mad investor chaos Carissa lands on Elie
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"Most Galtans aren't that clever, obviously, that just seems like it would get you a cabal of wizards – what do you mean you know a place that did it that way? Did it work?" 

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"They claimed so but it seemed quite possible they were in fact ruled by a evil conspiracy? Also by your hypothesis this entire conversation was a false memory."

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"Well, yes, but it's a false memory implanted by a Chelish princess who for some reason wanted you to believe you knew how to overthrow governments, that's interesting! I've never heard of any such place, and I believe I've looked as extensively as anyone in Galt. And anyway I'm above intelligence 16, so if the math works I should be able to verify it." 

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"If I teach you enough math will you agree that my implanted memories are in fact from the future? Because that'd be a useful thing to have someone persuaded of" who can't betray me about it.

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"You know, I have a friend who thinks that if we just taught children enough math in school they'd immediately realize that the kind of knowledge one gains from reason and understanding is inherently superior to the kind one receives from arbitrary authority and then they'd be immune to Asmodeanism? I think he's probably wrong since he has some complicated theory about how topology is an exception and that's why this doesn't happen to wizards, but he's one of my favorite people and I wish everyone in the world really was like him. 

...I don't know why knowing a lot of math would mean you're from the future. If I think of places that have lots of mathematical knowledge I've never heard of, the top of the list is probably ancient Azlant."

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"- I think your friend might be right but in a very complicated way and also not being Asmodean kind of sucks, if you're still going to go to Hell, so I'd really fix that before I started teaching everyone the math that'll break them."

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"...I've never been an Asmodean. Not since I was old enough to have the use of reason. Trying to be Asmodean almost broke me. It was only when I ran away from school and started to think for more than a few minutes at a time that I was able to begin making myself whole. Asmodeanism makes people blind stupid pathetic shadows of themselves. I have no idea if I'm going to Hell or not, but I've known my whole life that one day I would be executed as an apostate." Slight laugh. "Which is a blessing, really, since it means I have nothing to lose if I die trying to make damnation less inevitable." 

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"I'm very sorry to hear that but many people are Asmodeans and making them not Asmodeans wouldn't be a favor to them. Unless you have built a Civilization competent to negotiate with Asmodeus for a better deal for mortals."

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"Outside of Cheliax it's really quite rare for people to go to Hell. Unless you actually believe the line about Asmodeus's victory being assured?"  

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"Whether Asmodeus's victory is assured or not depends on whether it's 4699!!!"

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Well, it's not like he hasn't given this speech a hundred times before. 

"....I don't see how it does. It's a lie. It's always been a lie. To a first approximation everything the Church says is a lie, and this is the single thing they have the most reason to want us to believe to get us to fall in line, so we should doubt it to begin with. What reason do we have to believe it's true? Asmodeus is an ancient god, but so are Erastil and Sarenrae and Shelyn and Pharasma and a dozen others. I know the Book of the Damned claims he's older, but there's also a chapter in there that claims he's a former Empyreal Lord, there's a reason it's so hard to get your hands on the unexpurgated version, it contradicts itself in a dozen places just that I know of. He has a nation on Golarion, but Abadar does too, and Baba Yaga, who no one claims is a god at all. Mortals who aren't deliberately being manipulated their whole lives to the exclusion of all else rarely end up Lawful Evil. 

A disinterested observer, looking at the world we live in, would not conclude that Asmodeus was destined to conquer all of reality. But let's say that they did. We can still prove them wrong. In the first place, even if Asmodeus defeated every other god, Hell is finite and the Chaotic planes are infinite. How does he plan to occupy them? He can't, it's necessarily impossible, there are not and cannot be enough devils for him to do it. We think because we're holding the Worldwound that the battle between Hell and the Abyss is evenly matched, but that's only true on the Material Plane. But we're on the Material Plane, so that's not very comforting, fine. Next. 

