Victòria is supposed to be meeting Desnia here, but Desnia hasn't arrived yet and she doesn't actually have any idea when she will. She already topped up all the cisterns, and she doesn't have anything else to do while she waits, so now she's hanging out in the temple, staring at a brightly-colored painting of some sort of cat and looking vaguely unhappy.

"Not a cat fan?"

Blink. "—No, the cat's fine, there's nothing wrong with the cat."

"Well, it sure looks like something's on your mind."

"Mostly just convention stuff, I guess. ...On Rights we brought in a paladin from Lastwall to ask some questions and he — didn't really understand how people work outside Lastwall. And then he got annoyed at me for telling him he was wrong."

"I haven't met any of the paladins yet, what didn't he understand?"

"He was trying to explain a different point, and self-defense came up, and he was saying — if someone attacks you for no good reason, and they want to hurt you really badly, he thought your soul's natural first instinct was going to be — telling you not to hurt them, even more than wanting to make them stop attacking you. He had a bigger point but that part was... obviously wrong... so I kind of got distracted from the bigger point."

"Different souls've got different instincts, I'd imagine, or the world wouldn't look as it does."

"If he'd said there's some people like that it wouldn't have been obviously wrong, there's probably millions of people in the world, lots of them probably have holes in their conscience. And obviously some people are scared they'll get hurt worse if they do anything, or things like that, but that's not the same thing as — thinking the most important thing is making sure the person attacking you doesn't get hurt."

"Well, you know, I think my instinct would be to run away, but if I had a moment to think - I know where I'm going so really if someone attacks me they're putting themselves in much greater danger than they are me."

"If the first thing your soul tells you is to run away that's not surprising, if you can pull it off that's one way to stop them from attacking you." Victòria doesn't think it'd be her first instinct but it's still pretty different from what the paladin was saying.

"And — it's not like getting killed's the only way someone can hurt you. When he said it the first thing that came to mind was a man trying to force himself on a woman, where it doesn't really help if you're Good. But either way, it seems like if they don't want to risk their victim fighting back, they could just not attack innocent people for no reason, you know?

But I also think — maybe sometimes there's situations where it's complicated what the right thing to do is, like maybe an Evil wizard is making someone attack you, and it's not actually that person's fault, but — I think for most people, their soul's first instinct is still going to be, 'no, stop, I need to make this stop,' even if it's a situation where the right answer's complicated."

"Maybe we should try asking a bunch of people, except I'm not sure how much most are in touch with their instincts when they're answering surveys."

Nod. "And I don't think he'd listen, even if every single one of them said he was wrong, he'd just... try to say it was because they were Evil, or something."

"Is it possible he just misspoke or something?"

"I think if he'd just misspoke he'd've explained what he really meant when I explained why he was wrong."

"Huh. Well, I wasn't there so I haven't got a lot of material to guess with."

"My best guess is — he's from Lastwall, almost everyone is Good in Lastwall, if people there hardly ever try to hurt each other he might just not know how most people'd feel about it."

"Maybe he thinks that's how you tell what an undamaged soul's instinct is, by raising them somewhere Good."

"I don't think it makes me damaged, that if someone's trying to hurt me for no reason I want to stop them."

"Well, stopping them's not the same as hurting them."

"I know that. Sometimes the safest thing is to run." She doesn't like it, but it's not like it would help anything if a twelve-year-old girl tried to face down a grown man with a weapon.

"But I think — I guess I could be wrong about this, now that I think about it I'm not as sure of it as I was that the paladin was wrong — I think for most people, the first moment after someone starts hurting them, their soul is just going to be screaming for it to stop, no matter what that means, and whether or not to hurt them is later."

Maybe that wouldn't be true for her anymore? She's not sure. She'd obviously want to hurt anyone who was trying to attack her, if she could manage it, but in that first desperate moment she doesn't know if that's what her soul would reach for.

"Hmm. I think it's, you know, sort of interesting to think about what our souls would do first, but - that's not the same thing as what we actually choose to do, which is what really matters."

Nod. "I think probably it depends? I assume the paladin'd also say it depends, you'd have to be really stupid to think a little girl with no chance of fighting anyone off should do the same as someone who's already been trapped somewhere they couldn't run if they tried."

"If you want to call it 'stupid', I guess - I'm not sure everyone thinks as much about this as you!"

"Sorry, I didn't mean — if you just haven't thought about it I'm not saying that's stupid. I don't think you're stupid, or anything, I'm sure there's lots of things I've never thought about. I used to teach girls back home how to defend themselves, it's the sort of thing that was important to think about for that."