Here's Victòria! She's had a very long day, but but at least now she's had the chance to eat some food, so maybe the things the paladin is saying will make more sense? She waves.

"Good evening. So - I've noticed," easily dozens of people have noticed, and some of them are comparing notes with Angela, "that you seem to be finding yourself frequently - surprised - by other people's notions of the Good, and the purpose of lawmaking, and possibly other things too, and I thought it might be useful to frontload more of a conversation about that so you can" waste less time "more quickly see where people are coming from and what they're getting at in convention discussions."

Nod. "That makes sense to me — I know there's a lot I don't know, it'd be good if I could... know the things going in, instead of having to figure them out in the middle of another conversation."

"One way I sometimes think about conscience is that - the conscience is a means of comparing reality to an ideal world. Different people live different lives in reality and still would in the ideal world, so different things stick out to everyone - someone who is hungry will notice more keenly that in an ideal world they wouldn't be hungry, but if that drives them to steal, whoever they're stealing from will notice that in an ideal world they wouldn't be stolen from and that will be much more obvious to them than the fact that ideally also the thief wouldn't go hungry. Does that make sense?"

Nod. "I knew that not everyone's conscience cares about all the same things the same amount, that part isn't confusing. ...Sometimes the specific things people care about are confusing, even if their lives are very different."

"Like what?"

"Like what Delegate Saiville was saying about self-defense yesterday, except Laia thought maybe I didn't understand him right — I wrote him a letter but he hasn't replied yet. Or how Delegate Noguera i Mata thinks no one should ever treat anyone differently for anything they've done, even if all you're doing is being mad at them because they just tried to get your best friend killed and you aren't even doing anything to them. Except for watching kids, for some reason. Or... Abadarans... except I'm not sure if that has anything to do with conscience at all or if they're just pretending because it sounds better than saying they care more about money than doing the right thing. Or — Delegate Ardiaca told me today that Lastwall's punishment rules are about trying to cause the least amount of suffering possible — but he might've been wrong about that, it doesn't seem like they're even doing a good job of that if that's what they want, and he didn't have time before the vote to finish explaining why he thought they were good at the thing they were trying to do. Or how it seems like you don't care that Delegate Artigas tortured innocent people to death—"

"...I don't know all of these people or all the things they may have said, and I don't want to try to interpret 'what you remember them as having said' when you're yourself allowing that you're confused about it. What do you think it should look like to care that Select Artigas tortured people to death?"

"...well, you were there for Delegate Saiville. But — I know not everyone acts the same way about things they care about, but — I'd expect anyone who really cared about it to be mad at him, and to feel upset that everyone is just — treating him like a normal decent person who didn't torture a bunch of innocent people to death — and not to act like I was being unreasonable when I said it made me trust Iomedae less that she picked him as a priest. I'm — I don't think it only counts as caring if you spend a bunch of time thinking about how you'd like to avenge what he did, or anything like that — just to be clear, I'm not planning to take vengeance against him. Because he stopped."

Even if it's still awful and upsetting to think about him just getting away with everything forever. But it makes sense to focus on people like Delegate Ventura first — that's not really the point.

Chaotic people can just randomly lie about things but Angela supposes it's better than saying she does plan to take vengeance against him. "That's a lot of very specific expectations. I suppose it's reasonable that it makes you trust Iomedae less, but - only because you previously expected Her to be something that She isn't, and to instead be something which is actually antithetical to a very important and central tenet of Goodness shared by most major Good deities and their churches. I only say 'most' because I have not actually heard Erastilians on the topic of repentance."

If she were planning to take vengeance on him she just wouldn't have said anything about it in the first place, she's not stupid. "I don't think... being Good... means you have to pick priests who tortured innocent people to death? ...And it's not like she was just... picking everyone within a step of her, or something, she picked two priests in the whole country and one of them was him."

"...it doesn't mean you have to. But it also doesn't mean you mustn't. Select Artigas's own guess for why he was selected in such a thin year - it's not just Cheliax that got so few new Iomedaean empowerments, there's also no new ones in Lastwall - is that She was able to get all three of his circles without spending more than She'd spend on a new first-circle, and also specifically because his selection sends a message about repentance. It does nobody but Hell any service to have Chelish people, an overwhelming number of whom have done dreadful things, laboring under the belief that they cannot recover from their sins and reach Paradise."

"—so, I think there's a few different things I want to say about that.

Uh, first, I don't really know how the gods spending money thing works, I didn't know that was a thing at all until last Moonday. I guess maybe there are some ways it might work where it would make sense to pick him rather than someone like Enric — uh, Alicia already explained that to me when she was telling me about Shelyn, how sometimes it's worth it to just... never see justice done... if there's someone who can help a lot of people.

The second one is — I don't think most people in Cheliax has done dreadful things? Or, I mean, it might depend on what you count as 'dreadful,' most people have whipped people in school or prayed to Asmodeus or things like that. But — so, I think sometimes I talk about how people who do terrible things should face justice for it, and people act like I said I think everyone who's whipped someone in school should be executed. And I don't think that. I think people who murder innocent people and rapists and people who torture innocent people to death in the name of Asmodeus should be executed, but not everyone who's ever done something Evil. And I don't think most people are murderers or rapists or Asmodean priests or anything like that.

And the Diabolism Committee checked, before we got disbanded, there's a Pharasmin spell that can tell you someone's alignment even if they're not very powerful, so we checked Korva, the sortition on the committee, and she was True Neutral. ...Admittedly Delegate Artigas is Neutral too, so maybe that means less than we thought, but still.

The, uh, I forget how many things that was, but the next one is that — well, people use 'repent' to mean a bunch of different things — but if he really felt bad about what he'd done he'd have turned himself in for all the awful things he did, like the murderer Laia talked about during the floor debate today.

