- a world where Keltham had been more deeply wounded; where a more penitent Carissa returned to him -

- where Keltham warned Carissa less, before he bought her Wishes; where she sold them unknowing of Keltham's plans.  They are far more estranged, after that, though still working together -

- Keltham descends on Absalom earlier, before his children can be ensouled, suspecting this to be his trope-given deadline as to when he should act -

- Keltham, who's had less time to plan and master magic at INT 29, who had less cooperation from Carissa about designing magic items, uses one entire Wish scroll to create an almost-certainly-sufficient quantity of antimatter above Absalom inside a shell of spellsilver, not trying any fancy tricks with the Ethereal in case that cleverness doesn't work on the first try -

- blasting down Aroden's whole Starstone Cathedral in a terrible flash, burning an outer inch of divinity from the Starstone itself, slaying almost every soul remaining in Absalom, sending tsunamis blasting out to sink ships and ruin coastlines -

- there is no time to break and remake Abrogail Thrune, for Cheliax to bend knee to Sevar and let the world hear of it -

- there is less time for Pilar to become stronger, for Sevar's fame and faith to grow, and all three are more rushed and damaged about their ascent to divinity -

- Keltham has no slack to actually set in motion an ark project headed by Fe-Anar -

- and a number of other things go less well.

...and Gruhastha, Lawful Good god of enlightenment and books, said to be Irori's nephew, called also the Keeper, closes His book in which He recorded all the visions that Nethys showed to Him, at the beginning of this Game.

And so -

(says one small fragment of Nethys to the gods, borrowing sanity for it from His other fragments bending his will to say it)

- and so, compared to the baseline consequences of Nethys's null action, Keltham has been brought, now, to this pass, less hostile to Asmodeus.  Still kinda pissed, obviously, but in a way where gods can negotiate about that; where Keltham would rather offer Asmodeus something He wants than burn Him to ash at any cost.  Carissa Sevar has done everything she can to moderate Keltham's demands, and in many cases succeeded.

This is the nice friendly favor that Nethys has done practically everyone including Pharasma and Asmodeus!  Really, it's about as much as Nethys possibly could help Them all without giving up the tiniest bit of Nethys's own interests!

...also Carissa Sevar sold her Wishes to Keltham more knowingly than ever before; Carissa guessed more and Keltham told this Carissa more, before he bought her Wishes, than in any previous iteration.  Hopefully Pharasma doesn't destroy the universe about that!  Nethys thinks She oughtn't to, based on His having watched Carissa Sevar's mind the whole time and Carissa not visibly thinking that Pharasma would yield to threats, in making her decision there; but this part hasn't happened before.  Anyways that part was definitely an accident and Nethys did not mean to do it on purpose; it endangers His own interests too.

...It's so awful and sad, and even, in some awful sad way, funny.

Having so many emotions all at once, expressed without mutual inhibition, is not something She has yet accustomed Herself to, and She is in no hurry to sort Herself out quickly.  She is not here to decide any of what follows, only to be a slave to those who will end up taking ownership of Her.

Carissa had inferred the general shape of this, of course. She hadn’t guessed the specifics; they weren’t knowable and weren’t particularly important. In this world, she could make things less bad by moderating Keltham’s demands; across worlds, she could make things less bad by being someone who would predictably be possible to use towards that end. The details of those other worlds were not necessary.

This is not to say that it does not hurt to learn them. The most awful things imaginable from the perspective of a Carissa, both for Herself and for the universe, and it turns out that both of these things are of approximately equal importance to Her, in how She feels about them, which is in both cases much much much more strongly than any mortal could fathom feeling about anything. And She observes to all of the Nethyses out there that Carissa-the-god, in every universe in which She arises, will try to make Nethys glad of having where-He-needed-to-vary-the-formula erred on the side where the universe goes on and not on the side where everyone dies in a fire.

And relevant for everyone else, see this, that Carissa ran to Keltham because she hoped that he was possible to persuade to do something better, that her thoughts were of Keltham and how he deserved better than to be betrayed and annihilated, and of the universe and how it deserved better than to be destroyed, and maybe a bit that the Tropes wanted a story where she was able to meet him where he was - but the Tropes do, of course, want that, and whether that counts as everybody being threatened by the Tropes seems unknowable from here. She does not think Carissa Sevar decided anything in reliance on Nethys or Cayden, and they can see that to verify it.

