The high priestess is watching Iomedae thoughtfully. "Many impossible things are not as difficult as that."

"I would be very grateful if you would ask if it's - the kind of thing She thinks can be done in principle, and the kind of thing She'd be willing to do, if we can beat the lich-Arazni in a fight and have the chance to throw some miracles at it."

"We may not know how to do it yet. But that wouldn't mean it can't be done, just that we haven't yet seen how. I'll ask, but not - whether it's possible in principle, just whether the time is right to do it now. And if it's the latter, you should not give up."

"If it cannot be done now then I am going to kill her instead, if I get authorization from the goddess Iomedae to act at all. Because it's not fair to make her wait on the possibility it could be done someday."

"I understand how you would have arrived at that conclusion, though I'm worried that - embracing someone who has changed enormously requires some tolerance for the fact they will not be the same, that they will not be swiftly all right, that they cannot be whatever you once needed from them and may not live up to the stories you told yourself about them. I worry that approaching this with the intent to resort to killing if it looks discouraging will make it less likely to succeed.

- it's easier to be rescued by someone who won't give up on you than by someone who will. To put it more simply."

" - I mean, obviously if the strategy that performs the best is to predictably not give up on her then I won't. In war that strategy performs poorly compared to knowing when to cut your losses, despite all of the emotional considerations around it being easier to fight if you know you can't back down and so on."

"In love I am not sure that that is so."

"I would not claim to be an expert, there."

"I will put this question to my goddess, if you would like, because I can see that you love her, and I know what we all owe her, and because you are right that it is a matter Shelyn has contemplated more than any other."

"I would appreciate that. Thank you."

And she closes her eyes and begins to sing to herself. Unsurprisingly it is a beautiful song. Some attendants bring out the cinnamon and the burners and the wax, and the cry of the petition fills the room like something physical. Communing with Aroden isn't like this; but then, Aroden is still in the grand scheme of things a very small god. 

After ten minutes her eyes flutter open.

"Shelyn says that the thing you desire is not impossible, and that She would not be unwilling to do it."

"Thank you," she says, feeling like she is shattering into a million pieces or really just like she is noticing that that happened a long time ago and now there is a prospect of putting them back together. 

"She has a condition."

"Yes?" Shelyn is a Good god. It hardly matters what it is; of course Iomedae will do it. 

"She says that you and - another? She thought you'd know who - should go to relationship counseling. She'll recommend someone. From another planet, to mitigate confidentiality concerns."

"I, uh, would have to. Talk to the other relevant party about that."

"I understand."

"What exactly is relationship counseling."

"It is where, with a trained mediator present, you discuss your relationship with a person who you love, so that the two of you can arrive at a better understanding of each other, and love more accurately and therefore better."

"That seems like a bad thing to do with someone if you don't want them to have to spend much time thinking about the fact you love them?"

"There are moments where situations defy our comprehension and I can only defer to the will of my goddess." This isn't actually one of them, but she hasn't sworn any vows of candor herself.

"I understand. Thank you."

Her teleporter is waiting to convey her back to Fort Lorrin.

She waits until they're back in a private sanctum to ask, even though she can tell from Iomedae's face that - it's more complicated than 'it won't work'. She's just not sure how.

"I infer it can be done, but - the cost is high enough that you're not sure? What is it?"

Oh nooooooo the fact Alfirin inferred that makes this worse. 

"Not - high, just - ridiculous," she manages after a moment. "And not entirely mine to pay."

"Ridiculous."

Control your face, Iomedae, it's making things worse. But of course Alfirin has always been the best person in the world at reading her. 

"Shelyn will help us on the condition that you and I get 'relationship counseling' from a relationship counselor she recommends. On another planet. To mitigate confidentiality concerns."

She blinks. "Well. Doesn't She have anything better to - nevermind. I'll do it of course, assuming there's no trick - did Her priest say how long we're expected to spend on this?"

"I didn't ask. I should have, of course, but I was - surprised. Thank you for doing it. I will ask Aroden but I doubt there's a trick, just -" dumb priorities. That's an unkind and uncareful thing to say about a god who is helping her with something she cares very deeply about and maybe also an unkind and uncareful thing to say to Alfirin. "I told her I'd have to ask you. I'll make another appointment and get some clarifications. It'll be substantially inconvenient for us both to be out but manageable if we schedule carefully."

Bad priorities. Yes. She doesn't take it personally, she agrees wholeheartedly. It makes sense that Iomedae wouldn't say it. "Did she mention which planet? If it's not one of the ones around the sun Shelyn might need to provide transportation."

"She didn't say. I will follow up on that as well. - I guess getting to visit another planet will be pretty fascinating, though if it's coming out of Nirvana's budget I suppose we can't go run around acquiring all their books."

"A pity."

Imagine having that kind of power and using it on relationship counseling - this is not a productive line of thought.

She reaches out to the church of Shelyn requesting some clarifications on the requirements. Is transport to the other planet included. How much time are they expected to spend. Can Shelyn offer any assurance about whether this is a good idea by their own priorities, or failing that by Aroden's. 

They'll set up a specialized mindscape for interworld relationship counseling. Sessions are generally an hour a week for a few months, but the question is mildly suggestive of having an attitude that will make relationship counseling less productive: the point is to do it for as long as it is improving your capacity to love and relate to and have justified trust in one another. 

Shelyn thinks this is unambiguously a good idea by their own priorities and wouldn't have asked it otherwise. 

Iomedae conveys this to Alfirin.

Well, a mindscape would solve the logistical problems of transit to another planet and also keep them away from any libraries. Not that either of them actually would pile up the intervention bill for Nirvana, but - other people might. She wonders if Shelyn's church extorts people into relationship counseling often.

Over the years Ramona has gone back and forth about her intake processes. She started from her Earth Human templates. As cultural missteps mounted she added more and more questions to her intake questionnaires in hopes that she could prevent any repeated disasters.

"What do you wish for more or less of in your sex life," for example, turned into "Describe in detail what a typical sexual encounter is on your world/in your species, and how you are atypical with respect to that," and then "please explain the cultural, biological, and relational significance of any acts associated with sexual or asexual reproduction and/or the sharing of pleasure in your species, culture, and your relationship in particular."

This did not work.

Clients do not want to write whole textbooks prior to their first session, they just want to get started. And sometimes even that's a bit much; just like on Earth, interdimensional clients often have mixed feelings about being in therapy in the first place. The less you get in their way, the better.

So right now, Ramona's intake process pendulum has swung all the way to "seat of the pants" mode. She's winging it.

She's winging it so hard that she barely even glances at the materials the Astral Therapy Agency sent over prior to this appointment. And when the clients' astral projections fuzz into place in her therapy room, she's pleased to see that they look humanoid, or even actually human, though of course that can be deceiving.

"Welcome! I'm Ramona. I'm going to do my best to help you. Please arrange the projections of your bodies comfortably on the couch there, and when you're ready, could you please introduce yourselves and say a little bit about why you're here?"

She sits, somewhat stiffly. 

"My name is Alfirin. I am a human wizard from the planet Golarion, which I assume you've never heard of but if you have then maybe that reduces the amount of cultural translation we'll have to do from what I'm expecting. Proximately, we are here because Shelyn demanded it as the price to save our friend from involuntary lichdom. Ultimately we are here because we were romantically involved briefly, about sixteen years ago, and..." And what, Alfirin? And she still loves Iomedae, but she can't just say that. "...I suppose there's some - aftermath - of that."

Even in astral projection form she is wearing shimmering plate armor that covers every inch of her body. Her helmet is invisible because that way she can see through it. She sits even more stiffly but mostly because of the plate armor. "My name is Iomedae. I am a human paladin of Aroden from the planet Golarion, where I command the Shining Crusade. We were instructed that our objective here is to 'arrive at a better understanding of each other, and love more accurately and therefore better'. I take no issue with the objective but it would not have been among my priorities if Shelyn had not made it a condition of saving our friend."

Ramona can't remember if she's heard of Golarion before or not; the planets are all kind of blurring together at this point. It doesn't help that some of her clients have been a little over-eager with their termination-session mindwipes. She'll treat it as a brand new mystery planet and figure it out from scratch, though that's not the first order of business.

She's also going to let 'wizard,' 'paladin,' 'Shining Crusade,' 'involuntary lichdom,' and the shimmering plate armor go for now, because none of those are the most important thing to tackle first.

There's an old precept in therapy that every client is a customer, a complainer, or a visitor. Customers really want to be there and are willing to work to get the results they want. Complainers come to therapy to inform the therapist of how terrible their partner is. They're hoping to team up with the therapist to browbeat the partner. Visitors are just there for the ride; someone else made them come.

So far both of these two are presenting as visitors. That's not ideal, though it's more pleasant than two complainers.

"Who is Shelyn to each of you, that they can command that you go to relationship therapy, and then you go? Do you have any of your own reasons for being here, or is it just the price you pay to save your friend?"

"Shelyn is the goddess of love and beauty, and Her interests also encompass the redemption of beings that have been twisted towards Evil and damaged in a philosophically complicated way where they wouldn't necessarily endorse the damage being undone, which is what happened to our friend. There is no other power who can help our friend, and She can.

Shelyn says that this is also a good idea when evaluated by our own priorities rather than Hers, and I expect She's correct about that - more confidently for me than for Alfirin, Shelyn is more likely to be correct in Her evaluation of my priorities - but insofar as that means I have my own reasons for being here I don't ....know what they are. I care deeply about Alfirin and the state of our working relationship is very important to me, and if there is some respect in which I am wronging her I would want to know that, but I would not have identified talking about our relationship as likely to be a good idea, had Shelyn not claimed that it is, and I don't envision any specific way it's a good idea even knowing that apparently it is."

"I have no particular relationship to Shelyn beyond what Iomedae described. I... can see how it is possible that something like relationship therapy would be in our interests, but resent it when gods meddle in my personal life." It's an acceptable cost, obviously, to help Arazni, but that doesn't mean she's happy about it.

More words to put on the conceptual confusion pile: 'goddess,' and 'her interests,' though Ramona has the sensation of understanding the rest of Iomedae's first sentence.

"All right, let me recap what I understood so far."

"Shelyn is a powerful goddess and she's the only one who can help your friend, someone you both care about. What's that friend's name, by the way?"

"Iomedae, Shelyn told you that she wanted you to go to relationship therapy, and furthermore that it would be good for you even from your own perspective. And even though you can't really see that clearly for yourself, you trust Shelyn to be right about that and tell you the truth about it. So you're pretty sold, and you don't feel manipulated, but you also feel confused about how this works or what you want from it."

"Meanwhile, Alfirin, you're less on board. Shelyn is meddling. You're here, so at least some part of you is willing to check it out, but you're under duress."

"Please tell me what I got wrong."

"'Under duress' is stronger than I would phrase it. I am here willingly as a - trade. A sacrifice. But - I don't intend to be any less cooperative with this therapy than I would be if I were here on my own initiative. It's just that - it doesn't really matter, whether this is something that might benefit me, or that I might have chosen on my own in different circumstances. I am here because Shelyn wanted me to be here."

"It matters to me if this is expected to benefit me because - if this had been proposed by an entity more hostile than Shelyn I would be very concerned that their intent is to create a rift between us or damage our relationship, and I am not very worried that that is Shelyn's intent or a likely result, so in that sense my participation is - conditional on my understanding of Shelyn's intent. But I would be willing to do things more costly than I expect this to be to fix our friend - Arazni. Her name is Arazni."

"All right. It's a bit unusual to do relationship therapy when neither client actually wants it, but you've convinced me that you're here for internally consistent reasons. It may be a bit more work than usual to figure out what your goals are, but I'm game to try."

Normally at this point Ramona would ask how they want their relationship to be different by the end of therapy, but she has the sense that would be pushing for too much, too soon with this pair. And so far she's detected no signs of animosity. What is their basic deal? Best way to find out is just to ask.

"Can you tell me something about who you are to each other? So far I've gathered that you were in a romantic relationship a long time ago, that it was brief, and that now you work together. Can you fill in some of the details?"

...She's going to let Iomedae answer that one first.

Iomedae glances uncertainly at Alfirin. "I don't know how it would be wise to approach confidentiality here, but I suppose I can just start by saying what I intend to put in the historical record? Alfirin and I met in the Shining Crusade, a war against the evil necromancer Tar-Baphon. Alfirin was a wizard compacted with the Crusade for Teleports, and I was the commander of the Knights of Ozem, a paladin order I founded. We enjoyed working together and did so frequently. We were lovers, briefly, but I was not competent to - be a lover - after which Alfirin left the Crusade for five and a half years. When she returned we took some care to have a functional professional relationship, which became particularly important when Arazni died and it looked likely we would lose the war unless someone became powerful enough to replace her as the Crusade archmage. Which Alfirin did. She does not accept much pay from the Crusade. We owe her a favor of nearly unimaginable scale but she has not asked for much of anything. We haven't discussed her plans for after the Crusade. I think very highly of her. I worry about what she'll do to be immortal because I know it is very important to her to be immortal. ...I want her to be immortal, obviously, but most of the available methods are very Evil."

"I see!"

Ramona clears her throat.

"No, that's not right, let me try again."