And if she chose him to send a message, it's a pretty confusing message, like when I found out I thought maybe Iomedae just didn't care very much about torturing innocent people to death in the name of Asmodeus. And I don't see how anyone's supposed to know that that's not what she meant, if it isn't — before I met Valia I thought Iomedae wanted everyone to follow the law all the time even if the law was made by the Asmodeans — if I was still back home and I heard about him, I'd assume it was either something like that, or that I was just hearing made up stories, like how people said one of the archmages was a faerie. If she just wanted to say 'you won't necessarily go to Hell even if you've done some bad things' she could've picked someone who did bad things like whipping people in school."

"I am making some assumptions about you, and in particular the things you mean when you use phrases like 'see justice done', because you are a Calistrian cleric. Does that seem like something we should discuss explicitly, or that you might like to disclaim, before I respond to that on the basis of those assumptions."

"...well, I don't know what you're assuming. If you think you might be assuming something wrong probably you should tell me what you're assuming. The example she gave was — if Delegate Ibarra decided to stop being Evil and spend all his time using his wizardry to help people, it might be right to let him live, even though he burned down houses full of innocent children, because he could help so many people with his magic. ..........I am assuming that Iomedaeans think you should execute people for burning down houses full of children who haven't done anything wrong but I guess I don't know for sure."

"I think I'd put it as 'a well ordered justice system would have the death penalty for arson'. I'm not sure if that's just a - phrasing difference - or if you mean something very different."

"...the part where he murdered a bunch of little kids is more important to me than what he did to the house. Like, arson is" sometimes "bad, but not as bad as murdering innocent people. And I don't know what makes a justice system 'well ordered.' ...Do Iomedaeans" other than Valia and Feliu "think arson is worse than torturing innocent people to death for the glory of Asmodeus??"

"Iomedaeans are about tradeoffs. And I can't tell you how to trade those things off without more specificity about the nature of the events I'm to compare. I've dealt the death penalty for murder too.

- I notice that it is very hard to stick to a single specific topic in conversation with you as there are so many pressing tangents appearing at such a clip. I'm not actually trying to catechize you in Iomedaeanism. I'm trying to - inculcate a much more general ability to figure out where people are coming from when they talk about their ethics and their principles and the pressures they're operating under and so on."

She is actually still pretty upset about that! If Delegate Jornet thinks what she and Raimon did was worse than what Chosen Artigas — well, she did say it depends, there's probably some sort of arson that would be worse. Like, if an Asmodean priest set fire to the temple of Shelyn because he hated that they weren't Asmodeans, and the fire spread and killed a bunch more innocent people too, that would probably be worse?

She is still really unhappy at the thought that Delegate Jornet might think she deserves to die for it. Which shouldn't even be surprising, right, she's Lawful — except she doesn't want Chosen Artigas to die—

She is not going to say any of that, obviously.

"...Normally I figure that out by asking questions. Except you were worried that was taking too much time at the convention. Is there... some other way... to figure it out, that doesn't involve asking them?"

"I think you may tend to - embed a lot of baggage into your questions, and wonder if another format for them would help at all, like if you said, 'it sounds like you're saying arson is always worse than murder, is that an implication of your stance here', then that's a yes or no question, and would take up very little time."

"—well, I specifically brought up torturing people to death in the name of Asmodeus because — so, it sounds like you're saying that arsonists should always be put to death, but that Delegate Artigas, and other Asmodean priests that weren't at the Worldwound, shouldn't be, including right after the archmages kicked Asmodeus out of the country when none of the Asmodean priests had stopped being Evil yet. Is that your stance here?"

"No. Law enforcement is extremely complicated and almost none of my beliefs have 'always' anywhere in them. I'm in favor of the Queen's amnesty, though."

"I'm against the amnesty but I also think that even if she was going to do the amnesty she should've dealt with all the Asmodean priests running around first. ...In any case, I can try to ask... weird lawyer sounding questions... and see if it helps, I guess."

"I don't think sounding like a lawyer is necessarily operative if there's a rephrasing that would feel more natural to you."

"...if I'm not saying it in a lawyery way I don't really get how it's different from just a normal question."

"Can you think of a yes-or-no question you could ask which doesn't sound lawyery. ...or confrontational."

"...It depends on what I'm asking about? I've lost track of all the things we were talking about.

......and it kind of sounds to me like you think I know more things than I do? I don't know how to explain it properly, but — I think there's a lot of things where just asking one yes-or-no question will take less time than asking one normal question, but it won't actually make me less confused. Which is fine if it's something that's not really important, but bad if it's something that is important, and I don't always know how to tell whether or not something is important. ...I can give examples if it would be helpful. Do you, uh, want me to do that?" There, that's a yes-or-no question.

Approving nod. "- maybe start with one example."

"So, before I got to the Convention, I had never heard of the idea of it being bad for people who've done really bad things to go to Hell. And then on the second day of Rights we were talking about whether people should have a right to the Final Blade, and I was really confused about why the other people on the committee wanted it, and if I'd just said 'it sounds like you're saying we should Final Blade people even if they've done things that are really awful, is that right' it definitely wouldn't have helped at all, and even if I'd gotten far enough to realize that they wanted it as a right to keep people out of Hell I don't really think it would've made me less confused to say 'it sounds like you're saying it's bad for people to go to Hell even if they're really terrible, is that what you're saying?' so instead I'd've just kept being confused and upset. —I'm not confused anymore, they and Alicia and the azata explained it to me."

"What exactly would have been the problem if you'd said 'it sounds like you're saying it's bad for people to go to Hell even if they're really terrible' and gotten a 'yes', I'm not sure I see what the issue with that is."

"...I'd have assumed their reasons were stupid or Evil or both? And so I wouldn't have figured out that actually there are good reasons not to want really bad people to go to Hell, and I'd have had worse ideas in committee and worse votes on the floor, and when Feliu had explained why we can't just stop having nobles even if some of them really suck it wouldn't have made sense at all."

