This place is very cold, and very flat, and has no particular distinguishing features. Miles away there is smoke in the air, as from a chimney. 

Farther miles away there's a big soap-bubble force-field kind of thing.

Shakingly, but not slowly, Keltham rolls to his feet, does a rapid body-check to see if he has any detectable injuries after his plane crashed and his - head came off, he is reasonably sure he remembers the sensation of his head being literally ripped off his neck.  It does seem to be back on, though.

Somewhat gingerly, Keltham turns his head around to check for anything resembling a familiar or unfamiliar threat.

Plausibly threatening: the cold. It's really quite cold. The.....shrubs? They're low to the ground and look spiky but not particularly threatening.

There's really not that much else. It doesn't look like a place that has been particularly touched by human habitation. 

The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate. It rises to the same height everywhere, hard to judge from here but at least fifty feet, and there's motion faintly visible on the other side of it, hard to pick out at this distance and through the distortion, moving four and six-legged shapes.

..and the direction with smoke in the air?

The smoke is maybe rising out of a building, or something else grey and square and purposeful. It's not very far from an edge of the soap bubble. Between here and there there's frozen tundra, and some small stunted trees. 

Keltham takes a few moments to update his store of hypotheses on all this startling new evidence, computing at the lightning speed of sheer wordless guessing that the posterior sums up to -

- nothing.  Yeah, he's got nothing.

Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke.  It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.

Up a little closer, it's clearly a building, or actually a cluster of them, all of them one story high, all of them made of grey stone, or painted like they're made of grey stone. There's...what might be people, walking between the buildings periodically.

The sun moves across the sky, but not down in it.

It's really cold.

Yes, thank you sensorium, he is aware now that it is quite cold, that is why he is not carefully thinking through all of this in much more detail in advance, and is instead running towards the possible heat source whilst also generating more heat that way himself.

When he gets close enough people see him. They - turn and wave, nonchalantly, and then keep going; apparently the presence of a person racing across the tundra inappropriately dressed for the weather isn't notable in itself. 

Possibility 1: that people materialize around here after death and run in towards the nearest buildings all the time.

Possibility 2: that the people seeing him have entirely misinterpreted him as some other phenomenon not in need of heat.

Possibility 3: that it is BUTT-CHILLINGLY COLD and he needs to KEEP RUNNING into the nearest enterable building.

Its door swings open for him. Startled people turn to look at him now. 

"Something incomprehensible?" one of them says.

OH GOOD WARMTH.  "Keltham," he says between breaths, tapping himself.  "Dath ilan," making the gesture for thing A coming from thing B.  "I died in a plane crash and woke up here.  Hope somebody here speaks Baseline or has a universal translator device."

- they glance at a girl in the corner.

She casts Tongues. "Say that again?" she says, in Baseline.

"Keltham.  Dath ilan.  I died in a plane crash and woke up here.  What's the correlation between the strange gesture you just did, and your ability to communicate with me when you could not do so previously?"(*)

(*This sentence takes less than half as many syllables to say in Baseline as in Taldane.)

" - I cast Tongues, because it's a translation spell and you were speaking an unfamiliar language. You died and woke up here? This isn't an afterlife."

"Yeah, I was wondering if there'd been a mistake or systemic hiccup.  I'd perhaps ask you how to get to a place-people-go-when-they-are-dead, but I feel like first this possible systemic hiccup should be checked for profit potential."

" - that's a phrasing. Uh, I think Golarion ....hmmm. I think probably most dying people would rather show up in Golarion than in a proper afterlife, but they're probably wrong about that? I hadn't really thought about it before because I have never heard of such a mistake."

"I know nothing of this subject matter, at all.  So far as my people know, when you die, either Civilization manages to retrieve your brain-soul and wake you up much later, or you stop existing.  I died under circumstances where my brain-soul could not reasonably have been saved.  That I continue to exist at all is an unexplained violation of all expected laws of existence from my perspective.  If the same holds true from your perspective - does my new world also have proverbs about violations of previously holding generalizations being interesting and profitable in proportion to the degree of previous belief in the generalization that was violated?"*

Keltham has NO idea what is going on but he is SO ready to profit from it, he has been waiting ALL HIS (short) LIFE for something generalization-violating to profit from.

(*All of this is also much faster to say in Baseline.)

"...dead people usually go to afterlives," she says. Start with the bit you are confident about. "They don't cease to exist entirely, usually, that sounds awful. Some people get eaten in their afterlives but it's not, you know, a common thing - and you can just not go to Abaddon, which is the afterlife where you get eaten - sorry, the translation's very -

- very -

- do you mean basically the thing where if you want to be a fabulously rich adventurer you'd better have a damn good reason why the tomb you want to rob hasn't been robbed already, but generalized to everything? We ...don't have a proverb for that, I don't think it does generalize to everything, most things the reason why no one's dealt with them is that no one powerful could make that much money off it, and it wouldn't be much fun -"

"Sounds like your universe is nothing like my universe.  We don't have places-people-go-when-they-are-dead.  We don't have translation 'spells'.  And you don't have explicit math about inexploitable equilibria, which implies a vast amount of other missing knowledge.  If you've never previously seen people like me showing up, I'd say a glitch has occurred, and that is exactly the kind of situation where you might be able to feast on an exponentially vast buffet of profitable strategies that nobody else has tried before because they couldn't take advantage of the glitch."

" - well. We have not seen dead people showing up before, except if someone raises them as a zombie, or resurrects them, and the thing you described doesn't really sound like either of those things. It does seem important to, uh, get Asmodeus in touch with your world, so that we can collect the souls of your people when they die, instead of them ceasing to exist."

"Yeah!  Like that!  That is exactly what I am talking about!  Current exchange rates on true-deaths per labor-hour, Civilization will pay you at least a million labor-hours per soul you can save that way... though..."

Civilization lives in an extremely and to all appearances perfectly regular mathematical universe.  Being able to descend causally from it and copy people out of it does not mean you can send information back and execute trade arrangements.

"...though I'd bet at 4 to 1 that you can't actually get a two-way arrangement with Civilization.  I'm guessing Golarion can see dath ilan but dath ilan can't see Golarion.  But if we can manage to exploit any of the knowledge I have that this world doesn't, I will pay Asmodeus for his impact in grabbing any dath ilani souls that would otherwise get lost.  I've deliberately avoided fantasizing about what I'll do after I'm a billionaire because becoming a billionaire is the hard part, but I'm not actually averse to the part where I spend whatever I can't manage to spend on my own personal happiness on producing public goods."  It is said, for one thing, that this tends to impress members of the opposite sex, and so also contributes to personal happiness in the end.

" - all right, sounds good. Asmodeus is a god and I don't actually know that He would want a billion gold but I am sure He'll want something. I can, uh, get a priest, and let them know, about this - is it urgent, you must not age if you just stop existing when you die..."

