:I can think here. You can lie down. You're - safe, you know that, right, I am not going to hurt you -:

Well, he feels safe with her right now, because no-fear effect.

He - mostly believes it on an explicit level. At least, he's fully convinced on the level of logical arguments and evidence and the remainder is probably just...habits...and he suspects he'll get there all the way at some point. He...at least doesn't have enough uncertainty that he wants Iomedae to stop doing the no-fear effect because it feels like lying to his mind about whether he's in danger.

(If he didn't think he was safe with Iomedae, he would be...making different life choices. Such as not inviting her into his living room. It's just...maybe a little harder to feel entirely unconflicted, when Iomedae is powerful enough to kill him, nearly has killed him once before, and he...basically just told her what she would need to do to kill him permanently...and he doesn't expect her to, he believes her that she isn't angry and doesn't want him dead and in fact wants to give him a non-horrible way to live forever, and he still wouldn't expect her to kill him even if she was absolutely furious with him about the children thing, if she wants him to stop she so clearly has better options than killing him about it. It's just, his gut apparently still finds it stressful, for anyone to have this information.

Ma'ar is still approximately just letting Iomedae through his shields, but this part is a quiet note in his thoughts, mostly held back.) 

He's going to make his way to his bedroom mostly without looking at his surroundings, and collapse on his bed, and Iomedae can stay or not depending on what she wants to do. 

She'll stay. Quietly, by his side, with an arm around him if he wants that.

Yeah. Quiet is good. Iomedae holding him is also good. A lot of things feel terrible right now and he's having more trouble peeling them apart without the headband, and mostly isn't trying, just...breathing, being here, focusing on the part of this which is definitely good. Trying not to be distracting to Iomedae, if she's thinking. 

She's thinking. She doesn't know everything, she doesn't have all of morality figured out, and a lot of it - for humans - doesn't have a single obvious answer, just tradeoffs which are very hard to evaluate.

She is not inclined to say that people should have backup immortality plans that involve possessing their descendants because morality is complicated.

But it does matter, that it was a last resort of a last resort, that the probability of ever having to use it was quite low, and that it'd be necessary conceivably mostly in worlds where something had gone truly horrendously wrong -

- that they don't, as far as they know, have afterlives here -

- how willing would she be, to do her work for one human lifetime and then be gone forever - 

It seems like the kind of thing you do only if you are very very careful and good at accounting for a lot of unknowns and complexity. And she can complain Ma'ar isn't good enough at that, if she wants, but - he knows that. She already told him. And the stakes of this are honestly smaller than the stakes of wars of conquest. She already knew he was willing to kill innocent people when it seemed like the right thing to do. Is it coherent, to treat this kind as different from other kinds?

Can she turn her general doubt into specific questions to which she could in principle find a specific answer? 

Did Ma'ar have justified confidence that his immortality method wasn't going to distort him or create a monster.

Did Ma'ar have a good rule for deciding when to kill innocent people? Are there modifications to it that she thinks would perform better.

Was Ma'ar trying to act on his best guess of the right thing, or lying to himself about that. She thinks she knows the answer to that one.

If more people used Ma'ar's decision rule, would things be better, or would they be worse.

Is there some identifiable subset of people who should use Ma'ar's decision rule. 

She doesn't speak any of the questions, for now.

Lying in the dark and quiet with Iomedae beside him, Ma'ar calms down fairly quickly, enough that aren't just reactions to this being one of the most stressful conversations of his entire life. 

He's not, he thinks, upset about discussing this with Iomedae, or about whatever Iomedae is going to say after she finishes thinking about is ready to give concrete advice. He knows her. He could have predicted far more confidently than he did that she wouldn't be angry, because of exactly what she said when asked: what would possibly be better about the situation if she was angry? And Iomedae is, fundamentally, someone who chooses the options that make things better rather than worse. He trusts her to do that and he trusts her to be good at it, and not reacting reflexively or emotionally. She's been doing this for a long time. 

...realistically he's still too emotional about other things for having that conversation just yet to go well or be a good idea. That's fine. He'll poke at the pieces until he's actually calm. 

He's upset about what would have happened if the war had continued. This is reasonable! It's an upsetting prospect! Also it didn't happen and it's not going to and his mind doesn't need to be tracking it as an ongoing threat, just a hypothetical lesson in what can go wrong if you aren't careful enough. 

He's upset that someone knows, and to his hindbrain this makes it feel much less true that this is - something no one and nothing could take away from him. Iomedae isn't a mage, and he doesn't think she has a way of dismantling it herself with a sword, but she could tell someone. She won't, he's very confident of that, but he's - not used to putting weight on people's goodwill like that.

