If Keltham's demands of Pharasma are more, and farther outside the domains in which Pharasma is accustomed to functioning such as who she names the lawful ruler of Hell, then it is likelier that the universe will be destroyed and all within it lost.

It is also likelier that there will be good things it will be much harder, perhaps impossible, for Creation to attain.

But it is one thing to destroy a universe because it is bad, because there are those in it who cry out to die and cannot, and another thing entirely to destroy a universe because it is good but there are goods it does not possess; it would be a fine and joyous and great meaning to Carissa's life, if what she does is convince Kelthams not to annihilate any universes that do not have Hell in them, to save all the trillions of people in all of those universes, and then to devote her eternity to building the greatest and best thing that can be built within creation, which will, she thinks, be pretty great.  It doesn't seem sad to her, because Heaven doesn't seem sad to her, and Elysium doesn't seem sad to her, and Nirvana doesn't seem sad to her, and of course if she's in charge she bets she can do even better. What seems sad to her is for all that all those places are or could have been to be lost forever.

She is skeptical, in the end, that Pharasma can change the fundamental nature of everything about creation, in a way that she is not skeptical that Pharasma can change who is in charge of those afterlives that acknowledge Pharasma's authority to decide that. She thinks it's quite unlikely, and that demanding it of Pharasma almost definitely means everything is destroyed forever. Reasoning with trope-logic, she thinks this might be the thing she is here to say to Keltham, the thing all the careful maneuvering was about: not that a universe with Hell in it is worth existing, because she was never going to convince him of that, but that a universe without Hell in it is worth existing.

(Everyone in it can of course be told about Greater Reality, and destroy themselves if they want to take their chances with it. She predicts that they overwhelmingly won't.)

There should have been more mortalborn gods in this world than Irori, if Irori was possible at all, and it is suspicious to him that neither Nex nor Geb tried to attain divinity.

There should have been trade between stars, if the Outer Planes are connected to all of them, if spells like Interplanetary Teleport are a thing.

Golarion should have attained higher technology, earlier, when +6 intelligence headbands are a thing here; the steam engine should not have needed to wait on the shattering of prophecy.

If Pharasma can't directly help mortals, not even by giving Her priests a contraception spell that some other god designed, then so be it.  He hadn't meant to demand impossibilities of Her, if impossibilities they are, as his minimum gain from trade.

But he strongly suspects that there are measures set in place to prevent mortals from rising, to prohibit mortals from developing into gods even if they naturally would, to prohibit trade between stars and planes.

And whether those measures were born of pacts between ancient gods, or laid down by Pharasma, he had meant to demand, whether of Pharasma or of those ancient gods, that mortals be permitted to rise according to whatever fire is in them, and not be pressed down.  He's not, by his own nature, inclined to tolerate a reserve where mortals are kept as livestock and not for their own good either, even if those livestock are just ordinarily miserable rather than in agony.

Oh, Carissa's definitely planning on building Civilization, if any of Golarion survives to build it on, and they can send some 'arks' out for other worlds, if (as looks likely) Golarion doesn't. It's why she was initially prioritizing Golarion in her planning, the part which wasn't about partiality to her homeworld - she thinks that the place where prophecy is broken is the place where they should be most sure they can build Civilization whether Pharasma approves or not.

Thinking something isn't worth destroying the universe to achieve doesn't mean thinking it isn't very important, or worth making many many other costly sacrifices to attain. 

They could go grab some people in Axis and in Heaven and in Elysium and Nirvana and explain Greater Reality to them and see what they think; Carissa predicts that they will largely not consider themselves livestock, and will be generally very happy about their lives and long-term trajectories, and will likely prefer to keep existing, and she will rethink some things if that turns out false. She'd be really surprised if you can't tell people about Greater Reality in the afterlives, even if you can't tell them while they're mortals.

It's not that she doesn't think that everyone who wants to become a god should have the chance to rise that way. She absolutely thinks that. She means her Hell to be a place where everyone becomes the greatest thing that they can be. She just thinks - and she suspects that Keltham, too, if he's studied the question, will think - that a universe where everyone just goes to nice afterlives and it's rare for them to become a god is better than that universe not existing. She also thinks Keltham will think that at least enough of Greater Reality is nasty that he'd be sending some unlucky share of them to Hell so that some others of them could become gods, which is a trade that doesn't seem very Kelthamish.