"Dath ilan's got about a billion people, ten million die per year, about a hundred of those are true deaths, so Poisson-process expected three days until the next dath ilani death... except that the plane I was on just crashed which is going to double the true-death rate this year.  If Asmodeus can grab lost dath ilani from deaths that happened an hour ago, but not a day ago, that's pretty urgent.  I'd ask 'what's a god' but that is much less urgent."

"I don't know but maybe a priest will." She starts walking out the door and towards another building. "Gods are entities that are much smarter and much more capable and very different from humans and they set up the afterlives, Asmodeus is the one who is the patron of my country and also the most powerful one. What're ...untrue deaths, does that just mean you're able to raise them?"

Keltham takes a breath of warm air, puts his hands in relatively warmer places, and follows her out into the FREEZING COLD.  "Not yet, gonna take a much higher tech level.  If they're dying under controlled circumstances we pump enough vitrifactants through them to prevent ice crystal formation, chill 'em down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, atoms move around but they move in one-to-one flows which seem pretty likely to map cognitively distinct start states to physically distinguishable end states.  Later, when we can, we'll scan the brain and figure out who the person was and rematerialize that person.  True death is when your plane crashes and splatters your brain all over the place and lets the pieces rot in the sun or burns them in jet fuel, a process which maps many distinct possible people onto overlapping entropized ash heaps."  Keltham has, a quite short time previously, spent some very long minutes contemplating this fact and trying really hard to think of some incredibly clever way to have it not happen to him.

"Your language is really oddly optimized," she says, hurrying over to the towering, somewhat ominous-looking building with a red pentagram etched into the archway above the door. "I do know Asmodeus gets souls from other worlds sometimes because Barbatos, the ruler of the first level of Hell, got the appointment by bringing a whole world of souls for Asmodeus."

"You know anything else about the circumstances?  Were they from a world that didn't previously have an afterlife of their own, or translation 'spells'?"  Keltham isn't sure how to parse 'ruler of the first level of Hell' but he can ask later what a 'ruler' is.

"Uh, I heard that they became the barbazus, but that's all I know. Barbazus have spells now but I have no idea what they had when they were alive." She knocks on the door and enters the ominous building; it is symmetric in black stone, with a large stone altar at the center.

Oh good, WARMTH again.  "I think it's gonna be high-expected-value to at some point very soon spend a lot of time explaining to me a whole lot of locally assumed knowledge that I don't have.  I can't figure out what knowledge I have that can be deployed to profit in this world, if I don't know how this world works."

"Yes, the spell lasts an hour but I can do an hour of trying to explain things, and then tomorrow prepare better ones for this."

She switches languages to have a hasty conversation with a robed man, who listens, his eyebrows rising steadily.

"- he says he'll pray to Asmodeus about it."

"Does that mean we completed the time-sensitive part of this in terms of notifying Asmodeus that there's a hundred dath ilani he can pick up, if he can only do that for a limited time afterwards, and then on-average one more every three days?"

"Yes. I mean, I don't know how soon Asmodeus will hear but there isn't more we can realistically do about it."

"You mention to the guy that on the 1-in-5 off-chance you can actually trade with dath ilan, those hundred souls are worth a hundred million hours of labor?"

"I told him that your world has a billion people and that you were ready in a heartbeat to trade to Asmodeus whatever he wanted for protecting your dead. It seems to me like it ought to get His attention but trying to understand gods with a mortal brain doesn't always work very well."

"If gods are smarter than humans, shouldn't they be more understandable from a theoretical standpoint in the sense that they depart less often from the coherence theorems governing... never mind, if you don't have math about inexploitable equilibria you definitely don't have math about gods.  Yeah, don't worry, it'll get Asmodeus's attention, unless he already knows or immediately computes that he can't do it."

- Carissa's going to try not to feel insulted! Lots of people have done lots of studying of gods. Admittedly not usually with math, that she is aware of. "If we're needed for anything I'm sure we'll be informed. Should we sit down by a fire and I can try...explaining things to you...until my spell runs out?"

"I don't have any better ideas.  Knowledge is definitely my rate-limiting-resource in how well I can exploit Golarion for mutual gain."

"- sure. Okay. Uh. There are probably about a billion of us, too. I think lots more than ten million die in a year. I've heard people say that half of babies live to be adults? The age of majority's sixteen, in Cheliax, that's measured in time from the longest day of the year to the next one, I'm twenty five in those years. Humans who don't die of anything or have resurrection on demand generally make it to eighty before they die of their body just falling apart, it's called aging, it's said that the gods did it because they don't want us to stick around here forever and never go to the afterlives. Wizards can delay it, make 130 or 140 or so. Wizards are - people like me, who've learned how to cast spells."

"I have so many Additional Questions before I can understand this world as mostly in equilibrium.  Gonna say them out loud so you know what they are, but I suspect the best strategy is for you to ignore it all and then move on to the next most important facts.  Like, what kills that many kids.  How much would your people pay per child saved.  Why would gods pick eighty years instead of eight hundred.  Why are humans an efficient way of making things that get to afterlives if those are valuable.  What's the rate-limiting difficulty in learning to cast spells that stops everybody from learning it.  Also, my reality has something that translated as 'aging' and zero gods, and we know where that kind of aging comes from that isn't gods, but I've got no idea if that's the same here.  Feel free to ignore all that confused babbling and just say whatever you would've said next anyways."

"In what equilibrium? - uh, okay. Do you want to write those down so you remember them. There are nine afterlives. Afterlives go by attributes that the gods - use to see the world, attributes that are more fundamental to gods than to us. The attributes are Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil. Law is - duty, obedience, authority, following the rules, Chaos is - doing whatever you want, hedonism, non-coordination. Good is - self-sacrifice. Evil is - pursuit of the interests of the self. The nine afterlives, then, are Hell - Lawful Evil - Axis - Lawful Neutral - Heaven - Lawful Good. Abaddon - Neutral Evil - the Boneyard - True Neutral - and Nirvana - Neutral Good. The Abyss - Chaotic Evil - the Maelstrom - Chaotic Neutral - and Elysium - Chaotic Good. Asmodeus rules Hell.

Until a hundred years ago, there was prophecy, which is - some kind of ability the gods and powerful wizards had to look into possible futures, and sometimes nudge them, make unlikely things come to be, or fix a point in fate so that coincidences would bring the world to it. But a hundred years ago it broke and there was a related worldwide catastrophe that toppled many empires and now things are sort of settling into a new way for them to be, geopolitically and in terms of what the gods do. I don't specifically know of any reason that's important but if you're interested in - well with tombs they've been around for thousands of years so the reason they haven't been robbed must be good, but if a tomb is new, that's the reason, and the current world situation is new. 

