"We're talking to each other some, but there are only so many hours in the day and the Lord Marshal is sometimes called away whenever there is business requiring the world's most powerful paladin.

"Can you - try to give an example, again, of what kind of thing, very specifically, you think he ought to have said, which might have convinced someone who was willing to be convinced that torture is Evil, but not to take his word for it, because to me it sounds like you are saying, over and over again, that you think he should have said some different more convincing thing, and I am saying, again and again, that I don't know there to be such a thing."

"I don't know the exact right words for convincing people! People don't always listen to my speeches! I haven't been saying he needed to find the magic words that would have worked, I've been saying he should try, like, at all to convince people who aren't just going to agree with anything a paladin of Iomedae says! It sounds really hard to do worse at that than not trying at all!

If you want me to make some guesses about things he could have said I can try to make some guesses. They probably won't be very good guesses, because you haven't actually shown me the sand cathedral. But I'm worried that if I make guesses, you'll say 'well, I don't think those would've worked,' and ignore what I'm actually saying."

"I think what he did was, in fact, trying at all."

"Then he's really bad at trying!!"

It kind of sounds like the paladins here don't actually want potatoes, at least not as much as they want to complain about how people won't just ignore their consciences to listen to whatever they say. Valia would've listened — well, Valia wouldn't have had this issue in the first place, she didn't think people should just only listen to her and never to their conscience, not even when it was Delegate Thrune defending Delegate Ibarra.

"In this branch of the metaphor is the sand cathedral... Menador and Lastwall, existing... or are you thinking of something else."

"The sand cathedral is... it not actually mattering for deterrence whether you execute someone without torture or whether you torture someone to death. I don't think Lastwall or Menador are... fictional? ...are there countries the Asmodeans made up that don't actually exist?"

"Not as far as I know. So... it did come up, that Menador switched to the recommendations of their Church of Iomedae representatives regarding methods of execution, and did not see an increase. I think the Archduke said it, not the Lord Marshal. I would guess that the Archduke saying it about a change that he implemented and oversaw would work better than the Lord Marshal repeating the same story on hearsay. Do you disagree?"

"...well, if you can only pick one or the other, it should definitely be Delegate Narikopolus? But he didn't really explain it well enough to know it's true either, even if I assume he was definitely telling the truth about everything. Like, I still feel like there's a lot of different things that could've affected it, I don't see how you'd know for sure that torturing people to death doesn't make a difference at all."

If Avenger Ferrer has not picked up yet that "delegate" is only a polite title if it's competing with "mister" from Angela modeling it she probably never will but it's not a priority. "To that standard it seems rather impossible to know anything about governance for sure. They tried something. Nothing got worse, even the things they were worried about worsening the most, and they hurt people less."

They hurt people who've done a bunch of awful crimes less. But apparently the Iomedeans think that's a really important type of potato, for some reason.

"Well, usually your whole country didn't just get taken over. Like, if Taldor got rid of torturing people to death, and it had the exact same number of crimes one year and the next, that'd be one thing. But here it could've also been... not being able to prove as many crimes because the Asmodean priests all lost their spells, or not executing as many people for crimes they didn't do, or people trying harder not to be Evil now that the Asmodeans aren't in charge, or the Queen changing a lot of the laws, or probably lots of other things I didn't think of. And it seems— wait." She looks like she's just realized something. "Uh, you said yesterday that you can't be afraid, right? I think maybe that's making it hard to understand why the sand cathedral thing sounds so, uh, fake. I'd definitely be a lot more afraid of getting tortured to death than just of dying."

"I only reached that level of power recently, but yes, that's a paladin thing past a certain point. I actually agree that if what you are trying to do is make people afraid, torture is a way to accomplish it; I disagree based on the examples we have to hand - acknowledging that, as you say, they are not perfect examples, because Good people do not control for example the government of Taldor - that making people afraid is a good way to make them commit fewer crimes, overall; if some people do more crime when less afraid, as may be the case, some people also cooperate with the government more when it isn't doing Evil things like torturing people to death."

She turns that over in her head. It seems like if people are only doing crimes because they think the government is Evil, probably the crimes aren't actually bad? Delegate Jornet is Lawful, so probably she's against crimes either way, but that doesn't mean Victòria is. Or, well, some of them might still be bad, if they're wrong about whether the government is Evil, or if they're people like Delegate Ibarra who just want to hurt innocent people. ...Or if they make a mistake and accidentally make it impossible to track down an Asmodean cult, that too... okay, maybe enough of them are bad that it'd still be worth trying to avoid some of them.

