"You've been focusing a lot on Charon. Your stance on the torture planes is?"

"They've got to go. My team isn't primarily focused on that in our work, though we've helped a bit. Killed a demon-god, though that was with a lot of support. I haven't sat down and done a detailed assessment of the relative benefits of the Lower Planes, I don't, uh, want to be more responsive to the details of whatever atrocities Asmodeus – the god of tyranny – is up to than I am, that seems like bad incentives? I would be deeply surprised if we could somehow manage to take down Charon and maintain the status quo with Hell, that's Asmodeus's plane. Axis keeps proposing a full Heaven-Hell truce and they both refuse to sign, so."

"Understood. …if we're interacting with you holding me regardless of my will anyway, you would be capable of using thought-analysis magic on me. For many plausible goals a person in my position would have, such a person would not want to disclose those goals, but–"

Griffie is not, in fact, a particularly charismatic person. Eir speech is clunky at times, eir ability to actually talk down hostiles is low, and eir main actual diplomatic strength is capacity to pick up on and willingness to play along with stuff that is probably ridiculous nonsense and feels rather like losing face. Ey is not a good liar (though it helps that a genuine desire for friendship despite a mess actually looks like a genuine desire for friendship despite a mess). When ey has complicated social problems with humans, ey delegates them if at all possible.

This does not actually mean that Griffie is not perceptive, including in social domains. The Chelish manipulators and Khemet gave Keltham a skewed perspective here, on what outright-superhuman perceptiveness is correlated with, and he's lacking the aid of any spells or items, including his tiny sword of Glibness.

Like many people who have researched daemon cults, Griffie is aware of negative utilitarians as well as regular utilitarians who are just pretty darn sure that the non-Abaddon lower planes outweigh essentially everything else. Their commonality is probably overstated, but they're still a thing.

Griffie interrupts Keltham. "If you think it's morally net negative for the world to continue as it is and would rather side than Charon over us if that was what was needed for the highest chance of ending Hell and its chaotic counterpart the Abyss, you would not be the first, and given population sizes you plausibly will not be the last even if we move fairly quickly."

Keltham doesn't respond.

But in the absence of a Glibness item, his reactions still confirm the hypothesis. "So that's your dark secret, then. My guess is that at least one draft exists of a plan to turn over our information on Hell and the Abyss to Abaddon should Hell or the Abyss win, or we can get information on why it's a bad idea. Heaven is the Lawful portion of the Upper Planes, plural, we do in fact plan for handling disagreements in a friendly manner here."

Once the hypothesis is this salient maintaining secrecy is pointless anyway.

"Using thought-analysis magic before I finished talking was unfriendly."

"I didn't. You're not that subtle – we're going to need to work on that if you want to leave here under the basis of a secrecy agreement, by the way – and this is not that rare a thing for people to think."

"Well, either you know everything really core to our most plausible preference conflict, or it's in my interests to act as though it's everything, and I'd very much prefer to make this statement in both cases rather than lie."

Griffie can pick up on some sentiments there.

"I am not a paladin of Eritrice. I make false statements. I deceive people. I haven't made false promises, but if I were in disguise and it came up I would. I violate interplanar law that was designed to be a compromise among interests including mine and is only an unbalanced compromise due to lack of information, some of which I could turn over and haven't. Compromise with Hell, violate interplanar law, refuse to use your power despite the situation, they're all awful and if you keep not doing the third eventually you'll have to do at least one of the first two. I've done both. And for good or for ill we've oh-so-helpfully chosen one option already for you."

"You've compromised with Hell?"

"We had a shared interest in killing the aforementioned demon-god, and I took payment from them for doing it. We have a shared interest in Charon not destroying the world, so when Charon breaks interplanar law we tend to report it to an Axis-led task force with members from Heaven and Hell. The Asmodeus Corporation has a branch in the city where I normally live, and I have not attacked it, and not because I think my doing so would be genuinely costless to Hell. Et cetera."

Griffie pauses a moment, then winces. "And since we're either inducting you into our criminal conspiracy or constraining you from being an information source to others, I should also mention our interactions with Varten. Varten was a devil, a Hell-built slave of Asmodeus, specifically specializing in knowledge and the manipulation of others and quite empowered within these domains."

Keltham is not bothering to pretend to not be very concerned by this.

"We got advance notice from a friendly god that the situation that led to our interactions with Varten would be risky but raise our odds of success in other domains. We didn't walk in blind to the risks."

"At some point, it would be nice to get back to being in a world with actual professionals in that domain. But one out of three isn't the best."

"So! We have this vague warning about something in the Sarini Manor being useful but likely to scar us. We … so the reason we were there is that we'd figured out that the Sarinis were diabolists, uh, working with devils, and they'd set up a town charter to secretly be an infernal, uh, hellish?, contract with some document continuity tricks. Send the souls to Hell, stuff about 'appropriate town morals', et cetera. Manipulation persisted after their deaths. Anyway. These still have to stabilize on an actual physical document to work, and for stuff like this that isn't really a proper contract proximity helps, so when we built a tool to look for it it turned out the document we needed was located in their manor. And also this demon who was trying to poison the town was there so we wanted to deal with that too. So we deal with the demon and his minions, recruit some and contain others, and it turns out that … right, you have absolutely no idea who my mother is. I guess we can skip over that for now. We clean up the manor, our tool is like 'actually that document is waaaaay deeper than the basements here go', we poke things and find a hidden-from-the-Sarinis tunnel under the manor my mother made, and we find Varten."

Keltham is listening, but primarily waiting for the relevant part of this story.

"My mother bound Varten. He and his colleagues were in a bad position. He knew we wanted information and the bound souls of the town citizens. He offered us information necessary for our victory, his story, and answers to some of our questions, in exchange for our destruction of him and his colleagues, and freeing the souls in their possession. And no penalty clauses for non-completion on our side. He accepted us rewriting a contract covering those terms in our own language. It was all absurdly generous terms. We needed the information and the souls would be passed along to Hell otherwise. We drafted various clauses, and his only challenge to them was ensuring our receiving the souls was absolutely airtight in terms of Infernal property law, and that his secrets would hurt us and he would thus not sign a contract barring him from harming us by sharing non-deceptive information. We took the deal."

"And it turns out that Hell has some really, really good infohazards, except given that I'm your prisoner and plausibly have information you want, if you were working for Hell I'd be in a less pleasant environment by now. So do go on."

"The information was intended to cause interpersonal conflicts. With some notable successes interspersed with amusing-in-retrospect failures, he had a lot of secrets and wanted to see what would stick. The real issue was the souls. The overwhelming majority of souls in Varten's possession were almost certainly not moral patients, but were instead extremely simplistic souls that fed on devils who owned them, designed to multiply at the expense of their hosts and hijack the ownership structures and markets of Hell as a transmission vector. Transferring ownership of them to us … halted that. Varten called us heroes of Hell."

Griffie sighs. "The attack was slow-going. If we hadn't ended it, it probably still would not have borne fruit soon enough to matter."

"The infohazards that you noticed caused near-term personal conflicts, and looked like an attempt to throw things at the wall and see what sticked. Do you not realize why that's not necessarily the reassuring statement you think it is?"

"I am actually pretty good at noticing things. And there are a number of people we would retire and if need be enter containment on the word of, and they haven't asked us to, and at least in some cases not due to ignorance of this incident. Varten was dying and wanted to stop the parasitic souls and thwart Charon, which also suggests reduced capacity for really complicated manipulations of our mindstates."

"And how do you think he did at stopping the parasitic souls and thwarting Charon?"

"Pret…ty well. Some of the information on Charon he got us only became usable to us remarkably recently."