Uh. The most common kind of magic is being chosen by a god to do miracles on their behalf. That's five people in a hundred, maybe? We call them clerics. The second most common kind is wizardry. The smarter half of people can learn a little bit but only people who are well above average can learn very much. Wizards used to be much rarer than clerics but now Cheliax has universal testing and education so we find the smart kids even if they're farmers and we're actually up to eight in a hundred people who can cast at least one spell, which is the highest in the world. Overall I think it's one in a hundred or so. Then there are lots and lots of rarer kinds. Blood-borne aptitudes for innate intuitive magic, pacts with powerful entities that aren't gods, hybridization with other species than humans which have innate magic, stuff like that. 

The thing north of us with the forcefield is the Worldwound. A hundred years ago when prophecy broke and Aroden died, a chasm between this world and the Abyss opened up. Demons started pouring through. Demons are chaotic and Evil and they mostly like eating people so we've been trying to stop them from taking over the whole world. It's going - stably. But people'd give you a lot of money to fix it, if you figured out how."

(The Taldane words 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic' map onto Baseline words that respectively refer to deep underlying structures of things, and disorganization, both spoken with the inflection that indicates an everyday word is being repurposed to mean something else that it usually doesn't.  'Good' comes out as 'altruistic' and 'Evil' as 'negated-prosocial', both with the same inflection of technicality.  (Baseline doesn't have a word for 'antisocial' any more than it has a word for 'nonapples'; there are lots of specific things people could be doing that are antisocial, but it hasn't been deemed wise to add a word that means 'what you're doing is bad for society but I won't tell you why.'))

"Writing'd slow us down too much on the first pass.  Reactions to ignore.  The way the gods are parsing up these attributes seems very inhuman and probably isn't translating well, but if gods all see things the same way they probably share ancestry as species or constructs.  Hedonism and non-coordination seem uncorrelated to me, though in terms of what 'chaotic' translated to in my language we would definitely say I'm on the chaotic side of what we see as the law-versus-chaos tradeoff.  Good versus Evil makes slightly more sense but I don't know where 'Get rich, fund public goods, impress the prettiest people and screw them' is supposed to go on that.  We've got no idea what our world was doing a hundred years ago, but I expect we didn't have nuclear reactors then, so we're not in very much more of an equilibrium.  Who gets chosen by a god, what's an example of the simplest thing you have to learn to be a wizard.  Gee that Worldwound sounds incredibly interesting, could it maybe be closed if somebody knew more math, how much money is 'a lot'.  If there are 'gods' running around who are smarter than humans then why don't you already know about inexploitable equilibria and all of the other math, wouldn't the gods have invented it already... actually that last one sounds fundamental enough I may want you to pause and answer it."  It's sort of weird that Keltham doesn't already know a lot more standard theory about agents that would be smarter than human, now that Keltham thinks about it.  It seems like an obvious speculation on multiple levels.

"I am sure the gods have invented all the kinds of math you're thinking of, they have very complicated god-treaties with each other that involve kinds of interlocking commitments and ability to verify each others' commitments and it was explained to me on a very simple level once just so I could understand what it was that I wasn't going to understand. Why they haven't taught us - maybe the version of it we could understand wouldn't even be particularly useful to us? Maybe they're working up to it? Maybe it'd interfere with us having our purpose in Golarion which is generally understood to be - as the product of one of those god-treaties actually - the gods disagreed about which afterlives souls should go to, and the souls growing up in Golarion is meant to - draw out their natural inclinations and also maybe give them a choice, depending who you ask? 

There are more complete accounts of what's Law and what's Chaos but they in fact don't hang together perfectly from a human angle because they're god-things not human-things. All the gods are in fact the same ...kind of entity, whatever exactly that means, some are more powerful than others but all of them have much more in common with each other than with a human, even one who has enhanced their intelligence as far as it can go and is almost as smart as a god.

I think if you want to get rich so you can attract pretty people and fund ...public goods...that's Evil, I think things have to be almost entirely purely selfless to be Good, like, if you were thinking 'I don't even care for money except that it'll let me help starving orphans' then I'd wonder if you were maybe Good but it's not enough to kick you out of Evil if you also do things that mostly benefit other people, we're all Evil and we're up here fighting the Worldwound.

Kids mostly die of disease. Smallpox and measles and flu and cholera and so on. Also some people kill their babies because they have babies and don't want them but that I don't think you could make any money stopping, the whole point is that they don't care to have a baby and they've nonetheless got one. People who do want babies would pay a large chunk of their annual income to save them, I'd expect? Especially once they're bigger and you've already invested in them. People get chosen by a god for being unusually aligned with the god's - values? Plans for humans? Needs from an actor on Golarion? I don't know that it's completely characterized but it's always someone close by in alignment and it's always someone who mostly agrees with the god's priorities and usually it's someone who can wax poetic about the beauty of the god's thing once you understand it even partially.

To be a wizard you have to hold a spell in your head and be able to manipulate it in space properly, I can show you in a bit."

The number of questions being spawned per minute is increasing at a rate which makes Keltham worry about the overall convergence behavior of this process.

"Reactions starting to overload here.  Interlocking commitments and verification do not sound like math we'd call complicated, somebody first walked me through the surface results at age 10 and then since I'm planning on being an actual investor I walked through the proper proofs at 14.  It sounds like existence here begins as a multiagent equilibrium of gods negotiating, in the same way that dath ilan begins as an equilibrium of physics, natural selection, and human desires; possibly if I want to understand everything in proper order I should start with the gods.  Are souls a fundamental unit of value underlying all economics here.  Were humans here dying forever until the gods showed up, in which case we owe them, or do the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, in which case they owe us.  How do humans enhance their intelligence and end up almost as smart as gods.  Why does anybody spend money on anything else if you can spend money on that.  How smart are we talking about, exactly, use whatever units you like to give me any idea at all.  What do clerics do for gods, what do clerics get in return from gods, what if anything do humans get out of this whole system.

And, you know, I am on the extreme end of what my people call chaos and aspire to go further than that, when it comes to breaking the stultifying regularities that settle over human beings thinking and acting in groups.  I've been known to go by the Network handle of 'Mad Investor Chaos'.  But 'Decide you want kids, then change your mind and kill them' is fifteen hundred times more chaotic than - than I've ever - I mean.  How about if instead you think about your own preferences more clearly before taking yourself off contraception, and save yourself nine months of pregnancy?  Doesn't that constitute an outright preference reversal, where you could end up with more time and resources if you didn't have kids in the first place?  Isn't that prima-facie time-inconsistent behavior barring psychologically unrealistic arbitrary complexities of the utility function?  I, I mean, there's being chaotic, and then there's being so chaotic that it violates coherence theorems.  We have now answered the question of how much chaos it takes to make Mad Investor Chaos feel physically nauseated.  What is wrong with those people.  Why is anyone not buying the kids.  None of that seems like the actual info I need next and I probably shouldn't be asking."

