"Most people in the Abyss don't want to die and if they do it's not hard. The problem had by most people in Abaddon is that they do die. And Hell is - what, ten percent? And I don't think most people in Hell want to die. Devils certainly don't. People like me don't. As far as I know practically no one in Good or Neutral afterlives wants to die."

"Cheliax may not have been totally honest with you about a number of things, Carissa.  My understanding is that most of the sentient beings in Hell want to die, or would probably want to die if they could still think coherently about that.  Devils get shaped not to want to die but they don't, particularly, as I understand it, want to live."

"Most of the petitioners who go to the Abyss do end up permadying, as I understand it, over time.  Which would include a very large fraction of Boneyard babies - actually I should have mentioned that earlier, I'm just, not thinking at my clearest, right now.  I'm not used to thinking of the Abyss as a problem exactly because most petitioners who go there do end up permadying and I currently model that they get less twisted and damaged first.  Golarion people also habitually talk about Hell as the problem."

"....most people talk about the Abyss as the problem, actually, at the Worldwound, where I've spent most of my adult life. I know it's a problem, it's just not really a problem you can solve short of conquering it, or I guess letting demons immigrate and they make terrible immigrants. 

Even if I take at face value your 'understanding' that most beings in Hell want to die, that'd be 10%. If I were going to pick a ratio of people wanting to live to people wanting to die before you destroy the world, the strongest ratio you could possibly convince me of would be 1:1. Maybe it's worth dragging one person away from ten thousand years so far and infinite years to come of joy and fulfillment and hope and happiness in Axis or Heaven or Nirvana and feeding them to daemons to end one person in Hell who wants to die. It is not worth doing that to nine. 

My own intuition is kind of that it's worth doing it to none? It's tragic but acceptable to kill the person in Hell who wants to die, I guess, if you can't change the circumstances that made them want to die. Which we can if we overthrow Asmodeus. But the fact this person wants to die doesn't make it right to kill some other person with a wonderful eternity around them and ahead of them."

"Yes, I expected you'd say that.  It's not, actually, a very widespread intution, as best as I've been able to determine from some hired quick surveys.  That I landed on somebody at the Worldwound with that worldview is not, I think, very much more probable than Pilar Pineda being in that particular class of wizard students in Ostenso."

"That you might, in any sense, be on board with this, was based on the prospect of fewer people exiting this reality from Abaddon and the Abyss, if all goes well.  Not on anybody being rescued from their current or prospective eternal torment in Hell."

"Though, of course, you cannot in any sense try to use me as a tool to that end, and have any significant impact about it, because then Pharasma ignores your 'threat-by-proxy' and looks past me and says 'Sure, let's die in a fire together, Carissa Sevar.'"

"I do want people rescued from eternal torment in Hell! It is what I have been focused on since almost the moment I met you, my hope was that if people were better Asmodeans then less pain would be necessary, and once I realized that Hell isn't fucking using the necessary amount of pain I arranged to become a Power in Hell that could fix that! I am very serious about solving eternal torment in Hell, I just think it's a solvable problem without threatening to destroy everywhere else! For one thing you could just threaten to destroy Hell! - I also disprefer that very strongly, to be clear, but it's about 90% less bad!"

"I actually kind of have a problem with Pharasma's treatment of mortals, not just Asmodeus's, and I think current mortals are mistaken if they're okay with the division of gains that Pharasma imposes.  You know, the one where Pharasma doesn't actually give two shits about mortals or try to divide gains with them at all, because She thinks they're tiny helpless things that lack the power to endanger Her however She treats them.  This entire multiverse can never be a place where mortals get a fair share while Pharasma is permitted to go around acting like this."

"This, incidentally, is the point in my explanation where Tarnish pledged total unconditional obedience to me so long as, when I negotiated with Pharasma, I told Her that Tarnish specifically said 'fuck You'.  This, I understand, is not your own outlook, but it's one I find incredibly understandable myself.  Like.  Pharasma just can't be allowed to get away with this shit.  You know?"

"If Pharasma hadn't created this universe, I wouldn't exist, and so I regard myself as in Her debt, as do, probably, many of the 90% of people who are not in Hell even if I take all your claims at face value about the 10% in Hell. I'm not even sure She's splitting the gains from trade particularly unfairly! She's not especially getting anything from my existing! I'm getting a ton from it!"

"Yeah, we've got multiple differences here.  Not just about the relative importance of the people in Hell, but also, like - if 90% of the people in the room get a nice large share of the gains and are happy, and 10% of the people say they're not happy, this is, like - not an okay situation because 90% of the people are okay with it.  There's the question of whether Pharasma built the equivalent of a, slum, inside Greater Reality, or if this place is relatively nice, a thought I find absolutely horrifying which of course doesn't make it false.  There's a lot of further complications about what we would, in dath ilan, call 'average utilitarianism' versus 'total utilitarianism' where basically everybody in dath ilan is an average utilitarian for Reasons and you are trying to be a 'total utilitarian' who thinks it's helping to add more realityfluid to the slum, even if that drags down the average quality of life across Greater Reality and everybody who can possibly exist already exists somewhere."

