Every adult in a whole village?? Victòria doesn't think most of the people she knew growing up have done anything they deserve to die for, or most of the sortitions here. Maybe Delegate Jornet was visiting some especially bad villages? Maybe places that didn't use to be ruled by Asmodeus execute people for lots of things Victòria doesn't think people should die for?

"Before I move on — uh, you brought up 'no realistic prospect' of someone being stopped some other way, and maybe I misunderstood I think that's... a rule that's too strict? Probably lots of the time you're not going to be sure, and... if you think it's a coinflip whether someone keeps doing terrible things to people, it sounds really awful to decide that they should be the one who definitely doesn't get hurt, rather than their future victims."

...Feliu guessed that he could just explain to her why it was stupid to burn down the school and it'd work. And he was right, only she's not sure how he could have guessed except by being a hopeful-paladin sort of person, but — well, he was right. And also the thing she did was "burning down an Asmodean school" rather than "murdering an innocent person."

"And not saying where you heard only helps if it's a crime more than one person knew about, unless you don't tell someone what they're being punished for, which sounds like" some kind of awful Asmodean game "the sort of thing that'd be really bad for deterrence."

"Yes, it mostly only helped with the kinds of crimes where everyone knew. I... didn't have a strict probability I was aiming for, when deciding how strict to be, because there were usually a lot of other factors, like whether they had children or anyone else they were supporting, and whether we were close enough to a town that I could bring them with me to that town and follow up there instead of having to do everything on the spot - but if you're envisioning me leaving people alive when I thought they were a coinflip away from committing more murder you're mistaken, most of the murderers I tried were doing infanticide and they were among the likeliest to also have children they were looking after, a lot of people don't murder all their babies and infanticide in particular was in large part people not being aware that babies count."

"...Well, I'm not sure if" how does she explain this without saying 'deserve' "people should be executed for it, if it's babies specifically. But that actually reminds me of one of the next things I was going to say — it's kind of a side point but it's relevant to some of the other things I was thinking—

—It seems like a lot of the time you guys don't know how normal people will see any given punishment? On Family Delegate Goés was saying he was just giving out warnings for infanticide, like he expected that to work, only — so, before I came to Westcrown, I don't think anyone ever gave me a warning about something I'd already done without also hurting me at least a little, even if it was just something like my mom hitting me where it's really not a big deal. No one'd take a warning seriously, if you're not also hurting them. And even if you don't want to kill them, there's lots of things that hurt someone more than a warning but less than killing them.

Or also—" She flips through the Rights Committee transcript. "...Okay, it's hard to find a good quote because the transcript doesn't say anything about how people were acting, so I guess maybe I was misunderstanding, but people seemed surprised when I talked about how we used to get whipped for getting bad grades in school. That's an everywhere thing, I'm pretty sure, except I overheard someone say that where she was from they hit people with sticks instead. And so people don't really think of whipping someone with a regular horsewhip as all that serious, and if you're thinking you could just whip someone like you'd do in Lastwall or Molthune for the same crime, it'd be... kind of like if you punished someone in Molthune by hitting them once? I don't know if that metaphor made sense."

"The warnings for infanticide are because... it's unfair to punish someone if they were not adequately warned, and it turned out that for this population at this time, a declaration that murder was illegal did not constitute adequate warning. People were surprised. I could have accompanied the warnings with some kind of other punishment, but it did seem to me that people were taking the warnings alone seriously enough, and I usually had enough time to have an extended conversation like this one with the people who I needed to investigate and try, to figure out how they could proceed without doing it again. It's possible that all those people just fooled me, and that they weren't really surprised, and laughed all the way home planning to kill another baby, but that would not be my guess."

"...probably some of them listened, and some of them fooled you, and some of them were planning to listen when they left but ended up changing their minds? But I also think—

—there's a lot of people who think it's their right to hurt people less powerful than them, who'd never dream of the law going after them, who'd be really shocked if someone told them the law was going after them even though they're a noble, or a powerful wizard, or an Asmodean priest — or, I mean, probably the Asmodean priests figured it out when their country got taken over, but apart from that. And it seems really awful to me to say that someone shouldn't be punished for breaking the law, if they didn't realize they were breaking it, when — a lot of times what that means is just letting people get away with hurting people weaker than them. And — people murdering their babies isn't the exact same thing, I don't even really think it's close to as bad, but — I do think there's something to the comparison?

And — there was the delegate who went out and murdered a bunch of slips, I don't know if you remember but he got mentioned during the punishment debate, and — that's one of the things I was looking into over the break, when I was trying to figure out what was going to happen to Valia, and it sounded like he really thought murder was legal if you're doing it to slips? And they executed him for it, and I think that was the right thing to do. And — well, I guess I'm not sure whether you'd say that's somehow different from not knowing murdering babies is illegal, or whether you think the magistrate should've just told him 'no, the murder law applies to slips too' and let him off with a warning."