She might tell him he has to do something else. That's fine. If she does then she's almost certainly right, and - he meant what he said, that he wants to learn how Iomedae thinks, because he thinks taking on more of that will make him stronger. He wants to do something else, half of why he's upset is that he also hates this particular backup plan. He - does feel a lot more unambiguously positive about making additional plans rather than dismantling this one, but - he thinks Iomedae will understand that, and understand that even if it's never going to be used, having it as a fallback currently feels very loadbearing to him. Maybe that will change, someday. It might not even take very long. 

He's glad she's here. He...is overall glad that she knows. It felt like the last remaining major barrier between them. In particular, it felt like something he absolutely had to talk through with her before they had sex. He thinks he can talk about it more, now, with the no-fear effect and as long as he doesn't poke at memories of his childhood. What an annoying problem to have. 

He rolls over toward her. :Iomedae?: 

:Mmmhmm?:

:I think I am all right now. I have - I think I have the mental habits associated with being scared of powerful people who know of ways they could hurt me very badly, even when I am not at the moment able to experience fear, and even though I do trust you not to - use that information against me. But I - I think we can talk about it now, if you have thoughts.: 

:I've been trying to turn my questions into - specific questions, that have answers, or at least could have answers. I can - tell you the questions I've come up with so far, though you don't have to answer them - I'm really not trying to answer the question 'did you do something wrong', I'm trying to figure out - a rule that I would follow, or tell my people to follow, or teach in my church, that gets good results and not bad ones.: And she'll send him the questions: 

Did Ma'ar have justified confidence that his immortality method wasn't going to distort him or create a monster.

Did Ma'ar have a good rule for deciding when to kill innocent people? Are there modifications to it that she thinks would perform better.

Was Ma'ar trying to act on his best guess of the right thing, or lying to himself about that. She thinks she knows the answer to that one.

If more people used Ma'ar's decision rule, would things be better, or would they be worse.

Is there some identifiable subset of people who should use Ma'ar's decision rule. 

Ma'ar...feels like he's in the middle of re-evaluating a lot of things, and is not sure his cached thoughts on the tradeoff he was making are going to end up being ones he still endorses. 

He thinks he had reasonably justified confidence that his method wouldn't distort him and certainly wouldn't do so in the direction of 'not caring about other people' - he doesn't think he keeps 'caring about other people' in a place where losing a lot of memories, or half-inheriting someone else's procedural memory and emotions, would alter it - but the information he had may or may not be convincing to Iomedae. They were starting from different priors; he didn't have a large number of examples of people trying for immortality and ending up distorted. 

He does have a higher standard for when it's reasonable to kill innocent people by direct action than for when it's reasonable to kill enemy combatants attacking his country, because this seems like an important policy to have, and because he's significantly been trying to set policies that others in Predain can follow. He - overall isn't sure how much it makes sense to think about it differently from innocent people dying because he failed to act. A lot of innocent people die. He wouldn't, in fact, kill one innocent person - or one convicted criminal - in order to save two or even ten others in expectation, because the math is hard and there's huge uncertainty and so he wants bigger numbers than that. But in any case where his final backup immortality came into play, there were likely to be thousands of innocent children dying, and it - doesn't, really, feel like an incomparably worse thing, for a child to die of being kicked out of their body by their immortal ancestor than to die of starvation. 

(Also, the trigger is set for around when a child's mage-gift is activating. Thirteen or fourteen. Plenty of thirteen or fourteen-year-olds cannot entirely be described as innocent. ...This is possibly a Predain-flavored opinion. Ma'ar doesn't bring it up.) 

He doesn't think he was lying to himself, and he spent a lot of time and ink and paper on pinning down all of the considerations where he couldn't quietly fudge them in his head, but it's probably a good idea to sit down later and think about it with the headband, which makes it much harder to lie to himself. 

...Probably most people should not use Ma'ar's decision process here. That does seem like a major strike against it. In a world like Iomedae's, arguably nobody should. In a world like his...well, the outside view is that most people who want to attempt it are going to be wanting to do so for bad reasons, probably?

Ma'ar does not generally make ethical choices based on what things look like, or what policies would generalize well, or whether from a god's-eye view most of the people who want to do something should do it. He knows what he cares about, and he's mostly trusted his inside-view reasoning on the tradeoffs. Significantly less, right now, because he just made some major updates, but - his goal is to reach a place where he can put weight on that again, not to replace his own internal sense of right and wrong with a set of policies that he would be happy for everyone to follow. He expects to make very different decisions if he's working with Iomedae and her people, but - mostly because it changes the tradeoffs he faces, the resources available to him and the costs he pays for doing things that most people would find horrifying, it's - not a change on a deeper level than that. 

He feels like there might be a category here. He would tentatively include 'hypothetical Iomedae born in Predain' in that category. He's not sure how else to define it. 