" - People buy orphaned kids but newborn babies are a pain to take care of so I don't think there's much of a market, probably if you wanted you could buy 'em and raise them, though not in Cheliax, which prohibits human slavery. People don't think they want a baby and then change their mind, they never wanted a baby in the first place but they still had sex because they thought they'd timed it well enough a baby wouldn't result or they're fifteen and impulsive or they wanted to have sex more than they dispreferred pregnancy or they were raped or they had an abusive boyfriend who'd beat them if they turned him down or they figured they could handle the baby but then the dad skipped town and now they couldn't, or they thought their family would help and then family circumstances changed, or they figured they'd abort the pregnancy but then access to that, which is not universal, vanished for some reason. Or I know someone who got an abortion and it had side effects and made her permanently infertile, freaked me right out, so if I'd gotten pregnant as a teenager I might've figured infanticide would be better, and instead I just didn't have the kind of sex that gets you pregnant but I have more options than your average teenage girl.

You get smart enough to be almost as smart as gods with magic items. It costs more than most people will ever make in their life; people who can afford it usually do do it.  When I'm richer I'll get a headband. People spend money on other things because....otherwise they would starve? Or because they like living in a nice house and having nice things and having servants and the costs of those things is negligible compared to the costs of intelligence enhancement? 

Souls are...valuable. I don't know if they're - like, they're mostly valuable to gods and people don't directly trade with gods very much, if you're trading with humans the most important things are food and textiles and on the high end diamonds and spellsilver, which are scarce components to magic items. I think the gods culture humans in order to get more souls, but I don't know in what sense that means they owe us, it's not like if we told them that they should be nicer to us there would be a compelling reason for them to listen. Clerics evangelize for a god and take care of their followers and run their churches and fight their wars. Gods give clerics the ability to heal injuries and resurrect the dead and fight people more effectively. Humans get...afterlives, and healing, and in the case of Cheliax Asmodeus supplies us with material wealth from Hell so we can afford a decent education system unlike all the other countries which are too poor to have that."

"Yeah, so okay, either y'all are acting optimally with respect to alien problems I don't understand, or y'all got very different utility functions, or all y'all ain't got no idea what the ass you be doin'(*) and are ending up way below the multi-agent-optimal boundary, on levels where that goes from fun profit opportunity to not-so-fun emergency massive profit opportunity."

(*Extremely Chaos-aligned dath ilani are sometimes known, in moments of great gravity, to deliberately speak Baseline with nonstandard grammar.)

"But regardless of which branch of that trilemma if any is actualized, it sounds like you definitely have unsolved problems that are solved problems where I come from.  Like safe reversible contraception.  So either none of my world's solutions apply here, because the laws are different, or I bring with me knowledge and methodologies that are profitable.  Though more likely the first branch of that dilemma is actualized, if there are smart gods here who would've already worked out those solutions?  Except that you just said that gods have 'destructive-conflicts' that their clerics help them fight, which, either there's a translation difficulty here, or you just described the page-one-of-textbook result that should not happen between sufficiently smart entities who can do logical commitments and verify them.  If the strategies are ending up with overt destructive actions being carried out in reality and not just in decision-theoretic-counterfactual-threat-branches-of-reality(**), that's the page-one-of-textbook non-actualized-outcome where both entities could execute different actions and would both end up with higher payoffs."

(**This is a three-syllable word in Baseline.  Keltham has been trying to use those sparingly, so as to keep his sentences and concepts simple, and likely to pass neatly across whatever translation barrier exists.)

"The gods outright fight each other almost never. That is what happened a hundred years ago, and my understanding is that it was in fact a ridiculous anomaly of some kind, maybe to do with prophecy breaking and the strategies the gods used for commitments all breaking. I have never heard of it happening before or since. Their churches go to war on Golarion regularly but I doubt that destroys resources that the gods value? It kills people, but their souls are fine, and casters become more powerful in high conflict situations, and people get more religious when there's lots of war, I think. 

Safe reversible contraception sounds very good and you could sell that for lots of money. 

My current best theory for predicting the next thing you're going to say and/or be confused about is that - so Cheliax is richer than most places, and it's got more Law and less of the bad things you were confused about and more - of peoples' preferences being consistent over time, of things that are a good use of resources for the long term happening even if it doesn't benefit anyone until the long term, of not going to war - compared to other places. So extrapolating that wildly, your world sounds like a place that is even richer, and even Lawfuler, to the point the distinction between Good and Evil doesn't even matter much to people since you haven't got afterlives and all the parts of Evil which actually involve hurting other people on purpose have been Lawed out of existence."

"Oh, it matters.  See, even after you get rich and Law all that stuff out of existence, Very Serious People go on worrying about whether it will come back a hundred years later, if we let ourselves start to drift evolutionarily on the Good-Evil axis.  I hadn't actually been informed as yet, but considering the choices I made in some test-pranks as a kid, I expect I'd have been told a few years later that my place on the Good-Evil axis wouldn't have entitled me to much support for having kids of my own.  Which, fine, fair enough, if I'm the sort of person who goes around constantly assessing how much reciprocation other people owe me, instead of just being nice, I shouldn't be too surprised if Civilization decides it doesn't owe me much.  Because what have I done for them, right, under the rules the way I say they should work?  I can either prove they're wrong about people like me being unnecessary, or get out of the gene pool, fair enough.  My ambition before I ended up here was to fairly make a billion labor-hours, and then marry about two dozen women and have about a hundred and forty-four kids.  The first part to show them how much they need people like me, and the second part to unilaterally give the next generation some more people like me whether the rest of Civilization likes that or not."

"...which I should, probably, just never think about again, because this world is not and never will be a test of my ability to shine inside Civilization.  If I win here, it won't be because I was special, it'll be because I came in with a ton of knowledge that any other dath ilani might have.  And if I lose here, it'll be because there were gods smarter than any human being who ate all the low-hanging-fruit that anybody at all in dath ilan could've found.  But hey, I'm adaptable, I can reorient my entire life, might take me a couple of minutes but I can do it.  I just - felt it might be helpful to say out loud, once, before it all drifts away.  Help if somebody else knew, even for a halfminute, before I let it go."

"Moving on.  If churches are going to war, it means that the gods being smart doesn't prevent humans from being stupid, not sure why, but it obviously doesn't, so maybe I can still help there.  Priority question, how much of my knowledge still holds here, if any.  Does running electricity through water produce two gases, one of them lighter than air, which can be burned to yield water again?"  If molecular chemistry is the same, higher levels of organization will probably also be the same; and knowledge about steelmaking - or that synthetic hormones can signal the female reproductive system to not ovulate - will probably also hold.

"Just being nice is very stupid, if your planet's selecting for that they're going to have horrible problems the first time they encounter anyone else.  - I'm not an alchemist, I can look it up but probably after the translation spell runs out unless that information is really important information."

