"I am already immortal and do not anticipate any other specific projects in the near future which you would want to stop if you could."

Oh.

She is - glad, she thinks. Mostly. It is the most complicated gladness she has ever felt. 

Ramona is having a little trouble tracking the conversation -- these clients have so much shared context that she lacks, and she doesn't have time to ask them a thousand questions until she actually knows what is going on. She'll do her best to stay afloat.

"Should I infer -- and please do not offer more specifics than seems appropriate -- that Alfirin, you have already committed some evil act, and having done so, you do not expect to do so again for a long time?"

"That is a reasonable inference."

- No, wait, she's supposed to be making a good-faith effort here, which means being less evasive and ambiguous than normal, and also having facial expressions.

"...Also a correct one."

Ramona nods at Alfirin, soberly. "Thank you."

Quite a lot of Ramona's hope for this pair routed through the idea that they could stay together for a while, until Alfirin started evildoing in earnest. It seems it is already too late for that.

On the other hand, she didn't put much weight on the idea that Iomedae would meaningfully distinguish between Alfirin intending to do evil and actually doing evil. That Alfirin has already taken a serious evil action collapses those two states together, and now they can just deal directly with the clash.

She turns to Iomedae.

"What does that signify for you? Is it a meaningful update?"

"Yes, definitely, I thought it was very unlikely she had a solution already. It's a very difficult problem, most people can't do it at all, and Alfirin's very unusually gifted but I wouldn't have expected she could fit it in around the Crusade. ...nor would I have expected she could have figured it out as young as she would have had to, to have done it before she came back to the Crusade...that isn't very important, I don't think. I consider it very good that Alfirin hasn't been - warped or changed in any way I have noticed - by whatever she did. I consider it very good that she'll live forever. I'm sad that people died, and I'm - sad that Alfirin - didn't feel like she could talk to me about it - and I'm worried for her because I believe murdering people is bad for her on her own terms. But. Mostly I suppose I'm relieved."

Alfirin had managed to convince herself to expect more or less that response, but it's still a relief to hear. Iomedae is probably right, that murdering people is bad for her, but she hadn't thought about it like that before. It seems - somewhat beside the point.

"So, Iomedae, it sounds like you don't consider that there was a step change in the way you are able to relate to Alfirin, now that this event has already occurred. In fact, you see more of an absence of a step change -- you feared that Alfirin's first major evil act would warp her, and as far as you can tell, it didn't. So that's good."

Ramona wants to chase the thread about murder being bad for Alfirin on her own terms, but she isn't sure if it's directly important to the relationship therapy, it's hard to tell. She'll mentally bookmark it and maybe come back to it later.

Should she pop up a level and go back to the question about when the first bad thing actually happens? No, not yet, she should spend more time here, this revelation is a big deal, she should let it breathe a little bit.

"Can you say more about the relief? What concern can you let go of now?"

"It seemed possible that, after the war, probably after I ascended, she would become a lich and I would have to stop her. And it seemed possible that if we discussed the matter too much she'd get nervous about working with me and leave, which is what happened last time, but would this time mean we lost the war. And it seemed possible that discovering what she is like in the future in the other timeline would destroy our working relationship, which - could still happen but seems much less likely given that she found a method of immortality that does not seem to have damaged her in a different manner than war and murder damage people."

Ramona doesn't have time for too many side quests here, but this one seems pretty important.

"What exactly is a lich? Is becoming immortal the same thing as becoming a lich?"

"It is a kind of undead. Becoming one is a voluntary process, and the most widely-known and accessible way for a wizard to become immortal. It wasn't what I did."

"Oh, I think I see. So some of the bad things you were worried about haven't happened, and I guess they won't happen. So there's less to worry about now. Is that right?"

"Yes. And nothing I do to help Alfirin will enable them, so there's no tension between making her more able to achieve her goals and doing right by other people. ...I am still very upset about the murders, to be clear, but I think that it is easier to figure out how to relate to something awful that happened than something awful that is going to happen and hasn't yet."

She nods. "Of course."

"All right. Worth noting that sometimes the problems we anticipate do get solved before it's too late. There's an old-fashioned saying on my world, 'When you see ten troubles coming down the road, nine will fall in the ditch before they get to you.' I'm not sure that ratio is quite right -- it didn't actually quite play out that way for the man who originally said those words -- but it's worth noting that sometimes things do work out, and it's possible to give up too soon."

Ramona will pause there and see how Iomedae and Alfirin react to that bold claim.

Iomedae seems to shift out of relationship-contemplating mode to consider it. "Obviously one should do planning for contingencies that will only arise one time in ten, if they'd be important if they happened, but I wouldn't say that, of problems I anticipate, only a tenth come to pass, if I'm not specifically trying to plan for unlikely contingencies?"

Ramona watched Iomedae click into battle commander mode with some amusement. She wouldn't want Iomedae to stay there throughout therapy, but it seems useful to access this mode now.

"When you broke up, these bad possibilities -- Alfirin becoming a lich, Alfirin becoming warped -- how likely did these possibilities seem? Almost inevitable? A coin flip? One in ten?"

"I think it seemed...more likely than not to me that she would find a method of immortality that distorted and changed her and led her down a damaging path. Lichdom is of course only one possible form of that, and the likeliest but probably less likely than all the others combined..."

"More likely than not. And also, that outcome would be so bad, that in that case, you needed to avoid being in a relationship with her at all costs? For example, you couldn't wait to see how things evolved, the possibility of eventual lichdom demanded an immediate breakup?"

"Not...exactly? It was more like - I realized that I did not have a principled account of what duties I had towards a lover, and it wasn't obvious that they were compatible with duties to protect other people from Alfirin that I did and do understand myself to have, and it wasn't obvious that I was in a state to sensibly identify them, which made it apparent that I shouldn't have tried to take a lover in the first place."

"Oh, I think maybe I understand. You were worried that your state of affection for Alfirin might lead you to engage in motivated reasoning? That you would fool yourself into thinking that all of the concerns could be navigated, when maybe in fact they could not."

"Are you in a better state now to reason about that?"

"Yes. I'm generally less foolish than when I was twenty-five. I think I've clarified a great deal of my reasoning around duty. And I don't think Shelyn would have asked me to do this if I wasn't competent to do right by Alfirin in doing it, though I'm not entirely sure about that because arguably doing right by Alfirin is incompatible with letting Shelyn have any input at all."

"Indeed, we'll have to check on that at some point!" But maybe not right now.

"Let's review where we are."

"I asked when the first real problem would arise, and you thought of several possibilities. When Alfirin needed to conceal information from Iomedae, when Alfirin started committing evil acts, when Iomedae ascends. You solved the first one by talking about it and figuring out how Iomedae would handle Alfirin's private information. The second one was already in the past, and was resolved in a problematic way, but not nearly as badly as you both suspected. And the third one, Iomedae ascending, is still far in the future at this point. In addition to that, Alfirin does not have immediate plans for more great evil."

"Is that a correct summary? Are there more potential trouble points?"

"The amount of evil I did in order to become immortal was within the range that I expected when I left the Crusade. But apart from that the summary seems accurate, supposing that we're ignoring for the moment the concerns about Shelyn, which does seem to be another trouble point."