"Forgive me, I need to ask a background question to make sense of the situation."

"Is Heaven a real place? What happens when people die, in your world?"

To Ramona, Heaven is a comforting story that could, in theory, be true in her own world, but it's impossible to know. Alfirin seems to be speaking about it with confidence. It sort of doesn't matter if it's real, but it does matter if Alfirin believes in it, because it's the running alternative to immortality.

"Heaven is a real place. When one dies, generally speaking, one is judged in the court of Pharasma. The judge determines whether they have been Good or Evil, Lawful or Chaotic; their souls then go to one of eight afterlives, Heaven for people who are both Lawful and Good, Axis for people who are Lawful and neither Good nor Evil, and so on. People who are neither Good nor Evil nor Lawful nor Chaotic - mostly children - are kept in the Boneyard until they have developed enough - character - to be judged.

The afterlives for Evil people are generally understood to be pretty horrible places to exist, and the Good ones pleasant places to exist by most standards. It is not known whether this is solely caused by the quality of the company."

Well that was quite a download. Ramona couldn't immediately track all of it, too many interrelated culture-specific concepts all in one blob, and she doesn't have time to pick through it all slowly and make sure she understands all of it. Alfirin believes Heaven is real, that's an important piece; and that you can end up in a variety of bad places instead.

"Does everyone go to an afterlife? Or does anyone just... stop existing?"

"Almost everyone goes to an afterlife, though some souls are stolen from the River of Souls and devoured, and most souls that go to Abbadon - Neutral Evil - are devoured, and there are rare magicks that will destroy a soul."

"Okay. I think I have the basic idea."

"So... help me understand your options here. It sounds like dying doesn't entail stopping existing... but you might end up somewhere favorable or somewhere unfavorable. You'd like to opt out of the afterlives entirely and keep existing as a living human. But the methods for immortality are evil."

"I am sure I missed some steps that will make all of this make sense... but why not simply live one lifespan as a good person and then go to a good afterlife? What do you miss out on?"

Ramona can see that once you start down the evil immortality path it might be hard to get back to a good afterlife. Is the problem that Alfirin's already gone too far?

The problem is that that would involve acknowledging that Pharasma has power and also admitting that 'Good' is reasonably descriptive of what Alfirin cares about. Iomedae doesn't say this, it wouldn't be helpful. She and Alfirin have had this conversation to death; Ramona having it might go differently. 

"I miss out on most of my ability to influence the material plane, which is where many of the people and things I care about now are located. I also - don't like very many Good people or Good institutions, such that I expect the Good afterlives to be notably worse experiences for me than for most people who go there, though still mostly better than the Evil ones. But mostly because it would be - giving into coercion, of a sort, to choose any of my actions according to whether the Judge will reward or punish me for them."

"Is the Judge unfair, or capricious, or has wrong values by your lights? Or do you just resent having an entity above you, extorting certain kinds of behavior?"

"Being non-consensually judged sounds infuriating, but all the more so if the Judge's values are unlike your own, such that awareness of the judgment might warp your behavior."

"I don't think She is generally capricious. I think she is fair, by her standards. Her values - or, rather, the things She categorizes as Good - are empirically not the same as the things I've done in my life... I would not generally say that Her values or judgments are wrong, but they do seem to be different from my own and that contributes to my resentment of being subject to them... I would of course still resent Her if She made Her judgments according to values very similar to mine."

"I see. That makes a lot of sense to me. I wouldn't care for it, either."

"So, as I understand it, you've decided to opt out of being judged, by never dying. And that way, the Judge's opinions don't affect you. You have other reasons for wanting to stay alive, as well, including your ability to affect the land of the living, but -- and tell me if I've misunderstood -- steering around the Judge is the biggest reason. Is that right?"

"I believe it is the biggest reason, though I think I would still pursue immortality if judgment were somehow not a concern."

"Oh really? Why is that?"

"The aforementioned inability to act on the Material, personal incompatibility with most of the afterlives available, and some other less important things... Magic as I practice it does not work for dead people, though if that were the only obstacle, Arazni solved it for herself and I suspect I could too, with some research time."

Ramona had a half-baked idea, a minute or two ago. She wanted to point out to Alfirin that being evil to avoid being judged was still letting the Judge warp Alfirin's behavior. It sounds like coming to terms with Judgment would be insufficient to solve the problem, though, there are too many considerations here.

Alfirin has considered her options and said "nah" to death, and she has many interleaving reasons for her decision.