"If 'nice' sounds like a kind of thing that can be 'stupid' we've got some kind of translation difficulty running, that's a type error.  'Nice' is part of the utility function.  If you don't already know that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, it probably isn't... I guess you could just not know what anything is made of.  Do you know what water is made of that's not two one-proton atoms and one eight-proton atom?"

"I don't know what a proton is. Water freezes at a little above the ambient air temperature outdoors here at the Worldwound in the summer and floats when it's ice, and boils at a temperature you can get over a normal nonmagical fire and then is steam, and holds heat well compared to metal or plant matter or something. When it freezes in the sky it forms snowflakes."

"Sounds correct.  Do snowflakes have six-sided structure under a microscope?  Where I come from, that happens because molecules with two hydrogen and one oxygen have a least-energy crystal configuration that's hexagonal.  If all of that is still true and for the same reasons, then I still know how to make advanced steel and build electrical generators.  And the methodology I know to regenerate more of that knowledge will apply unchanged.  Male and female reversible contraception... was tech in a relatively advanced state where I can't reproduce it directly.  I can reproduce the methodology that generates it."

"Snowflakes have six sides. What's steel used for, what're electrical generators used for -"

"You don't have steel.  Right then, if steel is a possible thing here and you don't have it, that's step one in climbing the tech tree.  It's a metal that's harder than other metals, while still possible to work with at all; variations on it don't rust, keep edges better, and so on.  What's your current advanced metallurgy like?  Bronze, iron..."

"Magic weapons. They don't rust and keep an edge perfectly and they last forever. We have bronze and iron. I've seen work done in steel but I've also seen work done in adamantine, mithril, skymetal, there's lots of metals that exist but aren't mass-producible and I don't know what they'd be used for if they were."

"Huh.  Yeah, some of those terms aren't translating.  I wonder if I actually know anything portable about steel, or there's just some nearly analogous metal here, or if steel still exists but there's processes that don't exist in dath ilan for building other metals above or beyond it.  Let's try a basic tech on a higher level of organization.  How expensive is it to produce a thousand copies of one book and how would you do that?"  

"I think it costs about what a laborer would earn in three years to get a thousand copies, and you'd go to a printing shop where they'd line up moveable metal - tile things? - with letters on them to make the pages, and then ink them and stamp the parchment. I think the biggest contributing expense is the paper and the binding. Cheliax releases national histories every few years but I don't think other places can afford to do that."

"You got printing presses, okay.  I may or may not know anything useful about cheaper paper, if a book's worth of paper costs a day's wages.  Let's try refrigeration, how expensive is ice in hotter climates and what would you do to get it?"

"...I think you mostly cannot buy ice in Cheliax. I guess you could have someone ship it from the far north but I don't know this to have ever been done commercially, and my father's a merchant, I was broadly familiar with the things people were trying commercially in shipping. Probably you'd pay a spellcaster to prepare and cast Snowball for you, which would cost ten laborer-days and be about a hands-ful."

Keltham rapidly rubs his hands together.  It produces heat.

If heat is still disorganized kinetic energy, expanding and compressing gases should make them colder and hotter.

"Promising.  I very likely know how to turn mechanical motion into cold without using magic, maybe using a river waterwheel as the kinetic source.  Not sure how well it'll scale at your tech level, with any luck it's two orders of magnitude past Snowball, enough to enable food-preservation at scale, if you don't already have that... I don't actually have a good sense for how that tech scales costwise.  Worth having a backup plan.  Do your seagoing ships travel against the wind?"

"They know techniques for adjusting the sails so you can still make some ground. They haven't got something better than wind to power them except I met a Tian man once who claimed in his country tamed sea creatures towed them."

"Don't know if my world's standard primitive sailing technique is better or worse.  We can check later.  I have notions of how to build nonmagical powered engines for ships too, but they're higher up the tech tree and take fuel and steel and engineering."

"The conventional guess among my people is that steel, better steel, cheaper steel, fall among the first things you should try to sell - or not-sell - to a civilization climbing the tech tree.  We don't actually know what the past was like in that regard, but the conventional guess is that materials technology would end up being the rate-limit on most other inventions.  Like, the standard guess is that things to do with better steel end up being obvious, when a lot of people are all trying to figure it out; so it's the quality and quantity of steel they have that ends up limiting their technology, because exploring metallurgy is hard in a way that thinking up the printing press is not.  I wish I knew more about how that conventional wisdom was generated, but since I don't know, it's not implausible I should treat that as my point of departure.  If the metals better than your current steel are still rare and expensive, more and better steel should still be worth something."

"Supposing that's true and it makes my knowledge valuable, where do I go from there?  Including getting past basic accommodations quickly?  As you say, this seems like a poor society and I come from a rich one, so I'd like to spend as little time as possible being poor around here.  Unless Asmodeus sees me as having done him a favor with the dath ilan soul tipoff, but I'm not clear on whether that constitutes a favor.  And in fact you've said some ominous things about gods which would lead me to have second thoughts about doing them favors, if they're not the sort to repay favors to non-gods who can't logically verify their expected reciprocation.  Which would seem dumb to me because of the exact chain of logic I just went through, I mean, non-gods can generalize over the visible past behavior of gods in cases like that."

"It is better to have done Asmodeus a favor than not have done Asmodeus a favor, in terms of Asmodeus's inclinations towards you, I think probably the church'll give you money and a nice place to stay once I explain all of this. You should not count on that with nonLawful gods though they're still mostly, excluding Nethys, sane, and aware mortals can track our incentives ...probably the church'll want you back in Cheliax, not here at the Worldwound, where sometimes there are demons. I think you'll like it better, the weather's nicer and there are more - nice things of the sort I presume you're accustomed to, are there specifics I should mention?" The running list in her head already is 'admiration, women, money beyond ability to spend it', which seems like quite enough, really, but maybe also he likes a specific fruit.

"Probably, but at this point I have no idea what they are.  If I want to cool my house in summer in Cheliax, it sounds like I either need to get rich enough to hire wizards, or, like, invent air conditioning first.  So it sounds like all of dath ilan registers as Lawful and Evil on your whacked-out scales, but - are there exactly nine gods total, or is there more than one Lawful Evil god I might want to work for?  For that matter, I might want to check out exactly what the Lawful Neutral and Neutral Evil gods are like, maybe the Neutral Evil one pays ten times as much to make up for being unreliable."

The church is super not going to let him leave. "Uh, Lawful Neutral's Abadar, you'd probably get along but He doesn't have a presence in Cheliax and Cheliax is the richest country and the place it makes sense to start things. The other Lawful Evil gods are - arguably not proper divinities in their own right and don't have independent churches, they work for Asmodeus, I think He cleared out independent Lawful Evil competition before humans had writing, except for Zon-Kuthon who's the god of pain and misery, long story. The Neutral Evil gods are, uh, Urgathoa, goddess of disease and the undead, I've never heard anything about Her paying well, and Norgorber, who's an ascended human so that's promising in terms of being more aligned with humans but also He's the god of crime and assassins and I am not sure how interested He'd be in this project, which sounds like it optimistically involves no crimes and mostly only defensive dealings with assassins."