"Okay, so... the thing I most want to work on here is the thing where you would assume their reasons were stupid, Evil, or both, unless they chose to spend their time on the spot accounting for themselves and their motives to you. Sometimes people are stupid, Evil, or both. But - you keep being surprised, and so I think you should have fewer expectations to surprise."

"...it sounds to me like you're saying that if someone says something that sounds obviously Evil I should assume that they secretly have a good reason that I don't know about. Do you... normally... assume that people saying things that sound obviously Evil secretly have a good reason?"

"I assume they might. They often do. It's... actually exactly how most of what I've heard of Calistrian theology sounds to me, obviously Evil but with secret good reasons that may or may not make up for the obvious Evil but sometimes can."

Victòria looks really unimpressed with this claim. "...well, I don't think it's Evil to be a Calistrian, obviously. But I also don't see how I'm supposed to find out about people's secret good reasons without asking what their reasons are, even if they do have them?

And there's also — I'm not sure how to explain this well — if I just say 'I was raised Asmodean' is that a good enough explanation or should I try again?"

"Some Calistrians aren't Evil. I served with a Chaotic Good one briefly at the Worldwound. You won't usually be able to find out about people's secret good reasons without asking but you understanding everything is usually only worth a limited amount of people's time, and in particular a limited amount of committee time, let alone floor time, and often the right reaction to being confused is to note the confusion, act conservatively for the short term - if I were as confused as you often seem I would abstain from a lot of votes and belong to fewer committees - and follow up on it later, or bear it in mind to see if other information comes to light that makes it make sense. This is also what I would do if I found myself for some reason in possession of a convention seat while unable to speak fluent Chelish, or unable to stay awake for the entire session, or suffering from a curse that left me with frequent memory lapses. - well, in that event I might better give the seat to another Iomedaean, but presuming this to be impossible.

"I'm aware that you were raised Asmodean but I'm not sure what thing you are trying to explain by referring to it."

".....it sounds to me like you're saying that anyone who didn't somehow magically learn every single thing the Asmodeans were lying about should just act like their contributions are totally worthless. Which, I mean, maybe you think all the laws should be made by a bunch of foreign priests of Iomedae with no idea what it's actually like to live here, who act shocked every time people mention bad things that anyone who grew up here already knows about — is that, uh, what you're saying—"

"...no. I don't actually think the convention's a particularly good idea but if it's going to happen at all it will need to have born-and-raised Chelish people in it. But there are hundreds of people in the convention and if even half of the delegates spent just ten minutes of one randomly selected committee's time per day, each, on their catechism and their personal misunderstandings and their recriminations and so on, then every committee would run over time and have no other content in it at all. Working in groups requires scaling back one's own demands for time and attention accordingly. If you are ill-suited to work in groups you should work in fewer of them."

"I'm fine with asking fewer questions, or different questions, or writing down my questions to ask later, so that I take up less time in committee with questions. But that's not what you said, you said I should act like — someone who was cursed not to be able to remember things—"

It's not like all she's been doing is asking questions, anyway, she's been doing important work. Maybe it's not the sort of work Delegate Jornet cares about, maybe Delegate Jornet would be find if — the Rights committee had never voted that people have a right not to be raped, or no one on Family was willing to point out that some men beat their wives unconscious, or the publishing law had accidentally banned petitioning the Queen, or any of the other things she's trying to get through never happen — but Victòria cares about it.

"I did not say that." Ironically. "I said that if I had a problem which led to me being confused as frequently as you are, and I gave several examples of which that was one, then I would avoid committee memberships and abstain from votes if I could not give over my seat altogether. That may not be a good way for you to approach the situation, I don't know if you could give up your seat even if you wanted to and it might be that the committees you've happened to join would be without an essential vote or voice if you were to leave suddenly; but I think spending much of most committee meetings in which you are a participant talking about... your opinions on Delegate Ibarra, for example... is a poor way to spend people's time."

"...I don't mostly talk about Delegate Ibarra on committee? I think I've brought him up a couple times as... an example that had to do with the thing that the committee was already talking about? And obviously the Diabolism Committee talked about him when we found out he was secretly Evil and hiding it with magic."

"I said 'for example'. It was also not a good use of committee time to - again, for example - swear to wear shoes in the winter, and separately I think it would have been alarming if anyone expected you to treat oaths seriously, though I credit that you noticed that particular digression yourself at the time."

...Okay, that one is actually fair, she could have just not said that during committee. "I can try to say fewer things like that, that's not an issue."

"I'm gratified to hear it.

"But since right now it's just the two of us and I've blocked out this time I do want to try to actually resolve some of your confusions; which do you think are - most pervasive or most urgent or otherwise top-of-mind?"

"...What does it mean that Iomedae is the goddess of tradeoffs? I'd never heard that before, uh, a couple minutes ago."

"That - actually ties back into the thing you thought was about gods spending money. They don't; but 'spend' is a general term, you can also spend time or other resources. No god has unlimited resources. I'm not sure how most of them decide what to use theirs on. Iomedae buys the most Good She can. Sort of like if you went to the market with a few coppers and wanted the most potatoes you could possibly buy, you could wind up with a bagful of potatoes that were especially cheap for some reason - maybe they're bruised, or each very small and more peel than potato, or they're half sprouted, or they're a kind of potato nobody likes, or the seller's going out of business because he's so unpleasant to deal with that no one else will shop at his stall and he needs to sell everything today. As long as they're still potatoes - as long as the Good is still Good - then getting it cheap is best, and Iomedae is interested in that kind of tradeoff. Usually whatever Good is cheapest is going to be cheap for a reason, and when we're talking moral philosophy and not potatoes those reasons can be hard to navigate well."

That... doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense? Like, there's lots of different kinds of Good, it doesn't seem like there's any way to find the absolute cheapest kind, or to say that one way of doing Good is necessarily always better than each other — or, maybe you could occasionally, like how she's focusing on avenging wrongs by people who are still doing Evil, but not most of the time. But that's — different, anyways — and really it seems like the most important thing is that you're doing something Good, not that you've picked out Iomedae's favorite type of Good. 