"We are not going to solve any of that before it would be a good idea to use those Wishes."

"I am not going to persuade you to be upset with Pharasma, and you are not going to persuade me to be grateful to Her, definitely not in the next hour but probably period, is my guess."

"That seems likely. Okay. 

- I do find your plan upsetting, but I had already been moving my expectations downwards and downwards off how much you were avoiding telling me it, and it's about in the middle of how upsetting I was, by this point, expecting it to be."

"We're now past the first of three things I expect to upset you."

"Second is the part where I don't see any equally reliable way of getting to the Starstone, and surviving what I expect to be Achaekek's subsequent attack, without denotating two major explosions over Absalom that I expect to kill everybody there.  Possibly I can negotiate with Pharasma to bring them all back, possibly not, but if all goes well, I expect that nobody there goes to - the bad parts of Hell, Abaddon, the Abyss, because I'll be able to clean that up afterwards."

"- the prophecy."

"Prophecy?"

"WAIT is this a Snack Service thing, or a Cayden Cailean tavern rumor, because if so I need to not know about any of that.  I'd have mentioned that earlier but I was - dropping things mentally."

"That is not how I encountered it but that seems like a likelier-than-not explanation of its origin. I am observing that this is a fairly crippling handicap in planning and I hope someone in your organization is allowed to think about Cayden Cailean."

"You are.  Once you understand the basic structure whereby anything that looks to me like it's making my path easier, enabling me to do something I could not do otherwise, risks Pharasma looking past me and seeing Cayden Cailean and saying, 'Let's die together in a fire, Cayden.'"

"Great. Fantastic. In that case never mind about the prophecy, I've encountered no direct evidence He had anything to do with it but I'd still bet on it. You don't currently have a better plan than killing everyone in Absalom; we might think of one once we're smarter, or we might not. 

Do you want me to do it?"

"Shouldn't reasonably make any difference.  Probably does in real life.  Sure."

"I'm - not seeing any realistic way to do this without becoming the god in question, myself, because nobody else is going to be able to improvise multiverse-destruction traps fast enough.  I see this as largely equivalent to suicide.  Even more suicide than I've done already.  Sparing me that - is something else I'd ask you to look into."

"I suppose it can't be me because of the thing where I won't improvise any multiverse-destruction traps at all because that might destroy the multiverse."

"I mean, it could be be you if we've got some way for you to execute a self-modification that causes you to do the same things I'd have done, but there's three major problems."

"One is that from Pharasma's perspective I could be modifying you to do things I only mistakenly think I'd have done, making you my own threat-by-proxy."

"The second problem is if even at INT 29 I can't, in one month of accelerated time, actually cause you to know everything I do about physics.  Or can't do that without taking enough time that we can't successfully work out good-enough Wish phrasings for the large explosions this plan requires."

"The third problem is that I don't know how to modify you in a way that's guaranteed to persist through you becoming a god, especially if you ascend as the Goddess of Nobody Permadying."

" - they can if they want to - Asmodia wanted to, and I offered it to her - I just - don't think they'd want to, if Hell was run more competently. But of people who want to have forever really, truly getting forever -

- I don't know, it sounds Neutral or Good and I probably need to be Lawful Evil to take Asmodeus's job. Maybe I could give it to Dispater who is sufficiently obliged to me but that just seems like it has a lot of ways it could go wrong."

"I did get this far in my reasoning myself, as an obvious possibility, and people who know actual rather than Chelish theology were pretty sure a Lawful Evil goddess's domains could include 'nobody permadying'.  It's kind of a loose whole system, really."

He was thinking of her, some very stupid part of her thinks. 

"...I'll keep that in mind. 

Are you at all worried that Pharasma's going to look beyond you at whatever dropped you on Golarion and made sure you met me and Pilar and whoever else is an important element of this plan ...and say let's die in a fire together?"

"I... don't meant to sound flippant, about our enormous values difference, but... if that's the punchline of the story, when Pharasma tries to look past me at my Senders, I'll be pretty unamused with Whatever sent me here.  But I won't regret having put in a hard day's work to destroy Pharasma's Creation."

"Murdering billions and billions of happy people with wonderful lives when we could've fixed Hell anyway."

"How?  Maybe this is the part of the story where the whole plot shifts, it's not likely but you shouldn't assume it's impossible."

" - what I originally thought you were working on, killing Asmodeus and taking His job."