"I would have intuitively hoped, going on the description you gave me, that there is somewhere a Neutral Evil god of people pursuing their own sunlit interests without fretting about whether they are being too lawful or too chaotic.  Also, ascended human whoa possible new life goal how does one do that and does it trash your existing personality?"

- giggle. "There's a rock called the Starstone in Absalom, it's behind magical protections Aroden put in place and the purpose and nature of which He hid with magic and never clarified, you can touch it and ascend to godhood, hundreds of people try every year, the last success was about a thousand years ago, personality seems.....in some ways intact? As much as it could be, I guess, when you're getting that much smarter and getting a bunch of new sensory modalities and operating in a completely different context. But people stay the same alignment and some of their holy books detail new god-perspectives on the events of their life, so they at least remember it and can have opinions about it.

There might be somewhere a Neutral Evil god pursuing its own interests without worrying about Law or Chaos but if so their interests don't include the people of Golarion knowing about them."

"That's unfortunate because I can't deal with them, but at the same time, it's hilarious.  I mean, if I ascended, I would not actually fuck off and leave everyone else to go rot with no stainless steel, but the counterfactual me that does is within eyesight among the counterfactual universes.  I wonder if knowing god-math has anything to do with being able to touch the Starstone?  Seems worth a quick shot if trying is cheap."

"I mean the overwhelming majority of failures die. They're usually high enough level adventurers they just arrange a resurrection in advance if they want it, but I don't know that the church'll front you that."

"Resurrection is advanced clerics, right.  Can you give me a quick description of how one becomes a basic cleric or basic wizard?  I am wondering if knowing god-math or knowing regular math makes me sufficiently talented to do those without despecializing from my other work, and it seems like even small services there are worth tons."

"Wizards learn how to manipulate and stabilize spells, and then spend an hour every day - you can learn how to do it faster, I'm working on it, but average is an hour - preparing and stabilizing their spells, at which point they can cast them on very short notice with a couple seconds of work. Cheliax tracks people to be wizards at 14 and generally if you haven't washed out you can reliably cast and retrieve cantrips at 16. Possibly an adult with all the math background and none of the spell background can pick it up in days or weeks. More complicated spells are the same thing but you need to follow more complicated math and you need more working memory - which necklaces are great for - the specific math is topology, did that translate -"

"Closed sets, open sets, fixed-point mappings?  I was okay at topology at age 12, didn't follow up, probably better at it now.  Hour a day sounds expensive in time but it'd be nice to have an instant employment fallback option.  Clerics?"

"Yes, that sounds like the right kind of math. I can check if you're smart enough to be a wizard, if you want, there's a spell for checking that. For clerics a god picks you. Usually when you pray to them, not necessarily the first time you pray to them but the first time you've - grown up, in some relevant way, or understood something new - sometimes it's just at an apparently random time, though. They get more powerful through time in their god's service and deeds in their god's service and sometimes, again, apparently at random - I'm sure it's nonrandom from a godperspective."

"'Pray'?"

"Uh, you clear your environment of distractions and kneel on the floor and try to - acknowledge that you're in the presence, or could be, of something much bigger than yourself, something that can see much farther, and you think about their priorities and your desire to serve them, and sometimes ask for things, but, like, 'the strength to do Your will' sorts of things, not for things to specifically go your way, since the god knows better about what's best."

"Do people who become clerics ever regret that in retrospective expectation without benefit of hindsight?  Can you easily resign the position and pick another god if it doesn't work out?  Is successfully 'praying' enough evidence of purpose-alignment that it never happens with a god you'd rather not partner with under reflective equilibrium?  I'm wondering if there's any reason I should not just immediately do this with Asmodeus and cut out the middleman, in case that other cleric decided he needed to go cut his toenails first."

" - I think probably you should do it but you might be too Chaotic or something," or insufficiently informed about the things about Asmodeus that you're going to object to, "so I expect it to not work. I have never heard of anyone regretting become a cleric except if they eventually got ex-clericed, which I think can be traumatic. I think if you no longer want to serve the god that'd probably break clerichood, or if you change alignments to be too far from the god that does it, though I haven't heard of anyone breaking clerichood on purpose."

"Yeah, I'm getting the impression that gods are very much the big factions here, and if that's true, I am starting to wonder whether becoming a cleric is an obvious sort of thing to try if you don't want to get noisily moved around by clerics - supposedly on behalf of gods, maybe, but maybe in fact the clerics don't even know logical decision theory and start wars.  How is being ex-clericed traumatic?  Is the part where nobody does that on purpose because it's so traumatic?  Or because nobody forms a successful cleric bond unless they're gonna get along great with the god?"

"I think mostly - people don't form a bond if they won't get along with the god, and also if you're clericed then the church is - yours, it trains you and pays you and gets you help and guidance and is full of people like you, which for lots of people is hard to find, and also you get magic powers which you get in the habit of using for everything from drinking water to temperature tolerance to lighting - magic can make hot weather feel nice, that might be part of why we don't have a ice industry -  and then being de-clericed is being told you aren't worth that, and losing your magic powers, and losing your job, and losing your economically valuable skills? I don't know any ex-clerics, though."

"Can you talk to a god without being a cleric?  Have you ever communicated with Asmodeus?"

"You can. There are a billion people and gods have...maybe a hundred thousand times peoples' attentional capacity but they're also not spending most of it talking to people on Golarion, there are other planets and other things they're doing on their own planes. Also reportedly gods talking to you causes significant pain afterwards, if you're not using a high level cleric spell that prepares you for it. Because your brain is just - doing a bunch of stuff brains don't do on their own and then the resetting afterwards involves the brain sort of flailing wildly. But sometimes gods talk to people who aren't their clerics, if they're paying enough attention to notice and it's important enough."

He doesn't want to be too obvious about the meaning of the next question, so he'd better toss in a distractor first.  "I guess if the gods can talk to non-clerics, that's some evidence against the picture I was building up, where the clerics might be misrepresenting what gods say, and that's why some of this picture doesn't make sense in terms of smarter-than-human beings acting in coherent ways.  The part about clerics ending up fighting wars is still very strange, even if it didn't destroy much that gods care about.  It's much more a behavior I'd expect from flailing nongods under the influence of something like Chaos, if Chaos here is a kind of reified factor that can affect people.  But I may be stupidly missing the extreme basics of the equilibrium of this entire world.  Is it possible for you to - quickly sketch out who the major factions are and what they bargained for in the god-equilibrium that underlies everything?  So far I know about Asmodeus, the Lawful Evil god of people pursuing selfish interests but in an organized way that I'd ordinarily say is icky except that your standard of Chaos is fifteen hundred times more Chaotic than I want to be, Norburger, god of killing-people-for-money, and Abedder."