"Can you, uh, give me an example? Like, a real example, not a potatoes example."

"Do you want me to think of a situation I have faced in real life, or just a situation that could occur and features lives instead of potatoes?"

"It doesn't have to be from your life specifically, just... there's lots of different Good things? And I don't really see how you could decide which one is cheapest, if they're really different sorts of things."

"Iomedaeans are actually also unusually willing to - insist on and use numbers for - comparing the same type of Good. If there's two options for... stopping a monster that is eating people... and one would be slightly likelier to work, but also a little slower, so some people will certainly be eaten while you're setting it up, it matters how much slower and how much likelier. But also, hm...

"Peace is Good, because war is a terrible Evil. The best possible war conducted in the best possible way by the best possible people is still awful. Lastwall has a perpetual war on the front with Belkzen, because it's full of barbarian orc tribes that have no means of support that doesn't bottom out in raiding. Iomedae could have in her day conquered Belkzen, and then they wouldn't have that problem. They'd have a larger wealthier Lastwall and peace where now they have endless self-defense.

"It just would have required... killing a lot of innocent people... because a lot of orcs, possibly most orcs at any given time, are children."

"So she didn't do it."

"...well, obviously you shouldn't kill innocent people. I was thinking something more like... uh, let me think... let's say I was trying to decide what to do after the convention tomorrow, and I could pick between... teaching a self-defense lesson, or walking around to different places casting Create Water, or, uh, fighting monsters, if there were monsters running around in Westcrown for some reason. I think... all of those things are Good? And it doesn't make sense to me to say someone should definitely pick one over the other two."

"Well, if there are a hundred other priests filling all the cisterns, then it doesn't add very much for you to create more water, and if they're all busy fighting monsters but you happen to be bad at fighting monsters by comparison, being the only one creating water for everyone would be very important. It depends on the situation, it depends on what you're spending to get it, it depends on what other people are doing, it depends on whether there are monsters in Westcrown."

"...I guess there could be a situation where it's really obvious that one is better than the other? But I don't think it's usually obvious, I think usually you just have... a bunch of different Good things you can do. And some people are going to care more about one and some people are going to care more about another, but if someone really wants to make sure all the inns have clean water I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to care about that."

"It's Good to make sure all the inns have clean water. It is just not necessarily the most efficient you could be."

"That makes sense to me if you're comparing putting the clean water at an inn to putting the clean water somewhere else but not for comparing making clean water to doing some other totally different Good thing."

"Well, you could compare putting clean water at inns all afternoon to... coordinating a schedule with a lot of other clerics, so you make sure everywhere with a cistern has clean water for weeks without anyone making the walk to an out-of-the-way place unnecessarily or missing a place. You could compare it to going adventuring in the hopes that one day you'll be a high enough circle to make a decanter of endless water, freeing up all the clerics in a whole city for other tasks like copying books and spiritual counseling, indefinitely."

"...I guess? That still sounds like a weird way to think about being Good but I guess if you want to think about it that way I'm not going to stop you."

"All right. What else is there that you'd like to know?"

"How does Lastwall decide which things count as torture?"

"I'm not from Lastwall and in fact have not actually been there, but I think they mostly think about how various treatment of a person affects them, and what kinds of motives lead people to want to do it to others - not just wanting to hurt them, necessarily, neglect and carelessness can also cause a lot of pain - and maybe they've confirmed some cases with Communes, though I'd expect most of the questions that urgent to have been figured out hundreds of years ago."

"So — this isn't exactly a question, but — during the floor debate today some people were saying torture was always Evil, no matter what? And — so, I guess there's a few things here, actually. One is that if I look at the things that I know Lastwall thinks are torture and the things I know it allows there's not really an obvious pattern, I don't know how anyone would figure out whether Lastwall counts any given thing counts as torture if they didn't already know. Another is that a lot of the things on the list... don't really seem like things that are wrong to do to anyone no matter what? Like, I do think there are some things that are always wrong, but I don't really see why Lastwall people would think of... a lot of those things... that way? Some of them have happened to me and I didn't think of them as... particularly bad compared to other things that Lastwall doesn't count as always torture? And—

—when we were talking about rights for people who'd been arrested, and Delegate Requena i Cortes said maybe we couldn't have a right for prisoners to be fed because it would cost too much, no one said 'no, not feeding prisoners is torture and torture is always wrong'? Even though it's one of the things that Lastwall counts as torture. And it feels like... on the one hand you're all out here saying that there's a bunch of things that no one can ever do no matter what and getting annoyed at people for disagreeing — I guess maybe not you specifically — and then on the other hand you're not really acting like you think it's always wrong? I don't know if I explained that well."

That sure isn't exactly a question. "Which day was it that he said that?" Angela asks, flipping through her bundle of transcripts. "If you make prisoners pay for food that amounts to a fine, which isn't torture but is undesirable for complicated structural reasons we needn't get into right now; if you just generally don't make sure that food makes it to your prisoners, then you're de facto sentencing them to death by starvation, if you keep them long enough, which is a terribly torturous death, so you need some standard of how often they must be fed and when you can dip below that standard for what reasons - well, you need this if you're a Lawful government, anyway..."

"Yesterday, the tenth. Feeding prisoners makes sense to me, I was the one who suggested it in the first place, except for people who had specifically been sentenced to a punishment that involved not eating — I was just thinking of that as a normal punishment, it never would've occurred to me that it might be torture. ...and I don't see what it has to do with being Lawful? Not starving all your prisoners to death seems like it's about being Good, or at least not being Evil, but I don't think the Asmodeans cared about it and they were plenty Lawful."