"So - it's possible that he was in fact not adequately warned, somehow, but there are other ways in which it's different - I didn't encounter anyone who specifically took advantage of other violence and chaos in which to kill their baby and that timing is suggestive that he knew he wasn't up to something fully aboveboard. It has in fact been conspicuously illegal to kill slips that don't belong to you in Cheliax for many years, and they didn't belong to him; he was perhaps doing wildly foolish novel legal reasoning but he wasn't just continuing a practice that had been going on without negative comment from any authority for decades. And - I'm not actually sure I'd say that killing a baby isn't as bad, for the victim, though that will depend on the afterlife destination of the slip; but there is a sense in which it's more sympathetic, many of those babies were conceived by rape and the conscience may genuinely cry out for the better world in which no such responsibility has been forced onto oneself, whereas there is not a better world in which a bunch of slips are dead that his conscience might reasonably have been telling him about. Also, babies and slips have very different abilities to keep up with the news, which isn't a huge factor but does come to mind."

Now she's thinking about the little girl Raimon told her about when they were burning down the school. She killed her unborn baby, and it didn't really even register at the time in between everything else that was awful about what happened to her, and — it's hard to say that she's a murderer, or that Raimon's mom is a murderer. But it's also hard to say her baby deserved to die — maybe she can just say it was really the Asmodean priest's fault? That feels reasonable, she thinks, and it's not like the priest didn't deserve to die a hundred times over for everything she'd done.

Victòria wouldn't have — well, she's not sure, her conscience was only just starting to speak — she wouldn't now.

"I think the parts about conscience are more important to me than the parts about whether people technically knew exactly what the law was. But those aren't going to apply to anyone, there's plenty of people who kill their babies just because they're inconvenient. 

I think maybe a way that — like you were saying earlier, a way that my conscience notices different things, because my life's been different — is that a lot of people in my mom's situation would've just killed me. She wasn't forced or anything, but it would've made her life a lot easier, lots of people thought it was stupid she didn't, sometimes she said she wished she had. And I know that doesn't matter for the laws but — I think sometimes people... think about how the people who murdered their babies are people, but not about how the babies are also people? If that makes sense? 

...also I don't really get why it matters that slips can learn the news easier than babies, it's not like the slips or the babies are the ones deciding to kill people. Or, I mean, I assume sometimes slips kill people, but not this case specifically."

"Oh, the news matters - not very much, but at all - because the future children of a reformed infanticide will not be afraid of her and the halfling neighbors of a reformed slip-killer would be."

Nod. "Sort of related to that—"

How is she supposed to explain the next part without sounding incredibly pathetic and without talking about how some people deserve to suffer. Probably the not sounding pathetic part is a lost cause and she should focus on picking the right words?

"When something really awful happens to someone, but not so awful that it kills them, I think it can add on extra hurt to force them to act like actually they actually weren't hurt at all. I know that sounds kind of pathetic, but — I don't think that means it's not common, or even that it means it doesn't really count as hurting. I think it's easy for people who've never had something like that happen to them to imagine it as a smaller way of hurting people than it really is. If it helps, you could try thinking of it as something like — their conscience is crying out that in an ideal world this should never have happened to them, and the world is telling them to crush that voice.

I think there's a few different ways that letting people who've done really awful crimes off easy can turn into that sort of thing, or something like it. If you assign a little-kid punishment, it's easy to come across like you're saying that what happened wasn't actually that bad, or it didn't actually matter, or the victim should just — stop being pathetic. And you can maybe try telling people 'no, this was actually very bad,' but — that doesn't mean it'll work." Also Victòria is pretty skeptical that Delegate Jornet would bother, she won't even say that what Delegate Artigas did was terrible. "And maybe you get a village where most people don't care about what you think, so it doesn't end up mattering, or maybe you get a village where everyone's the sort of person who thinks you should listen to Iomedae just because she's Iomedae, and they decide that actually the victim's doing something wrong if they're still upset about it.

And I think there's lots of other ways it can hurt people that are kind of related — the one that what you said reminded me of is, if the victim has to see whoever it was that did the awful thing every day, and everyone expects them to just treat them the same as everyone else, and they can never really feel safe, they've always got to be on guard that it'll happen again."

"It's much less common outside of Cheliax to track whether things are pathetic, let alone in nearly the quantity Chelish people often do. I agree that it's a wrong to people to call for them to dismiss wrongs they've already suffered.

"It's - are we already mutually clear that beating a child with a horsewhip is not appropriate, especially not on a routine basis -"

Blink blink. "Like — do you mean always? Or just, not for things like getting bad grades in school? I know it's wrong to whip people because of getting bad grades in school but I was thinking of that as" this would be so much easier to explain with the word 'deserve' "it not being the sort of situation where punishing someone will help, especially if there's always someone whipped even if everyone gets a good score."