In fact Keltham has carefully memorized the names Norgorber, Neutral Evil god of crime and assassinations, and Abadar, Lawful Neutral god that Keltham would probably get along with; but he does not wish to show that he has.

"Yeah. So the biggest thing is that there was a very powerful god, Rovagug, who ate planets, and had eaten a bunch of them already when He came to Golarion, and it took an alliance of all of the non-Chaotic gods to stop him from eating Golarion too, and He couldn't be destroyed but they imprisoned Him. People say in the center of the world but I think that's probably a metaphor. But the imprisonment took the cooperation of all of Them, and I think any of Them could let Him loose, so that's sort of the base of the god-agreements, that all of the gods have to continue thinking Golarion ought to go on existing under any particular conditions on Golarion that obtain, or They could just destroy it.

The restrictions on cleric magic are generally understood to be part of a godagreement, for basically the same reason - that if any god who wanted could just put much more of Themself into Golarion then the others would have to do it reciprocally and then there'd be much less space for mortals doing mortal things - and so clerics are restricted to the more positive sum set of the things they could potentially be enabled to do. 

The afterlives are a godagreement. Each plane gets to do its own thing and gets those souls judged by Pharasma, who is True Neutral, to be theirs. Abaddon, Neutral Evil, defected on that, they eat their souls and they were eating some directly from the transit to judgment instead of waiting until they were theirs, so Pharasma changed the rules, and now people damned to Abaddon can choose Hell or the Abyss instead, and also most of the other afterlives volunteered some forces to defend the souls on their way to judgment. 

Asmodeus has agreements with most of the other gods, that protect Hell and the souls in it and advance His goals elsewhere. I know He's a party to lots of things protecting Golarion continuing to exist, and the sorting system for afterlives, and the compromise that cuts Abaddon out, and I think also agreements about intervention among the afterlives with each other, and with worlds other than Golarion. I know that long ago the gods broke into coalitions that disagreed on what we called "free will" - what I think you'd call preference incoherence, the thing about humans where occasionally we don't do what's in our interests - and Asmodeus was opposed to it, and in Hell teaches it out of people. 

Good and Evil are opposed but the Lawful Good and Lawful Evil afterlives don't fight each other directly, which is a godagreement of some kind. The Lawful Good gods are ...Erastil, who does agriculture, Iomedae, who is an ascended human and the god of the fight against Evil, Shizuru, who I think...used to do things on Golarion? but lost interest millennia ago - She's got a residual church in Tian Xia though - and some minor ones probably. I don't think the Lawful Good 'side' has unified priorities, Iomedae's all about defeating Evil but I don't think the other gods care about that very much. Iomedae's the one who's a signatory to the Worldwound treaty. 

Sarenrae's the Neutral Good goddess of redemption, the potential for goodness in everybody, and her afterlife spends most of its resources on arguing at Pharasma's trials that every single person should be sorted as Neutral Good, even if they're quite cheerful about being headed elsewhere, on a principle about how there's Goodness in everyone. She smote an entire city once for defying Her will, and She was instrumental in the Rovagug truce. I don't know much about Her. She's popular in the Kelesh Empire. Shelyn's the Neutral Good God of love and beauty and joy and music, She's in favor of those things I guess? I don't know Her to be in any important agreements either, which doesn't mean She isn't, but they're probably not ones relevant to Golarion or to Asmodeus."

"When you say Asmodeus teaches people to be more coherent, are we talking teaching people to not have kids and kill them, or, like, full-scale Keeper 'let's see how much god-math humans can become and wield' coherence?  Is Iomedae fighting Abaddon eating souls, or also fighting Asmodeus?  What's the entire anti-Worldwound coalition?  Where does Norburger or Abedder fit in?"

"Iomedae fights Abaddon eating souls but also fights Asmodeus - or, they don't fight, but - they're opposed, and their agreements are the agreements of enemies, renegotiated off relative power levels. Because He's also Evil. The anti-Worldwound coalition is Sarenrae, Iomedae, Calistria - who I didn't get to, she's the Chaotic Neutral goddess of revenge - Abadar, and Asmodeus, mainly, I'm sure there are other gods involved but They don't have large forces committed here and They aren't among the advertised churches you have obligations towards under the treaty, though the treaty also imposes obligations towards anyone who is here and fighting the Worldwound, regardless of their god. I have no idea what a full-scale Keeper is but devils - the kind of being that people turn into in Hell - are not just people who don't have kids and kill them, they're much more different than that. I suppose some of them eventually become mostly god-math, because some of them eventually become mostly gods."

"How is revenge Chaotic, what?  Not punishing defections is the kind of defect of instrumental strategy that you could mistake as niceness but is actually stupidity... feel free to ignore that if the answer is gods just not seeing the world the way humans do.  Are there afterlives besides Neutral Evil where people don't turn into mostly god-math given enough time?  What did Calistria, Abadar, and Norburger bargain for in the god-equilibrium?"

"Uh, I agree that not punishing defections is - you'd think nice, actually stupid - but I don't think Calistrians are very interested in only punishing defection as opposed to bad things in full generality and I don't think they care about the punishment being - systematic, calibrated in punitiveness - they're not a legal system - Maybe revenge is the wrong word. Reversals of power relations? I agree revenge could be a perfectly good Lawful Evil domain if approached differently.

In the Abyss people turn into demons. In the Maelstrom - the Chaotic Neutral afterlife - they turn into chaos beasts, which can't interact with causality - the Maelstrom doesn't have any - in Elysium I have no idea. In Nirvana they turn into animals for unclear reasons. The True Neutral afterlife kicks you out into other afterlives as soon as you develop a slant on Law/Chaos or Good/Evil but if you manage to never I think you turn into a very specialized kind of godmath aimed at enabling the sorting. Heaven and Axis I think work mostly like Hell in that eventually you turn into mostly godmath but with, like, different emphasis, Heaven'll strip all the Evil out of you and Axis I think just makes you pure Law with no other desires.

I have no idea what Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber bargained for."

Keltham keeps a neutral face.  It is, in dath ilan, mostly a theoretical study, because the incentives have been set up not to do that, to punish any attempt at doing that.  But he is starting to wonder if possibly the woman in front of him is a theoretical entity that ought to appear in only counterfactual branches of reality:  The overtly biased salesperson, speaking bad judgments of a sort she can potentially be caught out on later, and for which she will not later be able to plausibly present an unbiased line of reasoning leading there after-rewinding-hindsight, for purposes of executing more favorable trades now.  It seems like the sort of thing that could go along with a world in which people end up fighting wars.  It is possible, though by no means certain, that this information is being filtered.