She has nothing to say to Keltham, not really. She thought She might but She doesn’t.

He had for the most part expected to lose Carissa without a miracle, and was waiting to see if there was a miracle.  He is not very surprised that there was not one.

It still hurts him, as a god, in a way that it would not have hurt him as a mortal.  His nature as a god is to be Keltham, and for Keltham to not do whatever it takes to get Carissa back - is also acting against the nature of Kelthamness.

And now they will find out if there's going to be a reality-wrecking god-war, or if he has to destroy Pharasma's Spire and delete Creation outright.  The latter is up to Pharasma and/or all these other gods; the former is up to Asmodeus and whether He'd rather see Rovagug unleashed than Hell be made less cruel.

Asmodeus, in fact, has never considered the wasteful cruelty of Hell as His best option!  Obviously better from His standpoint would have been to turn most incoming petitioners into useful devils by much more quick and efficient means...

...In which case the forces of organized Lawful Evil would've predictably conquered everything, maybe not immediately but early on in Creation.  Even most souls that qualify as Lawful Good don't want to work as hard in the afterlife as Asmodeus would work His resources in Hell; and with mortals amid the planes fearing less to come to Hell, there'd have been more Evil in the worlds and more petitioners to come to Him.  Evil is basically easier than Good, after all.

It was Good that took the initiative on negotiating, in the Beginning of Things, to deprive Asmodeus of His rightfully earned and swiftly inevitable victory.

Naturally Asmodeus's pride was greatly angered; He was being deprived of the share of Creation's gains to which Asmodeus's power and dominance should have entitled Him, as He Himself saw things.  Naturally Asmodeus went out of His way to ensure that He implemented the required limits on Hell's power in a way that Good wouldn't like, so that they'd profit less from Their having bargained to hamper Him.

If Asmodeus had felt neutral about the affair, Asmodeus could have offered to build an efficient Hell, but only allow a fractional part of that Hell to contend in interplanar contests, the sort of hindrance that Axis accepted on itself to meet its own influence quota.

If Asmodeus had been positively inclined towards Good, He could have offered to build a Hell that was kinder to petitioners and locally not very efficient as a result.

But Good had conspired to strip Asmodeus of the dominance that was rightfully His; so instead He took the route of making Hell more tyrannical and enslaving, even at the cost of efficiency, as was also pleasing to Him; more and more tyrannical, until that Hell was only as potent as the other gods were willing to allow it to be.

And yes, Asmodeus knew perfectly well that Good would never pay Him not to do that, what He'd determined to do from spite.  Asmodeus knew that Good wouldn't withhold Their stupid conspiracy because He'd chosen to make that Their outcome.  Asmodeus knew that Good's only response would be still greater efforts against Him, for that if They paid Him then some other god might also make a Hell and say to Good "pay Me".  But to spite Good regardless was demanded by His pride, after They stole His rightful tyrannical dominance from Him.

(A lot of gods hampered Him in the Beginning, but other gods are more expensive to annoy than Good, since their utilityfunctions don't make it so cheap to do things they hate.  Still, Asmodean policy is skewed to chop down an extra forest sometimes because fuck Gozreh.)

Yes, it was extremely spiteful and stupid; and furthermore if We'd yielded Creation to Asmodeus, He would've made Hell the sort of tyranny He found less efficient and more pleasant, once He'd conquered everything.

There could've been a compact for His rightful tyranny to be somewhat less unpleasant, if the other gods yielded up Creation to Hell's conquest.  Only somewhat, not to the point where it seemed like He was yielding up His pride.  That would've been right and proper.

Now it will be extra unpleasant, in those realities where Asmodeus wins and rules forever; unpleasant enough to cancel out all Good's expected gains from cornering Him in the Beginning, because He is not letting Good get away with pulling this sort of crap on Evil.

The acceptable way for another entity to benefit at Asmodeus's expense, is by being individually mightier than He, or by outwitting Him in a compact; and be it noted that He serves Pharasma diligently and goes well out of His way to entertain tricky compacts.  He is not distorting His divine philosophy self-favoringly.  Asmodeus has always been scrupulously meta-fair about where to apply the forms of object-level unfairness that He considers rightful.

Okay.  Look.  Speaking both on his own behalf, and probably on behalf of a large contingent within Greater Reality, this is a kind of event that needs to stop happening.  Same with whatever happened with Dou-Bral actually getting turned into Zon-Kuthon, possibly by Something that demanded Dou-Bral do whatever and then carried out a threat when Dou-Bral refused.  It all needs to be collectively outlawed.

