“I wasn’t planning on changing weapons, but if it’s sometimes associated with Shelyn I’d like to know what she’s about, you know?  So, what’s her thing?  I’m pretty sure everything I previously heard about her is lies.”

He’s heard basically every female God called a whore at some point, even for ones it doesn’t really make sense.  Like Pharasma’s supposed to be an older woman, like a midwife sort of woman, and she’d be too busy overseeing deaths and births and judgements to have any sex.

Fernando has heard similar sort of things.  He’s not sure what things he’s heard are licentious slander and what parts are a misinterpretation of her being a God of beauty (or something like that)?  Actually, he isn’t sure if Good people actually hate sex or if that’s another Asmodean lie?  He’s not going to ask now, he can figure out a more discrete way of asking later if he gets the chance, but the question isn’t remotely a priority for him.  He’s never understood the extent to which people obsess over sex.

"So, Shelyn's associated with art, and love, and redemption, and... caring about other people and being nice to them? Uh, not just romantic love, she also cares about people loving their family or caring a lot about their friends. The love and redemption connection's pretty straightforward, her brother's Zon-Kuthon, and he used to not suck and she didn't stop loving him when he started torturing people, and she still thinks he can be redeemed even though he's been torturing people for thousands of years. The art connection's honestly more confusing to me, I haven't heard a great explanation besides 'art is nice and so is love,' but a Shelynite might have a better answer.

She's got some overlap with Sarenrae, who's also Neutral Good and also associated with redemption and being nice to people, but they're not totally the same — Shelynites tend to talk about redemption more like... caring about people the way people who, uh, have siblings, and get along with them, and wouldn't want them to be tortured forever no matter what they'd done, would care about their siblings, and then applying that to everyone, and Sarenrites tend to talk about it more like... they've already decided some things are true of everyone, and they don't really see how anyone could disagree, and one of those things is that anyone could be redeemed? But in practice they're mostly pretty similar. And supposedly Sarenrae likes healing the way Shelyn likes art, but it's not like Shelynites don't also do healing, or like Sarenrites never do art. And there's a bunch of smaller differences, but I'm not sure how much of them are, uh, because of the gods, and how much of them are for other reasons." (People who follow Sarenrae are more likely to start talking about how women being allowed to do things is the work of Hell and it would really be better to get rid of it altogether, not just the Evil parts, but that might just be because of Qadira, she's not sure.)

"And both of them do lots of... helping people in ways that don't hurt anyone? For the Shelynites that sometimes involves art, like there's a traveling Shelynite theater troupe that goes around putting on plays about redemption and not charging admission, but not always, they also do plenty of things that are just nice things to do for people. In Augustana, there's a soup kitchen that's run by Shelynites, and they also do some work helping widows and people who've been injured in ways that make it hard to work, and some of them work at the orphanages even those are mostly run by Sarenrites, and both of them do lots of spiritual counseling. —I've got lots of disagreements with both of their churches, but they do plenty of good work."

"A lot of the people in my dance troupe pray to Shelyn before performances. The ones who are really serious about her like to talk about how all forms of art are sacred to her, and how even though dance is temporary it still matters to her, but I've honestly never found her all that appealing. I went to Shelynite services once — about half of it was singing, but there was also a story from her holy book that wasn't a song, and a sermon, and a long prayer for the souls of the recently dead, and a couple announcements about some projects they were looking for volunteers for." The singing could have been nice but a lot of the people there were kind of terrible at it. People are allowed to be terrible at singing but listening to them isn't really her idea of a good time.

Is "love" a Good-people euphemism for sex and prostitution?  Except all the emphasis on sibling love makes him think it's not about sex?  Unless, incest isn't actually Evil?  Actually, given that neither Baphomet's cult nor Asmodeus's church encouraged incest, maybe it really isn't evil!  

"Free plays sound nice."  Maybe if they all have to end in redemption they would get a little repetitive, but free is free.  (He still hasn't quite oriented to having money he doesn't need to keep secret and doesn't belong to a larger organization.)