"I think I've got some pieces of the picture. I admit that most of it was deeply confusing, because of all the context I'm missing, but I'm not too worried about that at this stage. It's normal to take a while to get oriented."

She pauses and looks steadily at each woman in turn.

"We've only just met, you're not sure whether it's safe to trust me, and you're not sure what you're going to get out of this process. Despite all that, I'd really like to ask you lots of nosy, personal questions. Do I have your permission to do that? Even if you agree, you can always skip any specific question."

"I should also mention that under my personal ethics and the ethics of my profession, I will not talk about anything you tell me here without your permission, unless I have reason to fear you're going to do very serious, preventable damage to each other, yourselves, me, or the other inhabitants of my planet or yours. And, ahem, I guess I also gather that you're in the middle of a war on your planet. The kinds of serious, preventable damage you were going to wreak in your war anyway doesn't count as a reason to break therapeutic confidentiality."

Well that saves her having to figure out whether she wants to elaborate on Iomedae's description of who they are to each other. And the qualifier on the confidentiality puts a bound on what questions she'd be willing to answer here, though not really much more of one than Iomedae's presence already does. "Understood. You may ask your questions... though, with respect to confidentiality, do you expect a substantial risk of being forced to divulge anything that you learn here?"

"You are not the first clients to worry about that! Some clients take the precaution of selectively removing my memories of my sessions with them at the end of our time together, and I have consented to that in the past. I admit I'm somewhat worried that they might have erased more than they were supposed to in some cases... or maybe I'm just very bad at keeping track of my keys. In any case, if you possess the magical skill to do that, I'd consider it."

"It is probably not a good idea to erase my memories during the time we work together. It is helpful for me to remember who my clients are from one session to the next."

"More generally, I consider the baseline risk of coercion fairly low. For someone to force me to reveal your secrets, first they would have to know I was your therapist and be able to get to me, both of which are difficult. The agency that facilitates your placement with me guarantees that they cannot be suborned, though I don't know if their guarantee is legible and robust enough to be meaningful to you. You are welcome to investigate that on your end, of course."

"What do you think? Would you like to go away and think this over, or would you like to proceed?"

"Shelyn conveyed that She'd selected someone from another planet to mitigate confidentiality concerns and I do think that very dramatically mitigates them. I'd expect She can evaluate the placement agency, too. I think Alfirin's secrecy concerns strictly supercede mine, so I'll defer to her about whether we want to take any precautions on top of that. I do have concerns about your policy for endorsedly breaking confidentiality, though. 'serious preventable damage to someone' seems like a very broad set of possible exceptions, especially with the possibility of different cultural understandings of damage, and especially when a ...relationship issue... is my concerns that Alfirin might someday do Evil things. Such as, uh, damaging people, that's an Evil thing in many contexts. Is more confidentiality than that available with corresponding assurances? Though I was also thinking that Alfirin might feel more able to discuss matters relevant to our relationship with my assurance of confidentiality."

"It seems better to proceed while being careful to not discuss anything we're very interested in keeping secret than to abandon the project entirely, and we can take the time to think about where we can afford to speak more freely between sessions. I have no way to erase memories on the relevant scale which does not incidentally give me access to all your other memories, which seems contrary to your obligations.

...I am indeed disinclined to discuss the details of any specific Evils that I may or may not expect to commit in the future, especially ones which might fall under the confidentiality exceptions, but I don't think a greater degree of confidentiality would change that." She turns to Iomedae, "I appreciate the offer of confidentiality from you but I don't expect anything to come up where your promise not to repeat information would make a difference to whether I'd be willing to share it, absent a commitment not to act on such information which, even if you would give it, seems possibly contrary to Shelyn's intentions here."

"It seems possible that there is relationship progress that you could usefully make via talking to me with a promise I won't act on it, and then having that inform which non-confidential conversations you want to have with me."

"I will keep that in mind as an option, if such a conversation seems likely to be productive." And then she'll have it somewhere else, with no other witnesses.

"That was a lot of negotiation, some of it with each other, and some of it that I didn't actually understand, so let me recap where we are now."

"Alfirin, you're prepared to go ahead. You will keep your own counsel and not reveal information to us that you do not wish us to have. This seems entirely sensible and reasonable and I think most clients actually do that, whether they are willing to admit it or not."

"Iomedae, you were previously interested in whether I could make stronger guarantees than the ones I already offered, though I think you mostly wanted those guarantees on Alfirin's behalf, and so maybe it's moot."

"Let me tell you about the reasoning behind that set of guarantees and we'll see what we can negotiate."

"In general, I want you to feel free to tell me roughly everything. It is much easier to solve problems once we have shared knowledge of what the problems are, and secrets often mask important components of problems."

"However, there are certain things you could tell me that would be very concerning. For example, if one of you tells me in secret that you are plotting to kill the other one, I am going to have a hard time keeping a straight face while we have three more sessions talking about dirty socks on the floor. That doesn't feel right at all. So I need to let you know in advance that I am here to serve both of you, and I will not be an accessory to that kind of harm. I value keeping you both alive more than I value the benefit you gain from being open with me, and you need to know that up front so you can navigate accordingly."

"Similarly, if you are planning to destroy my planet, I am not going to sit idly by while you tell me all of your plans for that. I like my planet and while my power to stop you from destroying it may be limited, I'm going to use whatever resources I have to try to prevent you."

"If you're planning to destroy someone else's planet, well, I wish you wouldn't do that, especially without a good reason, but I probably have so little recourse that I might as well just keep your confidentiality and help you think it through. But I wouldn't be neutral the way I am about most topics. I consider that -- well, I don't know what the word evil actually means to you, but destroying other people's planets is pretty evil according to me. And again, you need to know that about me before you confide in me about your annihilation plans."

"There are many other possible scenarios, but I'll stop and ask if that clarified things."

"I understand you to be saying that under ordinary circumstances you consider yourself to have a duty to try to - not incline us towards a course of action on the basis of your own values, but you don't consider yourself to have that duty if our goals are committing atrocities. And that you would have difficulty maintaining secrecy if we were intending to kill each other, and wouldn't want to commit to trying, which is commendable.

I have no plans to kill Alfirin. I - hope very much that if we found ourselves in a situation where it made sense to try to kill each other we would talk first to see if we could do something that wasn't that."

"It is useful for us to be open with each other and with you, without worrying about how you might share things we discuss here or use that information against us, and so you have a policy of keeping confidential everything we say during relationship therapy. I infer that relationship therapy may include times when one of us speaks to you without the other present, and in those cases your policy extends to keeping the contents of those conversations private from the other person. You are, however, mortal, with only a mortal's ability to not act on confidential information, and are either as a matter of principle or due to expectation of failure not going to attempt to keep confidentiality in cases where we intend to harm ourselves, each other, or third parties. This all makes sense to me and if I did not say anything that seems wrong to you, or miss anything you considered important, then I think you communicated clearly. Is asking about the bounds of your confidentiality covered by that confidentiality? If so I have no further questions about it now."

She was tempted to ask now all the questions that she might later want to have asked, but she suspects that of being partially driven by an impulse to stall. Most of them would be unlikely to come up.

"Yes! I think you've both got it."

"And while it's a bit grim, 'let's talk about whether to kill each other before just going ahead and doing it' is a great example of the sort of tough-but-crucial communication we can foster in relationship therapy." [*]

See, most people are too avoidant to discuss their incompatible goals. It takes a lot of guts to look your loved one in the eye and have the hard conversations.

"Alfirin, you asked if asking about the bounds of confidentiality is also covered by confidentiality. Does that mean, are you allowed to pose hypothetical questions about confidentiality to me without me then repeating what questions you asked? And the answer to that is yes. In fact, I encourage you to do that. Whenever you're not sure, please pop up to the meta level and ask, and I will do my very best to avoid punishing you for that. I want to be legible to you so you can make informed decisions about what to show me."

"I think we might now have covered confidentiality. Is there anything else to talk about there? If not, may I return to the previous conversation about who you are to each other, and begin asking a lot of nosy questions about that, which, again, you can choose not to answer?"

----

[*] Talking in therapy about wanting to kill your partner is not just for arch-mages and paladins! See the story by Earth-based couples therapist Ellyn Bader starting at the bottom of page 4 of this document.

Covering the basics of who they are to each other before focusing on who expects to kill whom and why seems like a reasonable prioritization, given that nobody's expecting any imminent killing.

"Go ahead."

"Thank you."

Ramona consults her notes to remember what she wanted to ask.

"So as I understand it, you met because of the war, the Crusade that's still ongoing sixteen years later. You both had important roles to play in the war even back then and you worked closely together."

"You connected romantically, it didn't work out, and Alfirin left for several years. When she returned, you figured out how to reconnect purely as colleagues."

"And Iomedae, you're thinking ahead to what will happen when the war ends, and you have concerns about Alfirin's plans."

"Is that all correct? Alfirin, is there anything about that you want to amend?"

"And for both of you, which part of it feels the most... sticky, unresolved, like there's something there to address?"

"I have concerns about Alfirin's plans but I think I'm very plainly not owed a - resolution to my concerns, there. I think Alfirin knows what I am worried about, and why, and if she had anything reassuring to say she probably would have said it, and our being allies, or having been lovers, does not mean that I ought to get any further input into her choices. I might try to stop her or I might try to bargain with her but past a point, it seems - condescending - to try to persuade her, when I have no real reason to think that I'm right by her own lights. 

I assume Shelyn thinks we should talk about our feelings about each other. My worry is that it is useful to maintain some ambiguity about our feelings about each other and it seems very rude to make Alfirin sit through talking about my feelings about her. It seems likely to make having a functional professional relationship more difficult. I always imagined we'd talk after the war if Alfirin didn't immediately vanish after the war and never have anything to do with me again, which I ...think is what happened in the other timeline. And which is very much her right."

"That is what happened," she confirms half-automatically. "I do not expect we will be able to maintain ambiguity about how each of us feels about the other throughout this process and expect that some damage to our professional relationship will occur, but it seems that if possible it would be best to put that off until later in the war when that matters less...

At the moment I find myself somewhat preoccupied by the expectation that Iomedae, or her people, will try to destroy me. Not immediately, but in eight years, or eight hundred."

Ramona notes without comment that therapy with this pair will be very dull if they are planning to avoid talking about feelings until much later in the war, but there's no reason to confront that just yet. She can let them settle in and get comfortable with her by asking factual questions first.

"What is the typical lifespan of your people, that you're planning ahead for eight hundred years? Or does this have something to do with the immortality that Iomedae mentioned?"

"For reference, we call ourselves human on this planet as well, but eighty is a pretty typical lifespan for us, and we know no methods of immortality, evil or otherwise."

"Eighty is long but not unprecedentedly so for a human without a health-enhancing belt. There are a number of ways to live or otherwise persist longer than that on our planet. Many are Evil. Some are not. The people who seek out immortality are disproportionately evil because most people who are not evil are content to die and go to their next life; Iomedae is correct that I am not so content, and that I would be willing to use an evil method to become immortal if that had advantages over nonevil methods."

"And I am planning to become a god, which is importantly different from immortality in some respects but similar in that I intend to be taking actions in the world in eight hundred years. In the other timeline I was approximately successful, though of course with the benefit of an entire timeline to reference I expect I will be able to do it better this time, assuming I survive and we win the war."

"My goodness, you both have big plans. How typical is this, on your world? Of a million people, how many become immortal, and how many become gods?"

"Living immortals are... fewer than one in ten million people, I think, though there could be many more than that who are hiding their nature. If you count the undead it's maybe ten or twenty out of a million, though many of those are involuntary. Gods are much rarer than either. In almost all cases expecting to become a god is incredible hubris."

"We are all of us commanded to surpass the gods."

"It's a religious precept that almost nobody else takes as seriously as Iomedae does... Among people trying to become gods it's...about one a month makes one success per twenty thousand? Which I would still call hubris, in anyone else."

"Hubris in anyone else. But not for Iomedae?"

Ramona wants to see if they can show any feeling about each other, one way or another, and she thought she noticed Alfirin looking proud of Iomedae's badassery.

"No. Not for her. She's known she was going to go for it if we won the war for decades, she has a church more than halfway established already, she had Arazni's mentorship... she has Aroden's support, obviously, and has been winning the support of many of the other gods. She's deliberate about it and careful about it and - well, now we know that she succeeds in the other timeline, but I didn't doubt she would before we learned that."

"It sounds like you're very impressed with Iomedae's competence. She's been earning your respect through many years of hard and meticulous work. What did you like about her in the early days, when you first met, when she hadn't accomplished all of this yet?"

Aaaaaugh.

"She was - trying to figure everything out for herself. After Aroden chose her, she spent years trying to determine whether He was worthy of her service... most people who are chosen by a god do not do that. She hosted philosophy debates for her fellow paladins, and looked for reasons that things were Good or Evil or Lawful beyond common wisdom. And she was trying to win. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, like I'm implying that nobody else in the whole Crusade was actually trying to win the war, but..."

"No, that makes sense to me. Some people seem much more alive and aware than others, they're paying attention, they're less confused, they see more clearly, and they act effectively. And you were attracted to that."

It's a statement, not a question, but Ramona leaves a long pause, such that Alfirin could, in theory, object.