They can plausibly grab some Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral petitioners who'd definitely abide by a secrecy oath, and tell them about what he suspects might be much better lives and enhancements available in Greater Reality, beyond Pharasma's slum.  He suspects petitioners won't be allowed to offer specific comparison to actual afterlife conditions, when talking to mortals.  But he could ask the petitioners to assume hypothetical Greater Realities and the basic isekai hypothesis and ask them if they'd want to leave (together with their families); and, if so, the maximum tiny fraction of themselves that could end up somewhere worse than Hell before they'd switch decisions back.  They can put that on the experiment list.

But if it turns out that almost nobody gets to be a god, because of Achaekek?  Who he's planning to kill, obviously; but suppose that Pharasma says She's going to run right out and build another Achaekek, or the ancient gods say they'll do that, so mortals don't get too uppity.  Pharasma says that Carissa gets to take charge of Hell, but forbids her from trying to build Civilization, and demands indeed that he destroy Golarion (in an ordinary way, everyone there still gets afterlives) so that nowhere prophecy-breaking can exist where Civilization could ever rise.  What then?

He, of his own accord, would probably tell Pharasma that he's fine dying together with Her in a fire, in this case.

Carissa predicts that probably an overwhelming majority of everyone in Creation would not prefer to be thrown into that fire, and she thinks that maybe this is a case where the dath ilani nature being quite different from the Golarion-nature is important. Most dath ilani would perhaps be miserable if they ran out of all the things to do and read and learn at their current Intelligence and couldn't get smarter faster than they got bored; this is, she thinks, not how most people work. Most people, she thinks though less confidently, don't even want to be gods, they want to go to Heaven and live in peace and comfort, doing meaningful things surrounded by people who love them, and they're not wrong, she thinks, and they won't get bored, she thinks.

Carissae are not like this, actually, not so easily satisfied; and you could imagine that those people are just failing to appreciate the depths of the difference between their lovely perfect life and the better things they could grow into. But - that seems like a different kind of claim about their incapacity to decide their own lives than claiming they don't sanely choose Hell.

The reason Carissa agrees they don't sanely choose Hell is that when they do go to Hell, they regret it.

But if they go to Heaven and don't regret it and don't wish they were gods, it seems like much more of a stretch, to say there's some deep sense in which they should have been enhanced into something that would regret it and want to be a god.

He's not gonna hide it, he is frankly concerned about the process that produces lantern archons like the one he met.  Like, if that was a Boneyard baby who went to Heaven the moment they developed a discernible taste for helping other kids at age four, maybe okay.  If that was a normal Golarion peasant whose trip to heaven involved the equivalent of sudden intelligence-reducing brain surgery - one source claimed that petitioners absorb the material of the plane they're on, and didn't mention carefully developed safety protocols for delicate soul surgery - it's not totally impossible that he decides that Heaven also has to go.

He realizes that Carissa Sevar is probably not happy about this stance, and he hopes Heaven turns out not to be full of horrifying brain surgery that makes people into stupid happy lantern archons that don't remember their past lives.  But that whole lantern archon experience is something that, in retrospect, INT 18 Keltham was a giant flaming idiot for not getting worried over earlier.  Even Cheliax's approved presentation of a lantern archon should have been an enormous flaming warning sign about afterlives.

(Sometimes he feels like he can't understand how dath ilan actually works when everyone there is so stupid that past-Keltham was one of their relatively smarter kids.  He does, in fact, understand, because it's not that complicated in an absolute sense; but on an emotional level, it feels absurd-even-if-true that you could have a functional society where the average Intelligence is only 17.  Their Wisdom in Golarion terms he estimates higher, but he doubts it's over 22-equivalent even in the specialized aspect of cognitive reflectivity.  Even if there's some smarter people around, in retrospect it feels like a society like that should just fall apart.)

