"I think - that if you find yourself wanting to let your selfish priorities rule at substantial expense to plan success, that would be completely fine and understandable, and in that case we should give the million diamonds to the church of Iomedae and go hide somewhere until it's all over. If you are going to be selfish, be selfish enough to not do any of this to yourself; don't be just unselfish enough to decide you owe it to the universe to try and not unselfish enough to give it the kind of try that can actually succeed."

"Sadly these kinds of internal emotional arrangements often lack the kind of clear-cut structure that would make that a crushingly valid argument, and not every optimal strategy is at an extreme of the action space though they usually are.  Congratulations anyways on making the sort of argument to a dath ilani that even Ione Sala would not have known how to make."

"To check, because it's something that I'm nervous about, what did you understand about why not to destroy Cheliax immediately?"

"Lots of people have probably had the thought you might want to destroy the world, but they know you're a first circle wizard with a little bit of alchemy and so they're not very scared of you. Once you do something big, they'll recalculate, and that probably reduces how much time we have. You already threatened to destroy Cheliax, and Abrogail might've believed you, but other powers in Golarion didn't, and the gods don't know you're capable of it. We don't want them to know until it's too late. They might do what Otolmens did about Nidal and just steal all the diamonds, or change physical law, or squish you, or something.

...also we're almost definitely underground in the Ostenso nonintervention zone and I might hit us by accident."

"Heh.  Yes, that was the overriding reason not to do it in two hours.  Lrilatha sent me a message swearing that Otolmens wanted me back in the nonintervention zone, and demanded that I go there in Otolmens's name, guaranteeing my safe-conduct in Ostenso if I did and that Cheliax would not act on Lrilatha-derived knowledge about where I was.  I negotiated some on what I could get in exchange from Otolmens and Asmodeus.  Everybody here shares my diplomatic immunity if they want to visit Ostenso, and Otolmens has up some kind of further noninterference field around this mini-vault."

"I still keep up Mind Blank at all times and so should you per agreement."

"Did the Iomedaen or Fe-Anar manage to explain to you why it mattered that I still hadn't killed anyone?"

"She thought that it'd affect you quite a lot, and you didn't have any way of knowing how much, and so I shouldn't think that we'd get more functional Keltham-time out of killing people, especially not out of something like killing everyone in Cheliax and sending them all to Hell."

"That's... not exactly it.  You know, on second thought, I should not have hoped Carmin could explain that, I forgot how much nobody from Golarion can explain anything to anybody even when they do know."

"It's that - when Cheliax is destroyed, that's - throwing away all hope that Golarion is, glad to have known me, in an unmixed way.  Even with Cheliax taught to refine more spellsilver, there's still a chance that it'll end up okay, if the gameboard can be changed to make it winnable for Good.  I could think of something when I'm much much smarter and not need to release Rovagug or destroy Absalom at all."

"It's - the saying out of dath ilan goes - don't be swift to throw away your deontology.  Don't rush to break the Light, shatter the alignment of - all the different ways that something can be Good, all lined up on the same side.  They can't always be aligned, but while they can be, you keep them together."

"You don't always wait until literally the last minute to kill.  You don't wait literally as long as possible if that comes at a huge cost in failure.  You don't take any other plan no matter how terrible.  But wiping out Cheliax early, so that, you think, my mind will be more focused on long-term planning - that is not reason enough.  You can't be that eager.  You don't, go looking for, plans that make you do something like that, and then go, oh, well, that's what the expected utility numbers say, better go do that then."

"Your self who erased her memories might have understood that, when she sent you to buy back the souls of the Project Lawful researchers, especially if she knew that Peranza or Asmodia needed rescuing.  Or she understood how her Keltham would have thought about it, at least."

"You keep the last threads of the Light alive for as long as you can."

"That would be true even if we weren't in a story."

"I....don't have a hard time imagining believing that. I have a hard time imagining believing that and also thinking that unusually unpretty bits of Greater Reality should be scrubbed out of the face of the universe. 

I can't imagine any planet that, knowing everything, would hope to have you land on it. I understand preserving - the state where that's not true - in the same way as wanting the people who worked for you, Peranza and Asmodia, to be better off for it. But once you've thrown that out anyway..."

"I won't throw it away until the very end."

"I am not actually sure that makes any sense as a decision procedure but I appreciate you explaining it. I have in fact already killed people and will do so again if it seems like the best thing for me to do."

"The negative utilitarian is usually the honorable one.  Never wanted to hurt anyone at all.  That's what makes them such tragic villains."

"Not really how I thought of myself, before I came to Golarion, but there you go."