It seems to be much more obvious to Ramona now than it was to her at the time. She does not object.

Ramona is tempted to keep pressing Alfirin, but this early in therapy it's more important to keep things balanced. She turns to Iomedae.

"And what do you remember of those early days when the two of you first met? What did you first notice or admire about Alfirin?"

"When we first met I said to her that - I'd asked Aroden once if we could see all the stars in Creation. I said that to a lot of people on first acquaintance, because some people saw immediately why I wanted to know - because around the other stars were other worlds, and those might have problems as grave as ours, and to pray to the gods at all is in a sense to attempt to reallocate their attention to ours. 

 But I found it indicative about people, whether seeing the scope of our work expand up into the sky made them happy or afraid or defensive or reluctant - They almost always asked 'what did Aroden say?'.

Alfirin said 'don't tell me' and then reasoned out how the gods might have formed creation and what each of the possibilities would imply about whether there were stars we couldn't see. I couldn't follow all of the details of it, she's smarter than me, but - I appreciated how curious she was, and how - irreverent - she thought of Creation as something that ran on rules we could reason about - she seemed easily surprised, in the sense of a man who pays the world close enough attention it can easily surprise him with small variances rather than in the sense of one who pays it no attention and is surprised by everything."

This is unwise. She should stop. She stops.

She knew when she agreed to do this that it would mean talking about her relationship with Iomedae. She knew and was resigned to the fact that she'd probably have to admit to still loving Iomedae and probably destroy their ability to work together. She... hadn't been thinking about how it would involve Iomedae talking about what she used to admire in Alfirin. It hurts.

There's something here, in that word irreverent, in Iomedae's surprise that Alfirin thinks like a physicist, in the idea in their world, gods are apparently real and you can aspire to become one.

Everyone has a perspective. Everyone stands within their own context, and looks out from it, and the kinds of things they see as strange or remarkable says as much about them as about what they observe.

In Iomedae's context, it's strange to think like a physicist. That implies that in Iomedae's world, there is some other way that people usually think. It's so ingrained, Iomedae wouldn't think to point it out or explain it. So what is that way, that people usually think?

Ramona probably doesn't have enough information to figure that out yet, but she's allowed to ask more questions. She should be careful not to lose the emotional thread in her excitement about conducting cultural detective work.

"Iomedae, when you saw how Alfirin's mind worked, it was fascinating. She had the power to figure things out, to make predictions, about realms that felt out of reach. And that was maybe -- exciting? Intriguing? There's power in that. And maybe you wanted to see more of that, and learn some of it for yourself, or just be nearby to witness it. Is that right?"

"I am curious how regular people, non-Alfirin people, usually approach things in your experience. You mentioned an incuriosity, or just wanting the answer handed to them. Is there a sense that hard questions are unknowable? Or... you called Alfirin irreverent. So maybe by contrast, other people, more reverent people, left such matters to the gods?"

"Most humans on Golarion would have no way of learning what the stars were even if they wanted to, unless their priest happened to know, and no way to learn if their priest was mistaken. And they would probably be wronging their families, to direct their attention that way in the first place, because the stars don't affect the harvests. That it would be a wrong to set oneself the puzzle is untrue of most crusaders - one of war's few luxuries is plenty of free time - but it is not an easy thing to unlearn your conception of virtue when you find yourself in a place where it is less applicable, and not an easy thing to tell whether you've found that."

Ramona notes that when she asks Iomedae two questions, a personal one about her feelings about Alfirin, and a general one about cultural anthropology, Iomedae only answers the general one. When she gets to the point of wanting to push Iomedae, she'll have to give her less cover to hide behind. Not yet, though, and probably not for a while.

First, she needs to get a better handle on the basic context.

"It sounds like you two found a lot to admire about each other in those early days, and as I watch you talk about each other, it looks to me like that never went away. You're both very unusual in your world, strong and powerful women. Alfirin, Iomedae thinks you think in a different and powerful way. And Iomedae, Alfirin admires your methodical competence."

Hmm, probably too soon to ask about the relationship and how it ended. Where to go next? More cultural background, probably.

"In my world, especially historically, we've been confused about powerful women. In many times and places, women had little power, and even if they were hard-working and thoughtful and competent and managed to amass a little power, men would seek to take it from them. We're doing better these days, but our long history of disparity haunts us."

"How is it on Golarion? Are you two unusual not just in your power and aspirations, but all the more so for being powerful and competent while being women?"

She's pretty sure it did go away, at least on Iomedae's end. It doesn't make sense for Iomedae to still find her admirable, when - 

...She can just answer the question asked, instead of ruminating.

"Powerful women are less common than powerful men. The degree of disparity varies by culture and occupation; powerful priests being women is more common than powerful wizards being women, which is more common than powerful warriors being women. Powerful people are more likely to be women in my culture of origin than in Iomedae's."

Iomedae is curious what Ramona means that her civilization is doing better these days, what sort of ideologies or religions or material conditions produce the idea that women having power is 'doing better', but Nirvana is paying for this and she shouldn't ask just because she's curious. "The Crusade did not accept women as officers before I joined. It did accept them as wizards, because one can hardly be choosy about wizards, and as priests, because the gods are presumed to know best about that. Arazni, when She was mortal, was a woman."

Hmmm. There is somewhat less sexism on Golarion than on Earth, it sounds like, and also neither of these two have a moment to spare for brooding or bonding about systemic oppression. Ramona feels somewhat tempted to ask Iomedae about breaking the glass Crusade ceiling, but mostly expects it to be a dead end. If Iomedae is undaunted by the odds of ascension to godhood, she's probably not going to feel tenderness toward her past self merely for becoming an officer.

She'll pull a different thread instead.

"Can you tell me more about Arazni? She's the one you're trying to save, correct? But it sounds like... she already died?"

"Yes. She was an outsider, and generally when outsiders die they cannot be restored to life by any means. But - in the other timeline, about fifty years after the Crusade ended, my Church irritated a powerful necromancer, and he decided to take revenge by restoring Her to - not life, not exactly. Undeath, which preserves some qualities of a living person but not all of them, and which is generally considered a fate worse than most. For nine hundred years She has been undead and enslaved to him. I could kill her, but that wouldn't help much; Shelyn is the only being we know of who might be able to actually heal her.

She was also born to Golarion, originally, but thousands of years ago. By the time we met her she was an astral deva - a kind of angel - and an archmage and a bit of a god. She was - angels have to be sparing with their words, on the material. But she was generous with everything she could possibly share with us, and funny, and ambitious, and -

- shortly after I first met Arazni I said to her, 'I don't mind if I die, as long as the work of my life will get done anyway'. And she said 'sounds like you should mind if you die.' It's - the sort of thing you only need to hear once but may really need to hear once, or at least I did."

Concepts Ramona doesn't understand and is still not asking about, collected:

 - "the other timeline"
 - "outsider," possibly related to being an "astral deva / kind of angel"
 - "gods" and how you become one and why so many people fail at it
 - "immortality" and how you get that and why it often requires evil acts. Also if you are immortal can you better refrain from acting on confidential information or was that an incorrect inference?
 - "Aroden" who chose Iomedae, for what?
 - "Shining Crusade" against what and why is it shining?
 - "wizards" and "teleporting"
 - "paladins" and "knights"

The odds are pretty good that most of these concepts don't actually matter to the relationship between her clients. You could substitute in different goals and factions and attributes and the basic story would be just the same. It's important not to get bogged down in the details; that's the overly-specific intake form all over again.

But a few of the concepts might turn out to be very important indeed -- and Ramona doesn't know yet which ones are which. So she'll just track them, and see which ideas seem to come up over and over.

"Arazni seems like an amazing person and I can see why she matters so much to you, Iomedae."

"What kind of connection do you have to Arazni, Alfirin?"

"One that is somewhat more complicated than Iomedae's.  She was a friend and a mentor and - terrifying. Like - hm, no, I can't actually think of something analogous and even if I could it probably wouldn't translate. I am uncomfortable with divinity and she was a god, if a small one. Every conversation was - she could foresee how they would go before they happened, she could steer how they would go - not arbitrarily but extensively. And she didn't, I think, with me. And it feels like she taught me half of everything I know, and she saved all of our lives dozens of times and she was one of very few friends I had, even after I left the Crusade and came back."

"I think most people find Arazni terrifying and I am unusual in that respect because I am not capable of experiencing fear."

"I have been told that I am unusual in the manner and degree to which I found her presence discomfiting."

Ramona had been just about to ask Alfirin about her discomfort with divinity when Iomedae's comment hijacked the top spot on Ramona's priority queue.

"Iomedae, when you say you're not capable of experiencing fear, is that -- figurative? Or do you mean that fear is just completely absent for you?"

"And either way, was that always true, even when you were a small child, or did it start later?"

"All persons empowered by the gods as paladins, once of sufficient strength, experience no fear. I reached the relevant strength when I was sixteen."

"I'm confused! I consider fear a helpful feeling. Fear is part of the feedback loop by which we avoid repeating our mistakes, or the mistakes of others. How do you do without it?"

Or do 'paladins' just get injured and die a lot faster than other people?

Or is their 'sufficient strength' somehow enough to counterbalance the increased rate of injury? That doesn't sound right.

Ramona should stop trying to puzzle this out and just listen to Iomedae's answer.

"The fact paladins experience no fear is considered a mixed blessing for approximately that reason. Soldiers who will not flee in terror are more capable on the battlefield, and a unit that is less likely to break is likelier to survive, but fear is also protective against recklessness and more generally is part of peoples' processes for decisionmaking; when they are without it they will have to change. The conventional wisdom is that paladins should be part of a religious order that helps compensate for the challenges, and that they usually fall - are renounced by their god and lose their powers - without that. Or die young. Many paladins die young. Most people who could have grown up to be like me died young."

Well, that all checks out, at least. Still, these are not standard-issue humans! Ramona should check more of her assumptions.

"Are there any other major changes in the life cycle of a paladin, or a person on the way to godhood? Have you lost any other emotions along the way, or gained ones that I've never heard of? Gained or lost any other capabilities?"

"We both wear very good cognitive enhancement that improves our memory, reaction times, decisionmaking, intuitions, cleverness, and attention. I have been working towards making decisions in a way that is legible to the gods and being able to make commitments as gods do, but that's just a matter of deliberate practice, not a magical effect. We have...many capabilities. I'm not sure which ones are relevant here. Powerful paladins spellcast, are immune to enchantments, make their allies braver and more resistant to hostile magic, smite evildoers, move very quickly, heal people... as a person on the way to godhood I have more flexible spellcasting, can speak directly with Aroden, and can make fate go my way sometimes.

There haven't been other people like me so there's not established wisdom on whether being like me has psychological effects but I think I'm broadly the same person as when I was younger, just having learned some bitter lessons and grown wiser and learned how to do a lot of things I wanted to do all along."

Powerful wizards famously get their genius out ahead of their wisdom and make decisions that are kind of stupid for how smart they are, but she'll leave Alfirin to say that or not.

That's a dizzying list of advanced capabilities! Ramona scrawls notes as fast as she can, and then reviews.

Many of these things do not, strictly speaking, seem relevant to relationship therapy. Probably? The ones that stand out are advanced decision-making skills and being especially clever and attentive.

Many people have pretty strong feelings about exactly how clever their partner is, especially in relation to them. You might admire your partner for being much cleverer than you are, or you might enjoy taking care of your uncomplicated spouse. Maybe the two of you pride yourselves on both being clever. But few couples could withstand a substantial change in cleverness on one partner's part.

Maybe Alfirin got more clever, too, though? It sounded like maybe some of the cognitive enhancement was not just for paladins. Ramona will follow up on that in a moment.

"Alfirin, I'm not sure how many of Iomedae's changes happened before you met, or if they happened during the last sixteen years that you've known her. I guess some of them might have happened while you were away. Still, you have some perspective here. What has it been like, observing Iomedae's changes? Has it made her any easier or more difficult to work with or relate to?"

"She was fearless and had powerful cognitive enhancement when I met her. The making decisions like a god - I don't think it made her harder to relate to, except for when I returned to the Crusade when it was a more dramatic change. I think it mostly made it easier to understand and relate to Arazni and the other gods. The other things... aren't really personality-affecting in the same way. I imagine that for some people watching someone like Iomedae gain all the skills and powers that she has would make her seem more - unapproachable or intimidating, but I don't think I am one of those people. And of course I was also becoming much more powerful in this time."

There went Ramona's theory that this relationship went sideways due to uneven increases in cleverness. That's okay -- sometimes you generate fifty bad theories before you find a good one. The key is to let go of them as fast as you generate them.

"Yes, so that leads into my next question. Are you also missing any emotions? What other capabilities do you have as a -- wizard, is that right? -- that might affect how you relate to other people?"

"I do not know myself to be missing any emotions common to humans. I am an enchantment specialist - that's magic that affects or controls other people's thoughts and emotions - so from the perspective of someone without access to my own thoughts I might expect that to cause me to treat people as tools to use to achieve my own ends rather than people with ends of their own. I do not think that has happened but I don't have access to a version of myself with different talents to compare." That is less than perfectly candid, since it seems that it has happened to the other Alfirin over the next eight centuries but that's a different topic and not one that she's ready to discuss.