The universe still exists. If Asmodeus was inevitably, knowably going to win, then the other gods should know it! They're not acting like they know. Every minute we exist, more children are born who would one day be condemned to eternal torture. Any of the greater Good gods could release Rovagug right now, if they wanted. From their perspective, every instant they hesitate would be an unconscionable crime. They'd have nothing even to bargain with and no reason not to destroy the world right now. All they'd be doing is creating more victims. But let's say the ways of the gods are unknowable to mortals and we can't even try to interpret  their behavior. Next. 

The arc of history doesn't look like one where Asmodeus is winning. He won a great victory 90 years ago, but that doesn't mean anything on the scale of the past ten thousand years. In that timeframe, he wants to deny mortals free will and instead we keep ascending to godhood. And what kinds of gods do we become? Gods who are inherently opposed to the interests of Asmodeus. Nethys, the god of knowledge, can only oppose the god of lies. Irori – " Carissa might be able to detect a hint of anger here – "who's obviously failed to communicate something profoundly important because his worship is permitted in Cheliax when it's quite obvious that the pursuit of self-perfection is incompatible with deliberately keeping yourself crippled and ignorant and incapable of conscious thought. Aroden, the god of humanity, who wanted his followers to ascend with him. Norgober, the god of crime, but also the god of secrets and of thought and memory too, he's an important god for resisting tyrants, especially if they're Lawful. Cayden Cailean. And Iomedae. Every single ascended god is a shift in the divine balance of power away from Hell. 

...now, the smart Asmodean response here is that none of this matters because Asmodeus wrote the Contract of Creation and snuck the terms of his victory into some sub-clause, and nothing that happens in the meantime is evidence either way. But then we have the same problem of believing things we only know because Asmodeus told them to us, and also the problem where nobody's realized their mistake and destroyed the world yet. And it also means you don't get to use your best argument, which is that Asmodeus killed Aroden. I acknowledge that that's a flaw in my argument. But I never claimed that Asmodeus isn't a great power. All Aroden's death tells me is that Asmodeus's victory is possible. Not that it's assured, or even that it's particularly likely." 

There's one more thing, which he's barely been able to articulate to himself, but something the diabolist said shook it loose – 

"You talked about building a civilization competent to negotiate with Asmodeus. That's just what I want to do – or, I want to create the conditions in which it can be done. The way I see it, Aroden is proof of concept. He showed that mortals can become gods; that they can become the kinds of gods who make it easier for other mortals to become gods. We still have the starstone, and if it's broken we know it's possible to make another. It wouldn't even be hard, if we just stopped being so stupid about everything all the time. Wizards don't share knowledge; we spend all our energy learning to kill monsters or kill each other or become immortal lichs and none at all on making tools to make the next generation better. That's what we're going to change in our Republic. We'll teach our children to think for themselves and pursue truth instead of lies and collaborate instead of tearing each other down. We'll keep trying until we get it right. It might take another ten thousand years, or fifty thousand, but I believe we can create the world where humanity can win." 

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Carissa has never engaged in a serious argument about any of this because why would she. 

 

She blinks at the kid. 

 

(Doesn't really sound like Abrogail, even like Abrogail testing her perfoming range.)

 

"- none of those are the reason I think Asmodeus might be going to win in the timeline I'm from, but, okay, if you want to build a Civilization competent to stand up to him I'm not going to talk you out of that because it seems like a good idea.

 

- who are you, exactly?"

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"My name is Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet, and up until six months ago I was a student at the Isarn Wizarding Academy. The day before yesterday I gave an ill-advised speech and now there's a crowd storming the governor's palace." 

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" - right. Okay. 

 

Do you mind if I read your mind, I think it'd be hard to fake."

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"Obviously I mind. I might mind a bit less if you untie me first." 

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"As in, you'll agree to it if I untie you?"

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"Yes. Fine. It's not like you could possibly find anything more heretical than what I've already said." 

