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"Keltham. Did you or anyone else in your Golarion have an informed hypothesis as to Cayden Cailean's motives or plan?"
"Nefreti Clepati knew, being omniscient and all, but she wasn't telling. If I had to guess I'd say He was aiming for—a compromise both I and Asmodeus would accept over destroying the world. No idea what that looks like, though."
"My guess as well. Nefreti Clepati's reasons for doing things are not generally that legible, but I think it's a fair guess that she knew this was the kind of plan where if you as the" protagonist "agent of the gods' interventions knew what was going to happen, it wouldn't happen."
He explains the events of the past two years, minus a few classified details like what exactly the Basement is for.
"Yeah, that seems to support my hypothesis that this is some kind of bizarre offshoot of the original story I was in."
Derrin suddenly looks concerned. Less concerned than he did when hearing about the Nethys bullshit, but still concerned.
"How many people have you told this hypothesis of yours about being in a story?"
"The better for them," he replies. "It is in fact true, to the limit of Civilization's evidence, that we are probably all in some kind of story or storylike simulation. This is kept very secret, however, because reasoning from this fact while 'on screen' is the sort of thing that could cause the simulation to attempt an infinite recursion and then crash. And we are almost certainly 'on screen' now, so please, no trope-based analysis."
"Oh. Yeah, I probably would have thought of that with enough intelligence enhancement, and then done it on purpose because I was trying to destroy the world."
"—although, if this is a story, doesn't that imply that all the people suffering in Hell aren't really real?"
"There's no way for me or anyone to know that. All I know is that if we don't act like the problems in our world are real, we would ourselves have no reason to exist.
"—you are not, in fact, advanced enough in the Way to maintain that mental contradiction as I do. We are going to have to move you 'off screen' until this is over, which I might guess is what you wanted anyway?"
"It was selfish, but I prayed, at the last, for someone in Meta-Reality to let someone else take care of Golarion's problems, and have me wake up somewhere else. Maybe somewhere with a less complicated harem."
"The sexual desire you spoke of, to have power over others or cause pain in a safe and consensual way is not unknown to us. It does not make you a worse person. It is not contrary to the Light to act upon, under the appropriate circumstances. The issue, the reason that we would prefer 'sadists' to mostly not recognize themselves as such, is that there are very few 'masochists' in Civilization who enjoy having such things done to them.
"Few, but not none. Our policy is to awaken only those sadists who are successful enough that they might reasonably afford to bid on a masochist's free time, which is understandably rather expensive. If we win this, your small service to Civilization today may indeed be worth enough to us that you could be among that class."
Keltham now has so many Additional Questions that they are not really forming an ordered list, but the first one out of his mouth, stupidly, is "How do you even identify masochists? Without actually hurting them and seeing how they like it, I mean."
"Many ways, and I am hardly an expert, but mostly we go looking for people who seem to enjoy pushing themselves past their limits. Such as, completely hypothetical example, an Exception Handling medtech who does sixteen-hour shifts apparently for fun."