"I think the biggest way that being a powerful wizard changes how I relate to people is that I only very rarely have substantial interactions with ordinary people."

"I think it's not unusual for powerful people to have fewer substantial interactions with ordinary people." And Ramona is not that worried about it in this context, given that Iomedae is not an ordinary person.

"I would also like to go back to something you said earlier. You said you are 'uncomfortable with divinity.' Can you say more about what that means? Do you get increasingly uncomfortable with Iomedae as she gets closer to divinity?"

Well there's a good question she's never really thought about because how Alfirin feels about her is no longer any of her business.

"I think that the gods typically interact with mortals in ways that are unjust towards those mortals. With a few exceptions, I think they pursue goals that match mortal goals only coincidentally. The ways that gods manage and steer mortals upsets me, and I prefer to limit my interactions with and visibility to gods in order to avoid being so steered... the second of those concerns does not apply to Iomedae, and the others don't apply yet but - I expect that after she ascends I will try to avoid her like the other gods, and there might be intermediate states where I'd be uncomfortable around her for that reason. She's just not there yet."

This is relationship counseling and not philosophy counseling and probably it would run contrary to the spirit of it for Iomedae to give a very lengthy explanation of precisely where she disagrees with Alfirin about what it means to treat people justly so she won't do that. Though she misses when they'd do that even more than she misses the relationship, honestly.

Iomedae's straight back and steady gaze seem a trifle straighter and steelier, perhaps? Iomedae has so much dignity, it's hard to read her, but Ramona has a hunch.

"Something to add, Iomedae?"

"I'm not sure if this is the place for - philosophical disagreements - or if that'll ultimately be a distraction - and I think on the most recent occasions Alfirin and I have spoken of this she - wished we hadn't -"

"That conversation was upsetting in the moment because it touched on upsetting matters but I don't regret having it, exactly."

"Would someone give me just a brief synopsis of what that conversation was about and how it ended, without actually rehashing the conversation itself?"

This is a test! Many couples can't stay at the meta and talk about the conversation without accidentally having the conversation. Can these two do it? Ramona bets they can, but she's been wrong before. Intelligence and competence in leading troops or casting spells does not always translate to competence in conversational navigation.

"In brief, we talked about some of the ways that gods intervene on the material plane, and which, if any of them, are treating mortals justly. I was of the opinion that only a very restricted set of interventions were just; Iomedae was I think undecided. I presume she is planning to figure it out later. One case we were talking about was manipulations done without a mortal's knowledge or permission, but toward that mortal's eventual benefit, and it came up that that had happened to me and that I would rather it had not... I got upset, we ended the conversation there. Followed up later on whether or not it was Aroden that did it." Alfirin's face is carefully blank, or, rather, not carefully not-blank like she's been trying to keep it so far for 'relationship counseling'.

"This was about four years ago, shortly before Arazni died," says Iomedae, that being the only important detail that she can think of that wasn't present in Alfirin's summary.

Well, they certainly pass that test. They're good at staying on the surface when that's what they mean to do. Ramona thinks they used to know how to dive deep, too, but have lost the knack. Why? What are they afraid of?

(Except of course, Iomedae supposedly doesn't feel fear. Then what is her avoidance made of? Does she tell herself it's made of wisdom? Is there any way that's true?)

"So in that particular conversation, Alfirin got upset and you stopped talking, and then you came back to some part of it later, though it sounds like maybe the main issue was never resolved."

"What does it look like when Alfirin gets upset? What would an observer actually see and hear?"

On Earth, Ramona would ask what would show on a video camera, but she doesn't know the name of the corresponding magic spell that would evoke the same idea. She's supporting her clients in separating observation from inference. Again, she mostly expects that these particular clients don't need the help, but she doesn't like to assume.

"I think I may have made some angry gestures, or facial expressions, and spoken more sharply and less carefully than I usually do... Technically most observers would only notice the gestures, if they happened, the conversation was telepathic. Iomedae would know better, she was closer to being an observer."

"I mostly notice that Alfirin is upset when she speaks more quickly or more carelessly or when she - leaves me guessing a lot more of what she wants. Sometimes I can read her face but I try not to do that if I don't think she wants me to, and most people cannot."

Possibly it's just this setting being one where she's quicker to notice fondness for Iomedae, but that's actually really sweet.

That all sounds about right, actually! Ramona wasn't sure what she would learn about upset Alfirin -- you never know about wizards. But if upset Alfirin mostly talks quickly and gets a subtle look of annoyance on her face that only Iomedae can see -- well, that's a pretty reasonable way to be upset.

These two do not have any glaringly obvious, easy-to-fix relationship flaws so far.

Ramona is going to have to ask them again for some help figuring out some kind of objective for therapy.

"Thank you for putting up with all of my nosy questions so far! As you talk, I am beginning to form a very low-fidelity picture of each of you and your world, but it's a good start."

"I admit I am still a little bit confused about what we should be trying to work on or accomplish! And I know when I asked you at the beginning, you didn't know either. So let me try another angle on it. It's okay if this one doesn't work either."

"Shelyn sent you here. Could you tell me more about her, and can you take your best guess about what kind of outcome would satisfy her?"

"Shelyn is the goddess of love. Not specifically romantic love, also the love of friends or family. I ...assume she thinks that we have some things to talk about about how we relate to each other. I'm frustrated by that because - it is not as if we have decided not to discuss that out of any confusion, as far as I know. I think we have accurate information and have decided on this strategy for working together because it will win us the war, which matters a great deal to us. And Alfirin will leave after the war, apparently, and she is entitled to do that, and I would consider it inappropriate, to try to strategize to make her stay if she doesn't want to.

If I assume that Shelyn understands all of that - and gods do not always understand mortals that well, but I would not really expect a Good god to make a demand this specific without a fairly detailed understanding of what we care about - then I would assume that one of us is substantively mistaken about something we would want to know. Related to our relationship."

"That makes sense! Often I find myself explaining to people that many conflicts are optional, and that you can consciously decide whether to talk about the tough stuff or not, depending on what sorts of outcomes you are trying to steer towards! It sounds like you already know that and are doing that."

"Let's go with that idea for a moment, that Shelyn believes that one of you has made a mistake, and there's something important to discover by talking more."

"How could we go about discovering what that is, while minimizing the damage from talking about other things?"

Ramona has ideas already, but she habitually leaves the brainstorming and problem-solving to her clients as much as possible. She wants to see what they come up with, and what they don't come up with. Some ideas may seem 'invisible' to them for some cultural or psychological reason.

"If I assume that the relationship counselor is an important element, conceivably we could each produce a private-for-you account of the situation as we understand it, and then you could alert us to discrepancies that seem to reflect different factual understandings of the situation?"

"That could definitely work and I'm up for trying it if it's the best option! But I'd like to take a minute to run through other ideas that don't necessarily run through me. It's possible that my entire job is just to get you two talking at all. Anything else come to mind? If not, I can offer some ideas for you to shoot down."

Iomedae doesn't want to suggest anything that involves demanding things of Alfirin beyond 'access to factual information she cares to share'. Alfirin feels more coerced about being here than she does. She looks to Alfirin.

"...I'm sorry, I keep coming up with overly complicated schemes wherein we have a completely open conversation, write down the important conclusions, and then erase our memories. I'm not noticing anything that's not apparently worse than Iomedae's suggestion."

"We could try having an open conversation, not erasing our memories, but not acting on it outside an agreed upon set of conclusions. I think that is riskier than running things through Ramona, though."

"Agreed. Among other things I am less practiced at keeping commitments of that shape than you are and do not expect to gain a natural aptitude for it in eight years."

"I kind of like the memory erasing idea! I admit it wasn't on my list."

"Here's what I came up with. Some of them are probably not viable."

"One: maybe you secretly already kind of know the answer but you're reluctant to say it out loud. You could say it out loud anyway - very briefly - or if you both have an idea, you could write it on a slip of paper and hand it to me, and I could just compare those."

"Two: you could ask Shelyn! She told you to come here, so I know it's possible for you to communicate with her at all; maybe it's possible to ask for more details?"

"Three: you could ask anyone else that you trust and who knows you both, if such a person exists."

"Four: I have a technique I call a 'table of contents session' and I can describe that more in a second if it's of interest."

"I don't secretly know the answer. I guess I know Nefreti Clepati's inappropriate commentary and can share that if Alfirin wants to hear it, but I suspect Alfirin like me would prefer Nefreti Clepati be unable to accomplish things through inappropriate commentary so I've been acting like she didn't say it. 

Shelyn certainly knows and can be communicated with, but it is costly for the forces of Good to communicate with mortals and almost certainly not worth it. 

...Marit probably has an opinion. 

I would be interested in learning your techniques."

"I do not definitely secretly know the answer. I do indeed prefer Nefreti Clepati not be able to accomplish things through inappropriate commentary. Marit may have some useful insights and it seems worth asking him now that we've been forced to address this in the first place. I expect that this intervention is more expensive for Shelyn than other interventions that would cause us to talk to each other, so I expect your expertise will be useful and it seems worth trying any techniques that you think are applicable."

"I assume I should resist the temptation to ask who Nefreti Clepati is?" Ramona is rabidly curious to know about the inappropriate commentary, but restrains herself.

"Who is Marit and how is he connected to each of you?"

"And sure, I'll tell you about the 'table of contents' thing in just a moment."

"Marit is the other friend I have who is not dead yet. He's also very observant, appropriately paranoid, and an unusually talented swordmage, but the relevant part is that he's my friend and he's not dead. He's Iomedae's friend too, but she has more of those because she doesn't alienate people as much as I do."

"Marit serves under me in the Shining Crusade and knows us both well, and has for decades. Nefreti Clepati is a priestess of the god of knowledge and knows things she has no way to know, which is sometimes useful but I have no interest in it impinging on our personal lives and she hasn't offered me an outrageous bribe to put up with it."

'The other friend who isn't dead yet.' Ouch.

Ramona has to decide, and quickly, if she's going to respond to that. Often, taking an offhand comment about something that's actually quite painful and calling attention to it, dwelling there, can be a powerful move. It can help the client access some feelings they've been glossing over, a place they've become rigid and hard, and help them soften a bit.

Her instincts are telling her not to do that that here. She doesn't have quite enough rapport yet with Alfirin. She hasn't built a safe context for those kinds of feelings to bubble up, if in fact they're even in there.

She'll let it go, but she'll remember it in case she wants to come back to it later.

"All right, so we have two or maybe three options so far. The first idea was for both of you to go and write a long narrative for me -- or possibly meet with me individually -- and then I can figure out what the discrepancies are and help you focus just on those."

"The second idea is to ask Marit for help."

"And then there's the 'table of contents' thing, which is fairly similar to the first idea, but different in execution."

"Sometimes, after I've been working with a couple for a while, we arrive at a point where they've learned a bunch of emotion regulation and communication skills, but they have a backlog of old, painful topics that they're scared to address, because it always went so poorly every time they tried in the past."

"We want to clear out that old backlog, but we want to do it carefully, using all the new skills. We want to do it one topic at a time. And we usually don't want to start with the very hardest one."

"So we spend an entire session just -- making a list. We don't actually get into any of the topics. I have the clients take turns simply naming a topic, and saying maybe one or two neutral sentences about it, just enough so the other person knows what it means."

"We end up with a fairly cryptic list that has things on it like 'that time at the florist' and 'another baby?' and 'your habit of whistling' and 'that thing your mom said to me'."

"After that, we go through the whole list and each person rates each item, 1-10, for how explosive it seems, how dangerous it would be to talk about it. We sort the list from lowest score to highest."

"And then, usually, we start going through the list, one topic at a time, the next time we meet, starting with the easiest topic."

Ramona kind of wants to go on a tangent here about all the skills the clients are practicing just by making the list but refrains.

"This is not exactly the right technique for you -- but we might be able to do something kind of like it."

"You could list all the sticky spots, the candidate spots where there might be a misunderstanding, using just a few words for each. And then we could check them out, safest to most dangerous."

"Or -- if that's too risky, or seems too likely to miss something important -- we can try the other two ideas instead. What do you think?"

"That - sounds promising." It sounds like it might go badly, but they are here to do things that might go badly because it is what they'd want with full information, so one can't exactly steer by 'sounds like it might go badly'.

"It sounds riskier on net than us conveying things to you in private but likely to have other advantages. And it seems like the risk is largely...being more consciously aware of the things that we are avoiding talking about. That seems like an acceptable risk."

"All right. Shall we begin? We are looking for... snags... in your past, present, or future relationship. These might feel like messy events that were never fully resolved, concerns about the future, wishes that things were a different way... Who will be brave enough to go first?"

Phrased like that, it'll probably be Iomedae, right?

She'll glance at Alfirin first, but yes. 

"Hmmm. The breakup. Whether I wronged Alfirin by dating her in the first place, and if so why. Immortality. My ascension. What Future Alfirin got up to."

"My feelings about Iomedae. Iomedae's feelings about me. My possibly being evil or likely to become so. Iomedae or her church trying to kill me."

"All right, excellent! That's a lot to work with, thank you."

