Closing arguments are in some ways the most unpleasant part of the trial; if one did one's best during main arguments and didn't have a last brilliant flash of insight they consist entirely of repeating things one has already said. Nonetheless, it is standard for trials to include them and so included they shall be.

"The decedent's life was dedicated to the service of Good causes, even when he was empowered by an Evil deity. He saved dozens, perhaps hundreds of lives at the Worldwound, and earned the favor of Iomedae. For the majority of his myriad daily actions, his motives, his methods, and the results of his methods were Good. His life bent the world towards Good. His Lawfulness is unimpeachable. He has earned a place in Heaven."

Lots of people save lives at the Worldwound and are as evil as they come. Unless he is not supposed to think that because that will cause more of them to go to Hell in spite of the fact that he is not a lawyer.

"Thank you. Hell?"

"Why, Hell says that it is time to come full circle. Blai Artigas is a cleric of Asmodeus. As a cleric of Asmodeus, he tortured four people to death and far more close enough to it. He lied, cheated, ruined the joys of his classmates simply to fit in, treated them as cruelly as they treated him. Then he spent the rest of his life engaged in a technically nonevil activity which was nonetheless the thing that the armies of Hell most wanted him to do. His Lawfulness is unimpeachable, and he tortured four people to death. For the entire part of his life that he got to live, his actions served Hell. Let him come to his masters."

Actually some of those four people were before he was chosen.

Did he just completely fabricate the entire thing where Asmodeus dropped him and Iomedae caught him, somehow, were the last months of his life all an implanted memory for some fucking reason -

"Thank you. Axis?"

"The decedent was a cleric of Asmodeus. He is a cleric of Iomedae. If, for some reason, we were to rely solely on the evidence of his two clerichoods, he would be straightforwardly Lawful Neutral; Axis believes this to be indicative of his alignment, but not conclusive evidence on its own.

But even if we discount this evidence entirely, his actions best support the conclusion that he is Lawful Neutral. His Lawfulness is nearly undisputed, and in fact no one in these closing arguments has actually attempted to dispute it. In terms of his moral alignment, it is true that he tortured and killed people in the name of Asmodeus, and that this was Evil. It is equally true that he dedicated years of his life to holding the Worldwound out of primarily Good and Neutral motives, and that he thereby achieved Good ends. Both the Good and the Evil he has done are significant and relevant, and when they are both considered, in the context of relevant mitigating and exacerbating factors, a judgment of Lawful Neutral is most accurate."

please please please please please PLEASE PLEASE

"Very well.

This case is unusual, though not entirely unprecedented, in many of its particulars. With that being said, considering the information we have about the decedent, his life, and his soul, I find that he is Lawful Neutral.`

This concludes the trial of Blai Artigas."

maybe he heard that wrong somehow and actually this result is bad? -

- is all Blai has time to think before his consciousness terminates and picks up again from an earlier point.

Axis is a great big beautiful city, and if it's not what he expected, it's only because he expected not to expect everything about it.

There's a park. There's a chess table in the park. It's just a few steps away. There's real physical pieces, in a drawer beneath the row of marquetry chessboards, a full set plus extras for pawn promotions and variants.

He should get around to finding where Iomedae's people in Axis congregate and see about entering their command structure, but it's been almost a month. He sits down and starts setting up, in case anyone comes by to play.