"Abaddon offers oblivion for most; food for the very hungriest."

"Hell is the Lawful Evil afterlife and unlike the Abyss or Abbadon, will not send you to oblivion. Should you be judged Evil and want to continue existing, you want to also be judged Lawful. Or Neutral and choose Hell, since Pharasma objects to oblivion. We also offer instruction and perfection of your myriad mortal flaws, the chance to participate in useful industry, and advancement opportunities, all under the auspices of Asmodeous, God of among other things, well defined contracts."

"The Maelstrom is infinite. All the Chaotic planes are infinite, but Elysium and the Abyss have a theme. The Maelstrom, the Chaotic Neutral afterlife, has everything, and it's all within reach. You can be anything.

When you arrived, the news caught the interest of the Maelstrom, and various creatures lent their attention, their memories of past trials, their lawyerly personalities... and I was created, Advocate for Maelstrom. Or rather, I was reassembled. When I return, it will not be my death, but just a change, and eventually another case will bring me forth again to continue this thread of life.

So. If you like being alive, we're the most alive."

"If you want to be actually free, free of the gods setting rules and expectations on everything, free of demon lords trying to eat you, and also still meaningfully the same person as you are now in a couple hundred years, you want Elysium. It's a wild place, infinitely so, and that means you can just walk away from bullshit instead of having to cope with it. Good so that we just let people be, and don't eat each other for no reason, and that Elysium contains some things people actually care about. Chaotic so that there aren't any stupid kings or temples or sets of social mores designed by committee that end up incredibly constricting and confusing and kind of Evil most of the time telling you what to do, but not quite as chaotic as the Maelstrom. You can just wander places, and see cool things, and meet interesting people, and then wander somewhere else when you get sick of it. But I'm not your dad. Do what you want."

"The Abyss, the Chaotic Evil afterlife, is for fighting. Winning. Crushing and consuming. Come test yourself in the only game that ever matters, with the highest stakes and greatest victories. Yes, you might be destroyed painfully in the maw of a greater demon. Would you want it any other way?"

"The Boneyard, the Neutral afterlife, is where you are now. Sometimes Neutral people stay here for a while until they have more of an alignment and leave to the corresponding plane. The Boneyard is also the permanent home of True Neutral people, including scholars, artisans, custodians of nature, tricksters, and especially those involved in collecting, guarding, and judging souls.

Your experience working with the resurrection trees of your home universe intrigues me. Here, you could continue a similar task, of similarly vast importance."

"Heaven is the Lawful Good afterlife. Nirvana and Axis already spoke of Good and Law. I would only clarify a few points.

Yes, Heaven strives to have no Evil. If that dismays you, I beseech you to check if you truly wish for Evil, or merely for things that don't fit the stereotype of selfless toil. Heaven, and all the Good planes, have a place for ambition, greed, sadism, power, satisfaction. Evil means that you fundamentally want the world to be worse off. Good means that you want people to thrive and be happy. If Heaven made our own people miserable, that would defeat the whole point.

Heaven is not just for fighting Evil. You can have a quiet Lawful life with your friends. You can make works of art that inspire. There are people you can organize, comfort, or heal.

Our outsiders usually do appear to embody the stereotype of selfless toil, but that is a course we choose for ourselves, which fulfills and delights us, not a burden of forced conformance."

"The option to say 'fuck this, I'm out' like you seem to want to on some level may or may not be available depending on the judge's decision."

"I see. Assuming lying is impossible here..." She glances at the judge. "Well, I will consider all this carefully."

Axis sounds most reasonable to her, honestly, followed by Elysium, followed by Nirvana. At least at first blush; They could all be deceiving her quite strongly, and a shining city - like the Black Empire, that was torn away, like Amenta- Does sound more like what she wants eternity to be than vast wilderness.

There's some part of her that has a tiny sick thrill at the thought of the Abyss. Could she kill a horrible giant elephant thing, with enough preparation and skill...? But, no, that's her blood talking, the same fighting impulse all Dwellin seem to have, and it's quite different if they won't come back.

"The original question, what do I know of our souls? Well, largely speculation with no way to verify any of it- I was one of very few serious scholars on the matter, we don't tend to keep written records." Damned gods. "The soul as we understand it is not a physical thing, it's more like a record of a person's experiences and the - pattern of themselves, their personalities, their skills and tics and unconscious mannerisms, their cached reactions and associations. A babe touched to the Soul Well will, some ninety-nine times out of one hundred, receive a soul and grow up as a person who already once existed, growing up and remembering more and more over time. One in one hundred, they are left to develop a wholly new soul, becoming a new person - it's quite distinct and obvious from about a year and a half of age. But reincarnated persons can remember specific locations of buried caches, carry grudges from past lives, and learn the same sorcery life after life should they eat sorcerer-stones again. When a person touches the soul well, their current state is recorded and stored. If they die, or if they are out of contact for too long, eventually their stored pattern as of the last time they touched the Well will come up for reincarnation, generally geographically close to where they lived."

"They're not lying."

"Your souls sound completely different from ours, not like souls at all, but like a life copied from one person to the next with Scribe's Binding - that's a spell that turns someone into a book, which can be copied or edited. Under Maelstrom vs Ndaya 0454, mind-affecting spells are given no special deference, so we should be judging her 'most recent life' as she perceives it, which is in fact the creature before us."

"That is not the creature before us. What we have is a thing resembling a Pharasmin soul, not a text. If that is a direct import from her universe, we judge the soul. If that is a container for a 'text' made by whatever process brought her here as an attempt at translating between universes, we judge the creature it represents as Heaven proposed."

"We might not be able to tell.

If we judge her memories of past lives, we create an incentive to distort memories, which flies in the face of Ndaya. Even without deliberate distortions, memories are unreliable. For example, people remember a moment of shame more vividly than a hundred quiet kindnesses."

"And remember themselves more righteously than they actually acted."

"Ooh, what if this is a test?"

"Then we judge exactly as if this were real."

"We're already relying entirely on her memories, which may be completely fabricated."

"Your point?"

(Abaddon had been thinking that all this fighting about evaluating memory is a waste of time and she smells edible so how about this problem disappear the fast way.)

"We don't even know if she's actually from another universe. Maybe this is an attack meant to waste our time."

"Are there any other points before we begin actually considering her alignment? I'm still undecided about what parts of her life, if any, are in our jurisdiction, but we can come back to that after we know more."

"We can see if spells and soul-affecting detection effects affect her normally."

"I would like to ask the court what precisely a soul is so that we can consider things correctly. For example, In re Constantine, that it is Evil to interfere with Pharasma's judgement, should not apply if her people's patterns are not souls according to the court- Or simply because they would not, normally, be subject to Pharasma's judgement. This trial is clearly an exception to the usual course of things."

"In re Degurechaff, 2113. Degurechaff suddenly entered Pharasma's Creation from outside it, and the court decided that she would be judged normally, that is, her actions from before in, for example, arranging the killing of civilians in wartime and committing acts of cruelty towards her subordinates, contributed strongly to the shape of her soul and future decisions. Making her Evil." 

"We already know that her soul doesn't properly work with the transcription spell made by Pharasma Herself... but maybe that's optimized only for Pharasmin souls. We can get a Shoki to take a look?"

"Bailiff, please fetch a Shoki and someone to run future errands for us."