"Next we want to figure out which ones are least risky to talk about, and which we should put off discussing unless we have to."

"Is rating things on a scale from 1 to 10 a familiar mental motion for you, or should we find some other way to categorize things?"

"It seems intuitive enough. Is "one" the least risky or the most?"

"One is the least risky, ten is the most."

"With that scale in mind, how do you each rate each of these topics? Also fair game if more topics occur to you as we go along."

"Trying to use the whole scale, I think ... one, whether I wronged Alfirin by dating her. Two, Alfirin's feelings about me. Three, Alfirin being evil. Five, the breakup and my trying to kill Alfirin. Six, my feelings about Alfirin, my ascension. Eight, immortality. Ten, Future Alfirin."

Alfirin can provide her ratings, leaving some space around the edges for more extremely concerning or unconcerning conversational topics that she's not thinking of yet.

2 - Whether she was wronged by dating
3 - The breakup
5 - Feelings about each other
6 - Immortality
7 - Evil
7 - Iomedae or her church killing Alfirin.
8 - Iomedae's Ascension

...She does not know how to rate the activities of future Alfirin without giving away a good deal of information about the activities of future Alfirin, but they're going to actually talk about all these things eventually so there's not actually that much value in obfuscating it even though not obfuscating feels vaguely terrifying. She'll call it a seven.

And then Ramona can calculate a combined riskiness list. This technique sort of assumes that both clients' opinions should be weighted equally, and with enough cleverness you can devise situations where that will fail, but mostly it just works.

3: Did Iomedae wrong Alfirin by dating her?
7: Alfirin's feelings about Iomedae
8: The breakup
10: Alfirin being evil
11: Iomedae's feelings about Alfirin
12: Iomedae trying to kill Alfirin
14: Immortality
14: Iomedae's ascension
17: Future Alfirin

"Well done!"

"Usually at this point I would suggest we end the session and come back another time to discuss the first topic. Simply making the list is often nerve-wracking enough that clients need a break afterwards. How are you doing? Do you need to return to other duties or otherwise rest, or would you prefer to continue?"

If they want to take a break, Ramona might ask them to send Marit over sometime soon, but that'll keep if they want to keep going.

"I am willing to continue." Especially since they are starting with the question of whether Iomedae harmed her by dating her, which does not seem dangerous at all and is mostly just confusing in its presence on the list. Which, she supposes, is the point of ordering the conversations this way.

"I am also willing to continue, I was unsure how much time to set aside for this and set aside a lot in anticipation of it - potentially causing problems we have to fix afterwards or similar."

"All right. I also have time today!"

Intakes from Astral are extremely unpredictable but they also pay really well, so Ramona tries not to book anything later the same day.

"Before we begin, let me remind you that you can pause at any time, you can leave things out if that's best, you can say you're not ready to talk about something today, or ever. Everything we're doing here is voluntary."

"With that in mind, it looks like we're starting with whether Iomedae wronged Alfirin by dating her. Iomedae, you contributed that topic, so you can lead us off. Do you think you wronged Alfirin? Or do you think maybe Alfirin thinks that? What's the story?"

"I mean, I think I was poorly equipped to be in a relationship and should not have attempted it, but I think we've both agreed on that for a long time. But when we travelled to the other timeline, it was put to me by followers of, uh, my religion, that it was an inappropriate exercise of power, to pursue any relationship with someone on the Crusade, and while I think the most straightforward analysis there isn't quite right it does seem true that Alfirin - left the Crusade for five years afterwards, because it would have been hard for her to continue to do the work that she did that was important to her, and that she is obliged even today to maintain a relationship she might prefer not to because the world will end otherwise, and that this was predictable in advance. 

This is mostly not very fraught because Alfirin is going to say that, being a human being equipped with a Teleport and the power of reason, she could've done something else if she'd wanted to do something else, and that we were foolish to approximately equivalent degrees. But - if people who've thought more about it think you've wronged someone you should rarely be totally satisfied that there's no important insight there."

"I do not think I was wronged and I do not think that Lastwall gets a say in whether or not I was, though it seems at least possible that they identified some manner in which you might have risked harming someone else in my position. I think... we could probably debate that at length but I'd need to hear their case in more detail. And that doesn't seem topical. If you in fact think there's good reason to think I was wronged in spite of my insistence to the contrary then I suppose that is topical and I'd like to hear why in more detail."

"I don't really consider it any of my business if you don't want it to be my business. I think - the rest of what I think is more about the breakup than about this."

"It can be your business if you want it to be your business. I object somewhat to it being any of Lastwall's business off of what I presume was a fairly brief summary, but... You know what happened as well as I do and if you did think I was harmed in some way I - trust your judgment enough that I would want to hear why."  Not that she really has any doubts that Shelyn will follow through on Her end of the bargain, but Shelyn had better follow through on Her end of the bargain, here.

"It seems to me that if Alfirin thinks she was not wronged, then she is correct about that."

"I wonder, Iomedae, if the remaining doubt you have about this is not so much about wronging Alfirin as about -- your standards for your own behavior. Like maybe you didn't think enough about the repercussions to the Crusade, if you began a relationship and then ended it? Or maybe you thought about it but didn't give it enough weight? What do you think?"

"I did not really anticipate repercussions to the Crusade, I never imagined the series of events by which we'd end up needing Alfirin, needing to work together closely even if Alfirin no longer preferred to have a relationship with me. I did worry about whether I was - doing sometimes less than the maximally good thing. I try to only do the maximally good thing at all times. But Arazni felt this was a concerning habit of mine, and I should try being a bit more of a human...this is perhaps venturing ahead to topics which accumulated a higher rating.

I believe you that I didn't wrong you," she adds to Alfirin, "but I think I probably did harm you? I have been operating on that assumption."

"Where the difference between harming and wronging is that both hurt the other person, but wronging is intentional or preventable, whereas harming is inadvertent and mostly unforeseeable?"

"...Hm. I think I would draw the distinction slightly differently than that on my own, but that's probably close enough to go on if Iomedae agrees... I will accept that I was probably harmed. I imagine Iomedae was, too." She frowns. "I assume thoughts that touch on later conversational topics should be reserved for those conversations?"

"Yes, ideally. Obviously everything is pretty intertwined! But going slowly helps us avoid damage."

Then Iomedae will keep talking about ethics, which is interesting and safe, and not the breakup, which has a Rating. "You can wrong people and not end up doing them harm - if you take a gamble you had no right to take but that panned out, say. I am tempted to say you wronged someone if the rules you used to decide how to treat them aren't the ones you represented yourself as using, or the ones they reasonably thought you were using, or if you applied insufficient care to the decision and so made it poorly, or if you are using an evil rule for deciding how to treat people in the first place..."

Ah, but Ramona will notice Iomedae abstractly talking about ethics and tie it back to the case!

"That helps. I had been thinking of wrongs as sort of a worse subset of harms. It makes sense now that you can have wrongs that happen to do no harm."

"And so... Alfirin suggests that both of you were harmed but that there was no wrongdoing. Does that sound correct? Or are there lingering doubts?"

"Technically, I said that I don't think I was wronged and that we were both harmed. I think the ways that I possibly wronged Iomedae here are...tied to other conversations, though."

"Fair enough! You did catch me rounding off a step there, so thank you for correcting me."

"Let me just check with Iomedae about the original question. Do you have lingering doubts about your own potential wrongdoing or has that been resolved? Did you gain any new information?"

Iomedae is not yet the kind of entity one cannot meaningfully speak of wronging, but she has spent long enough intending to be to find it slightly uncanny for Alfirin to claim to have perhaps wronged her. She isn't sure Alfirin is making a mistake, she just never particularly contemplated the question. 

"I think that's about the answer I expected Alfirin to give and she's right. I don't have particular lingering doubts - or, I have doubts about what fraternization policy to leave Lastwall, but not about my decisions particularly."

"All right. I think we may be done with our first topic. My sense is that we did not yet resolve the discrepancy Shelyn was hoping we'd find, so by default we'll keep going."

"The next item on our list is 'Alfirin's feelings about Iomedae.' It's a big step up in difficulty from the last one. Alfirin thought it was moderately risky, while Iomedae is not worried about it much at all."

"Are you ready to continue, and is that what we should talk about next?"

Iomedae is not exactly enjoying this but she doesn't do 'apprehensive'. "I am ready, and I think the policy of going through the list continues to make sense."

"All right, Alfirin, if that's what you want to do as well, then begin when you're ready."

Alfirin is apprehensive but the prospect of asking for Iomedae's aura of courage or shapeshifting into a form that doesn't feel fear is utterly mortifying so she's just going to power through.

"Well. I suppose the relevant feelings are that I never really stopped admiring her, or being in love with her, even though that's - irresponsible and unprofessional and dangerous and unkind." And gives Shelyn reason to meddle in her personal life.

Oh. That is surprising to her, in the sense where she wouldn't have predicted it and also in the deeper sense where a bunch of her other predictions suddenly have glaring holes in them. She takes a fraction of a second to gather her thoughts, but only a fraction of a second because waiting too long would probably be deeply hurtful.

"...oh. That is surprising to me," she says. "I'm now confused about a bunch of things. I ....don't see how that could possibly be irresponsible or unprofessional or dangerous or unkind, unless it's causing you to, I don't know, secretly ignore strategic objectives to sabotage romantic rivals or something....you don't have romantic rivals. Obviously. I'm just struggling to think of ways you could be being irresponsible that are compatible with what I have observed. 

...why, uh, do you suppose that in the other timeline you leave the second the war is over. I. Took that as significant evidence that you did not prefer to have any relationship with me and were only doing so out of necessity. I guess that's compatible with what you just said."

"It's irresponsible and unprofessional because it - if it was known, which it now is - makes our working relationship more complicated and might lead you to think that you had to - manage my feelings, or something - to get my help with the war. It's dangerous because it's a - temptation to believe I am safe from you. It's unkind because - I don't actually know if it is unkind for reasons separate from the unprofessionalism and irresponsibility. I have a strong felt sense that it is unkind toward you.

...I think that I leave when the war is over because I'm no longer necessary and I at the time expect you want as little to do with me as possible."

"Okay. As a clarification, I have never at any point wanted to do as little with you as possible. I realize that how I feel about you is higher on the list and this narrows down the range of answers there, but it seems like an important clarification. 

The reason I was not very worried about hearing what you felt about me is because I didn't think it would make our working relationship more complicated under any of the plausible ways you might feel about me. I won't try to manage your feelings if you don't want me to do that, and I assume you don't want me to do that. I don't think I'm owed you feeling any particular way about me, and it seems particularly absurd to demand you don't think highly of me.

I - with respect to it being dangerous - you know that I would guarantee your safety for as long as I live, if you want that. ...I have been assuming you know that. I owe you much more than that."

"That is not what I'm worried about, but that's also a later topic... I do not believe you owe me anything."

"...I am tempted to respond to that by arguing about ethics because I enjoy that, but I have been trying not to do that around you because I have believed you find it uncomfortable or upsetting or - close to intimacy - because it probably is -"

They've been doing so well, Ramona's only job has been to stay out of the way. But now they're getting a little off track.

Good to know, though, if arguing about ethics is one of their couple-hobbies!

"Iomedae, you said before that you were surprised when it turned out that Alfirin still thinks highly of you and might still be in love with you. I would like to figure out why that was a surprise. What did you previously believe and why did you believe that?"

"I thought that Alfirin disliked me and was tolerating me for the sake of our shared cause. I thought this because - well, because I think I treated her poorly, in a way that hurt her, and because after she came back she was distant with - me, and all of our other old friends, except Arazni - and because her familiar profoundly dislikes me and familiars usually take after their masters, and because in the alternate timeline she leaves the instant the war ends, which I thought was because she didn't want to be around me. And she dislikes paladins. And Lawful Good people. And gods. So it seemed a bit overdetermined, really."

Ramona has an unreasonable urge to laugh, but that doesn't seem appropriate.

"It makes sense that you were confused, given all of that!"

"Alfirin?"

"That seems like a reasonable conclusion to have drawn given those facts, which are all true. I... was not trying to give you that particular false impression, but I was trying to avoid making my feelings apparent for the reasons I mentioned before, and I may have overcorrected." For a fleeting moment she is inclined to smile and say that she apparently errs predictably in that direction, but that seems - too much -

"Do you like Iomedae despite her being a paladin who's working on becoming a god, or because of those things?"

"That's... complicated. I like her for traits which seem to almost necessarily lead to her becoming a god in the world we live in. I like her for some of the traits she has in common with other paladins and for lacking some of the traits that are common in paladins."

"I'm not sure I've correctly guessed what a 'familiar' is, but is there any explanation for why your familiar doesn't like her, or is it just... luck?"

"Curiosity is irrationally inclined to take my side in all things, and thinks that me being hurt after the breakup was entirely Iomedae's fault and not something that I had any responsibility for. And I did not treat him as well as he deserved, in that time, and he blames her for that too."

Ramona blinks for a second, trying to parse that, before she realizes that Curiosity must be the name of the familiar.

"There's one more thing I still wonder, though it may be a little off topic. What typical paladin traits does Iomedae lack?"

