“You were just discussing how this court doesn't consider mortals competent to write contracts it takes literally. Why then are we competent to sign them? The standard established in the Paizo case would require you to defer to a ‘reasonable’ interpretation of the signatory’s intent, and no reasonable person actually intends to agree to be tortured forever for any price.”

“Aktun Consolidated Insurance Co. v. Hell, -6401: any positive discount rate on future experiences implies that eternal torment has finite present disutility.”

“Immaterial,” snaps the judge, and then to Cansellarion: “Are you asking the court to invalidate the entire concept of soul sales?”

“Yes! Hell’s entire case was that everyone knows it’s bullshit—they were pretty much bragging about it—but that you’ve been affirming the bullshit so long that now you have to keep affirming it. Well, you don't actually have to. You could always, instead, stop.”

FUCK.

“I don’t actually have the authority to do that.” It would start a godwar.

“Your Honor,” says one of the archons, “Heaven would, actually, like to ask the court to reconsider its decision in Abarco, as well as other soul sales from Infernal Cheliax, which are already acknowledged to be marginally legal. We find the analogy to the Paizo standard to be a persuasive argument which has not, to our knowledge, been brought up in any previous case on soul sales.”

“You know what, you can file a separate suit about it if you can convince me you’d have thought of it without this trial to prompt you. No one would use the court system if the outcome of filing a lawsuit might be that you lose fifty thousand souls over a completely tangential argument.”

Yeah that’s unfortunately valid.

“Does Heaven wish to make any further statement on this matter?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Hell ‘paid’ for the soul of Cheliax with a series of so-called ‘investments’ which, by its own admission, it would have preferred to make even if it had received nothing in return. We do not claim that this fails to be a ‘trade’ by some abstract Abadaran definition.” Which may be the first time anyone has ever accused Hell of being too Abadaran. “We claim, rather, that to classify it as such under the law would make a mockery of the principle of mutually limited intervention on which the order of Creation is founded.”

“Hell claims, for example, to have invested in the education system of Cheliax. Let us be clear about what they mean by that. The state of the education system of Cheliax is that Hell has replaced it entire, in order to indoctrinate Chelish children in the false and poisonous philosophy of Asmodeanism—”

“Objection, Your Honor. Rule of Procedure 44.9 prohibits counselors from disparaging parties of another alignment by the standards of their own.”

“Sustained.”

“—in order to bring souls to Hell, while also educating them in wizardry at a scale which no country at Golarion’s ordinary level of development could possibly afford, gaining Cheliax a substantial military advantage over all the powers of Golarion not directly and outrageously backed by one of the Outer Planes. Your Honor, do you imagine that Heaven would not prefer to teach arcane magic to all the apt children of Lastwall? We cannot afford to, not because we are poorer than Hell, but because if we did it, it would be considered an extraordinarily expensive direct intervention, whereas Hell may account it under the far looser rules governing interplanar trade.”

“Why is it, Your Honor, that the powers of Good cannot buy souls, even to save them from Hell? The soul trade in general is held Evil by analogy with slavery, but this court acknowledges that buying a slave in order to free them is a Good act, as is helping someone to escape an Evil afterlife. Why, then, can one not sell one’s soul to the afterlife of one’s choice? Because then everyone would do it. Hell’s unique privilege to buy the souls of mortals is considered a reasonable and limited intervention only because nearly all mortals strongly prefer to avoid Hell—even above and beyond the degree to which they prefer to avoid Abaddon or the Abyss, as statistics from Neutral Evil petitioners granted the choice show. Payments for souls are governed by looser rules than other interventions because the limiting factor was intended to be mortals’ willingness to sell, rather than Hell’s ability to buy. In the case of the ‘soul’ of Cheliax there is no such disincentive. Cheliax cannot be tortured in Hell. Its people can, but the woman who sold its soul has already demonstrated that she doesn’t care about that.” They’re sacrificing this point for Abrogail’s hypothetical trial, which hurts, but it’s vanishingly unlikely that Abrogail Thrune ever sees the inside of this courtroom whether they win or lose the lawsuit or the war. “She already believed herself irrevocably damned before she ever conceived the idea of selling the soul of her country, an act by which she lost nothing and gained a great deal. Your Honor, if this court rules that Hell can buy the soul of a nation from a puppet ruler whose ancestors it’s managed to keep on the throne for a few decades, and then by dint of that ownership defend their puppet against other mortal nations with such force as would be appropriate to a war in Hell itself, there will be nothing to stop their expansion on the Material or even slow it down. A ruling in favor of Hell risks turning soul sales into an asymmetric advantage for Hell that might end only with their total conquest of Creation.”