Flip flip flip. "Pardon me, I was imprecise. A Lawful government aimed at the welfare of prisoners. Someone else keeping prisoners might ad-hoc it and might do well or poorly at that; an organization needs a policy if it is going to achieve a goal, but with the Asmodeans, the welfare of prisoners was not one of the goals. It looks like he said... 'food is a cost'. He said this was a 'difficulty of implementation'. I took that at the time to mean that we might not be able to have prisons at scale, use imprisonment as a punishment routinely, because it would be too expensive. It's not common in most places for just that reason. 'The more we must track, the greater the cost to the Crown'. That's technically about the possible costs of making sure the right is correctly implemented rather than the costs of the food itself but it comes down to the same thing, enshrining and enforcing the right would make prison expensive perhaps to the point that it would see less use. It's possible I misunderstood him, but it's also possible you did."

"I don't think he wants to almost never use prisons, he included prison sentences as part of the publishing law. ...I don't think you're going to have a transcript for that committee meeting, it happened before the archmage put his scribes everywhere."

"Alas." She smooths the pages back onto her lap. "It's not impossible for something to be - bad enough, enough of the time, to enough people, and for little enough benefit to anyone, that it should be banned; and also to not have affected you in particular very deeply at the time it happened to you. People can choose to accept, or happen to weather well, events that would be devastating to another. And the opposite also."

"Sure, but — I guess, first of all, I don't think I'm that unusual? And second of all that still doesn't... tell me anything about how Lastwall's deciding what they think counts as torture, or why they think those things are never okay."

"Do you want to pick an example variety of torture to talk about more specifically?"

"...The one I was thinking of as — it's happened to me but it's not anywhere near the worst thing that's happened to me — was not letting someone eat? Which, I mean, it sucks a lot, I'm not saying it doesn't, but any punishment that actually does anything is going to suck. ...Or, like, I see why it might be torture if you didn't let someone eat for so long they starved to death, but they didn't do it for that long back home. It doesn't really make sense to me to talk about it as... the same sort of thing as flaying someone alive? Which is the worst thing I've ever seen happen to someone else."

"So, in most places they don't use imprisonment as a punishment at all; they use it as a stopgap while someone is waiting for their trial, or their execution, or their spiritual counselor. Within those limited periods of time I think it's still ideal for the imprisoning authority to cover food but - better to dispense with that so you can afford to have a trial, can afford to let them have time to talk with a priest, rather than be in a rush. I wouldn't accuse a place which was genuinely making budgetary tradeoffs between important things, and chose not to cover prisoner food for short stays which were all they ever had in the first place, of 'torture'. But I'd want them to be very much aware of those tradeoffs, and doing what was in their power to make the waits shorter, and being alert to any cases where they held someone longer than usual and had to feed them so they could get through their trial or their counseling usefully. If the people in power in this hypothetical place seemed to instead be - glad that this policy freed up money for other things that are less important, like... new guard uniforms, or things that are actively a problem, like bribes, then I might push much harder on trying to get them to feed their prisoners instead. Resource constraints are a constant, but when they're at their most dangerous is when they interfere with people's consciences, that view into the ideal world where the prisoner would not be hungry.

"Using hunger as a punishment, so potentially over longer periods of time but not necessarily, has a very smooth gradient of how bad it is for the prisoner. On the one end you have sending a child to bed without supper for making an ungrateful face at the fish sauce but giving them their breakfast in the morning, and on the other you've got starving people to death. Are we in agreement that at one of these ends is torture and at the other is not?"

"I wasn't actually sure whether Iomedaeans would say that the first thing isn't torture but I agree that it's not, and that the second thing probably is. ...Is the reason for saying it's alright if the prisoner isn't there for very long that you think it's not torture if it's only for a couple days, or that you do think it's torture but you don't actually believe it's never okay to torture someone?"

"'Torture' is a - bit of a strange word. In most contexts it seems perfectly clear to me but in this one I find myself tempted to pretend there is no word for it at all, so that I can be sure we're talking about a thing and not a word. There are many situations where it is permissible to do things that happen to inflict pain or discomfort. Happen to is an important word there. It happens to inflict pain if I stab a demon with my sword, but that is not the point. The point is that then the demon can't use that arm, or is a little closer to never being a threat to anyone again, or is distracted for a moment while someone else comes in with an axe. If I were in a position to cause a demon pain that had no other point at all, if there were not a tactical objective I were achieving by stabbing it, I must not."

That doesn't really make sense? Either in terms of right and wrong — well, the azata might say — no, she should focus on this conversation right now. Either in terms of right and wrong, or in terms of making sense with what the paladins were saying today and yesterday. Also she doesn't get why anyone would care about not hurting demons, they're demons. 

"I think people nearly always have multiple reasons for doing things? So I'm confused about what the paladins were saying about the punishment rules if it's just, if you want to hurt someone you need to be doing something else too. It... sounded like you guys were saying there were specific punishments that shouldn't ever be allowed... but I guess I might have misunderstood what you meant."

"Punishment is more complicated. Neither hurting someone for no other reason at all, nor fighting a battle, are quite like it. And because it's complicated there is a lot of room for reasonable people sincerely seeking the Good to disagree about what is Good and what is necessary and what is effective. The Conde Cerdanya who proposed that list of punishments is returned from Heaven, if I've heard correctly, and I have no reason to think either that this was a fluke or that returning to life has dreadfully worsened him - I think he's made some factual mistakes and is failing to be corrected in them and that this will lead him to do grievous and unnecessary harm."

Victòria totally thinks it was a fluke, but not because of this. 

"...if the thing you and the other paladins meant to say in committee and on the floor was that figuring out what punishments were Good in any given case is hard and complicated, and that you liked the Lastwall list but don't think it's Evil to want to use other punishments in addition, then that's not a confusing thing for you to think, but it really didn't come across like you guys were saying that."

...Or, actually, maybe some of them were just lying to try to convince people to vote for the laws they wanted? That would explain a lot of what was happening but there's not really a good way to ask about it.