"Hm. I've never had to describe it to someone without the cultural context before, it's - a certain - narrowness of thought, conviction of their own rightness, unthinking devotion to their god, an obsession with - doing things the paladin way, regardless of whether or not the paladin way works. Or, that's the stereotype at least, how much it fits any individual paladin varies."

Iomedae has a take on this but apparently they're not supposed to get distracted in relationship therapy by interesting ethics conversations. She will refrain.

"Iomedae, do you recognize yourself in that description? And did you know Alfirin liked that about you?"

Ramona is using a narrative therapy technique called 'thickening,' in which you take a 'thin' description of a feeling and get the client to fill in a lot more detail until it becomes richer, more nuanced, and more meaningful. Iomedae might let Alfirin's love sink in a little more if she understands it better and finds it more credible.

"It's not precisely how I frame it internally but - yes. I think Alfirin likes it when people know what they want and have surrendered very little of their capacity for pursuing it or their sense of authority over it, and many paladins attempt in their pursuit of virtue the renunciation of that. That is a fine way to do all right and a bad way to fix all of Creation, and therefore unappealing once you've noticed you've got to fix all of Creation. I knew Alfirin at one point liked that about me, though being - the way I am - also has disadvantages which I think are fairly salient to her..."

"Would you like to try to talk her out of admiring and loving you?"

 "...do you want to be talked out of admiring and loving me?"

"Would it be convenient for you if I were?

...Do you think you could?"

"It seems like it would be totally indefensible to talk people out of loving me for my own convenience, and I would not want to do so at all! I am totally unaware of any tactics to achieve that but it's not as if I've spent a lot of time trying to learn how to do it and if you want me to try it seems possible Ramona knows some, given that she asked! Though plausibly we should first have the conversation about how I feel about you if what you want here is at all contingent on that."

She doesn't know what she wants. She is trying not to want particular outcomes from relationship counseling besides Arazni being saved, which isn't hard because there aren't many outcomes she can imagine endorsedly wanting.

...She probably does not want to be talked out of admiring Iomedae, though, even if it could be done, which she doubts. "I think I don't want to be talked out of admiring and loving you but if there are techniques for that it seems that it might be good to learn those in case there are future problems that are best solved that way."

Alfirin! Skills for learning to fall out of love with Iomedae are almost certainly not what Shelyn, Goddess of love, sent you here to learn!

Though possibly Ramona should be glad that one of these clients finally developed something like a goal for therapy.

"I do sometimes help people figure out how to get over their feelings for others. It feels a little... out of place with the work we are currently doing, though? If it doesn't feel urgent, I'd like to defer that conversation until we've uncovered more of what's going on between you two. Does that work for you?"

"Yes."

"That's fine with me." She is relieved. It turns out she does not want Alfirin to fall out of love with her, not that she considers it any of her business. 

"Thanks for your patience! I'll check back with you later about that question." Ramona makes a note so she doesn't forget, because she might be tempted to forget.

"So, to recap this topic: Alfirin still admires Iomedae and is in love with her, and Iomedae was quite surprised to learn this, for several quite defensible reasons. Alfirin had been... not necessarily hiding her feelings, but refraining from volunteering them, also for defensible reasons. When we explored why Alfirin loves Iomedae, it mostly made sense even to Iomedae, I think?"

"And then we checked, and it turns out neither of you wants to work on undoing those feelings at this time, if that's even possible."

"What did I get wrong, if anything?"

"I think that's correct."

"Likewise."

Ramona has a very old inner conflict that sometimes flares up when she gets clients who are "too easy" in some sense. It goes like this:

Ramona: I should give back their money, they're doing all the work themselves and I'm just a spectator.
Also Ramona: And yet, they were stuck for... how many years, before they came here? And they're not stuck now. You're earning the money.
Ramona: It's the setting and the expectations, it's not anything I'm doing.
Also Ramona: You made this setting. You picked out the couches and the artwork. You set the expectations.
Ramona: But...
Also Ramona: Shut up and take their money. Work doesn't always have to be difficult to be valuable.

Ramona is so good at this particular inner conflict that she can breeze past all the lines and just go straight to the conclusion, so she does that.

She maybe also directs some appreciative thoughts in the general interplanar direction of Shelyn, for being correct that there were misunderstandings to uncover here.

"I think we're making really good progress, and if you both feel up for it, we could continue down our list."

Iomedae is sort of hoping they can get through the whole list in one day and call it good. Probably she shouldn't be hoping that. "I'm ready."

"The next topic on the list is the breakup, but we don't have to go strictly in this order, the scoring is approximate anyway. It could make more sense to talk about Iomedae's feelings for Alfirin next, for example. Or if Alfirin isn't ready we can take a break."

"I don't need a break." She's anxious and a little bit sad but that doesn't seem like a reason to stop. "Either topic is acceptable to me... If Iomedae doesn't mind talking about her feelings next I'd prefer to do that so I can stop avoiding making inferences about how she rated those relative to mine."

"That's fine with me. I rated it more highly because it's more plausible that you'd want to leave the Crusade over my conduct than the reverse."

"I admit I was also curious how those two topics ended up so far apart in the riskiness scoring! Let's go ahead with talking about Iomedae's feelings about Alfirin, then. Iomedae?"

Ramona feels a little bit like she's just thrown a heavily armored woman into the deepest part of the ocean, but Iomedae seems so competent that she can probably just breathe underwater anyway.

Iomedae can only breathe underwater when she's had reason to expect she might need to!

"I think probably the most straightforward characterization is that I still love Alfirin, and expect to for as long as I'm capable of love. I want her to be happy and live forever and achieve great things; I experience a lot of anguish over the possibility that she'll do something awful and I or someone will have to stop her."

Oh. That's - surprising. She assumed, given the terms on which they parted... 

Does she feel happy to learn this? Not... really. She'd expect to, but... she still feels worried. Regretful.

These women both look so terrified at the prospect of still loving each other.

Iomedae calls it anguish rather than fear, because of course she doesn't feel fear. But this sure has all of the hallmarks of fear: a prediction about something bad that could come to pass, strong negative emotions about that possibility, the urge to avoid the bad outcome...

Ramona is not sure how much to believe in this business about paladins not feeling fear. Maybe they do feel fear, but they just have large quantities of courage to counteract it.

She's not going to say anything, yet, she'll let the two of them sort this part out. But she is intrigued! How credible is it that Alfirin will do something truly awful and why can't she just... not do that?

There is probably a reason. There is always a reason. But Ramona can't guess yet what it is.

"That seems like something I would have been very happy to learn in a different context."

"I am not sure whether you mean that you resent learning it as a consequence of Shelyn telling us to speak or that you would have wanted to learn it in some context with plausible deniability or something else."

"I don't know what Alfirin meant, we'll have to find out from Alfirin herself, but I interpreted what she said very differently!"

"It sounded to me as though she was saying she wished you two could just... love each other. And that under different circumstances, it would have been happy news to find out that your feelings were mutually positive."

That interpretation did not occur to her at all and still seems implausible!

"First one. And a bit of the third.

...I think after this conversation I will need some time to think through how I endorse responding to that."

"That makes perfect sense. I am - grateful for having a more accurate understanding of things, and I'm sorry if - you would have preferred not to have this information."

"Alfirin, you too are surprised that Iomedae loves you. Can you say more about why you're surprised?"

...Right, she can just focus on the factual questions where what she wants doesn't matter, and figure out what she wants later when she's alone.

"...Many of the same reasons Iomedae was, I suppose. We - had our disagreements, when I left, and I thought - It seemed like she would have plenty of reasons to stop loving me. And we hadn't spoken in six years. And she was very - professional. Distant. And she's always been trying to think and act like the god she's going to be, and she's not planning to be a god concerned with or capable of love, so -"

"Iomedae, do you want to comment on why you were keeping your distance?"

A picture is starting to form, here, but it's still helpful to have them say things out loud.

"Well, dating Alfirin had been a mistake, and it seemed like a mistake we would plausibly have some trouble not repeating if we went around having common knowledge of being in love, and if instead Alfirin despised me then she would want me to keep my distance, so it seemed indicated in either case. It is true that I intend, as a god, to care about love only insofar as other beings care about it and not for its own sake, and that I mostly try to reason as a god, but I haven't tried to reduce the intensity of any of my mortal friendships, that seems like the kind of thing that would be wildly ill-advised for anyone else and is not so important I should gamble on being unlike anyone else."

"I am curious... where are you on this becoming-a-god project? How many years have you been working on it, and how many more would you guess you have to go?"

Ramona wants to know, is there time enough for love?

"In the other timeline I ascended five years after the end of the war. There's plenty of flexibility. I expect to stay longer this time, as the existence of two worlds means there are more tasks best accomplished while I'm mortal. I would stay longer than as long as needed to finish all my business if Alfirin wanted me to but I predict she doesn't want to - be able to change my behavior by wanting things like that -"

Indeed, Alfirin seems pretty alarmed about the possibility even being mentioned. Part of this has to be that she hasn't fully accepted that Iomedae still apparently loves her, since a part of her can't fathom why Iomedae would stay if she wanted her to.

"I am beginning to think we should probably just go ahead and talk about the break-up."

"It seems to me that either you have sufficient reason not to be in a relationship, or you don't."

"If there are good reasons not to be in a relationship, then you can just... not do that. Sorry, the word 'just' is dismissive there, I realize it's quite hard to refrain from being in a relationship that you yearn for, and if that's the correct answer, then I can do my best to help you ease the pain of it despite the common knowledge you now have. And revisiting and verifying your reasoning for being apart will help you immensely."

"And if there are not actually good reasons to not be in a relationship, well."

Ramona chooses not to finish that sentence right now, and instead falls silent to see what the reaction will be.

"If there are not actually good reasons to not be in a relationship then we will have to go take some time so Alfirin can think about whether she wants to let Shelyn get away with this kind of nonsense.... I think you're right that we should speak about the breakup, though, probably."

"I think I would benefit from taking the time to think about Shelyn first."

"Then this may be a good time to wrap up our first session!"

"Does that sound correct, and is there anything either of you would like to say before we conclude?"

"Nothing."

"I don't think so. Thank you for your work. Are we supposed to arrange to pay you in some way, or did Shelyn's Church handle that?"

"Payment arrangements were already made so you don't need to worry about that."

Ramona pauses, not entirely sure how to phrase the next part.

"I want you to know that I'm very impressed with you both. Even very intelligent, competent clients often have quite garden-variety relationship problems. You two have already mastered the vast majority of the skills I would ordinarily expect to teach. I'm honored that it's my role to try to help you anyway, by facilitating your conversation and offering some structure and support. Thank you for trusting me with that."

"You both took a big risk, today, sharing the information that you both still love each other. I hope you will hold this new information tenderly and let it sink in a bit. It may take a while for all of the implications to unfold in front of you. And this may be too much to hope for, but I hope you allow yourself some small warmth or pleasure at knowing that you are loved."

"Take care of yourselves and I will see you again when you are both ready."

"Thank you." Now she wants to go do something non-stressful like die horribly, so she'll go do that.

She does give Alfirin the high priestess of Shelyn's contact information in case Alfirin has questions for Shelyn about this whole endeavor. "How does Alfirin feel about Shelyn arranging this" might be more important than all of their other relationship disagreements, because Alfirin absolutely would refuse to date her just to spite Shelyn.

...does she want Alfirin to date her? It was a disaster last time. But they are a couple of decades more mature. She thinks about it in between instances of dying horribly and concludes that, yes, she does. If Alfirin wants that. And they can figure out how to talk about Future Alfirin. And it's not a bad idea for some reason she hasn't thought of yet.

She tells Marit that the relationship counselor might want his take on their relationship.

"How have you vetted this woman?"

"We are approximately unable to because she's on another planet and we only meet in a mindscape. Shelyn's church arranged the from-another-planet arrangement to protect our confidentiality."

"Mmmhmm. And what does Shelyn want, here."

"Alfirin's rather agonizing over that. Shelyn claimed this is in our interests, and I don't expect her to be wrong or lying; that leaves the question of why it's worth this much to Her, but she's a god of love and may just be invested in my being more - correct- about love when I ascend."

"Or in your being more - affected by love in some other way!"

"That would give me a lot more pause if I didn't have the assurance this is in my interests. Since I do - I don't consider it very likely Shelyn is lying, and I'm not very worried about how She and I are dividing the benefits of Her intervention. We can straighten that out later."

"This strikes me as allowing a great deal to depend on the assignment of Shelyn as Good and the advertising of Her church as accurate about Her aims."

"Why don't you discuss this with Alfirin. It will probably cheer her up."

Alfirin's problem here is that she was approaching relationship counseling as a sacrifice, something made sacred and given up. Whatever may come of it was Shelyn's. If Shelyn wanted to ruin her working relationship with Iomedae, She could have that. If Shelyn wanted her to reveal all of her secrets, She could have that. If Shelyn wants her to start another relationship with Iomedae...

She didn't think about the possibility before because it did not seem at all likely but now that it does - It really does not seem fair to Iomedae to have a relationship with her founded on Alfirin feeling an obligation to Shelyn. It doesn't even seem like what Shelyn wants, either.