:I think a lot about - who I would want using a given decision process. It's okay if the answer is 'literally just me, I'm better at it than they are', that's sometimes the answer. The set of people I'd want trying to unleash a superweapon in Hell is relatively small. But it's - important for noticing how much the plan relies on my own judgment and what bad things will happen if I'm emulated by people who only mostly understand.:

:...I think you have a higher expectation than I do that - people will try to follow you, including in - trying to figure out your underlying decision process, including the parts that are not obvious?  - For the immortality contingency plan in particular, I had not expected anyone would or could emulate me, given how you are the first person I told of it and that - as far as I know this is magic I invented for the first time. At least here in Velgarth.: 

:And that is relevant to - how much you have to worry 'foolish people emulating you' will be a problem! But - 

- you want people to emulate you, in the long run. That's how you get - allies, enough help to actually fix the worlds. And that means teaching them your decision processes.:

That seems right.

It's not something he's thought about it that much detail before. Because it hadn't felt a real option, yet, to find those allies, and it hadn't felt like the lack of it would be his main bottleneck for a long time. Ma'ar is pretty sure that he's thought about some of those same considerations, but - for a hypothetical future that he's not sure his gut believed would ever happen, and that's exactly the sort of place where self-deception is easiest. 

:I know a lot of secrets, but none of them are secrets that would change my allies' assessment of my character or decision processes, if they came out. It would - feel a bit like betraying people, to have their trust wrongly because I had a secret that would change how they saw me.

I don't think any of this would necessarily have been a reasonable priority for you, to be clear. I'm just- describing why I do it.:

:That makes sense. ...I think Predain is different? I am used to thinking that keeping secrets - separate from telling lies, which is much worse - is not the kind of thing that anyone would consider a serious betrayal. I - think everyone I have ever worked with would have assumed I was keeping secrets, because it would be stupid not to.:

:No one at home would be surprised to learn that I was - keeping military secrets, or that I was keeping something secret because it had been told to me in confidence, no matter what the secret was, or that I had done something the reasons for which were secret and didn't want the fact it had happened spread around without the context. But they - 

- would be very surprised and, I think, meaningfully betrayed, if I were pursuing lichdom.:

Lichdom. The concept conveyed in Mindspeech isn't one that fits clearly into anything known in Velgarth's magic, but - the pieces are there, from his conversation with Iomedae a few minutes ago. Standard and widely known methods of immortality, that are also known to distort you. Golarion has that history and that concept. Velgarth doesn't. Velgarth's magic works differently, such that immortality is - either it's harder or they've just had less time to develop it, he's not sure - and also the obvious methods, the ones that would come before his final contingency, are very unlikely to distort one's values. 

Would his people feel betrayed, if they learned that Kiyamvir Ma'ar had figured out how to live forever, to come back and keep leading their kingdom, but only by stealing the bodies of his own children? He's not sure. Opinions would be mixed. It would probably depend a lot on how well and how quickly he succeeded at - whatever he would have been planning to do and how obviously it strengthened Predain, in his hypothetical next life. 

- he's not sure how to feel about that. Urtho's people would feel betrayed, if Urtho did something like that. 

:I think that matters, but - it's not the only thing that matters. It's all considerations to weigh, kinds of trust you want to have and kinds you can't reasonably aspire to have - there are some paladin orders that would never order their soldiers on a suicide mission, and I would, because that's not a kind of trust I decided was worth the costs of losing the option.:

...It feels like the entire concept of a suicide mission must be different, in a world that has afterlives, and where presumably anyone Iomedae is giving orders will be going to the non-horrible one. 

That's probably missing the point.

And he's abruptly not in the mood to keep having this conversation, which is frustrating and confusing and probably very useful and productive and he can think about it sometime later. Maybe when he's wearing the headband again. 

:- Iomedae. I– is this, the thing I told you, going to - change things with us. How you feel about me.: 

Because they're currently in a safe shielded room - his bedroom, even - and despite everything he's noticing that this is perhaps a good opportunity for having sex. Thought it would be very reasonable on Iomedae's part to not be in the mood. 

: - I haven't thought through how I think about my general principles here, but I -

 - honestly I sort of thought there might be something like this. Not because of anything to do with you. Just - general starting assumptions. So I don't - feel differently about you than when I guessed there was maybe something like this.:

:...Do you want a minute to think about your general principles? Before - well, I very much want to start kissing you, and we are not currently at a holy site of the Nameless God, and - probably the main reason I wanted to wait to - go further than kissing - was because we really needed to have this conversation first. But. Now we have done that.:

:Ah. - yes, I think I want a minute to think about my principles, just to feel like I laid that to rest instead of getting distracted from it. And then I'm all yours, insofar as that's a romantic thing people say which carries only romantic implications and not broader strategic ones; I remain all mine in every broader context.:

Ma'ar likes Iomedae so much and appreciates so many things about her, including her dedication to her principles, and he will give her a minute. Very patiently. It's taking some effort and restraint but these are both things he's already decided he should work on for other reasons.