maelstrom are more of a problem.  On your view, the problem is the souls from Awaiting-Consumption being raised like cattle and being consumed in Abaddon, and those mortals who sort Neutral Evil and are terrified enough of Hell and the Abyss that they choose Abaddon, which, on the best statistics I've been able to find for Golarion, is around five percent of the non-Boneyard-baby population.  I haven't, yet, been able to find out whether fifteen percent of Boneyard babies are choosing Abaddon, for example, which would bring the Golarion's real average up to ten percent of all souls born being destroyed there; I hadn't put a priority on knowing, before now, because it didn't matter much to me.  You are able to command my resources if you want to find out from Sarenrae's Church what the actual figure is."

"I don't know what the statistics are for the larger multiverse but it would not surprise me if, Pharasma being Pharasma, it's around one-ninth sorted to Abaddon and then, maybe, half of those not going to Hell or the Abyss."

"Your stance that you would only accept a very tiny risk of destroying the multiverse, in order to save souls in Hell, may perhaps be valid given your view of things.  That you should not, in general, accept a tiny risk of destroying the multiverse in order to fix it, does not strike me as equally valid.  You want to minimize that risk but you should in fact be willing to go to some extreme lengths to fix Abaddon."

" - agree. Fixing Abaddon seems like it should not in fact involve incurring much particular risk of the destruction of the multiverse. I expect that with unlimited Wishes and twenty years as Golarion counts them I could, in fact, just conquer it, and Hell wouldn't object, and Good wouldn't object, and even Pharasma wouldn't object because She hates Abaddon too."

"I'm not sure how you'd do that, exactly, but whatever it is, I expect it works only if you're the only one with unlimited Wish diamonds.  Which, once the Scientific Revolution gets going, is maybe not going to be true a single year from now, let alone twenty years."

"Also unlimited Wish diamonds is not at all the same thing as unlimited Wishes, especially right away, because you need casters for them.  The City of Brass will start to notice if Golarion begins buying thousands of Wishes per day from efreeti."

"What I expect, mostly, is that the gods notice and shut it down.  Unlimited diamonds is a disruption to a status quo that the gods don't ultimately object to.  It would never have been allowed to happen in the first place, if prophecy were not broken here."

"That sounds about right but They do let important changes to the world happen once in a while and I'd just have to get Abaddon in before They shut it down.

...I do see why you'd be deeply unsatisfied with trying to build Civilization in a world that works that way."

"Calistria.  Asmodeus.  Sarenrae.  Dahak.  Erastil.  Gozreh.  Abadar.  Desna.  Etcetera."

"All of those gods - I think, it is my over-50%-probability-estimate - either have the power to release Rovagug if Pharasma's Creation starts to have less value to them than nothingness, or have executed a logically binding compact with Pharasma, such that Pharasma's Creation, from their standpoint, is never allowed to fall below the utility of nothingness."

"To at least those gods, the world will always fundamentally look, in a certain sense, okay.  Not as good as it could possibly be, maybe, but okay.  Noticeably better than okay; they would not be receiving a fair share of the gains from sealing Rovagug, or keeping it sealed, if reality, to them, was barely better than nothingness.  I doubt that Sarenrae particularly likes that Hell exists, but while Nirvana exists and is full of redemption and healing, Sarenrae, who is goddess of those domains, thinks that on the whole, the multiverse contains a whole lot of the stuff that She likes."

"No guarantee like that exists for mortals, for slaves sold in Absalom, for miserable people who wish they could suicide to Axis but know they'd go to Hell, for people who suicide out of misery and end up in Hell or the Abyss, the millions of mortals raised like cattle in Awaiting-Consumption and consumed in Abaddon."

"They don't get a seat at the gods' negotiating table.  Why should they?  They have no power.  They are not dangerous.  Why should the gods concede anything to them?  They can do as they want with mortals and the mortals just have to take it."

"Lots of the gods are ascended mortals."

"None of the important ones.  None of the ones who get to say, sorry, the world doesn't get to be like that.  Abadar and Asmodeus are, I think, I get the impression, spread across all of the planets and all of the Material planes, Iomedae is just here and maybe a dozen or so other planets.  Asmodeus is allowed to export huge numbers of textbooks into Cheliax and buy souls by the hundreds.  The older gods are allowed to intervene substantially more per planet than all of the younger gods on that planet, or at least, that's how it seems to be in Golarion.  I would guess that's because the older gods set the intervention budgets and see little reason to give the younger gods more than scraps."

"There's also the incredibly suspicious fact that nobody else seems to have managed to do exactly what Irori did, despite an awful lot of Irorians trying, with a greater knowledge base developed over time about how to advance along that pathway and much better institutional support than Irori had."

"I mean, I say it's suspicious, but in fact the very obvious and essentially known explanation is Achaekek.  Which I flag as maybe hiding other traps, but still, there's an obvious explanation if you take the obviousness at face value."

"Nethys is powerful. Aroden was powerful. Iomedae does all right for Herself, I think, for as new as She is. Cayden Cailean apparently is powerful enough for whatever His current batshit plan is, and He's pouring more effort into that than I've ever witnessed or heard of Asmodeus spending on anything."