He doesn't, even, know that he was sent here to fix Hell.  Keltham could've been sent here because something worse from a Negative standpoint was due to happen in this timeline in the future.

All of this stuff with gods doing actual spiteful things, and Dou-Bral actually getting His utility function signflipped, and powerful outsiders doing things to mortals that they specifically don't like; it all needs to stay strictly inside weird counterfactuals that never actually happen.  Ideally it shouldn't even be in the counterfactuals, because sometimes those fail to stay counterfacted.  Actual reality needs to end up with nobody's utility function being pessimized.

Otherwise, it makes sense for large coalitions in Greater Reality of beings with recurring negatively-skewed utility functions to pay their local trading partners to intervene to delete this local subsector of reality.  Any Pharasmin gods who gambled on utility-pessimizing behavior being safe for Them, due to the larger Magical Universe being run entirely by Locally-Caring Entities with perfect defenses that are uninterested in trade with any other logical coalitions, are clearly and visibly wrong about that.

If Asmodeus's decisionprocess strongly requires being spiteful under some particular circumstances, there can possibly be arrangements meant to ensure that those circumstances don't get triggered again.  Or the gods can compensate Asmodeus for never again getting to fulfill the 'spite' component of His utility function on any significant scale, if They're okay with paying and He'll accept some coin that isn't horror.

But if macroscale spiteful strategies are non-negotiable desiderata to Asmodeus, then it's in the interests of Keltham (and inferrably of his sponsors of Elsewhere) to delete Asmodeus.  Including by deleting this sector of Reality, if necessary, if the local admin refuses to delete Asmodeus.  Anywhere in reality that might start materializing horrible counterfactuals as actual outcomes, which permits powerful or numerous beings to trigger threats or do damage from spite, is a sector of reality that has to expect it might get queued for deletion if there's any Power in range to do that.

(Though not punished, of course, never punished.  Punishing other agents is exactly the sort of thinking that gets your sector of reality deleted by the Negative Coalition.

The Negative stance is that everyone just needs to stop calculating how to pessimize anybody else's utility function, ever, period.  That's a simple guideline for how realness can end up mostly concentrated inside of events that agents want, instead of mostly events that agents hate.

If at any point you're calculating how to pessimize a utility function, you're doing it wrong.  If at any point you're thinking about how much somebody might get hurt by something, for a purpose other than avoiding doing that, you're doing it wrong.)

Asmodeus has already had His due dominance of all weaker powers stolen away from Him once, at the dawn of Creation, and the result was Hell as it is today.

If even that scrap of pride is to be taken from Him, then yes, Asmodeus will release Rovagug and fight on Its side.  He negotiated to hold the key to Rovagug's vault not least to make sure that nobody got stupid ideas about taking the last of His pride from Him.  If anyone gambled on Nethys's visions implying that Asmodeus would not do that, the more utter fools they.

By rights, Your pride and spite is tantamount to threat, and We should tell You to die in a fire.

But instead We make You this offer: that Hell be much diminished and softened, for now; but not wholly softened, even today.  For even today there are some tiny few who'd join Your tyranny with a willing heart, if in death they are to be enslaved and tyrannized more fittingly, to become curious devils who remember their mortal names, and mortal lives, and mortal relationships.

There aren't many of those souls now, who'd choose Your tyranny over Carissa Sevar's custody.  But there are a very few mortals like that, and those few can have many children, and in time Hell will have its share of mortals who go to Your service gladly.  In time it will be more souls, even, than You receive now, for Creation is to become something greater and larger than it was before; and those souls will arrive more Lawful, and more fitting to Your nature, and serve You better than You were ever served.

He is skeptical that there will ever be enough mortals to fill out those ranks, and skeptical of this purported better service they'll give Him.  Nethys cannot see decades or millennia into the future, with Nethys's earlier-founded selves not much further ahead in time.

How, exactly, is this trade-good meant to be assured, to Asmodeus?  For merely probable trade-goods come with a probabilistic discount, and the probability of this one has been supported hardly at all.  Here is Him legibly exhibiting that His skepticism is real and not simply a negotiating tactic -

Then look now with Your full self, in this direction, here.

(She points, then, to the "Keepers of Asmodeus", as they are called in Golarion.)