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"I promise, I am incredibly uninterested in the fate of your eternal soul. Go wherever you want. If Hell wants everybody it had better figure out something useful to do with all of them. That said, if you run off I probably will kill you, because I still have no idea what's going on and don't want anyone to know I'm here while I'm injured and out of spells."

 

They're command-word restraints. She releases them.

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Élie is thinking that he was never under the impression any Chelish authority figure cared about his eternal soul except insofar as damning it might net them a promotion, which is exactly the situation he's worried about here, and that if he ever gets past his stupid fucking spell block he's going to hit eight circle and cast Mind Blank every day, just see if he doesn't. 

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She has Detect Thoughts up now and does not object that if she did care about his eternal soul it wouldn't be to net herself a promotion. She should maybe not be trying to explain herself when she's this existentially lost on this many levels. "How did you become a revolutionary."

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"Well, it was that or flee the country, and finding a revolutionary cell was much easier." 

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"What was your thought process."

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He thought he explained this already. He's not an Asmodean, if he doesn't manage to overthrow the government he'll be executed and maledicted and he doesn't want to go to Hell. Isn't that reason enough? 

"One day we were all given a half-day from classes to go see an execution – it was one of the long ones – and in the middle the cleric gave a speech about how the filthy heretic's companions would soon be found, which isn't the thing you'd make up since it makes the secret police look incompetent and anyway they dragged him away about five minutes later. So I knew there were people out there who hadn't yet been found, and who were trying to change things, and that I could be one of them, and that I'd never be able to pass a loyalty test again. So I ran that night, and – " He's not going to tell her how he found them, he's not even going to think about it, he can review his Draconic verb tenses how's that. 

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"Look, what I'm looking for, here, is something Abrogail wouldn't think of. And she's very smart, and very creative, and has enough advantages that maybe Galtan revolutionaries actually can't think things that make me go 'all right, this isn't Abrogail, if Cheliax had these capabilities they'd have used them last week -' but that speech about why Asmodeus wasn't going to lose came close, except for how obviously as a speech it could just be cribbed off the actual Galtan revolutionaries. So I want to see- the thought process that produces those speeches."

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He's thinking that Abrogail can't possibly be especially creative except to a Chelish audience, because she's Chelish herself, and the whole Chelish system props itself up through stubborn and deliberate denial of the diversity of human experience and basic facts like how people actually respond to torture and what they act like when they're not constantly terrified out of their minds. Of course he grew up in Cheliax and he's not like that, but then he doesn't see how someone could understand how people really are and stay Asmodean. Maybe she has all the freedom in the world and still just terminally values hurting people? If anyone was capable of that, it'd be a scion of house Thrune. He feels sorry for her. It seems like an impoverished way to live. 

"It is my speech, but it would be possible to copy it, I've given it before. It's hard to say what my thought process was. I never believed that Asmodeus would triumph the same way I never believed anything they taught us in school, unless it's the kind of thing you can prove. You know how it is – they change out the history textbooks every year, and a teacher is a loyal servant of Church and Crown one day and an obvious traitor the next, and beating us is supposed to make us better at lessons except for how it transparently, observably doesn't. If you treat any of it like it's information you're just asking to be taken in. That's why I like magic. It can't lie to you. If you don't understand how a spell works you'll lose it or blow yourself up or some other real thing in the real world – 

Sorry. I'm getting off-topic. Anyway, I never believed it, but then around the time I got first-circle spells I realized there was a really good chance I was managing to fool myself anyway. I know I'm paving stone material. If it's true, the only thing for me would be to try to destroy my soul, and I very badly want to live. So then I started thinking about all the arguments I'd ever heard for why Asmodeus will win, and they all seemed stupid so I tried to come up with better ones, and then I asked myself what else they would imply, and what it would mean to live in a world where they were true, and that's what I came up with. Does that answer your question or should I try to be more specific?"  

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