"...I continue to think that you did not understand at all the point about why you go 'let's die in a fire together' to conditional Zon-Kuthon who will build Xovaikain unless you pay him 5 gold pieces.  It's not about that part of reality being unpretty, it's about that counterfactual branch being one that you didn't want to end up in so you don't give agents retroactive incentives to create it.  There's an entire philosophy of decision theory which says that the very act of making a decision is annihilating all the branches of logical possibility where you made different decisions, and that the principle of rational choice is to choose so as to unmake all realities except the one where you get the best outcome -"

"You know, maybe let's just pick that up again at INT 29."

"Sounds good. Right now I feel - threatened by decision theories put forwards by people who don't share many of my values, I feel suspicious that tucked into the justification somewhere is an assumption that I find horrifying. Probably when I feel competent to derive most of it myself I won't feel that way about it anymore."

"If it's not the same decision theory used by all the gods, they screwed up, or we screwed up, or dath ilan didn't teach me real decision theory because it was too dangerous."

"Yeah. Any of those seem kind of plausible."

"I wouldn't say it's that plausible that dath ilan screwed up.  I - still don't think you properly grasp a difference of scale between Civilization and me... nevermind."

"Do you have anything promising for plans to allow us more time to work?  Especially if there's resources we need to gather now, or decisions we need to make soon rather than at INT 29?"

"So, one, I think that you should be willing to wait until the point where Cheliax tells you that there's a child ensouled, you don't have to preempt that. You intend to either destroy the world or fix it; if you destroy it, there's no reason to think that the child will wake up somewhere else, since there's no - thing that you care about, there, just because there's a soul, there's no mind with continuity of memory. That buys a week or two. 

And two, well, I may in fact have a bias towards plans that involve assassinating Abrogail, for personal reasons. But I think that Cheliax without a Queen - or, uh, with me as Queen, if we see a way to swing that - would also not invade Osirion immediately."

I must say, that went rather well, all things considered!  Apparently We put Keltham over some critical threshold of being slightly less traumatized, where he doesn't just accept the Wishes from Carissa as reparation because that's the utilitarian thing to do; and Carissa figures out his real plan before handing over the Wishes, but does so anyways; which utterly changes the dynamic between him and Carissa; which causes the resulting conversation to be absolutely nothing like any possibility that Nethys showed Us!

And Carissa even seems to be talking Keltham into waiting past his calculated ensoulment time, which completely throws off all of Our schedules for everything according to what We previously thought was the plot!

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA," screamed the god.

Cayden Cailean, I genuinely modeled You as having more tolerance for spontaneity than this.  You literally became a god on a drunken dare.

And as I've tried to explain many times to My followers, often in Elysium, when I managed to pull Myself together as a god afterwards, My very first thought with My vastly increased intellect was that going for the Starstone while drunk had been an ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE IDEA, even IF it had happened to work that one time.  The concept of doing stupid things while drunk does not prohibit the concept of regretting them afterwards.

A lot MORE people are going to die if We don't know how to time evacuations, but We can't exactly ask Keltham to set a hard date and deadline, while We are carefully not encouraging him in any way whatsoever to do any of this.  They're still on a time limit and still going to make mistakes but now neither they nor We know exactly what their time limit IS!

And even that desideratum completely pales next to what happens if We've fucked up the main story logic on any number of possible levels, or if this is happening because Nethys lied to Us about the real goal of His walkthrough.

Indeed.  So now it's time to shift to improvising everything that remains to be done!  Flexible schedules for all the new plans!

Cheer up, Cayden Cailean!  If nothing else, this gives Pilar Pineda more time in which to eat You.

It's not like that between Us.  Seriously, it's not.

And yet it's still a beautiful young thing who ends up consuming that much of You.  Somehow.

Carissa spends the next several subjective days building a wall of sorts so she can keep all the considerations in her head at the same time. Here's how we might try to take Avernus; here's how we might try to use my compact and other forces in Hell to side with us in taking down Asmodeus; here's how we might finagle the release of Rovagug so there's a chance of survivors; here's how things might turn out if we go home and leave this to Iomedae.

To her enormous irritation, there's a strong argument for the threaten-Pharasma plan. It's not one anyone thought of, possibly because it doesn't matter to anyone but her. In any plan for a war with Hell or in Hell, billions of the current inhabitants of Hell will die. Keltham thinks this is good, since they want to die. 

Carissa...grudgingly acknowledges that they get to consider that an improvement over their current situation if that's how they feel about it, but it's still an almost-maximally-bad outcome for them. The man she interrogated about rumors in Egorian hoped for Abaddon, and he wasn't wrong to hope for Abaddon perhaps, but that doesn't mean she'd have been doing right by him by giving him Abaddon. She'd have been doing right by him by giving him other options he in fact preferred to Abaddon.