"If a child has managed to commit an adult grade of crime for - adult reasons, I don't mean accidental manslaughter with a new sorcerer spell or something - then they can receive adult consequences, but frequently children manage not to be adequately warned about things even if they have been told them many times very clearly, because they're children. Their Wisdom isn't done growing in yet."

"I agree it doesn't make sense to punish a little kid for having a sorcery accident, if it's really an accident. It sounds like we agree on when kids should be whipped but I don't know how to tell for sure if we actually do."

"I'm not sure how little you mean by 'little kid'. For reference I don't believe I - or my sisters who are not paladins - were whipped growing up, though my brothers were - well, switched, not whipped, but I think it's the same general grade of injury."

"Well, like, if someone's fifteen, they're technically a child, but it'd be stupid to treat them like they were six, or even like they were twelve."

"That's... true... but doesn't clarify if you think a twelve year old is a little kid."

"I don't have, like, a specific number. Probably I'd usually call them a kid but not a little kid? ...I'm not saying a twelve-year-old should be executed for a magic accident, if that's what you're asking."

"...I think we're getting sidetracked. I think it is often possible and perhaps even ideal to bring up girls and maybe also boys but I'm less sure with very little violence - nothing that would ever cause bleeding, or still sting half an hour later, and judicious less-than-weekly applications of whatever that leaves. Chelish people are accustomed to a much higher level of violence than that. Right?"

"Right."

"And it would be better if Chelish people were accustomed to a lower level of violence, yes?"

"...Maybe? I think it depends, like, it's better not to have people getting ripped for bad grades, and it'd be better if fewer people attacked each other for no reason, and better if the riots hadn't happened, but it wouldn't be better if people stopped trying to fight back against people attacking them."

It would also not be better if people never rose up against their Evil Asmodean nobles but she's pretty confident Delegate Jornet is Lawful.

"Right, but, relevantly to the topic of whether a punishment is taking the offense seriously, an Asmodean background calibrates people dreadfully on that subject."

Victòria turns that around in her head for a couple moments. It sounds like Delegate Jornet is saying something along the lines of... the amount the Asmodeans were hurting everyone all the time makes it so that sometimes, even if you hurt someone as much as they deserve​, it still doesn't feel like enough? Which could be true, except the way the paladins talk about the punishments it feels like a lot of them are just obviously less than they deserve, so obviously that even the paladins can see it. ...But probably if there are crimes where people deserve to be whipped but don't deserve worse, it would feel like those people aren't getting what they deserved? 

"I think — so I can be sure we're not talking past each other — it would be helpful if you could say what you think the punishment should usually be in normal countries for some different crimes, and then the punishment you'd usually give out when you're being the courts in Cheliax. Assuming the circumstances are basically normal, like, the person who did it wasn't a six year old and didn't have a really good reason, but it's also not like you just punished them for the same thing the last time you can't through their village. Like... murdering innocent people who aren't babies, rape, big theft, small theft, being a priest of Asmodeus and trying to get everyone else to also worship Asmodeus..."

"- so, assizes are absolutely terrible for having a range of punishments available. We're only in each village for a few days. Taking the reports, determining what happened, and issuing the sentence all has to happen in that time frame, and paladins can't - for instance - sentence someone to labor if we don't have excellent grounds to trust whoever they will be laboring under, and there's a similar problem with fines and debt collectors, and - it's a dreadful set of conditions under which to work, I was cutting off people's fingers when I would far rather have given them eight months hard labor because I can do the first thing fast and had no systems I could trust to handle the second thing."

It really seems like they could have a bigger range of punishments if they stopped randomly deciding that all kinds of normal punishments are secretly torture and shouldn't be allowed!! ...Probably there's a way to say that that paladins are okay with but it's a bit of a side point, maybe she can bring it up later if she doesn't forget. It's kind of annoying to have to put all her regular words into words that don't upset paladins but it sure does seem to be helping.

"I think... if there's a punishment that most countries would handle by whipping or something, that the Asmodeans would have handled much more harshly, that's one thing. But sometimes when you talk about what sort of punishments you give you make it sound like you're giving out a much smaller punishment than what someone would get somewhere else, and I think — so, obviously it would be better if people didn't think of getting whipped as a little-kid punishment, because we weren't just giving it to little kids for doing badly in school. But if someone sees you give a mild punishment for an awful crime against them, when someone in another country would be punished much more heavily, then even if they don't know anything but what their own village used to do I don't think they're wrong to notice that you aren't really treating it like something awful."

(That last sentence feels like she's grasping for something she hasn't totally managed to reach, but she thinks there's something there.)