She's angry. She agreed to a trade and when the bill came due it was much, much larger than she expected. She's angry at Shelyn, for tricking her, and at herself for being careless and falling for it... It seems quite plausible that Shelyn did not intend to trick her. She is angry at herself for being so bad at thinking about Iomedae that she tricked herself into thinking relationship counseling would be an at all tolerable sacrifice.

...The question of what she actually wants seems...irrelevant, still. And hard to think about, for that reason. She can't get anything she endorsedly wants from relationship counseling; She might get things that benefit her, she might get things that make her happy or bring her joy or that she's sad to be without, but she cannot get anything she wants, because everything she wants she wants to achieve by her own choices and talents and luck and not at the whim of some higher power.

She's still mulling it over on the peak of Mount Himcho when she gets Marit's sending.

"Iomedae said I should discuss my reservations about Shelyn's manipulative schemes with you rather than her."

Oh. Well. He probably can't help her sort out what she wants but maybe he has some thoughts on the rest of the situation.

"Mount Himcho, in Tian Xia. Scry the rabbit." she responds, then takes the scrying rabbit that her allies use to teleport to her out of her pocket. She gives it an endure elements and an air bubble.

She must be really upset because that's kind of inconsiderate. Marit does not have a Greater Teleport. He has to go over Kalsgard and Hongal. He's there half a minute later. 

"I would've picked a very hideous place, personally," he says, looking out at the landscape.

"I don't know that that would have been better, but in hindsight it might have been wiser to pick a place where you can't see the stars... You can see a lot more of them, from up here. What are your reservations?"

"What's your guess of what Shelyn is playing at?"

"Iomedae thinking of love as an important aspect of the nature of Good when she ascends."

"Iomedae was admittedly being an idiot about you but I do not remotely trust Shelyn to only correct that and not try to get anything else. Also if I were Iomedae I wouldn't let Shelyn even correct that, but that's just saying that if I were Iomedae I wouldn't be Iomedae."

"...I don't think Iomedae becoming a god unconcerned with love is her being an idiot about me, she - Hold on, let me check that, actually - 

- No, I still think that was the obvious trajectory before she met me. That's a bit of a tangent. I agree that Shelyn probably has secondary goals here, and if Her sole intent were to change Iomedae's priorities as a god She could have made a more targeted intervention."

"Iomedae first told me that Good had enough entities concerned with love and it would be more balanced if she did not care at all for it the week you left. I don't think the god she will become is the same one as if she'd never met you. Not do I really think she ought to aspire to that." He's not sure that is a tangent, but - "So what else does She want."

"Presumably some change to how Iomedae or I relate to the other. It seems increasingly likely that Shelyn thinks we should be involved again, or at least - cognizant of the possibility of being involved again."

"After the war I intended to tell Iomedae to stop being childish and talk to you about it. But arranging for that during the war looks, to me, malicious."

"Possibly. I think She just had us do it now because now is when Iomedae asked for Her help with Arazni...She could have said 'after the war is over,' I suppose, but - I suspect indifference towards our ability to prosecute the war more than malice.

...Telling Iomedae after the war probably wouldn't work. I left the moment Tar-Baphon is sealed, in the other timeline."

"Oh. Well. She wouldn't've wanted you to stay for her sake."

"And I wouldn't've wanted to stay just for mine. We've been idiots about each other and would probably continue to be until she ascends if left to our own devices." She kicks a rock down the mountainside and watches it tumble.

"But you're not thrilled that the entity that effected an end to that is an incomprehensible alien intelligence with its own agenda."

"I am not... I have been trying to think about what I owe Her, in terms of outcomes."

"Shelyn? How about nothing? She's not a Lawful god, you're not a Lawful god. She and Iomedae can bargain; the rest of us can do what serves us, and fence Her out if She's pushing too hard for something that we don't trust."

"I care about getting Arazni back very much and was willing to pay a lot for that. I don't know that I am better served by - refusing to cooperate with the payment demanded of Iomedae."

"I think Iomedae can probably cope if the realization she has about love is that it's not something you can achieve through divine meddling."

"I think that's rather beside the point."

"I don't want Shelyn interfering with the Crusade, and I want to have a plan for how to vet if I like what She did with Iomedae. Everything else is your business."

"I want to help the other Arazni and am or at least was willing to sacrifice a good deal of my personal life for that. So, separately from concerns about interference with the Crusade, it matters to me exactly what Shelyn will accept as Her price for that... Thank you for looking out for interference with the Crusade. I intend to for my part serve the Crusade no worse than I did in the other timeline, regardless of how things go with Iomedae."

"That doesn't sound like an unreasonable plan. Good luck paying Shelyn as little as possible."

"I suppose to that end I should probably talk to Her priest...I'll take you back to the Crusade first. Fort Lorrin or somewhere else?"

"Fort Lorrin's fine." He takes her hand. It's hard to tell if that means Alfirin is feeling a bit less out of sorts, or just that when he showed up late she remembered he isn't seventh circle, but he'll take it.

She takes him back to Fort Lorrin then teleports to the Shelynite temple.

It's very beautiful.

She does habitually take note of beautiful places so that she can return to them later but suspects she'll have too many negative associations with this one to come back without pressing business. 

"I'm here to speak with Vinressus Weir."

They show her in. (She has a Mind Blank up. She's probably important.)

"I am in relationship counseling with Iomedae, on the orders of your god. I would like to know what She intends with this, and what precisely Her requirements are."

"I can ask Her, but I would probably need to ask Her a...more specific question. And... She's probably not going to be able to tell you anything as specific as 'can we make this relationship work' or 'should we make this relationship work'. That's why She recommended you talk to a ....human."

"I am not interested in Her answers to those questions. I want to know at what point She will consider Herself adequately compensated for Her intervention to help Arazni. If you need a more specific question... you could ask how many more relationship counseling sessions we would have to undergo before She is satisfied, though I expect that is not the form that Her requirement takes."

"I'll run a Commune if you want, but - it sounds to me like you still have the kinds of questions that humans are better at answering. You disliked the relationship counseling, and feel - coerced to attend it?"

"I could decline to attend, in which case all that would happen is that my friend whose well-being matters to me very much continues to endure an existence worse than annihilation. I would not call that coercion, exactly, given that Shelyn had no role to my knowledge in creating that situation."

Vinressus Weir looks very tired. "Is the problem that - you don't appreciate the way you're being treated in the relationship counseling? You don't want the results you expect? You don't feel comfortable with the concept? You're too distracted by worry for your friend to feel ready to care about anything else? Those suggest - different things I might ask Shelyn."

"My problem," she says slowly, "Is none of those. It is that Shelyn has asked something of me - technically of Iomedae, but the nature of the thing unavoidably involves me - but has not specified under what conditions She will consider our obligation fulfilled. If you are able to predict the answer to that question I don't need you to commune for it. We have attended one session of relationship counseling; is this adequate? If not, will ten be? A hundred? One each week for so long as we both live? Or if Shelyn instead requires a particular outcome, what outcome is it."

"I can ask that question but I'll tell you right now that I expect the answer will be 'unclear' because that question is not drawn into the world along lines Shelyn can trace. I could ask 'the relationship counseling is not working, would I, if I searched, find with Iomedae and her companion some other way to achieve whatever it is you hoped to see them achieve'. I could ask 'does being this unhappy after one session of relationship counseling predict that it will not serve this person'.

But nothing that matters is measured in numbers of sessions of relationship counseling. It is the sort of thing you are meant to do if it is helping you, and not if it isn't. If you are getting nothing out of it besides Shelyn's help with your friend, then my advice would be that you should stop going, and either Iomedae should attend alone or we should discuss some other way to achieve whatever Shelyn thinks is important to achieve here."

"What do you mean by 'helping me'?"

"The hope with relationship counseling is that it does not solve your problems for you, but teaches you strategies you can use to solve them, and maybe creates an impetus to solve them where they'd otherwise go unsolved. If it is working as it's intended, you will learn things you can use to pursue any relationship goal you choose for yourself."

"Well then it seems to be working as intended. When can we stop?"

"After three sessions."

She just said that nothing that mattered to Shelyn was measured in sessions of relationship therapy. So this answer is at best a half-truth; perhaps she has discerned that whatever Shelyn's goals are they will likely to have been met after that time, perhaps she's given up on crossing the communications gulf with Alfirin. Most likely she thinks Alfirin is being a tremendous idiot and will see the light soon. It doesn't matter. She has her answer; as long as Arazni is helped any mismatch between the answer Shelyn's high priest gave and what Shelyn truly valued is Shelyn's problem.

"Fine. Thank you for your time."

Ramona is sitting in her office, writing up a case conceptualization and treatment plan for Alfirin and Iomedae. They’re due for their second session shortly, and Ramona is feeling a little underprepared. They are unusual clients, even by Ramona’s standards, in that she still hasn’t figured out what the problem actually is, or how they’ll know when they’ve solved it. Ramona is hoping that if she systematically analyzes the case, she’ll come up with a brilliant idea for how to move the case forward.

The two were in a stable if unhappy equilibrium for years, avoiding each other and avoiding thinking about the relationship, until the goddess Shelyn interfered and insisted that they go to therapy together. To what end? To live happily ever after? To live happily until Iomedae’s ascension? To give Alfirin some tie to the world that keeps her from turning evil? What is Shelyn’s actual end game here?

And should Shelyn be calling the shots? According to Iomedae, Sheyln guarantees that her aims are in line with the clients’, and Iomedae believes that. And Alfirin gives off a confusing combination of vibes; she manages to convey that she’s there willingly, despite the situation looking coercive on paper.

Nobody can say what the therapeutic goal is, because only Shelyn actually knows, and it’s too expensive to ask her.

For therapeutic goal, Ramona writes down: “Unknown / exploratory; maybe it will become evident. Resolve misunderstandings and see what happens?”

She turns her attention to the pair’s interaction patterns.

She writes: “Pattern: Avoid / avoid, held together by mutual(?) dependence/shared goals in war; end of war → end of relationship.”

Avoidance is popular for a reason: it’s effective. Couples who keep their distance and minimize their entanglement can often live much more peaceably than those who get closer and reveal more of themselves – but avoidance also imposes a cap on intimacy. It’s cold and lonely. These two have taken it to an extreme. They are still, in their hearts, a couple, if a broken one: there’s a space inside each one of them reserved for the other and going unfilled.

Their mutual avoidance was self-perpetuating; they each had misunderstandings about the other that led them to maintain the distance. As they clear up the misunderstandings, they might find that there’s nothing stopping them from being close. More likely, as they reveal themselves to one another, their old problems will be right there to confront them. The pain will get worse before it gets better, and it might not get better at all.

Ramona wonders what stopped them from solving their problems the first time around. She probably doesn’t have enough information yet to tell. Hearing the story of the break-up will probably help, and that’s coming up soon.

Lots of couples need help with their emotion regulation and communication skills. These two mostly don’t, as far as Ramona can see. She’s not sure she buys this “feels no fear” concept – Iomedae seems to have a perfectly functional awareness of and avoidance of pain – but these two seem skilled at regulating themselves and conducting their conversations productively.

She writes: “Skills: good.”

There may still be some way for Ramona to lend domain expertise once the real problems emerge, but it’s hard to say in advance. They’ve asked for help in getting over each other, but Ramona will wait to give that until it’s obviously their best way forward.

So what’s the plan, then?

Just stay the course, apparently, and be ready to seize on some opportunity to help. It’s not a very satisfying treatment plan, as it’s very content-driven. She’s not actually teaching them anything, she’s just a moderator. Good thing she’s not billing this case to insurance.

She writes: “Treatment plan: continue to explore client-generated list of painful topics.”

She should also make a point of asking about some of the cultural terminology at the beginning of each session. Not too much, as that takes away from the harder-hitting topics, but it’s an investment that might pay off if she stumbles across an important question.

She writes: “Second session: ask about Shining Crusade.”

Paperwork done, and just in time for session, with two minutes to spare! What’s in the snack stash?

Ramona eats some dark chocolate toffee and then immediately regrets it because now her teeth have sticky stuff in them and the clients are already materializing on the couch. Well, it’ll be an uncomfortable minute or two but then it’ll dissolve.

“Welcome back! It’s good to see you again.”

“Do you have anything to share about the time since I last saw you? Any interactions you had with each other, or thinking you did on your own?”

Iomedae has died thrice and navigated a bunch of culture clash related to the wizards she imported from the other timeline (the paladins fit in fine) and run around recovering a bunch of artifacts and dedicated half an hour to prayerful reflection on Alfirin, which she spent concluding that she should probably be more careful about miscommunications in cases where she's deliberately withholding information for strategic reasons, and that probably love is a valuable experience and she should be on the lookout for opportunities to experience it whether Alfirin wants anything to do with her or not. (She's not forming intentions about repairing her relationship with Alfirin because Alfirin is quite likely to decide she does not want to grant Shelyn that kind of steering power.)

"I haven't given our personal relationship much further thought. I spent some time thinking about how I ought to orient, conceptually, to love, but I think that may be out of scope."

"It doesn't sound out of scope to me! Are you willing to say more about that?"