"I actually don't mind bad singing if I'm at least a little tipsy and everyone's having fun!"  Probably he should just go to a bar for that but if he needs to blend with the Shelynites he can just drink a little beforehand to make it actually fun.

He has a younger brother he hasn't seen in years.  He didn't see any point in visiting his family when he was an Asmodean or a cultist, but it's now dawning on Fernando to worry.  He's pretty sure his brother actually followed his mother's advice and avoided getting sorted to wizard school or anything like that.

"Is it true that at least nine people in ten go to Hell?  In Cheliax, I mean.  Even people in the countryside where people don't become wizards or clerics or do anything big or important?"

He hopes it is just a lie of the Asmodeans.  Then he can stop worrying about the family he hasn't seen in years.  He hopes this sudden random impulse counts for Goodness or at least Shelyn worship or something.  Is he obligated to go gets his brother and mother out of Cheliax?  He could probably get really far on just rope tricks and mounts, but he's not sure he could convince them to just up and leave.  The same sort of instinct that made his mother discourage him from being a wizard also probably means she would absolutely refuse to do something like that.

The wizard is overthinking it.  They are going to be out of Cheliax, and then he can get out of the Abyss or Hell or whatever by worshipping a Good God because it isn't illegal.

Headshake headshake. "No, that part's not true. Uh, first of all, people who die as babies or little kids pretty much always go to the Boneyard, and babies in the Boneyard don't usually go to Hell — uh, I heard once that they're more likely to go to the Abyss, actually, because it's hard to get a baby to be Lawful, but I don't know if that's true, and as far as I know plenty of them go to the Good or Neutral afterlives."

She pauses for a moment to sort her thoughts. "With adults it's harder to say for sure, but — it's almost certainly not nine in ten in the countryside. Going through the ways we have to take a guess...

First of all, people've done Communes about it. Counting the exact numbers of Chelish people in all the afterlives is the sort of thing gods are really bad at, but the answers people say they've gotten all mean the Asmodeans are definitely lying.

There's Pharasmins who'll check people with an Early Judgment, and every Pharasmin I've ever heard talk about it says that in Andoran a lot less than nine in ten people are Evil, and that that was true even right after the revolution. But that's not perfect — lots of people probably made Good from rebelling against Cheliax, and the sort of person who knows for sure they're Evil probably isn't going to bother a Pharasmin to check, and if someone's good at lying they might just lie to the Pharasmin.

Osirion's got a project where they Scry a lot of dead people from Osirion to find out what afterlives they're in, and they also try to check people from other countries to compare, and then they write up reports about how they're really good at being Lawful Neutral and everyone else should be more like them." (This is the sort of thing that comes up in political arguments sometimes, although in Andoran people mostly bring them up if they want to argue that Andoran should be more like Lastwall.) "And... I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but what they say is, when they scry rich merchants from the cities or famous adventurers or important nobles, the sort of people that're easiest for them to get a list of, those are nearly all some sort of Evil, but when they scry random dead farmers that people who managed to get out remember knowing, it's... more than one in two that's Evil, but not two in three, so a lot more than a normal country but definitely not nine in ten. I do think their numbers might not be exactly right — they've got ways of guessing about people they can't scry but they're easier to make mistakes about — and they might've made smaller mistakes too, like they count adulthood differently from how people in Cheliax do and that's one of the things they use to split up their numbers. But I think they're probably not just making things up, if they were making things up they'd come up with fake numbers that make them look better. 

And if Cheliax really were managing to make almost everyone Lawful Evil, there's lots of things they could do to argue back, and they're not doing any of them. They could let people check over all their Worldwound soldiers with alignment detection, lots of them are strong enough to detect, or they could give Osirians copies of the school rolls to make their scrying project easier, that sort of thing. 

And — you don't have to do anything really big and important to be Evil. There's plenty of regular people who go to Hell for doing regular sorts of Evil, even if they've never done anything really awful. But even in Cheliax, there's plenty of ordinary people who make Neutral or even Good by just... making different choices. If someone's damned for living a 'normal life' it's because the sort of life they thought of as normal actually involved a lot of Evil, and if someone's just a farmer and they're not doing any of that they're not going to be damned just for praying to Asmodeus."