"It's complicated. But it is not impossible to figure out. Iomedae did a lot of research into the question in life and Lastwall has refined the approach since then. If you'll pardon another metaphor, building a cathedral is complicated, someone trying to do it from first principles and maybe having seen a cathedral once will fail at it, and also architects know full well how to do it and it can be done whenever the will and the materials are gathered together. Reasonable people can disagree about punishments, and some of them are right, and this doesn't actually make the ones who are wrong necessarily unreasonable, just - wrong, and since some of them have political power in need of political opposition."

That is still pretty confusing but she doesn't know what to ask to get less confused. Basically every punishment is going to do something besides just hurt someone? Maybe if you hurt someone in a way that didn't leave a mark, and then used magic to make them forget, and never told anyone else, it would only hurt someone, but no one was even suggesting doing that. 

"...Can I see the Rights transcript from yesterday? And if you have a copy of the speeches people gave during the punishments fight that would also be helpful, but I don't know if there were copies of that."

Angela finds them and hands them over. "If you want blank paper to scriven them onto we'll have to go inside for it. The important thing, and this I believe every single Good church agrees on, is that you must hurt people as little as you can while achieving your other aims, and that not all other aims are important enough to justify any amount of hurting anyone."

That seems like a really confusing rule to have and Victòria is trying to figure out any way at all that it makes sense. Maybe it just means you should try to avoid doing anything that hurts innocent people, except then it doesn't really make sense as a rule for considering punishments. Maybe it just means you shouldn't hurt people for dumb reasons, that makes sense with the part about some aims not being important enough, except that also doesn't seem like a rule that makes sense for punishments. Maybe it means that if one of your goals is to hurt them you should try as hard as possible not to hurt them more than they deserve, and that they think it's better to hurt someone less than they deserve than to hurt them more — that sort of makes sense, actually, with the confusing things people have been saying about Hell—

"...I think I'm confused about what you mean by that, a lot of the obvious things it could mean don't really seem relevant. But, uh, what I was going to say was—" she flips through the transcripts "—when I was listing punishments that weren't on the Lastwall list and I thought probably should be, and I brought up branding and he said Lastwall doesn't allow it but it's probably not torture, and then I brought up cutting someone's crime into their skin, and Delegate Saiville said, 'I struggle to imagine a method of... carving a crime into the skin... which would not also be torture. Especially relative to branding which achieves the same result.' 

And — I know it's a mistake to assume that people who aren't Chelish are — feeling the same way a Chelish person would, if the Chelish person was acting like they were? But — it's hard to tell from just the transcripts, obviously, but — I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but — it really didn't seem like he was... treating it like a complicated question that reasonable people might disagree about? Even in — a way where one person is right, and if they explain why the other person can see it too. Rather than as — something where he'd decided it was obviously bad without even thinking about why, where he was going to get upset at anyone who disagreed.

If he'd been... treating it like a complicated question that reasonable people might disagree about... I could've explained that the reason for cutting someone's crime into their skin — or, well, there's lots of reasons, but the not-Asmodean reason — is that if it's — a crime that's not bad enough they deserve to die for it, but that people should still be on the lookout for, it gives everyone else a warning so they can stay safe from them. Like... uhh, let me think... selling someone a spell but lying about what spell it is, or something like that. It doesn't really have anything to do with hurting them, I don't actually know whether it hurts more or less than branding. And you can kind of do that sort of thing with branding, but if it's someone who's allowed to leave the area then everyone in the whole country needs to know what the brands mean, or else it won't work, and you'd need a ton of different brands for all the crimes where you might want to do this. Whereas if you can just carve their crime into their skin, and you're, uh, competent at it, then someone only needs to be able to read to know what they did. —It might not work in Lastwall, if it's true that other countries only teach rich nobles to read.

...I know that probably sounds like a tangent, but — if the thing you guys were trying to say was 'this is a complicated question, we think there's a lot of different considerations that can go either way, here's our best guess at the one that gets us the most metaphorical potatoes,' that's really not what it sounded like, the thing you were saying sounded more like — 'here's a bunch of things that don't really have anything to do with each other that we've decided are always Evil even if we can't explain why, or if our reasons don't make sense, everyone should just trust that we're right and listen to us and if you don't it's because you're Evil.' And I don't think it's just that I'm confused about a lot of things, I think if you asked a bunch of other people at the convention they'd agree with me." It can't be that every Iomedaean is like that, Valia and Feliu weren't like that, but maybe every Iomedaean who's still at the convention is like that.

"I think you and Ser Saiville have an exceptionally hard time communicating and you should probably preferentially talk to any other paladin instead of him where what you're seeking is a generic paladin opinion and not his own personal opinion, and I can't think when you would ever need his own personal opinion." He has already spent Goddess knows how long writing you a multipage letter he probably shouldn't actually send. Please never talk to him again. "You're saying 'deserve' and you also keep specifying 'innocent' people, am I correct in thinking that you believe that guilty people deserve to be harmed, perhaps even that it would be wrong to omit to do so even if there were no other consequences at all?"

"...yes?" Obviously? "...Maybe not if they've completely stopped being Evil, that's one of the things I was talking about with the azata, it thought you should only take vengeance on people who are still being Evil. I... can't really think of a situation where someone is still being Evil and also you could just not hurt them without there being any other consequences..."

"I do not have a transcript of your conversation with the azata so I'm reluctant to speculate on what it meant.

"Hurting people is not Good. It can be a side effect of doing things that are Good, like any time you do yourself some damage pushing harder to heal more people or get a message where it must be. It can be a way to prevent Evil, like defeating Evil enemies in a fight or delivering the gentlest possible justice which still achieves deterrence. The hurting people, in and of itself, by itself, is not and can never be Good. This is the universal consensus of all Good gods and powers. Good mortals have a lot of tradeoffs to make and that's one of them but hurting people per se is not ever Good."

