"I hadn't really thought about the part about giving Asmodeus more soldiers, that does sound bad."

Maybe you could work something out where you try and give them what they deserve before they die, and then execute them by Final Blade. Only if you don't declare people have the right not to be tortured during their execution, though. And it seems hard to get it right without killing some of them by accident. And sometimes you won't have a Final Blade. And it doesn't really feel satisfying — but maybe that's less important than not giving Asmodeus the tools to hurt innocent people? ...That wasn't really Alicia's main point, she doesn't think.

"I never had a brother or anything, but — most of the people who hurt me when I was a kid were other kids punishing me when I did badly on an assignment? And I don't want to hurt them about it."

(...Should she? She just thought of it as a normal thing everyone does, barely even the kind of thing that needs avenging, but maybe that was wrong? But it's not like she hasn't repaid them for it, not out of vengeance but just because she was also a student.)

"And that seems kind of similar to what was going on with your brother? But—" Okay, apparently she doesn't trust Alicia enough to outright confess to murder, no matter how justified and no matter how pardoned. "—but the person who hurt me the worst anyone's ever hurt me, I wanted him to hurt for it, and every time I saw him I was angry at him, and when he died I was happy about it. And I don't wish I hadn't wanted that, and I don't wish I hadn't been angry. And I think Delegate Ibarra is the same way, unless — unless I were saying his victims counted less because they aren't me, and that sounds awful. You're — you're angry at him, aren't you—"

"Yes! And it's not like I wouldn't - I mean, it's not like if we were at an entirely different constitutional convention I wouldn't kill him to stop him, if it weren't for the fact that I'd fail horribly and die and that even if I succeeded he'd get brought back. I'd do it even if I didn't have a final blade available. You don't need to just - let someone go around murdering people, because they might regret it later. But if he gave himself up to the church of Iomedae, if he promised he'd give them every teleport and every other spell he could prepare every day for the rest of his life, if he stopped hurting people and was trying to make up for whatever evils he could - I'd do my best to convince people that he should be left alive, no matter how angry I was, even though it would probably be really hard."

"Even if — even if he gave himself up, it wouldn't feel right for him to just get away with killing innocent people. And if the other man I just mentioned had given himself up — I mean, he couldn't have, because we were still being ruled by Asmodeus — but if, I wouldn't have wanted people to just — act like, since he was working for Iomedae now, it didn't matter what he'd done."

"It does still matter what they did? A lot of people start trying to repent when they get old and realize they're going to face the judge, but unless they weren't very evil to begin with or they die killing a pit fiend or something, they often don't even make it back to neutral. And you don't have to trust them either. If Lord Cansellarion told me a bill that looked good was secretly evil, I'd vote against it and tell everyone I knew to do the same, but I wouldn't do that for Ibarra even if he repented. It's just that the good they're doing also matters."

"So it's like, you think it's worth waiting on letting them get what they deserve, because in the meantime they'll be helping people?" That doesn't really sound like what she was saying earlier but it makes some amount of sense.

“Not exactly? That’s - there might be some god I haven’t heard of that says that, but it’s not what I meant, I think it’s a sad thing when someone is trying to do better but doesn’t succeed in time because repenting is hard. I just mean that you don’t have to ignore everything bad they did before. Like if a schoolteacher beats a kid to death, even if they’re sorry and trying to make up for it you shouldn’t put them in charge of another class of kids.”

"Are there people who think you should put them in charge of another class of kids??"

“Not in Westcrown, that I’ve heard? Unless you count the evil nobles. After the war, though, when I started telling people about redemption that was one of the more common kinds of misunderstandings people had.”