"All right, thank you for patiently explaining. I realize that you're both very intelligent and have been thinking about these questions for a long time. It's unlikely I'm going to find a solution you overlooked in my first five minutes of trying. Even so, I think it's worth double-checking your reasoning."

"Can we go back to the part where Arazni -- an alive version of Arazni -- could potentially help get you immortality without you committing evil acts in the process? It sounded like you thought the evil would just be shifted from you to someone else, but I couldn't quite track what the proposal was. Would you mind explaining it?"

"Outsiders - like Arazni - have limited ability to act on the material plane. I don't know the exact details of how it works, so take this as informed guesswork rather than a definitive explanation, but - It seems likely that there was some agreement made, among representatives of the gods and the outer planes, that limited the total impact each could have. There were things Arazni would not tell us, not because she did not know, not because they were secret, but because - I infer - her telling us would count against the things She was allowed to do, or the things agents of Nirvana were allowed to do, or both. She was very smart, and very wise, and I think very practiced at thinking about this constraint in particular, so I think she was - efficient, or close to it. If She helped me become immortal, that would mean there was some circumstance elsewhere in the world where She or Nirvana or Aroden would have acted but would be unable to, because She chose to help me instead. And because She is efficient, I would expect that intervening in that situation would achieve at least as much of Arazni's values as helping me become immortal, and likely much more."

"I see." Ramona thinks for a moment. "Or, at least, I begin to see, a little bit."

She pauses to consider.

And then shakes herself a bit. She's seen this before. Maybe?

"When you broke up... was it all about the future? Was it about things Alfirin might do, that Iomedae might have to try to stop her from doing, or enforce laws against? Had anything bad actually happened yet?"

"I was only concerned with the future when I left, and I think Iomedae was also solely concerned with the future when she broke up with me, but there appears to be some disagreement about who broke up with whom so I'm not confident I am representing her position correctly."

"That's also my understanding. I would feel differently about it if I knew of specific harms that were in the past, instead of just - unbounded potential future harms that look hard to avoid."

Ramona feels for the first time like she might see a track she'll be able to follow for more than a minute or two. This may be a dead end, as well, but there's something here to look harder at.

"I think I would like to zoom in on the breakup itself." Er, that phrase maybe doesn't translate very well? "That is, take a closer, slower look at the day or the hour when you stopped being a couple with a potential future, even if it was a confusing one."

"Alfirin, you said that 'things came up' and that you left. And Iomedae, you said you broke up with her. How much time elapsed between 'things coming up' and the relationship ending?"

"A day, or thereabouts? It was - the same conversation we were having here just now. Immortality. What I'd do for it and why -"

"I found it very upsetting, because - it felt as if I had spent most of my adult life witnessing the wreckage of people being willing to rip apart others' lives for immortality, and I had thought we were in agreement about how awful that was. I felt angry at Alfirin for - being willing to become something that I thought she'd never be willing to live under. I felt - I kept dwelling on the possibility she would fail and go to Hell. I kept thinking I'd have to go there and get her out. I realized, obviously, that I couldn't - couldn't plan to do that, couldn't be someone who'd do that - and ultimately it didn't really seem to be something I knew how to do, to hold Alfirin closer than everything else in the world if I didn't trust what she'd do with the strength I wanted to lend her -

- I tried to say all of that but gently, and I don't think I communicated very well at all, and then she left, and I was in pieces, and mourned for a few years, and came to terms with the fact that you don't get to fix all your mistakes, and made a bunch of rules so I wouldn't make them again."

Most people, when they relive the moment of a breakup, especially one they grieve as much as this one, will get emotional about it all over again. Iomedae is always in control, but that speech seemed to rip something out of her all over again. Alfirin, is, as always, hard to read.

This is not a moment to go too fast.

Ramona will wait, silently, steadily, holding the focus but not doing anything with it yet.

How do her clients look? Do they need a moment?  Do they have more to say, to Ramona, or each other?

Iomedae would be looking at Alfirin except she doesn't know if Alfirin wants her to see her, so she's looking instead at nothing in particular. She does not usually indulge wishing things that had already happened would happen differently - it doesn't usually seem very useful, compared to having Marit write an analysis of everything you did wrong - but she wishes that she'd been clearer in that conversation. Maybe it would have helped.

"Oh, that's what - 

I think, if it matters at all, that I had decided to leave before that conversation. For - for the reasons I mentioned before, that it wasn't fair to you to keep pursuing a relationship when - I was willing to become something horrible, do horrible things if that's what it took -"