“Objection: Hell has always maintained that it knows a legal loophole that will lead to its total conquest of Creation. Without commenting on the object level on what we believe that loophole to be, the allegation that a certain ruling from this court might create such does not oblige the court to rule the other way.”

“Overruled. ‘Balance between the alignments is a fundamental principle of the order of Creation,’ in re Adam, -153718 A.R. You may convince mortals that you have a loophole in the Contract of Creation but you will not convince me.”

“Your Honor, Hell nonetheless maintains that a general balance of power between alignments does not preclude the possibility of mutually offsetting asymmetric advantages enjoyed by each alignment. The ability to conquer countries on the Material by legal trickery is an advantage uniquely suited to the nature of Lawful Evil, and does not even begin to offset the profound and inherent advantage which Good possesses by virtue of its greater alignment with mortal values—”

“Objection, uh—in the words of Iomedae, it sucks to suck.”

“Rule 44.9, also, She never said that.”

“Yes she did. Perhaps you can figure it out while you're bound not to use the information in any way.”

“Order. The objection by Heaven is overturned; internal alignment and ease of coordination have long been acknowledged by the court as asymmetric advantages of Good in Creation’s balance of power.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Where were we? Ah, yes—having finally established that Hell owns the soul of Cheliax, we may begin to ask what actual and concrete rights that grants us. To answer this we may take one of two approaches. The first is analogy with mortal petitioners—dead ones, not living, since the contract of the Third Damnation is very clear that the soul of Cheliax was transferred to Hell’s custody immediately, rather than on death as is customary for more ordinary souls. What rights does Hell possess over an owned soul in its custody which we do not possess over an ordinary damned petitioner? To answer this it would be simpler to ask what, at all, we cannot do to the ordinary damned—very little, in fact, but there are at least two such things. We cannot refuse them resurrection, except in the somewhat special case of Malediction. And we cannot use this court system on their behalf, Hell v. Church of Abadar on Golarion, 4071*. Both of these we may do for an owned soul. This suggests that Hell possesses a certain power of attorney over owned souls, which we will extend to the case of states in a moment.”

“The second approach is more abstract, but in some ways even clearer. What is the soul of a state? We have said ‘territory and people’. But, in truth, there is a better answer, a single indivisible object without which a state is not itself. The soul of a state is its sovereignty. And to ransom one’s country’s sovereignty to a greater power is a perfectly ordinary act in the international law of Golarion. Rulers are permitted to do this even in countries where the people are imagined to have rights.”

“That we are permitted to defend Cheliax in war follows immediately and without space for doubt from this understanding of our relationship with them. Does anyone at all deny that if Isger or Korvosa were attacked, Cheliax could lawfully come to their aid? Of course not; that is nine-tenths of this relationship as it exists among mortals. Our relationship with Cheliax is not perfectly analogous with any relationship between mortal powers, of course; to suggest so would be an insult to the majesty of Hell. We possess them far more absolutely than they own Isger. But this cannot imply less ability to defend them; the law of Hell, at least, is that property consists solely in the right to defend one’s possession with force. If we bought the soul of Cheliax without the ability to protect it from incursions of paladins, what indeed did we buy? To find that we cannot defend Cheliax as our own territory, this court would have to throw out the whole of the contract of the Third Damnation, and we have already established—indeed, Heaven has already mostly conceded—that it is surely and entirely legal.”

(*In which Hell attempted, on behalf of Maledicted petitioners who had bought resurrection insurance, to sue the Church of Abadar for having failed to resurrect them.)

“Hell now claims—after leading this court on a tour of spurious arguments on subjects ranging from the fundamental nature of the soul to the property law of ancient Taldor—that Cheliax is their protectorate. They could have claimed this at the first. There would have been no dispute; that, unlike owning a country’s so-called soul, is a legitimate and uncomplicated posture for a greater power to adopt toward a lesser. Why, then, did they not simply make the claim, today or seventy years ago? Because they didn't want to pay for it.”

“Your Honor, what we have witnessed here today is none other than that ancient Mephi—”

“Objection.”

“Overruled; as much as He might like me to, I cannot and will not actually place the name of the Lord of the Eighth under seal.”