"It has always seemed to me that Evil ought be at least as interested in the melioration of Hell as Good; we are the ones going there. I would work with you, I think, if you would cooperate with Lawful Evil who shares your most important interest. I appreciate your offer of Flesh to Stone but I have, in fact, too much Pride to be content to be a statue while others solve my problem."

"...you keep identifying yourself as Evil but you don't have to be, we can get you an Atonement. It wouldn't fix the soul sale but I think people prefer not to have the alignment aura either."

He laughs softly. "I doubt I could manage Good," he says. "Neutral, perhaps, but not yet—a Lawful Evil alignment may be an asset, in some places, and losing it will not make me any less damned.

"I was, you see, part of the Chelish secret police. Primarily counterintelligence. I have sent too many of your spies to Hell to ever read Good, I fear, and if there is a spell that can make it so anyway then I dispute Pharasma's categories—though of course I do that anyway. I have less experience with the other side of the game, but I am, I suspect, still better at it than your paladins; it is not Good work, even when done in Good's service. And unlike them I have nothing to lose."

Clerics of Iomedae are somewhat selected for not being the sort of people who will get angry at people over sentences like 'I have sent too many of your spies to Hell', but that's definitely producing some sort of strong emotional reaction. She's not quite sure what it is.

—they aren't Sarenrites, to deny almost all agency to the mortal instruments of Evil. Cheliax itself is a vast machine designed by a superintelligent alien being who shares approximately none of human values, but those who rise high in it still chose to do so. There is a difference, between an ordinary Chelish citizen and someone who sells his soul and joins the secret police and has spies Maledicted having already decided that all humanity ought to unite against Hell, and that difference has to matter, but—

—but it doesn't actually matter at all, because it's not actually better to stay small, whatever the cost, when such a thing as Hell exists in the world, and the price of not being small in Infernal Cheliax is one's soul, both literally and metaphorically. That's a fact about the world that, for all Iomedae desperately intends to change it, Riudaure didn't choose, and—

—and those who stand up for Good at the earliest possible moment, over something like being made to cast Acid Splash on their classmates (such a silly little thing, in the balance with all Hell), are brave but foolish, and they're probably doing exactly what Asmodeus wants; they just get tortured until they do it anyway, or if they outlast their tormentors' patience Maledicted, and never have the chance to stand up for Good again, and the classmate still gets Acid Splashed, and—

—and Cheliax would fall, if everyone stood up at the same time, but humans aren't shaped like that by default, and if they want everyone to learn that kind of courage they need not to be taught by the empire of Hell on Golarion, and sometimes what it takes to defeat an evil system is to play along until you can strike a blow that actually hurts, and—

—and if the hurt Riudaure did to Cheliax today isn't nearly enough to make up for all the Evil he's done while playing along, well, hopefully he's only getting started.

"It's important, I think," she says, "to try to stay Good even in war. Not foolishly so, not in a way that risks defeat at the hands of something far worse, but if you're too willing to justify Evil for the greater Good, even if you're right in each individual case, I think you risk losing sight of what you're fighting for in the first place."

"I'm not fighting for the greater Good; I'm fighting for there to be no more Hell, and I'd disagree with you even if I valued everything you value. That said, I don't particularly mean to start a theological debate."

"It is difficult to lose track of what we're fighting for, when it's something like that. I lack the authority to formally accept your service, but I think that we would."

"If Iomedae could damn a hundred people to Hell forever, and thereby save the rest, would She do it?"

"Yes." Unhesitatingly; you'd get at least that many volunteers from a single paladin order.

"If they had to be random peasants, and not paladins cursed with whatever insanity the gods curse paladins with?" A smile; 'insanity' is meant mostly in jest.

"Yes, though it isn't wise or useful to contemplate such unlikely—"

"If it were a million that were required, rather than a hundred? Ten million?"

"...I expect so, though She'd spend correspondingly longer to seek alternatives that didn't require—"

"Then I think we shall get along just fine."

Ships in Golarion, especially warships, are generally quite prepared for the possibility of fire. They're made of wood and canvas, and Fireball is a third-circle spell. If they didn't have good fire protections, all naval combat would be suicide and at least the Lawful countries of Golarion, and probably most of the Neutral ones, would have just made an agreement to Not. Meteor Swarm is as powerful as one would expect a ninth-circle spell to be, but it's still, fundamentally, just a lot of Fireballs.

They're less prepared, however, for a fire this bad, in an overcrowded port that isn't at all a proper naval dockyard, while a dozen parties of random adventurers Teleport in to pick off the Asmodean clerics casting Create Water and also Fireball any ships that aren't yet on fire, and a fucking seventh-circle elven druid shows up from gods know where and starts casting Control Weather to stir the wind and whip the flames.

(The surrender agreement signed regarding the city of Augustana prohibits Andoran from Teleporting in any forces for at least a month, but doesn't prohibit them from putting out the word to any and all that there's an opportunity to kick Cheliax while they're down if they act fast. They aren't paying them, except in XP from targets that can be killed without it being too bad for one's Good.)

