"Yeah."

"After that the story is simpler. The polymorph victims appear to have had an aging curse forcibly applied to them that wasn't there before, which is presumably why so much erasure going around. And they also act birdlike at first when de-polymorphed, and even after recovery still don't have useful memories. We step up security a lot until we get a connection again, and we, uh, place a call to Heaven with basically all the movable wealth we aren't actively using offered as payment as soon as we can connect. Heaven sends a powerful team, cleans up a runaway daemon they can find… it's pretty impressive to see someone respond to a hostage-taker with 'not only are my weapons smart enough to pass harmlessly through the hostage on their way to you, I can also actually buff the hostage while I'm at it, and I'm really mostly focusing on reading this book'. We convince all the key witnesses to testify. It turns out that Rhoswen really did lastingly stop Tenzekil from bleaching, and she could probably have made him start again but she didn't get the chance, Heaven convinces him to retire up there in part so that they can use him as a reference for maybe curing more gnomes. We get access to high-power scrying resources to look for Kenchlo very shortly after we get in touch, but it doesn't go through."

"Ultimately, the gods hold a hearing about the matter. There's proof of lots of things Charon doesn't want proof of, like that Devarre saw warnings about Rhoswen's seal and tried to report it to Heaven only for the archon, on returning, to get killed by daemons before turning in the report, and in general a lot of suspicious death-y coincidences, but we don't have conclusive proof. Charon does get sanctioned, though, and the Planes of Law start planning a research expedition based on our claims. …I guess I won't know how that would turn out, but it sounded promising at the time. And if you'd talked to me several years ago, I would have ranted about the Horseman of War's behavior at the hearing, but I don't want to give her the satisfaction, so I'll just say that … she asked us some very harsh leading questions intended to throw us off-balance, though we basically stayed on balance. Mostly I went with a lot of 'I wasn't present for this event, so why is it relevant to the hearing for me to speculate about it?'."

"Oyé, how did you get a legal drama in your adventure fantasy?

"...It's the rationalism.  It's gotta be the rationalism."

"The rationalism?"

"The same breed of thought that produced the AI alignment people who I recommended earlier.  If your world's not premised on being a rational!Pathfindersetting, I'll..."

"Well.  I'll be very surprised.  You're fighting death.  That's a very common - tenet of faith, really?  That death is bad and needs to be stopped with all due haste."

"…in general, thinking clearly and avoiding death are useful for one's other goals. I don't see why ambitious people valuing them, combined with gods ever using legal procedures which are also useful, is evidence of much. It wasn't even very legal-procedure-y this time, I've been to an Axis hearing and those were orderly. This was … 'there was a concerning accusation, gods wanted to talk about it, Horsemen demanded the right to individually question their accusers but were talked down somewhat', and then also at the end of it Axis announced they were imposing sanctions on Charon."

"...Well, a), 'rationalism' qua being rational isn't quite...rationalism qua political ideology and associated praxis, and b) even if thinking clearly and avoiding death are useful to achieving one's goals, most people do not actually operationalize said goals to any effective extent.  Let alone the people that believe death is good because it's natural, which Suaal explicitly averts with Charon in a very rationalist-qua-ideology message of death being something not just defeatable, but to defeat."

"Oh, the general consensus is that while Charon is taking credit for all of senescence he's lying to make himself look like a bigger deal than he is, and the psychopomps certainly go around promoting the idea that death is a natural phenomenon to be accepted. …and make a fair amount of friends with their opposition to things like undeath and nonconsensual use of life extension on prisoners."

"...nonconsensual anything is honestly bad, but - they really oughtn't get net-credit for opposing one nonconsensual thing while not only condoning but promoting and practicing a much worse nonconsensual alteration to people's lives!"

"I think a lot of people tend to see dying of senescence at a predictableish time as a less bad thing than, to drop the euphemism, being kept alive for purposes of torture."

