"The day Asmodeus dropped me I expected the men at the fort to tear me to pieces. They instead left me in command of the fort even though I had - nothing - and it was surreal."

Valia would certainly have been considering how to kill the fort's priest of Asmodeus but she sure wouldn't have put those plans into action specifically in response to the news he had stopped being a priest of Asmodeus! She probably shouldn't say that. "I kind of resent the whole constitutional convention immensely but - I hope that you are able to do some useful things at it and it was worth leaving your fort."

"I don't currently feel useful as a delegate at all but I think the surrounding - environment - is in enough flux that there are probably useful things to be done there."

"Well. Goddess go with you." The woman in uniform is back and - not hovering, but deliberately not hovering.

"Lieutenant, are Selects not yet sworn to the Church still obliged to have fun at least once a month?"

" - Iomedae choosing you doesn't itself impose any obligations, though representing yourself as Hers does, but the obligations associated with representing yourself as Hers are all - not lying, not betraying a parley or offering a surrender falsely or breaking your word. The having fun at least once a month is just advice because everything else you do will go much much worse if you don't listen. It's more like Iomedae saying you shouldn't avoid thinking about what you're really hoping to accomplish or Iomedae saying that you should try to adopt policies that predictably get results you like. They're things Iomedae said because people who listen to them will be better at doing things."

"I just don't think She has any business telling me what to do with my time while She hasn't even fixed the Evil afterlives yet."

"Are you imagining that when She's fixed the Evil afterlives She'll hang around to obsessively manage our lives? It is generally understood that She'll - reallocate, or maybe dissolve, pretty substantially, once we win, because She won't be a particularly useful shape for the work that remains. The habits of a people in a state of emergency aren't the habits of people when everything important will be all right forever. 

She is managing our lives now because She would like us to do more with them, rather than less with them. The only penalty for not following the advice is that you will probably be worse at things."

"Well, I don't want to be worse at things," says Valia, very grudgingly. "But I don't think I need to pretend to be a noble once a month to be good at things. It really seems like working on being good at things would be a better way to be good at things."

DISSOLVE? Oh no does that mean that if they win any time soon he will be dropped as a cleric TWICE. What is he supposed to DO after that.

"Oh, you don't have to - go to fancy parties or anything like that. Just - something that makes you feel - connected with the world. Like there are things worth fighting for. Like you can imagine Heaven. Or if you'd rather, like you can imagine the world where we've won and are all right."

"Oh. The thing where Good isn't only different from Evil because Heaven is different from Hell, where a free people in everything they do are better than a tyrannized people, the thing where if you don't have a wanting-things impediment it isn't hard to tell, which part of the battlefield you're on, because Good is good for people -"

"That sounds like a closer approximation than 'the things rich people locked in vicious status competitions do', yeah."

"In that case I think I have fun all the time."

"That unfortunately is also classically a thing people say when in fact they are not meeting the mandatory fun requirements. But you will have to work that out with your confessor. I was sent to get Select Artigas for our teleport."

"Right. Good luck. With the convention. ...everyone there's terrible but some of them are trying."

"I read the report." And off with Blai she'll go.

And back in Westcrown he will proceed to do something that hopefully isn't catastrophically stupid.