"It seems plausible to me that Shelyn wants me to have a different relationship to love than I will by default when I ascend. It would be difficult to justify her expending resources in this way otherwise, though sometimes the ancient gods make inexplicable decisions. But - I think this was not an inexplicable decision. She waited for me to approach Her about trade, and with our permission She introduced us to a humanlike creature who could help us. That's what the gods do when they are exercising unusual caution to - deal with mortals justly - She could have just nudged us into talking before Alfirin left after the war, probably -

In any event I understand Shelyn to be aiming at causing me to realize something about love. I would like to have attitudes about love that are generally appropriate and not excessively shaped by my specific situation, when I ascend, except that it seems perhaps characteristic of love that it's not very compatible with my interest in having priorities not specific to my individual life, since love as least as I seem to be being encouraged to experience it is inherently a fairly specific thing. So I suppose I ought to try understanding it better. I was considering pursuing some relationship towards that end, after the war. - not necessarily with Alfirin because I expected she might not want to change her behavior based on Shelyn's intervention. I found it difficult to think of any other people I would want to fall in love with but this is probably a failure of imagination." 

Ramona hasn't forgotten about Alfirin, but Iomedae's line of thought here is too interesting to immediately let go of.

"Can you say more about that tension between love being -- a specific thing -- and you wanting to experience a more pure or general form of love? It sounds like it's almost a research project, a way to make you more well-rounded? How do you imagine your specific love might differ from some very typical, canonical love?"

"Well, I would say that the most important case of romantic love, from the perspective of humans on Golarion, is the love that grows in a good marriage, and enables the participants to care for and protect each other better than duty alone would permit them. There are already gods concerned with marriage, so I don't intend to be, but - I ought to understand everything that is important to people, because the decisions I make will involve exchanges among them."

Ramona is not sure if she has enough rapport with these clients to go here at this point, but she'll take the gamble.

"Is there still room in your mortal life for a marriage? Or are you too close to ascension, or too bound by your other obligations, to permit for a marriage? That is, assuming you could find someone you wanted to marry, who wanted to marry you."

Ramona doesn't look at Alfirin.

"- well, I haven't settled on a specific schedule for ascension, and have always intended to do everything that is better done as a mortal first, but I think it would be unfair to children for me to bear them, and it is in any event impossible for my species at my age."

She felt a brief wrenching moment of what was probably jealousy when Iomedae mentioned an intent to pursue other relationships, but none at all at the prospect of her marrying. Probably because the thought is almost inconceivable. Being a wife just seems wholly incompatible with being a paladin or a general or a soon-to-be god.

To Iomedae: "Must marriage always imply children?"

"...well, some couples are unlucky, but it seems like one would not really be obtaining whatever specific valuable experience is obtained through marrying if one married while knowing perfectly well one couldn't bear children and did not really intend to live as a wife in any other important respects either. I do think it'd be good for the world if a married woman ascended, though the world would have to be very different for that to be possible and the things that would make it good would not be present if I found a man to whom I was willing to make what would have to be some deeply eccentric vows. I think if a married woman ever does ascend she'll be of a longer-lived species and almost certainly not a paladin."

"I see. So this is what you're talking about, when you say that your personal form of love will necessarily be more specific. You are not in a position to have a typical marriage, the kind of marriage in which you marry a man and bear his children and raise them. If you find love, it will not look like that, it will be different. Unusual. Atypical. And because of that, you distrust it, you're not sure if you can learn anything from it that is generally human and good for you to know as you move into your existence as a goddess. Is that right?"

Fuck if this didn't turn out to be a queer oppression case after all.

"Well, I can't have the set of experiences associated with being a wife and mother. And for that matter I can't have the experiences associated with being a husband and father, or the experiences associated with being a slave, or a peasant, or an orc, or a merperson. I have approximately resigned myself to that, though I do think it will probably impair me in becoming the ideal god.  When I say that love seems specific I mean something more than that - that loving Alfirin does not seem to me to be mostly about experiencing love, it seems to me mostly about experiencing Alfirin. Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd been in love with more than one person."

Okay, okay, Ramona will rein in her desire to launch into some sort of soapbox speech about how Non-reproductive Lesbian Love is Love. Iomedae has a good point.

"Is that because of who Alfirin is? Does she seem so very different from other people you might love? Or do you think you would feel this way no matter who you loved, if there were only one of her?"

"Alfirin is very different from everyone else in the world," she says fondly. "There is no one like her. There are other people I could imagine falling in love with, and it'd be for some similar qualities - ambition, honor, ruthlessness, a sort of self-containedness - but I would have to go to some pretty extraordinary lengths to find them. There aren't ten, I'm sure of that."

Iomedae is almost beaming!

"I think a lot of people feel like that. That their beloved is special, different, very hard to replace."

"Now, I'll grant you that Alfirin really does sound quite remarkable, objectively quite different from the general population of your planet! But I am not sure you are having a unique experience for all that. I guess it's hard to know until I hear more about your actual relationship."

"When I was in my twenties I thought the degree to which Alfirin seemed special to me was probably an error of some kind but at this point she is an archmage and I feel justified in my assessment."

"Is it possible that Alfirin is objectively extremely special, AND that your experience of loving her is still in some ways typical of what love is like for a lot of people?"

"It could be, but it seems a striking coincidence if so!"

Ramona is in danger of extending too far, trying to convince a client of a point of view, and not even one she's sure of at this point. It's too much and she should back off. If she's right, she can always come back to it later. Timing is everything.

To Iomedae: "Fair enough, I guess it's hard to say!"

To Alfirin: "Hello there, sorry to ignore you for so long. Welcome back to you also, I'm glad to see you. How has your time been since our first session? Anything you want to share about what you've been thinking about?"

"I have been thinking about Shelyn's goals and the extent to which I endorse being guided by them. I have not yet determined that. I spoke to Her priestess who - eventually - told me that she thinks our obligations will be fulfilled after three sessions, and I think it is likely that I would prefer to stop at that point, which it seems good for you to know as I expect it affects your plans."

Ooof, that's a bit of a blow. Three sessions is not very much time at all, especially when you haven't even established goals for therapy after the first 1.1 sessions! Still, Ramona is grateful for the heads-up, it's more than she often gets, and Alfirin is right that it will help her plan.

Ramona wonders... does Shelyn think three sessions is enough because it will have worked by then? Can gods predict the future? Or is it more like, if three sessions doesn't do it, then more won't help?

This is among the questions Ramona does not actually need an answer to, to do her job.

She tries not to let her disappointment show. Alfirin doesn't need any more pressure than she's already under.

"Thank you for telling me! You are correct, that does help me plan."

"I've been thinking about Shelyn's role in all of this as well. It is quite awkward, having only Shelyn's word for it that this process is good for you according to your own values, but not knowing how or why that might be true. Can you say more about how you wish to proceed? I don't want to be a party to coercing you in any way."

"I am not being coerced." Why does everyone seem to think she's being coerced? "Iomedae and I are doing something for Shelyn, in exchange for Shelyn doing something for us. I think Shelyn is probably wrong about this being good for me by my values, though it might be the case that undergoing this process without Her having been involved would have been... I think it's best to proceed as you would for any other pair of people with our history, and not change things because of how we came to be here, apart from taking into account the time limit. Unless you think talking about Shelyn's involvement is an important part of relationship counseling."

Ramona wants to know more about whether Shelyn could be wrong about Alfirin's goals. Are Golarion gods omniscient? Apparently not?

Ramona also really wanted to ask about the Shining Crusade, or about any of the other confusing cultural terms she's encountered so far, but with the clock ticking, she's not sure she can afford to. She'll have to prioritize.

"All right. Thank you for being so clear. It is hard for me to tell what is important -- I remain very curious about Shelyn's involvement -- but given the time limit, I think I'd better focus on your history as a couple and the issues you brought up last time. Those things almost certainly matter, and we'll have to stay focused just to get through those in three sessions, so we had better press on."

"When we stopped last time, we were on the verge of talking about the breakup, but Alfirin, you wanted to go and think about Shelyn first. You also said just now that you hadn't really resolved your questions about Shelyn. Did you make enough progress that we can talk about the breakup, or should we choose another topic?"

Alfirin has the option of choosing another topic and running out the clock if she wants to. Ramona can still give her that much.

"We can talk about the breakup. The only things I'm still uncertain about are about what I endorse doing outside of here."

"All right, good."

"If that works for you, as well, Iomedae?" she looks in Iomedae's direction and pauses for objections.

"Either of you can begin, if you're both ready. Tell me the story. What tripped you up, and why were you unable to fix it?"

"The short version is that - we worked well together as friends, and as partners and - I was very happy being intimately involved. I believe Iomedae was too. But things came up - that are I guess we never really resolved. Me seeking immortality. Me being more comfortable with doing evil. Iomedae ascending, and the god that she expects to be... And I realized it would not really be fair to her, to continue to have a relationship with her while being - likely to at some point be evil. While being someone who would pursue immortality at - many costs that she would not consider acceptable. So I left."

" - I broke up with her. Because of - the things that she mentioned, because she wanted to be immortal and was willing to do things to do it that I - couldn't countenance, that I was making laws against which I - couldn't exactly make an exception to because I loved her - and - and in general I couldn't - make exceptions because I loved her - I realized that I believed on some level that she would go to Hell, and believed on some level that I would chase her there to get her back, and - that wasn't fair to anyone else -"

"I think maybe it is time I learned more about what you mean by 'evil,' exactly."

"And I realize, we talked about this early on, Alfirin, you might choose not to get into specific plans that you have for the future, it may be better for a variety of reasons to keep that to yourself. But can we talk generally about the class of things you're both thinking of? I don't have a very clear idea."

What are they going to say, Ramona wonders. Sacrificing babies? Summoning demons? Blighting crops?

"Prioritizing my own selfish interests sufficiently strongly over those of others. I believe I would kill a significant number of innocent people in order to preserve my own life. Hundreds, maybe many hundreds. I would probably torture someone if I had a good enough reason and expected it to work. Likewise for destroying someone's soul, or - many other things that are generally considered extremely bad to do to someone else."

This is Ramona's neutral, unjudgey face.

"Do you feel inner conflict about that, or are you at peace with it? How do you make it okay with yourself to do those things?"

"I would prefer that the things I'd kill hundreds for could all be easily achieved without harming anybody? I care about other people living, I just care about myself living much more than that. It would be - convenient, in a sense - if there were never tradeoffs between things I cared about, but I don't believe that to be the world we're living in. I don't know whether you'd call that inner conflict."

Iomedae is more still and less expressive than before they got on this topic, and not doing the thing where she suppresses the urge to linger on an interesting conversation. She is also picking her words very precisely. "The - usual - methods of attaining immortality involve a lot of human sacrifice. There might be something better. I hope very much that Alfirin finds something better. But most people who think they will find something better are mistaken, and either end up dying and going to an afterlife or end up - trying steadily worse and worse things in increasing desperation.

I - do not want to say that there is no evil I would ever countenance, I am fighting a war. I do not want to say that there is no unnecessary evil I would ever countenance. There are - kinds of selfishness - that do not seem to me to be as - dangerous, as much a road to greater evils in the future. 

But I think that the willingness to bring about the end to many other peoples' lives for immortality is a degree of evil that is - sufficient to cause nearly all of the great horrors that hold civilization back from surpassing the gods, and the cause of much of it, and - I can, self-evidently, love someone while knowing this is true of them. But I think that I could, when I was young, only really feel good about it to the extent I believed that Alfirin would - do better, if I could find her something better, and that I could if she trusted me. And I do think Alfirin believes herself to be a worse person than she really is, and I separately believe that there are lots of routes to the things that she wants which only become available if you are predictably someone who won't slaughter innocents. 

But it seems ill-advised to - attempt a romantic relationship with the premise that if only I love her enough she won't do what she believes she will, or that I will always be able to find a better way, or that ultimately I am right and she is wrong about being a Good person being on balance the better way to accomplish the things she wants to accomplish. Especially since - one of the things I believed until a few years ago was that if she wasn't willing to do great evils for selfish reasons Arazni would obviously help her with a better kind of immortality. And now Arazni is dead, or worse than dead.

Also she - knows now how it goes in the future. Maybe that changes things. I can imagine many possible ways it could have gone in the future that would change my assessment here."

Alfirin is very still. Iomedae's words might be directed at Ramona but most of them are meant for her to hear. And mostly touch on topics that feel very dangerous, though they'll probably get to them all today anyways. (Alfirin feels that even though her obligation to be here expires after two more sessions, she still needs to take relationship counseling seriously, and that means completing all the conversations that have been scheduled unless Ramona has other recommendations to displace them.)

...But later today does not have to mean right now, and she is, after all, a bit of a coward. "I think," she says instead, slowly and carefully, "that if Arazni could have helped me with immortality if I were unwilling to do significant evils for immortality, then doing so would have come at a substantial cost. It seems likely that that is not any less - selfishly allowing people to be harmed - than pursuing immortality myself would be, if one is only counting the harm, and is not particular about which hand deals the blow, and counts evils willfully not prevented as much as evils actively caused. That was not among my reasons for not asking her for help, but would have been if I had not had other sufficient reasons, and were I a Good person. And I believe that, given that cost, she would not help if the consequence of not helping was merely that I would die and go to Heaven in twenty years. Or longer than that, longevity is a much easier problem."