"Yes but the solution is stop torture not embrace deathism!"

"I don't disagree but if there are people going around who are maybe kinda involved in death-is-okay-ism when they're not even the main force that means you have to die anyway, but they also help stop always-evil undead and demonic torturers … one of those things is probably going to seem more salient than the other."

"Uergh.  Do Not Like That."

"Fair. …I don't know why there being legal drama is weird to you, if there's a cold war maintained by treaties and stuff happens regarding those legal drama seems like a natural consequence? What would you expect instead?"

"Because I was expecting a different genre up until I processed that."

"I thought I'd mentioned the divine non-interference treaties and such, I'm still confused by your expectations."

"It's..."

She wibbles a hand somewhat desperately, trying to figure out how to convey her thoughts.

"You know how I was going on about narrative analysis?  Well, there's any of that that's useful in rationalist fiction, but you actually shouldn't try to do as much of it in that genre, because the core conceits of the genre are that actors will act, well, rationally, or at least consistently, informed by their goals and motives in a way that is derivable from first principles if you know said goals and motives.

"And instead, I had previously assumed you were in a different genre, where not logic, but tropes and the rules of the game system, reigned; that the marvelous worldbuilding had been more incidental than - well, almost the core conceit.

"And Suaal's still tropey, don't get me wrong - but that's incidental, a consequence of working backwards from Pathfinder to a world."

"So, if this is a known genre in your world I'm not going to tell you it isn't, but from my standpoint it really seems like your claim that we're fictional is no longer making testable predictions. …also I'm still curious what happens instead of legal drama in the genre you were originally modeling my world as being."

"Yeah, see, that's exactly the sort of thing a ratfic protagonist would say when the narrativist absolutely bombs on testing because of her critically underexamined priors!  Now you tell me I'm just doing hindsight bias!"

"Hmm.  Instead of legal drama, which is very rationalfic, well...actual drama?  Not that legal drama isn't dramatic, but...theatricality.  If it was standard adventure fantasy, you'd have, like, monologuing.  Charon might carry out that ambush as did canonically happen, but it'd be...

"Both less and more powerful?

"In that there would not be a small army of daemons, just a group, but Charon, The Antagonist, would be much more invested in fighting you with them, probably possessing one to deliver a dramatically threatening speech or something.  That make sense?"

"I'm not going to lecture you right now, to the extent I want to make a point to you as opposed to wanting to test your claims for my sake I think the point has been made. Really, I think 'don't casually switch what you're testing halfway through a test and expect this to not be messy' was an issue here, which applies to both of us. …and that alternative model is a what would happen in the forest before the seal fell, but, uh, my question is what would happen afterwards when we called up Heaven to say 'Abaddon set up a plot to unseal and reseal a prewar global threat for their own benefit', if not legal drama?"

"Yeah, the experimental design here baaaasically wasn't.  As for what happens when you call up Heaven, in the Standard Adventure Fantasy universe...

"Well, you probably wouldn't be dragged into the politics so directly?  Even if it was alluded to.  I'd suspect you end up with a mission to gather proof of what happened more directly; Pathfinder isn't very heist-shaped but it sure can try."

"Huh, that actually makes some sense. Though wanting witnesses to testify is a pretty popular thing? I guess it could have been glossed over."

"Yeah, it could have; it might have still gone down the same way, but normally you don't have the big numinous forces being people-shaped enough for this in the first place, organizationally.  Like, your lantern archon friend would still be befriendable, but the highest-up ones..."

"It's not that they fundamentally at their core are as people-shaped as they look, it's that it's a thing they can do with some of their power and it apparently helps with having a meeting."

"Well, that at least makes the fundamental limitations of human authorship diegetic.  Well done, whoever that was.  I'm somewhat surprised that they did do that, considering that rational-fic's surprisingly willing to attempt to model superintelligences, for a genre that tries to maximize predictability above all - but they did, and neatly."