She doesn't actually have any idea how you'd tell whether you'd get more crimes from people thinking the government is Evil or more crimes from never torturing people to death, that seems hard to figure out just from thinking about it. Less like trying to build a cathedral out of sand, more like people being complicated.

Also none of what Delegate Jornet said is taking into account what people deserve at all, but paladins really don't like it when you talk about that. And maybe the afterlives are better at that anyway, if someone's done a lot of awful crimes it'd be really hard to give them what they deserve before killing them. As long as they can't just take the Final Blade, and as long as it's not something like Chosen Artigas. (Her chest twists.) But probably it mostly won't be? And if someone breaks a law doing something that's not Evil, it's definitely better not to torture them to death over it.

"I think 'torturing people to death deters some people more than just killing them would, but more people than that will decide to do crimes because the government is torturing to death' is less like a sand cathedral than 'torturing people to death basically doesn't deter anyone.' I don't know if it's true, but it seems like the sort of thing that could be. ...I guess Delegate Cansellarion did say something kind of like that."

"Communication is really, really hard," sighs Angela.

"I really do think it can't hurt for him to just write out his speeches in advance. I know he's really busy but I, uh, get the impression you guys really aren't happy about the torture law. ...I guess I could be wrong about how many potatoes you're missing out on from that, if it's not as important to you as I think it is. 

...And maybe he could, like, show them in advance to people who grew up here and let them ask questions? And then they could say things like 'I don't actually have any idea what you mean by "torture"' or 'it sounds like you're saying you can build a cathedral out of sand' or whatever."

"Sometimes things arrive on the floor without everyone having courteously notified everyone else in advance to let them write speeches in advance, and the Lord Marshal is incredibly busy, so he would need really quite a lot of advance warning. It's possible he should be delegating more. When the Church produces internal reports on how we could have handled a situation better it is very common for the finding to be that we need to delegate more. But that doesn't make it simple to find people we can work with whose help will save more time than managing them costs."

"So, I'm guessing here, I might be wrong, but I think probably how easy it is to delegate depends on what it is he's delegating? Like, it'd be hard for him to have someone else write his speeches, because unless he completely agreed with them about everything they might not write it quite right, and even the other paladins might disagree with him about some things. But — it'd have taken you, like, thirty seconds to tell him it was going to come up on the floor, and that doesn't require trusting you to do anything but remember what your committees are bringing to the floor. Or, I don't remember if there's a paladin on Urban Order, but if there is then they could've told him. And — I don't know what all you guys are doing, but if you all got together for five minutes at the end of each day to tell each other what sorts of things were going to be brought on the floor, it'd still help a lot with knowing what to prepare for, and it'd barely take any time at all. And I guess it'd still be a problem for committees that don't have paladins... maybe you could have someone read the transcripts or something, but that might take longer."

She hadn't actually thought of getting copies of all the transcripts and reading them but now that she's thought of it it does seem like a good idea. ...And now that she thinks about it she's not actually sure whether the paladins can mostly read, none of them are from Cheliax. But if they can read it'd be really insulting to point that out.

"The Lord Marshal himself attends Urban Order. I think you're drastically underestimating how long it takes to do things - not to just gesture at them but to see them wholly done. I expect he tried to stop them from bringing the bill to the floor and then did not have time to write a speech between when they outvoted him and when they brought it before the floor. Writing a speech is time consuming. Writing a speech better than the one you heard along any particular axis more so. Testing out a speech on someone else requires the speech to be drafted and the someone else to be free long enough to hear it and to relate their thoughts, and using those thoughts wants more time still after this occasion. He could be notified of half a dozen things that might want his voice every morning, and it is not always obvious which the convention will strike down without his guidance and which need more attention. Even if he plans to do all of this he may be alerted at any moment to something requiring his attention in, for example, Razmiran, and need to teleport there to deal with whatever it is and see the aftermath handed off neatly. If someone else writes him a speech he must still read through the whole thing and make sure he agrees with it all because paladins mustn't lie. There are transcripts available to anyone who wants them from every committee now, and we're working Select Artigas's assistant quite hard sorting through them to bring the right things to everyone's attention wherever we miss something ourselves, and the Select tried to hire another man but the fellow appears to now be working for the Archduchess. If it would really take five minutes to not have people tortured to death in Cheliax we would have clawed those five minutes out of our days somewhere, but I just don't think it's the case."

