"I have always understood the self-modifications we are discussing to be entirely voluntary and deliberately undertaken, and in fact in Axis purchased. And no afterlife, to my knowledge, bars you from the destruction of your person, though -" earnestly - "if you destroy yourself then you just no longer exist, you don't find yourself somewhere else. If there's something you want, you have to build it here."

"Everyone is, in fact, in so many different places that it's impossible to destroy all of yourself; the worst thing that can happen to you is being transformed while still conscious and existent into something you didn't want to become.  It's not so much that you find yourself in another place, though it can in fact feel like that, but that you find yourself in the remaining futures that continued from your past.  But my figuring out how to explain that may have to wait for later."

"Hell and Heaven don't run on the purchase method?"

"My humble understanding, with yet more emphasis we've ventured far from the questions I contemplate regularly, is that Hell and Heaven both evaluate the suitability of candidates to be devils or angels, and people work for many centuries to earn an evaluation as a suitable candidate. A priest of Asmodeus might tell you that Hell's evaluation is not so different from how Axis does it, except that we are accepting some bad results in our process in exchange for the simplicity and transparency of having it done in a standard fashion, as a business arrangement. A priest of Shizuru might tell you that if the universe would be overall worse as a consequence of some person's growth in Law, then Heaven will not enable it, and so additional screening is necessary."

"And what happens to people in Elysium?"

"That is a much harder question to answer. The Lawful afterlives tend to have organized churches that don't tolerate, say, different branches in different countries teaching contradictory things about the nature of their god. The Chaotic gods have not prioritized resolving such contradictions. Elysium is perhaps an infinite wilderness populated by flighty beings of simple delights; is perhaps full of dangerous adventures; is perhaps full of places that distort your perceptions and comprehensions in different ways, that you may return from them with a deeper understanding of the contracts inside your mind. - they wouldn't say 'contracts'. It's a beautiful place, I'd bet money on that, and the people there seem happy. I really can't tell you more than that."

...enforcing consistency is not the same as enforcing accuracy, but this Keltham will not argue; if you can make that mistake at all, you are probably hard to correct about it.

"I'd think it would be something of a priority, if you wanted people correctly valuing Axis versus Elysium as a desirable destination, for even the Lawful Neutral priests to be able to tell people how Axis contrasted to Elysium, meaning that you'd prioritize having accurate info about Elysium yourself.  Otherwise what prevents Chaotic Good priests from claiming that Elysium has everything Axis does, plus free chocolate cookies?"

"Oh, there's misleading advertising, to my great annoyance. I've seen it argued that the reason the Chaotic gods don't bother clarifying their teachings is that they get to benefit from whatever interpretation of them is most favorable and most compelling to their followers spreading, without it needing to be constrained by truth. But ultimately, if you die and go to either Axis or Elysium, and decide you chose wrong, it's not an irreparable mistake; it's costly, and slow the way mortals mark time, but there are demigods who will ferry you between them, and effect your transformation from one kind of petitioner to another. I am open with Abadar's trainees that it seems to me that Axis, possessing more of the virtues that make men rich and businesses successful in life, is a better place, but that these sorts of things are hard to see from where we stand."

"I have, due to strange circumstances, ended up as the cleric of an unknown Lawful Neutral god whose symbol now adorns the cloak of my representative here.  Assuming I'm willing to throw quite a lot of resources at it, is there any fast way I can find out which god that is and get in touch with their church in Golarion, including by going through Axis?"

"The head of the church of Abadar is the Pharaoh of Osirion, long may he live, great may his nation grow, and it is said that Abadar has made a shard of Himself unusually available to the Pharaoh to direct him in the management of Osirion. It is conceivable that if I sent your inquiry to Osirion, and they deemed it worthy of the Pharaoh's attention -- which isn't a sure thing, though a large monetary contribution helps immensely - then He would be able to derive the answers you seek straight from Abadar. Before you tried something that momentous, of course, I'd take every possible smaller step - you could place an advertisement in every newspaper in circulation in Absalom, offering a reward for any information on the symbol. You'll get a lot of claptrap, but hire someone competent to investigate the more promising submissions. You could do the same thing in Katheer, and Goka, and at the Worldwound. A full page newspaper advertisement is 45gp, and reaches tens of thousands of people."

Welp, that's definitely either a seventh-circle priest of the business-god with actual competence, or Conspiracy Carissa, because now Keltham feels like an idiot and there's not many beings in Golarion who have demonstrated the ability to do that to him.

"Bit surprised that Osirion would ask for a contribution rather than a bounty on successful identification.  There isn't a standard pricing on this, is there?"

"The Pharaoh accepts payment for his attention with some probability related to, but not only related to, how much you pay him, as a form of price discrimination. If he entertains the request in the first place he'll probably separately want a bounty for identification."

"Uh huh.  And do you have any idea what some attention prices and attention probabilities would be, or what kind of separate bounty the Pharaoh would be likely to ask?"

"You'd get a better estimate if I knew anything about you; part of the point of the price discrimination is that 1000gp, from someone for whom that's obviously a year's wages, means much more than 1000gp from Xerbystes. But in general, 1000gp will mean the application gets seriously reviewed by the pharaoh's staff, 3000gp gets through a majority of the time, and I'd be very surprised to ever hear of an occasion where 10,000gp didn't. No, you can't just immediately resubmit with more money if it didn't get heard, you generally have to wait at least a year or until something has substantively changed."

Not very multiagent-efficient... is this an attempt at extracting maximum value from customers via an elaborate one-sided mechanism that sometimes destroys value?  Keltham is tempted to go pay them in spellsilver just before the news hits of the price drop... okay not really that would not be nice, they could resell it on directly to a customer who'd be harmed thereby.  Actually they should figure out how to announce that sometime very soon, people are trading at bad prices, Keltham forgot there wasn't any Governance office managing that sort of news release in Golarion.