"Nethys is suspected, and not just by me, of being a special case."

"Aroden seems to have somehow ended up dead, you'll note."

"And neither Cayden Cailean nor any other ascended mortal have ever done anything like what seems to be happening now, as best as my full-time historical researcher can determine.  I suspect that Cayden Cailean, and possibly also Nethys, are putting Themselves into a position where, if I don't pull this off, they are caught and executed by the ancient gods for intervening beyond their allowed budget."

Seems like maybe they should put all that effort behind someone who doesn't want to unleash Rovagug, Carissa refrains from saying. 

"Every ancient god who really got to shape the multiverse, Gozreh, Erastil, Calistria, Asmodeus, all of them got there by having the ability and willingness to destroy Pharasma's Creation, or risk its destruction with some noticeable probability, unless that Creation looked noticeably better than nothingness to them."

"I expect you're not particularly fond of that fact, but on my model - my epistemic model, Carissa, not as a question of values - on my model of how Pharasma's Creation works, that is fundamentally a requirement to be seated at the grownup bargaining table and have opinions that matter about things like Abaddon."

"Especially if you want to have opinions about how Abaddon works across an unknown number of inhabited planets across however many planes, and not just opinions about how the Golarion-adjacent parts of Abaddon work.  Which is, I suspect, the most that a Wish-based assault would be able to buy you before that got shut down."

"It seems to me like it also ought to work to be willing to kill other gods unless those bits of Creation under their attention looked noticeably better than they'd be unsupervised."

"It's not enough to have the willingness and ability to kill gods, you also need the ability to not get killed by them.  'Anybody can kill anybody but they probably shouldn't', goes the saying, and what it means is, the existence of an asymmetrical offense with no defense, doesn't mean you get to have a lot of power yourself, because other people also have that power."

"There's also the point that I don't, in fact, have any particularly workable schemes for destroying Asmodeus particularly and not the entire ninth layer of Hell plus whatever I had to do to get through the first eight layers.  I mean, maybe it would be a better scheme to just assassinate all the Evil deities except three, one from each afterlife, who we'd bargained with, but I don't know how I could do that."

"I do suspect I could destroy the entire multiverse, given some work.  I never did give Project Lawful any knowledge I considered actually dangerous in the presence of magic, but there's a fair amount of it and I just need one of the top three obvious methods to work."

"Incidentally, one of the several ways in which I realized I'd been stupid once I put on a +6 Intelligence headband is that having a Scientific Revolution around Golarion is really not at all a stable situation and we are heading into some major divine intervention quite shortly once They actually realize how much of a problem it is if anybody figures out real physics.  I expect that the gods themselves don't know, except for Pharasma and maybe Otolmens."

"And you don't want to destroy the entire multiverse per se but you think that the fact that you could  - if you're right, if the gods couldn't just easily shut you down - means you get to make demands. But if everyone goes 'haha, no', then you will, actually, destroy the multiverse."

"Well, yes.  I'd rather fix the universe than destroy it, and would rather destroy it than let it stay unfixed.  There's a lot of people in Evil afterlives who feel very strongly that they'd prefer to stop existing, one of whom explicitly screamed that out loud in the Vision of Hell that I cast.  Given how strongly they feel about it, I think their vote wins.  I also feel, with increasing passion after spending some time around two sides that strike me as equally and oppositely crazy, that a sensible and nuanced position on this issue consists of having some fraction of people being eternally tortured above which you'd prefer a multiverse disexist rather than exist if those were your only two options, and not just being, like, 'destroying the multiverse is good' or 'destroying the multiverse is bad'."

"You, Carissa Sevar, can 'threaten' to destroy the multiverse," he uses the Baseline word, not the Taldane, where the technical meaning is unambiguous, "but of course the only reason you'd do that would be if you expected them to give you what you wanted in response to the 'threat'.  And of course the ancient gods would ignore your threat, even if you modified yourself in a way where you would do it and exhibited the fact to them.  If they were the sort of beings that gave into threats, they would, in that case, be better off being inert lumps rather than gods, because if they were inert lumps nobody would go around trying to destroy large amounts of their utility in counterfactual branches in order to force actions out them; and it is a Law-fragment of coherent agents that they do better for themselves than inert lumps."

"The overwhelming majority of people don't want to be destroyed. The ones who do probably think they'll stop existing and might well feel differently if they thought as you do they'd just show up somewhere else."

"I don't consider the set of all people outside Evil afterlives to be an 'overwhelming majority'.  And I think any time spent debating the population statistics of Greater Reality will be spent much more effectively if I, we, have INT 29 first, to the point where I'm just kicking that to my future self."

"I suppose the smart-aleck reply would be that I know of two worlds, dath ilan and Golarion.  By the same visual / combinatoric reasoning used to figure out the Law of Succession, dropping a new billiard anywhere 'nicer than dath ilan, between dath ilan and Golarion, worse than Golarion' is 2/3 probable to land somewhere nicer than Golarion.  That's not actually even faintly valid, it just, I don't know, illustrates that there could be an argument about it."