He's on Urban Order and Delegate Jornet still doesn't think he should've done anything different?

"I think I was probably just confused about how many potatoes you get from torturing criminals to death not being allowed, if it's not as important to you as I thought it makes sense that none of my ideas are good ways to get more potatoes."

"...Avenger, it's completely consistent with these being the biggest most important potatoes in reach that none of your ideas work. It is very easy to come up with ideas that do not work. It is far easier than coming up with ideas that do work, especially when you are making recommendations to people whose constraints you know nothing about and do not respect."

Is acting like the person you're talking to is stupid just a really important type of potato for paladins, because they sure like to treat it that way.

"I don't know if my ideas will work! Probably some of them won't! But you don't know they don't work, either, you keep coming up with reasons they might not work and acting like there's no point in trying—"

That's probably not actually a good way to explain it, Delegate Jornet is just going to think she's upset that she's not listening to her. Which, well, probably a little, but that's not the point.

"—I think I explained that badly, let me try again.

I think if it were really important to me to get as many potatoes as I possibly could, and this particular type of potatoes was as important to me as I thought it was to you, I would want to... try a lot of ways to get it, even if I wasn't sure if they'd work, because if something's really important it's worth trying even if it might not succeed. I wouldn't be... running off to other countries all the time to get foreign potatoes? Or if the foreign potatoes were really important I'd see about having one of the other paladins also give speeches — you guys hardly ever give speeches apart from Delegate Cansellarion, you could have him give all the speeches that are like 'here's what the Church of Iomedae thinks, listen to us because we're the Church of Iomedae' and the ones with more time to write speeches could see about making speeches explaining things for, uh, people who are actually trying to listen to their conscience. And I'd've chosen paladins who'd be really good at explaining things to people." She doesn't actually have any idea how they were chosen but Delegate Saiville cannot possibly be the person who will get them the most potatoes.

"But — none of that is exactly the point? Maybe none of those ideas would help at all. But it doesn't really seem like you're trying to come up with more ways to get the potatoes. And when there's something as important to me as I thought this was to you, I... try to find ways to do it. It doesn't always work but I try."

"We do think more of us should be trying to give more speeches. We weren't chosen for public speaking experience - Select Wain had public speaking experience and we can't afford more of that, I know she's popular in some corners but overall the damage to the Church's reputation is awful and everybody's vote counts for just as much as yours does. We were mostly chosen for being literate, steady, orthodox, and already in Westcrown - but we do have 'more paladins should consider making speeches' on our minds.

"The problem with ideas that won't work, or that might not work, is that they could make things worse. We don't know in advance how many people will vote one way or another. So it could be that trying something will make it go from a failure to a success, but it could also make a success into a failure, or it could eat up a lot of resources turning a success into also a success or a failure into also a failure. Not torturing people to death is very very important and insofar as I understand your advice about how that should have been handled I simply disagree with your assessment about whether it would have been wise to abide by your suggestions. That doesn't mean I don't care, or that I'm not trying; it means I disagree with you. People who care about things very much can still disagree with you about matters of fact and you should expect this to happen frequently. You will have to show me your own sand cathedrals in the form of political victories before I am convinced that you are very likely to be correct on these topics."

...If the paladins here were picked to not be like Valia, maybe Iomedaeans are mostly pretty great, and she's just stuck interacting with the kind that are especially likely to think everyone else should just completely ignore their conscience and listen to what they say and especially unwilling to say that it's incredibly awful to torture innocent people to death in the name of Asmodeus? Admittedly that still doesn't explain Chosen Artigas.

"I don't really think 'it might help if you explained yourselves well enough that people can understand what you're saying and what your reasons are' is saying you can build a cathedral out of sand. But if you're so worried it'll make things worse or take a lot of time that you don't even want to try it I can't make you." 

"I'm taking what you say into account. That's just not going to look like taking all of your advice."

"I'm not saying you need to take all of my advice."

"...all right. Do you have more questions or do you suppose we might be done?"