"... Obviously whether it's right to hurt someone depends on why you're doing it?" she says, this being her best guess at a non-insane version of what Delegate Jornet was saying.

"That is true, but it is not the thing I said. Do you understand the thing I said, which is that hurting people is never Good?"

"I think there are a few different things you could mean by that." Many of which are — insane? Evil? Completely inconsistent with the actual Good people she knows?

"I could... give some examples of times when I think it would be right to hurt someone, and times when it wouldn't be, and you could say if you disagree?" And depending on what Delegate Jornet says, it could help her figure out whether she means something stupid and Evil or whether she's just doing a bad job at explaining.

"No, I don't think I want to get into when it is or isn't acceptable to hurt people. I want to get across this single specific thing which I think is very important. It is never Good to hurt people. I can try saying it a few more ways if that one is confusing somehow."

"...so, when I say something is Good, I mean something like — it's the right thing to do? I think people should do it? I would think someone who did it is a better person than someone who didn't? And I don't really see how it makes sense to talk about hurting people as... acceptable but not Good? That's just... two different ways of saying the same thing... or, like, I guess it would make sense to say it's acceptable to, I don't know, eat a cheese pastry, but it's not Good and not Evil, it's just Neutral, but I don't think hurting people is going to be like eating a cheese pastry basically ever."

"If - I know, full well and thoroughly, that this virtually never comes up, but if, somehow, there are two options, and the only difference between them is that in one of them someone is hurt and in the other option they are not hurt, the second option is always better. This might sound like it is not very important because it doesn't happen. It is however important as a matter of mindset and as a matter of thinking about what, if anything, you are getting out of hurting people. If you do not understand and remain aware of the fact that the hurt itself is not a Good and desirable feature of anything you are doing, you will - out of cruelty or carelessness or both - hurt people more than you must. At which point we are beyond 'not Good, like eating a cheese pastry' and into 'not Good, like it's actually Evil instead'."

"...Obviously you shouldn't hurt someone for no reason?"

As far as Victòria is concerned she's never hurt someone for no reason! Sometimes the reason is to give them what they deserve and sometimes the reason is to protect the people they'll hurt next and sometimes the reason is so that any other Evil nobles like Delegate Ventura know they can't just kill innocent people and get away with it and sometimes it's because the world feels a little more correct with someone dead and sometimes it's multiple reasons at once — usually, she thinks, it's not like she's ever hurt people in a way that didn't protect people — well, no, she whipped people in school, but she knows that was wrong.

"My statements continue to apply when the person who is or is not hurt is not innocent."

"I didn't say — if someone... randomly went and hurt an Evildoer for no reason I wouldn't call that Good?" If someone went and randomly tortured Delegate Ibarra to death just for fun, not because of anything he did or was going to do, she'd be glad he was dead but she wouldn't call the person who did it Good, they could just as easily have picked someone else.

...Angela takes a deep breath with her eyes closed. Twice.

"Okay. Is the 'randomly' part important to you?"

"...Well, we're talking about hurting people for no reason, right? It seems pretty hard to... not have a reason... if it's not... like, if you know someone is going around murdering innocent people, and you put a stop to them, then it's not for no reason..."

"Okay. I apologize if I'm - going over the wrong things at the wrong intensity. I am having a more difficult time communicating with you than I do with most people and I am trying to compensate for it. How about we try your idea after all, one example at a time."

"Okay. Uh, starting with an example that seems relatively obvious to me... today at lunch I met a woman who told me that — uh, I'm skipping some details, but — she told me that she invited one of the nobleman delegates into her house during the rain last week, and then while he was there he murdered her husband for no good reason. I sent the Queen a petition to tell her about this and ask her to have him executed, the way she would for a regular person who murdered someone for no good reason. 

Executing him will hurt him, obviously. I think executing him is... the right thing to do? And the way I use words, it means the same thing to say 'executing him is the right thing to do' and 'executing him is Good.'"

"Okay. I think that's right, especially because you went through a petition to the Queen instead of doing something yourself."

"...I think petitioning the Queen is more Lawful but I don't think it's more Good." 

"Yes, I mostly prefer it for Law reasons, but I think it's also protective against making a mistake."

Sure, that's reasonable now that the Queen is Good, she can make sure of what happened under Abadar's Truthtelling. She nods.

"And... if we imagine that instead a thief who didn't know about any of that killed him to steal his stuff — I know it'd be hard, since he's a noble, but imagining — I think that'd be wrong, or Evil, or something they shouldn't do — those all mean pretty much the same thing to me. Because even though it's right to kill him, they're not doing it for any of the right reasons, they just wanted to steal from him."

"That sounds right too."

"...And it would also be wrong for the Queen to have him Maledicted, no matter what he'd done, even if it were really good for deterrence, because there's some things you shouldn't do to anyone and Malediction is one of them."

"That's also right."

"And... uhhhhhh... let's say it turned out that actually he'd been Dominated by an Evil wizard, and it wasn't his fault at all, and when the Queen sent people to take him in the wizard came back and dominated him into attacking them in front of everyone, so people thought he was a murderer even though he wasn't. I think in that case it'd be wrong to execute him for it, even though it'd be really bad for deterrence to just let him go, everyone would assume the Queen was just lying. Partly because killing him wouldn't do anything to protect people, the wizard could just Dominate someone else, but mostly because... it matters if he actually did it? ...Uh, usually I'd say that as 'people who murder innocent people deserve to die, innocent people don't' but I get the sense that you don't like that way of saying it."

"I don't like that statement. I don't know for sure yet if it's actually just an objectionable way of saying a thing I otherwise like fine. But I agree in this example too."

"I was pretty sure you wouldn't but I don't really understand why. Would you rather I try saying the same thing in more ways, or keep going with examples?"

"My present guess is examples are more likely to help."

"Okay, uhh... for crimes that are way less bad then murder, people mostly shouldn't be executed unless there's something weird about the circumstances? Like, if someone stole a few silver off me while I was buying dinner, I wouldn't want them executed for it."