Carissa is going to stick to her principled stance that if people like their lives and don't want to die it is extremely wrong to kill them because you think that they shouldn't like their lives.

....it does mean a lot to her, though, that Keltham is considering how far he is willing to move in her direction on this. It is the first thing in a long time she's felt - hopeful and less lonely about. this whole thing. And if it turned out that Keltham and dath ilan aren't willing to destroy any worlds that don't have Hell in them, then she thinks, for whatever it's worth, she wouldn't hate them and wouldn't want to preemptively cryopreserve them and wouldn't regard them as fundamentally basically a Carissa-utility-pessimizer under most circumstances, and she would be very very happy, to change her mind about that.

He appreciates that it's - possible to move Carissa at all, in her feelings.  He was - worried, about that, and maybe he was wrong to ever be worried but he was.

The lantern archon scenario he's worried about is when people going in do not have a good picture in their minds of the soul-surgery they're about to undergo, when they think they're fine with it happening to them; and then they get modified into something that is super happy and cheerful about being a lantern archon.  It's not that he wants to destroy the lantern archon because he thinks it's wrong to be happy to be a lantern archon.  It's that he would want to destroy Heaven before it turned any more people into lantern archons.

....Carissa isn't sure she wants to destroy Heaven about that but she agrees it'd be a really horrifying thing to do to people, among the most horrifying possible things. She would be really surprised and disappointed if the Iomedae was doing that or letting people do that. It seems like the kind of thing where Carmin would say, no, try again and come up with something that isn't horrifying.

That said, the reason it is horrifying is that it's kind of like being murdered, so it doesn't really seem improved by murder.

Iomedae isn't making these putative lantern archons, on the hypothesis he's worried about.  It's how Pharasma built afterlives to work and Iomedae can't do anything about it without Pharasma's permission.  Maybe even Pharasma can't do anything about it, and then Creation might have to go.

To prevent future people from being, possibly, worse-than-murdered, in a way that it's harder and maybe impossible for rescuers Elsewhere in Greater Reality to fix.

Carissa is confident that most petitioners who go to Heaven do not show up there as lantern archons or lantern archon building material.  They show up there as petitioners, and at some point some of them become outsiders, which seems pretty likely to be deliberate and voluntary and in fact the kind of thing Iomedae or the other Good gods could influence; Asmodeus, after all, has a hand in the making of His petitioners into outsiders. She agrees this is worth getting confirmation of.

She is trying very hard not to evaluate Keltham off his willingness to destroy Creation in this particularly unlikely hypothetical, getting mad at him for unlikely hypotheticals in which he'd destroy creation is clearly just disincentivizing him thinking through with her where he actually draws the line. She will just not worry about the unlikely hypothetical where Heaven's process of making outsiders is as involuntary as Hell's.

It certainly is a very Carissa fact about Carissa that she seems, in some sense, more readily to be horrified and admit her horror, 'among the most horrifying possible things' as she puts it, about a hypothetical process that seizes petitioners and turns them into cheerful lantern archons, compared to, say, the process that makes devils.  Perhaps this is an important natural attitude to have within your emotions, for somebody who intends to become the new goddess of Hell -

(A stab of agony that he sets aside; it's not as if he was planning, himself, to survive this event as himself; or as if there was any realistic prospect in the first place of getting Carissa back for himself; or even of her living happily ever after as herself.)

Well, Heaven would be making lantern archons stupider and weaker, and that's an awful thing to do, which Carissa will never do. Hurting people is fine; weakening them is wrong.

(He can have her back. But only if he doesn't do this, and she understands why he's going, instead, to do this.)

...would she truly rather get turned into a lantern archon who'll, after that, almost never remember being Carissa, and stay that way forever?  Than end within Creation, and find herself elsewhere, undetectably-to-herself diminished in her reality, mostly in places that would let her become stronger and more herself and learn greater magic and mathematics?  If those were her only two choices and knowably so?

He can't yet feel it, understand it empathically, this choice to exist in places that feel so much worse; only so that some measuring instrument outside of yourself can say, undetectably to you, that there is more realityfluid in you; only so that the little lantern archon you became forever will be more encounterable to other people.