There's a wizard on site with Aqueous Orb prepared, as is standard for naval dockyards, but only one; they were expecting an accidental fire or maybe less extravagant arson, not this. They'll have to send to Ostenso to get scrolls of it.

Within minutes there's an actually serious Chelish response team on site, including literally half of Cheliax's seventh-circle wizards and Aspexia fucking Rugatonn for the second time in four days, with twenty scrolls of Aqueous Orb from the naval base in Ostenso, but by then all the foreign adventurers are gone and there isn't a single ship in port that can go to sea without major repairs. The five or six that were closest to the center of the original Meteor Swarm are almost certainly unsalvageable, and the docks are going to require serious work too.

Aspexia Rugatonn obliterates a random third-circle wizard in unholy fire. He didn't do anything wrong, except be stupid enough to stand next to an incandescently furious Aspexia Rugatonn.

That helps her regain her composure enough to cast Overwhelming Presence. She guessed, upon getting that spell this morning, that today was going to involve a giant disaster, but unfortunately Asmodeus isn't allowed to tell her in advance what the disasters are going to be.

"YOU MISERABLE FOOLS."

Her voice isn't actually loud, but it carries. Everywhere within a hundred feet of her is somehow even quieter than dead silence; the spell's effects carry far beyond the range in which people are actually compelled to prostrate themselves.

"THE DISASTER YOU SEE BEFORE YOU IS MADE UP OF SO MANY SEPARATE INDIVIDUAL FAILURES THAT I CANNOT POSSIBLY LIST THEM ALL BEFORE YOU ARE NO LONGER MAGICALLY COMPELLED TO LISTEN TO ME, SO I WILL CONFINE MYSELF TO THE WORST OF THEM FOR NOW.

"FIRST, THIS TREASON OBVIOUSLY TOOK MORE THAN TWO ROUNDS TO PLAN. NINTH-CIRCLE SCROLLS WERE INVOLVED. I MUST ASSUME THAT, SINCE CHELIAX STILL EXISTS, OUR MINDREADERS ARE NOT THAT INCOMPETENT, AND THERE IS SOME GOOD REASON WHY THIS PLAN WAS NOT DETECTED IN THE TRAITOR'S MIND." (It's memory fuckery. It's totally memory fuckery. She's considered asking Asmodeus for a Miracle to erase Modify Memory as a spell from existence, but she supposes her Lord requires even her to be improved by suffering.) "HOWEVER. THIS CONCEALMENT SHOULD HAVE, ITSELF, LEFT OBVIOUS TRACES WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN REPORTED TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT."

"SECOND. I AM SURELY NOT THE FIRST TO NOTICE THAT HE WHO SPEAKS OF DISASTER COURTS IT—"

Wait, how does she know about tropes already? That's not supposed to happen for eleven more years!

"—THIS IS MORE THAN SUPERSTITION, WHEN IT COMES TO TREASON. WHOEVER SENT THE TRAITOR ON A MISSION INVOLVING FALSE TREASON PLANTED THE IDEA IN HIS HEAD, AND IS ENTIRELY AS GUILTY AS HE.

"WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS? BRING HIM BEFORE ME."

     (Two soldiers drag Major Olivera out of the crowd and throw him at the Most High's feet.)

     "His—idea—" Olivera squeaks out, but it's incredibly hard to speak under the effect of Overwhelming Presence.

"WHEN YOU GET TO HELL, LET YOUR OWNER SEE WITHIN YOUR MIND THAT I DID NOT THINK IT NECESSARY TO TELL HIM WHAT TO DO WITH YOU, BECAUSE IT IS IN FACT FUCKING OBVIOUS."

(Slay Living.)

"NOW FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT MATTER. WHERE IS THE TRAITOR NOW?"

(She cancels the Overwhelming Presence. She's made her point, and now she needs people to be able to actually respond.)

"Un—unscryable, Your Highness," says the senior Security on-site. "We did attempt one as soon as we identified who had cast the Meteor Swarm."

Bestow Curse (Cruciatus).

(Aspexia once specialized in custom curses. Causing the target to suddenly experience intense sourceless pain isn't even, theoretically speaking, a complicated one, although she can't seem to teach the technique to anyone else.)

She Removes it after a few rounds. It's an essential feature of an Asmodean tyranny that people get punished for failure, even when that failure wasn't "technically" "their fault", but she doesn't want to discourage accurate reporting of bad news too hard.

"I suppose that, once again, I shall have to do this myself," she says, and speaks her Word of Recall to return to Egorian. She really doesn't trust anyone to Teleport her right now.

She goes to her office, finds a Miracle diamond, and prays for Asmodeus to pluck Riudaure from wherever he is and deposit him in front of her. Standard procedure for this is to have a team of Security waiting to kill him the instant he appears, but she can actually handle that just fine, and if Good has afforded the traitor the absurd level of protection he would need to avoid the kidnapping (or even, for that matter, had his soul destroyed to keep it from Hell), she really doesn't want other Security knowing about that.

lol