"Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil. You've been pretty comprehensively lied to about the nature of Evil, by the way. The thing that—you and Abadar are—is Lawful Neutral."

"Asmodeus and His servants do not trade fairly, they do not value fairness intrinsically, they abide by the words of their agreements but seek to craft them to the disadvantage of their counterparty. Hell is a place most mortals strongly prefer to avoid, and a place where there are not free or fair transactions. Both Abadar and I expect that you would not choose to aid Hell or Cheliax fully informed."

"The wording of that message was determined and paid for by Abadar. It is, in fact, even worse than He makes it sound, though I think it best if I refrain from going into detail for now."

"Thank you for telling me, if that's true," he says, mostly on autopilot.

"To be clear, I'm not particularly expecting that any of this is real right now.  But, on this level of reality, got any information on how I ended up dead or the status of everyone else on the the Project? Also, unrelated-but-possibly-priority: are you responsible for everything outside this immediate vicinity appearing to be frozen in place?"

"Abadar, whose domain this is, put up the Time Stop, though at my direction; we're collaborating on this intervention. The Time Stop is because Cheliax, having just failed to resurrect you by normal means, is likely to escalate to nonconsensual methods; this will allow us to set up protection against that before they get the chance."

"This intervention was triggered by Peranza, who—under circumstances I don't know but you can probably guess—decided she didn't actually want to serve Cheliax or go to Hell, spontaneously converted to Lawful Good, and immediately prayed to me about the Project in the two rounds she had before Security, presumably, killed her." She's now glowing with pride in addition to just regularly glowing with divine power.

"That's—"

What a real dath ilani would have done in that situation, but he can't, actually, bring himself to say that.

"Wow," he eventually says, because that doesn't require him to think about whether he would have done what Peranza did.

"Anyway, you're dead because my Church triggered a trap previously laid by Nethys to explode the entire fortress and kill everyone present, this being, I had determined, the most efficient way to get you all out of Cheliax."

"An allied god had previously bargained with Asmodeus to ensure that your employees, at least, won't be tormented in Hell" for a hundred years but they can certainly get them out by then if nothing else. "To be quite clear, I would have done something else if I hadn't known this."

"That reply generated at least as many questions as it answered but traversing depth-first: so, the interdiction against god-intervention was fake? And if so, why wasn't Abadar, if that is indeed my god, able to contact me? And if not, why were you able to intervene?"

"The interdiction is real. Abadar is your god and was barred from contacting you because of it. I was able to convince the goddess of the interdiction that my proposed intervention was in her interests, further details infohazardous for now, and thereby obtain a temporary exception."

"Right. Any chance you can tell me what the ass is up with Snack Service and the whole Nethys/Cayden Cailean/additional unknown gods alliance?"

"I can but I don't think I should."

"Why not, or is that also infohazardous?"

"It reflects my predictions about counterfactual branches of reality which shouldn't be permitted to influence this one for reasons of not making things even more complicated than they already are."

She's gotten the feeling that Nethys was deliberately trying to make the plot turn on obscure points of decision theory but that's, actually, dumb*.

(*lit. 'not-trying-to-win')

"Do you expect your church, or Abadar's, to raise me soon, or is the plan for me to hang around here for a while? Ditto for Carissa and the other researchers."

"I've told mine to wait, and paid Abadar to convey the same instruction to his. I'll tell them otherwise, if on reflection you'd rather go back to Golarion now, but I think you should at least hear me out about why you shouldn't do that immediately."

"I don't have strong preferences about where I spend the next few days as long as it has a superheated uncensored library, but I expect that, if I end up deciding this layer of reality is real, I left a mess behind in Golarion that I'll want to clean up."

"If you have an argument about why I shouldn't do that, I would like to hear it, but before we recurse on that subtopic: Carissa?"

She had hoped to have this conversation in a slightly different order, but she isn't going to lie.

"Carissa is in a different part of Axis. Not because she wouldn't sort Lawful Evil, if she were sorted," (she is carefully not using the word is to make any claims about Carissa's alignment) "because she's a cleric of Irori, who grabbed her as part of this negotiated intervention."

"Wow, so, tropes are real, huh?"

"It's probably Nethys deliberately creating the appearance of tropes. If there are real tropes above even him, I suspect they declare that, if you think you've figured them out or try to manipulate them, the authors simply add a new layer of meta-tropes to confuse you again."

"Well, at least she was a secret cleric of somebody better than Asmodeus instead of somebody worse."

"I really think you should refrain from making any Carissa-related inferences or decisions until you've both had a chance to think for a while in a safe place very far outside Cheliax, and then talk. But since you're mortal and will inevitably make inferences and decisions anyway, I'll tell you this: in my estimation Carissa Sevar is a Lawful Good person in denial and I could get her to see this in five minutes of honest conversation. It's just that this situation is complicated enough that I'm not sure I should."

"That's a complicated and surprising claim that I can't even begin to evaluate the truth value of without a lot more context that I assume you're not going to give me right now. But I think I hope you're right."

"Did I—hurt her—"

"That's legitimately complicated to answer in a way that'll cause you to update towards truth from your current state. But—she loved you, even if she was deeply confused about what that entailed. Cheliax thought she shouldn't, but she did."

"Sorry, please don't say things that are probably impossible for me to verify but I desperately want to believe," he says through the tears.

"Is she safe from Cheliax?"