Keltham is trying to figure out a way to tell if this guy is actually Conspiracy Carissa.  But that's sort of hard to do when Conspiracy Carissa is reading your mind about which tests you're thinking about trying.

No, he's not suddenly ripping off her headband, it's genuinely not nice, and also now that he's thought it out loud the Conspiracy has invisibly tapped Carissa with a Fox's Cunning so she'll keep the same +4 bonus.

"It's been represented to me that women in Osirion can't own property.  What's the logic of that from a business standpoint?  Half of your economy isn't free to participate in the economy."

Kind of a naive attempt at Carissa detection, Conspiracy Carissa probably has any ability to argue completely opposed viewpoints, but it's worth trying; they could be only reading his mind intermittently.

Don't lie about this one!  The whole truth will sound bad enough to him anyways.  Has Sevar been read in on -

Aspexia weighs up considerations in a lightning flash.  Playing to tropes - does not actually override Asmodeus's orders - and reading in Sevar on this, which has not previously been deemed advantageous to Cheliax's interests, will take time and create a suspicious pause -

Aspexia decides to make a move; she is not Keltham's defeated opponent the way Abrogail is, nor has she driven enough of the story that her greater authority should threaten Sevar's main character status.  She will step forward once, and fade back after.

(She is being respectful to the tropes, in following her own Lord's orders; she has previously not told Sevar of her Irori-cleric status, as the tropes wished; she does now attempt to do this in a way that will not disrupt their story-weaving - is this an attitude they wish to discourage -)

"I'd call that an unfair representation.  Matters are more politically complicated than they represented to you.  Osirion is not Absalom, the people there are extremely skeptical of the equilibrium as it holds in Absalom or say Cheliax - if I've correctly identified your representative as hailing from there - with high abortion, high infanticide, high infidelity, legal divorce, and women's rights.  Most Osirians are deeply skeptical that you can just take the women's rights and legal divorce part, and not get the rest of the Avistani equilibrium."

"Mortal life only lasts a few decades.  To the extent Osirians worry about the inherent badness of oppressing women, they think that's outweighed by the benefit of making sure that people end up in Axis rather than the Maelstrom - which is not a plane you can with any reliability leave if you did not wish to arrive."

"The reign of Abadar is not so old, and the current administration has been slowly shifting in a direction I think Chelish sensibilities would approve as a direction, in this regard.  Before Abadar united Himself with the Pharaoh, property could only be held by married, landowning men; to this has now been added young married men with incomes but no land, and spellcasting women have been made eligible for that status as well.  It is a great change to Osirion, and now they will want to wait and see what comes of it."

"Fairness does impel me to say, that did you ask this question of a priest of Abadar born and raised in Osirion, they might say less that they were trying to move in a Chelish-approved direction, and more that they are striving to build the institutions Abadar asks of them, institutions whose participants end up in Axis, whether that was best done through women having more rights or less.  But that's involved slow moves in a Chelish direction, in that regard, not away from it."

This reply was not immediately interrupted when Keltham had a bright idea in a flash, one that had to be implemented before the Conspiracy could react to the detected thought, and ordered Carissa to be quiet - he needed to hear the answer, after all - and then started suddenly tickling her.

"Heard, let me think," he Messages the priest, and then says to Carissa, "You can talk now."

"You're - abusing me terribly, you know that?" Her eyes are shining. "I'd just had an insight on your math problem!" Asmodia help what insight did I just have on the math problem, she can use the one she genuinely had but it's not ideal, too preliminary. 

Knowing they know you know they know goes off to infinity which means you're not going to be representing knowledge as probabilities assigned to propositions, it's got to be some finite representation that lets you can derive the infinite series of facts about who knows about who knows what.

We've actually got a specific system worked for partitions of possible worlds, but if you tell Keltham you've got that far, he'll be expecting a solution from you almost immediately after.

"Well, obviously Conspiracy Carissa wants me to ask, but I suppose Ordinary Carissa does too, so: what insight?"

"I know you know I know etcetera goes off to infinity, which means I have to throw out the entire approach of representing knowledge as probabilities assigned to propositions, I need a finite representation that derives the infinite series there. 

I'm actually, on a different note, really confused about your Conspiracy threat model, here? Even if you assume the Conspiracy put all the best liars in Cheliax on this project, I'm not on this project in my capacity as one of the best liars in Cheliax, I'm on this project because it might be that the gods picked your landing-place on purpose and if so we don't want to mess with that. So it'd be bizarre if I were the best person in Cheliax to pretend to be a seventh-circle priest of Abadar. Also, Abadarans always have a price, in the Conspiracy we've just paid this guy to lie to you and promised to exceed any bribe you credibly offer him." 

"Imaginably correct as of the moment I landed on the Worldwound, but since then I've been teaching you in particular and also I plausibly landed on somebody who'd understand me better than other liars -"

Wait.  Has he been distracted enough by considering whether that particular response sounded less like Carissa than the previous ones, wondering if they read his mind and brought in a different actor to run that, that he's failed to consider the simpler possibility where the person he tickled was not Carissa at all -

A thought crosses Keltham's mind, and he quickly reaches out and grabs the hand of the possible actor playing Carissa Sevar, before they could be invisibly spirited away and replaced by the real one.

Keltham considers whether to use up his one Glimpse of Beyond to check on the true identity of the person whose hand he's holding.

- she looks down at his hand, and then back up at him. "... new theory is that someone is impersonating Carissa Sevar so Carissa Sevar can impersonate a priest of Abadar?"