If they get Pharasma to give them Hell, they can make things better for the entities in it, instead of giving up on them. If they do anything else, probably several layers of Hell get destroyed. 

Devils don't particularly want to live. She can see why, now; it has to do with Aspexia's favorite concept, corrigibility. Something that really really wants to be alive is a notably worse slave than something without any such strong wants. 

Obviously, a great horror was done, when they took the shattered formless soul of someone like Carissa and shaved away the part where she wants to live. But she doesn't think all the horror was done there. Some of it has not yet been done, and will be done when they in fact kill that person using the fact they no longer want to live very much as justification. 

If they do the Pharasma plan, she puts on her wall, they should arrange to be able to fix the devils and the paving stones. It is worth some risk - not, in Carissa's calculation, very much risk - but some risk of losing everything, for the chance of saving those souls too.

She doesn't talk to Keltham about Cayden Cailean and Nethys, but her guesses about what they want make it onto the wall too. They encouraged her cult on purpose. Why? How does ascension even work, does it matter if she has a cult? Should she be encouraging her cult? Would Pharasma care who all the Lawful Evil humans think should be the Lawful Evil god? Can Pharasma even see that?  Why would Chaotic Good want a Chaotic Good god eaten by a Lawful Evil one? What are they getting in exchange for that, or is it more that - only in that manner can any compromise at all exist between Hells Keltham will permit to exist and Hells that Asmodeus will?

What is Asmodeus, at His core? What are the most essential features? He's not, actually, the god of torture; are there Hells without torture He'd abide?

What is the minimum guarantee from Pharasma they'd need to be confident they'll get to keep building Civilization? Can Abadar be trusted to look out for that? If He's handed a specification? How could Abadar not know something important to His domain He's been trying to understand for a long time, what kind of limitation is that anyway? Is it fundamental? If it's unknowable to Him presumably He wouldn't be trying to learn it, right?

How important is Golarion in the multiverse? How much do they lose if it's lost? Are there alternatives to destroying it? Are there alternative distractions that'd let an ascending god slip through? ...Zon-Kuthon's in a vault, right? Can Iomedae be persuaded to let Him out? Is that even worse than Rovagug?

What would Hell be like if it wasn't stupid? Forget what both alien entities hostile to human values - Keltham and Asmodeus - want here, what would Hell be like if it was a place for Lawful Evil as it abides in human hearts? What would the place Maillol should go be, if it wasn't Hell? If he'd turn down Nirvana, not wanting to be smoothed away into something Good?

It is actually only the second most complicated Wall she's dealt with recently but for the first one she had Asmodia and Korva. They're thinking that resurrecting Asmodia, even if Hell let it go through, would be a giveaway about who Carissa works for now. Carissa is less sure that going to the Gardens is impossible, especially since they still should talk to Erecura about anything related to Pharasma-negotiations. Most importantly, Erecura stole divinity from Pharasma and Pharasma doesn't seem notably weakened by it. Is She a different kind of thing than everyone else? If so, what about Rovagug made Him a danger to Her? Was it something about prophecy not working around Rovagug? Can they get them some of that?

He spends most of the time alone, wearing the +6 Splendour headband and using no other enhancements, even as spells.  If the nice comforting deadline has been removed on how long he needs to hold himself together with solder and duct tape, then he needs to recover and put himself together now that he's in time dilation...

Is his will failing, here?  Possibly.  Being able to keep up a storm of work for three months on Project Lawful when everything is going great and you are having fun and in a lot of supportive relationships and your problems are fundamentally way way easier, is not the same as being able to work continuously under his current conditions.  Even with a +6 Belt of Mighty Constitution.

He will, if he gets a look at Carissa's wall or checks in with her on what she's thinking about, remind her that she cannot plan to threaten Pharasma by proxy.  If she expects him to threaten Pharasma successfully, and prefers that outcome, she cannot help him with that in any way.  Carissa can try to reduce associated harm to herself and Pharasma, maybe, if her method doesn't hinder his plans, but she can't plan to threaten Pharasma.  That is the whole reason why Good couldn't do this earlier.

The fact that she came up with her plan to delay Cheliax's invasion and give him more time to work, while still in utter horror at his plans generally, is helpful.  That shows Carissa wasn't threatening Pharasma by proxy, in trying to give him more time to work.

But if she's started thinking there's a case for being less than utterly horrified with all this, that is going to require him to be much more careful in considering Carissa's further suggestions to make sure that they benefit Pharasma as well as himself.

"Yes, yes. I promise I still want you to stop all this and go home. But when I'm working on alternatives I need a calculation of exactly how bad your plan is so I only present you with alternatives I genuinely think work out better by my values in expectation."