"Because Axis is a nicer place to live than Abaddon and Norgorber is selfish."

"And the Powers of Law allow the god of crime to hang around in their home plane because..."

"They are lawful, and proceed by due processes of law.  Nobody has proven Norgorber guilty of any crime in His entire life, either as a mortal or a god, so they can't kick Him out of Axis without breaking their own rules.  There's a reason that criminals worship Him."

"I see.  And Iomedae has a hidden Chaotic Evil side and goes on secret dates with Nocticula?"

"Iomedae is almost pure Lawful Good, by Her own choice."

"Touching the Starstone is like consuming the corpse of a god, in terms of the underlying mechanics.  You don't embody some domain to the extent that the universe recognizes you for that and grants you divinity.  You get stuffed with enough power that the universe recognizes you as clearly some kind of god, and you end up with a domain.  Going that route means you get more of a choice, if you know it's coming and plan ahead."

"You're not explicitly saying that I have that choice coming," she notes.

"It's a possibility.  Nothing is guaranteed, in the visions that Nethys showed Myself and Milani."

"Milani?  Wait, then Asmodia wasn't joking when she said she was Chosen of -"

"Asmodia ended up getting blessed by Otolmens, which is what We were steering for.  There's possibilities Nethys showed Us where Asmodia ends up working with Milani.  In other possibilities she ends up on the side of Rovagug, and that We definitely wanted to avoid."

"Look, I'll just ask straight out.  What's up with that entire weird business?  Why are the trope-girls even a thing, why do we exist?  Can I hear the actual truth or at least what Ione knows?  I won't use the information in a way that hurts your interests."

"And yes, I can guess it would be easier to understand after I put on the artifact headband.  I'm asking now anyways."

Once she puts on the artifact headband, Pilar can guess, she will not perceive herself as having any real choices; she will know the way ahead, and do what maximizes expected utility, and it won't feel like much of a choice.  The choice to put on the headband is the last choice she'll make, in some sense; and she wants to know, before she does, what it is she's last-choosing.

"It's genuinely not easy to explain.  It's the sort of thing that even gods can understand only in metaphors, and you don't have those metaphors."

"This does not surprise me.  So, are we all inside an 'eroLARP', or -"

"Dath ilan's eroLARPs, according to Keltham, have paying player characters and paid non-player-characters, both assigned background stories.  The player characters act freely not knowing the story's possible ends, and the non-player-characters act in secret conspiracy to keep overall developments on course for a satisfying ending."

"We're not inside one of those.  At least, not so far as I can tell.  What we're inside instead -"

"In some worlds, according to Nethys, there are games that are like magical books, books containing choices.  You go to the store - a metaphorical store, because books like that aren't physical enough to be contained in a physical shop or handed over when you buy them - but you go to the metaphorical store, and you buy a metaphorical novel-game.  You metaphorically read it, and you get to the point of the book where the novel-game offers you a choice, and you choose an action at that choice-point, and then new pages appear in the novel-game and you keep reading."

"In some worlds, the artistic idiom of the novel-game is manifested in their versions of dath ilan's 'computers', with illusions of people's heads talking and text flowing, and players who 'click' to make choices.  In other worlds, a novel-game enchants the player into feeling like they're inside the world it describes, and if the novel-game is cursed you might die there for real."

"And we're inside one of those magical books?"

"We're not actually in one.  It's just a metaphor that you can understand without putting on the artifact headband.  Or to the extent you could say we're inside one, it's because the idiom of the novel-game is one that's repeated in many different forms across many worlds Nethys can get information about, which is part of why Nethys guesses it might be a good fit for something that's happening around and above us."

"And the gods are the game's players?"

"The metaphor starts to break down at that point.  A novel-game has only a single player, who is also its reader, who is also the customer who bought that copy of the novel-game from the store that decided to stock copies.  That's not what Nethys thinks is happening with us."

"Milani and Myself did most of the carrying out of actions, at the choice points that Nethys told Us about, according to options and instructions that He left to Us.  In the game we're all inside, Nethys is the closest thing to a player, because Nethys is the one who can see the game as a game - view the alternate possibilities and decide which one to go down.  But what He saw was not exactly the one true future, and reality has been getting further and further away from any of the possibilities that He told Us about."

"So Nethys is the player.  Who's the reader, if that's not the same Person?"

"I did not understand that when Nethys tried to tell Us about it, and I would advise against you asking Him even if He could answer in mortal speech."

"One aspect I did understand is that the metaphorical book-readers - the Things that watch us, who are probably watching us right now and here - are responsible for making the novel-game real; or rather, the novel-game would be real to some tiny degree no matter what, but the Things watching over Pharasma's Creation make it more real.  In one sense, the answer to any question that asks why we're here, why we find ourselves here, gods and mortals alike, is that it's a kind of event that's interesting to Things who in observing those events make them more real."

"Well, that's disturbing.  If I know too much about this do I go mad and start trying to summon Yog-Sothoth into Creation?"

"According to Nethys, the Things-That-Watch are much vaster than Yog-Sothoth and flatly wouldn't fit inside Creation.  Any one of Them is larger than the entire greater universe that contains Creation and all of the Outer Gods we know as a tiny bubble.  The Things are not small enough, weak enough, or comprehensible enough to be the sort of entity that mortals can successfully glimpse and go mad about.  The most familiar thing Nethys could identify in His glimpses of Their continuum was an alternate universe's version of Aroden, who managed to make himself look useful enough that one of the Things copied him out of his native world and made him a fragment of the Thing's own mind to be a voice in Its deliberations.  If one of Them wanted to interfere in this realm, nothing we did or didn't do on our side of reality would make the tiniest bit of difference as to whether They could."

"Very reassuring, good to know, I'm sure I'll sleep better knowing that."

"So those are the metaphorical readers.  Are they also the ones who bought the novel-game at the shop?"

"Nethys isn't sure what bought this novel-game at the store, in the sense of Their being the entities with 'economicdemand' whose 'utilityfunctions' determined that a novel-game like this one would be stocked at the metaphorical store.  In one possibility Nethys saw that had a stat-boosted Keltham reasoning from things Nefreti Clepati was telling him, that Keltham said there was more than one Customer and more than one 'utilityfunction', combining their buying-power and trading with each other."

"At least one Customer wanted Keltham to have a romance, and is responsible for Keltham appearing in a place and time and possibility where tropes could happen around him.  At least one Customer probably isn't happy about the direction the future is currently headed for the mortals in Pharasma's Creation, and wants to disrupt the future that would otherwise come about for us; or, rather, is acting on behalf of other Entities that feel that way.  But the Customers' mode of action is complicated by how changes in Their 'purchasingbehavior' also redirect the Things' attentions from one novel-game to another."

"The - Customers - want Keltham's Civilization to get built here?"

"We can guess at least one Customer prefers the result of throwing Keltham into the mix, to whatever would have happened otherwise, or whatever the Things would have paid attention to otherwise.  They may or may not care whether or not the outcome is Civilization; They might be trying to avoid an unusually bad-to-them outcome rather than trying for an unusually good one.  They might be buying something much stranger or more complicated than that.  Nethys can't see centuries ahead with prophecy shattered, and We have little evidence about the possible long-run outcomes of the novel-game."