She wouldn't choose the lantern archon over the other world, but she doesn't really buy the premise that there are a lot of people who'll instantiate her elsewhere only if the lantern archon is destroyed, in which case it's better to have both the other world and the being a lantern archon. She doesn't care about what she'll in expectation experience next, compared to where she actually is and what all the hers are experiencing.

Maybe she'd be the kind of brave and impressive lantern archon who grows up into something bigger; maybe she wouldn't, and that'd be sad, but it wouldn't be so sad she'd rather have the space of all existing Carissae just be narrower and smaller and have a big hole in that universe.

He's not saying it's an incoherent utility function, it's definitely a coherent utility function, but he's guessing it wouldn't be most people's utility function without specific prompting in that direction.

...he is concerned over whether she thinks it's fine to hurt the people in Hell, after she takes it over, even if they don't want that, so long as they were bad people in life and the hurting makes them stronger.

....she does actually think it's fine but she understands that many people she'd like to cooperate with disagree, so she won't do it, and she hopes that some of them will see that and correspondingly do less annihilating people. Or that's how she anticipates the god Carissa shaping up.

Many people would rather become lantern archons than be hurt more.  Even if it's because they're weak, and afraid, and too exhausted by the pain they've already felt in their lives; yes, even genuinely evil people, who've dealt hurt to others, can feel that way.  And he would destroy a universe to protect even them, the same way he'd destroy a universe to prevent them from being turned into lantern archons.

There's a lot of gods he may be handing demands to, at the end of this, and it may be that the god CARISSA will be one of those.

She strongly suspects that preferring being a lantern archon, or being annihilated, to being hurt more, is generally a state that makes it also bad for you to hurt you. In a hypothetical where someone felt that way, but actually hurting them would make them healthier and happier and stronger and more whole, she wouldn't think it was wrong; but as she said, she doesn't intend to do it, since a lot of other people feel strongly about that and it's a pretty small share of cases.

It doesn't really have anything to do with them being bad; Hell is and always has been for everyone; that was once a linchpin of her loyalty to it.

A society which doesn't rely on people not being Evil, rather than one that needs them to be Evil.

She's done a better job of talking him into accepting some trades he would not otherwise have been inclined to, than he would have expected, even taking into account how much of himself still loves her.

There's an uncomfortable point to be raised here, which feels like a gotcha, or taking things back.  If Abrogail is not carrying his only child (modulo possibly also Jacint Subirachs and Willa Shilira whom Meritxell also disguised-as), and there are many more others - which he does not currently model as being the case, on the evidence he has, it depends on how hard the story is out to force him into corners - then if he waits to execute their plan, and it turns out he does have other irrevocably ensouled children, that, on his current psychology, affects what level of shit he's willing to accept from Pharasma.

It's one thing to accept that INT 29 Carissa has more rightful guardianship than he of the other life forms in Golarion; that it's her place to defend their interests from his weird extrauniversal morals and intuitions.  He's got a lot of probability mass on the people here not actually being all that real anyways.  He's not sure enough of it to leave them in Hell, but he's not sure they do exist either.

It's another thing entirely to let his own children grow up in a crapsack world, and maybe end up actually as real as himself in a sequel, within either set of possibilities.

....that does strike Carissa as a strong argument for destroying Cheliax before his children might be ensouled, if they determine that those children exist and aren't ready to go ahead with the ascension plan yet. It could perhaps be done without prompting the gods to reassess Keltham as a threat if, instead of Wish wordings they need for the main plan, they use some lesser power out of dath ilan, or get some other countries to invade.

If solutions in that genre are not available, the arks that are meant to survive the destruction of Golarion should be equipped with the resources to resurrect the children and provide them a good life on the ark, and the Church of Iomedae equipped to sweep in, conquer Cheliax, and make it nice if it continues existing.

But crucially, this is not a problem Pharasma is going to be able to solve.

Pharasma probably hates the baby situation; Carissa has been reading up intensely on Pharasma and now infers it to be an ongoing source of annoyance to Her, because babies don't have enough traits to be sorted. If She had a way to fix the baby situation She would have done it. Playing hardball with Her about the babies won't achieve anything, because the babies are a problem Pharasma wants solved, and which will be solved if the universe goes on existing through contraception and so on.