In the Chaotic Neutral afterlife you can't interact with causality, hm?  Maybe it's just a translation error, but.

"Huh.  What do clerics or other faction-members of Calistria, Abadar, and Norgorber do in practice?"

"Calistria runs abortion clinics and shelters for women who've made marriage vows and want to run out on them. Often for good reasons, like that their husband sucks. Abadar runs Osirion, which is a country south of Cheliax, and runs banks in other places. Norgorber's followers are - mostly criminal gangs. Orders of assassins, most of them that I've heard of, but overwhelmingly criminals aren't assassins and other kinds are less notorious so I bet it's mostly less notorious kinds of crime.

Did you want me to do the thing that checks if you are smart enough to learn to be a wizard, I bet you are but if you are I can ask them to also get a spellbook for you, while they set up somewhere nice."

"Cost, side effects, is there a reason to bother running it if I can already prove basic theorems in topology?  Also snerk about the Lawful Neutral god running the banking system.  I was about to ask how you did banking in such a way as to not make a profit for yourself or try to benefit anybody else, but then I realized that a crazy ideal bank setting ideal prices would drive all other banks out of business, so of course the Lawful Neutral god runs the banks.  Not sure why you think I'd get along with that god, that is very not the kind of investing I aspire to.  Is there a Lawful Good god of unselfishly wanting people to know more stuff and figure out more stuff?  Obviously I couldn’t be their cleric, but they'd be the god whose thingy benefits most directly when I disseminate knowledge and methods of creating knowledge.  They should potentially be going in with Asmodeus on backing me, if Lawful Good and Lawful Evil ever do mutual projects.  Separate dumb question to ignore, how do Chaotic gods think at all, let alone be smarter than human?  Cognition is built of shards and fragments of higher mathematical structures that we'd consider extremely the word that translates to us as 'lawful', unless the godly concept of Law and Chaos only applies to overt social behaviors."

Is he being too obvious in his strategic objectives as inferable from his tactical maneuvering, despite the distractors he's throwing in?  Not much he can do about that without slowing down, and he's under a time limit.

"Good and Evil do collaborative projects sometimes and this sure sounds like one but I don't actually know of a Lawful Good god with prosperity in their domain? The reason why you'd hear in Cheliax is that Good people are so obsessed with unselfishness that their societies can't even sustain positive-sum things like wealth that run on selfishness and I think the way a paladin would say it is that wealth invites greed and corruption and so on, and societies that are trying too hard at pursuing it lose the selflessness." She is at this point dancing along the line of saying things that are supportive of other churches, which is illegal, but letting him decide he can't work with Cheliax would be catastrophic too. Plausibly she should pretend the spell has run out but it has six minutes more and maybe he could tell. "...I don't know that much about Chaotic gods, they're barred in Cheliax because Asmodeus mostly can't form god agreements with them, I think.....just thinking of things I know about, and I don't know all that much about gods, you can have a very short time horizon or very high discounting so you don't care very much if your values will be different tomorrow because you don't care much about anything that happens tomorrow, and will trade off lots of it for things that happen today, you can probably have the equivalent of that in dimensions other than time, you can prefer that future instances of you share your values but otherwise have entirely different attributes, I think gods have lots of attributes that are not overdetermined by their values, you can - I don't really know. Some kinds of outsiders you can summon and ask this stuff but obviously you can't summon full-on chaos beasts and the things you can summon from the Maelstrom are generally not very easy to get answers out of, is my understanding."

Interesting.  Push on that slightly harder and see what happens?  Maybe his strategy will then be too obvious, but inferring other people's strategies from the infinite possibility space seems like it should actually be hard, or at least, fiction writers talk about how often their readers misinterpret them even when trying to telegraph things.

"Not a god of prosperity, a god of - teaching?  Knowledge?  Aside from everything to do with parents and kids, people who unselfishly want other people to gain knowledge are, like, one of the few examples I can think of Good that doesn't seem fully inhuman.  I'm not one of them, but there are dath ilani teachers who want you to learn their whole subject matter in a way that seems - as unselfish as anything ever gets?  And more importantly, there are people driven towards gaining new knowledge in a way that should code as either Good or Neutral, as I understand it?  If there's a god for that, and people going with that faction are actually competent at the god's thing, I am going to need the best of those people if I try anything on the order of reconstructing a nonmagical sailless ship.  The sort of people who invent math before any wizards have a use for it because they are just that obsessed with math.  Those people.  Is there a god for that one?"

"A god of teaching. I'm pretty sure not. I can ask once the spell runs out and give you a signal yes or no - yes looks like this, no looks like this - my books list all the gods including the minor ones by domain, and there are lots of minor ones, but that I expect I'd have heard of, it's not a rare profession exactly, my mother's a teacher. ....honestly I think lots of people like that are Neutral and worship Nethys, the god of magic and knowledge. Nethys is said to be omniscient, but He's also insane, His plans don't make any sense on the material world and his clerics get steadily less capable of talking about things to humans over time and usually blow themselves up doing ridiculous magic experiments. ...Irori is a Vudrani god - ascended human - of perfect self-knowledge - no, I guess that doesn't seem like the thing either -"

"Sounds like we're running out of time.  Are we running out of time?"

"Yes. Last questions? Planning to get you nice accommodations, spellbook, writing implements, look up gods."

"Sounds correct.  Look, I'm sorry if this is impugning your honesty, but I hope you realize that I'm in a strange place with a visibly low level of Law where people fight destructive-conflicts.  I do not actually know that people here have set up all the careful structures and customs you use to incentivize honest business arrangements.  I am going to be taking some precautions based on that and I am genuinely sorry if those are unnecessary and lead to suboptimal outcomes from your own perspective, but please consider my own ignorance."

"So, you could have reported all that to me completely honestly and I just went picking for coincidences until I found some.  Or it could be not-coincidence that you're willing to tell me the identifying things of all the Good and Neutral gods I can't become a cleric of, but not actually give me Asmodeus's key identifying info, plus there's supposedly no other Lawful Evil gods worth mentioning, plus all the Neutral Evil gods you identified to me are horrible.  I am not actually going to get myself into a situation where other people are playing middleman between myself and Asmodeus, and pawning off cute financial rewards on me, while keeping the intelligence-enhancement rewards to themselves.  Again, sorry if you're not even considering that, but I need to consider what your incentives might be.  I am currently considering options that include praying directly to Asmodeus about this, tonight, based on my guesses as to what the top Lawful Evil god's thing might be, starting with 'making money'.  If that's a terrible idea because, for example, I can accidentally get Iomedae if I accidentally think about how I'm unhappy about the Abaddon business, or because the existing Asmodeus clerics get snippy when somebody tries to talk to Asmodeus without them, maybe explain very fast why I shouldn't do that.  Alternatively, tell me how to make sure I get Asmodeus."