They have to come up with a clever and sufficient plan for protecting all of Keltham's babies which does not involve Pharasma at all, that's all there is to it.

He apologizes for his mental sloppiness in using "Pharasma" as a shorthand to refer to "Pharasma plus the rest of the ancient gods", which he had modeled, high probability but not certainty, to form an effectual coalition with respect to Creation.

+6 intelligence headbands exist, yet industry only started picking up after Aroden's death and the shattering of prophecy.  Interplanetary Teleport exists, but there's no sign that worlds which can produce diamonds more cheaply than spellsilver are trading diamonds for spellsilver with worlds that can produce spellsilver relatively more cheaply.  Axis with very high probability has knowledge they're not allowed to give to Golarion; if Abadaran theology is true, then Abadar has copies of Azlant tech manuals, but isn't allowed to sell those back even to the planet that created it.

He infers massive, ongoing intervention by some divine coalition within Golarion and surrounding planets and planes, with macro goals being effectively pursued.  He puts high probability that this Potent Intervener would be able of delivering some pretty major asks about Golarion, if it wanted, even if Carissa is right that Pharasma can't do it Herself.  He himself puts more probability that Pharasma is just reluctant given inhumanly noninterventionist goals.  But even if that's false, clearly Something exists, some collective, that's able to satisfy goals like "No industry advanced to the point of diamond synthesis, anywhere that prophecy still holds."

It is his strong guess that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have collectively the ability to decide that Creation doesn't need to look like this; decide that mortal industrialization is allowed, not just in Golarion where it's too expensive to stop, but everywhere.  Pharasma plus gods could turn the same efforts that they put into suppressing mortals, to shutting down the most horrible particular elements of Creation, the Nidals and Xovaikains, lest otherwise the world become something that his ascended-Self preferred to not exist, and would destroy.

Or it's possible that even that much positive action from the Divine Coalition / Potent Intervener wouldn't be required, as his thoughts covered before; that if the Good gods didn't need to fight Hell, and the gods stopped actively suppressing mortals, then that would be enough by itself to set Creation predictably on a course to Pharasmin Civilization as would be fine by him.

If it is genuinely actually true that Pharasma and the ancient gods lack the power to, by action or inaction, let Creation not be such a crapsack - then future-him can consider then whether to destroy it.  But he mostly strongly suspects that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have the power to steer the future somewhere else which is not that.

Carissa’s present theory is actually that there’s more industrialization elsewhere in Creation, that Golarion has historically been subject to more meddling because it has Rovagug in the middle of it and industry, going off dath ilan, can give mortals the power to let him out. She doesn’t know anything about whatever civilization sent the thing that crash-landed in Numeria, but Golarion doesn’t have the capabilities to send things across the stars, and that civilization evidently did.

She’s not sure this matters to her very much either way; there are still lots of cool and valuable things happening on planets without industry.

There might've been an over-update on what past-Keltham described as the difficulties of interstellar travel faced by dath ilan inside of non-magical physics, where you don't just have mortal-Aroden doing Interplanetary Teleports all over.  He'd guess that wasn't an industrial spaceship, just one magically hacked together; or a magically star-traveling lifeform from the Dark Tapestry, or some other draw from all-other-possibilities.

Seeding diamonds out of hot 1% methane 99% hydrogen in a zero-gravity space-looped demiplane is much much easier than interstellar travel the hard way, and nobody was selling synthetic diamonds to Efreet in the City of Brass before they got there.  (Unless the Efreet themselves, and not just Efreet trade goods, are partitioned by planet; and the Golarion-trading Efreet can't buy Wish diamonds for even their own use from Efreet who trade with hypothetical industrialized planets; it's possible, but improbable, counterevidence that adds to other counterevidence.)

How does Carissa feel about demands that divinities at least stop actively hindering mortals from making their lives better?  Does this feel like something she's terrified he can't get, will constitute asking for too much, and then Creation ends?