"And... what would you want to happen instead."

"... I'm not sure, I didn't specifically think about it until just now. Back home they mostly maimed people for theft but I think back home people mostly only reported theft if it was, like, big theft, there was always a risk that going to the government about something would come back to bite you. And a few silver might be a lot for some people but it's not a lot for me right now, since the stipend's so big... but they might not have known it wouldn't be a big deal..."

"Let us imagine that it was discovered by means of someone trying it that theft could be deterred by... collecting a lock of the perpetrator's hair and keeping it on file for scrying later, let's imagine that this just worked all by itself because the thieves realized they'd be caught if they reoffended. Would you object to this being the only sentence ever issued for theft, if that were a discovery someone made?"

"...yes. ......And that wouldn't even totally work for deterrence even if every thief went along with it, it wouldn't do anything to stop the first time someone steals. But I'd object even apart from that."

"We can suppose that it works as well or better than anything else anyone has tried for the purposes of this example. Why would you object even apart from that?"

Victòria looks so confused. "...it's wrong to just... let people get away with hurting each other for no reason."

"Sometimes people imagine inventing the opposite of Malediction, 'Benediction', sending someone straight to Nirvana. Would you object to this spell?"

"...I think it would depend."

"Suppose it were offered the same way as the Final Blade and sold the way Archmage Naima's reincarnations are."

"...It would still depend."

She swallows. "Lluïsa's Evil. But she's still a decent person, she saved Valia, I really don't want her to go to Hell. And probably there's lots of people like that that I just don't know about, because they're not strong enough to show up as Evil.

But — I'd be pretty upset if Delegate Ibarra, or the nobleman I told you about earlier, or people like them, got to just — go be happy little magpies, flying around telling all their magpie friends how proud they are of all the innocent people they killed. And if I somehow ended up in Nirvana, there's people where — I don't think I could ever be okay, if they were just — running around the same afterlife, getting to be safe and free and happy like they were actually decent people, and everyone wanted me to just pretend like what they did was alright. Like it didn't matter what they'd done to me or anyone else.

And — I'm not saying I want them to burn in Hell for a thousand years. A thousand years is a really long time, even for people like that, and — I mean, I don't want Asmodeus to get more devils. But — I'd be upset if the thing that happened to them instead was that they got to just — go off to Nirvana and be happy and free and never, ever face justice."

And she mostly hasn't been thinking about it, but—

"—I know this is a way that I'm — different from the azata I talked to. But I did ask it, and it said — Elysium's a free plane, there's plenty of people who'd be bothered by that sort of thing — not that specific example, obviously, but similar ones—" It had felt very important at the time, that Elysium hadn't just decided to keep out all the people like her to make space for people like Delegate Ibarra.

"Okay. I think this is - very significant, it's a way that the human conscience behaves when the thing it wants really is justice. You're picking up on a real difference between reality and the ideal world. In the ideal world Nirvana wouldn't have any healing murderers they snached out of Hell's grasp, because they never would have been murderers in the first place. In a slightly less ideal world, they might have meant to be murderers but at least would have been - selfish enough and smart enough to think about the consequences, and held back for that reason. Right?"

"Right — or, well, I'd say more than slightly, but basically right."

"So... what it takes to deter every smart selfish would-be murderer is the sort of thing you can learn about by experimenting with it. Right? You can't necessarily deter the ones who aren't smart and selfish enough, but the ones who are, you can find out what the best way to do that is."

"I guess you could... try? But I don't really know how you could tell for sure unless it was really obvious."

Also it kind of feels like it's missing the point.

"Well, you'd need an entire government coordinating on trying something, and seeing what kind of crime rate they wound up with and what the criminals they caught had to say for themselves."

"...but the criminals could lie. Or even if you put them under a Truthtelling they might not know for sure. Or refuse to say anything because they don't want to help there be fewer murderers. And you could end up with... I'm not sure how to say it... if you try changing the punishments and you end up with less or more crime it might still be because of something else? Unless you normally have the exact same amount each year."

"The exact same, no, but if you let the experiment go on for long enough you'd get an idea of the normal amount."

"I don't really see why that would be better than just, uh, I don't know if there's a word for this, but... thinking about how the world works?"

"You can't build a cathedral that way. If you'll pardon the return to metaphor. There needs to be a step where you check how the world works, not just think about it."

"It seems to me like the thinking is pretty important! If someone told me they checked what happens if you build a cathedral out of sand and it actually works really well I wouldn't believe them, even if they said they did a really good job with the checking."

"I mean, I'd be skeptical, but if they could show me the sand cathedral that would be pretty convincing."

"...I guess maybe if you could be really really sure it wasn't an illusion or something? But I'd probably still assume it was some kind of trick I hadn't thought of, sand doesn't work like that."

"It doesn't work like that by itself, but a stone cathedral needs mortar too, it's not just rocks. There could be some trick to it that would make sense once I saw it. Anyway, with people it can be tempting to think - okay, I'm not a rock or a grain of sand, maybe I need to check how those work, but I'm a person, so I know how people work already. But people are very different from each other."

"Sure, maybe there's some things you need to check."

"So, when I say that I think Conde Cerdanya was making a factual mistake, I think he was - looking at what Lastwall has built, and deciding that the level of mercy that has worked well there is not suitable for here, and I think this is an error of his but a factual one; I think he is probably trying to achieve the Good goal of deterring as many selfish smart would-be criminals as possible while doing no additional harm that doesn't contribute to that. Does that make sense?"

Saying that people are just as scared about dying quickly as about being tortured to death really seems like saying you can build a cathedral out of sand!!!

"...The way people were talking about it during the debate it didn't sound like Lastwall tried executions both ways and compared, did I misunderstand what Lastwall" is claiming that they "did?"

"Lastwall specifically, no, you have to compare to other countries, which is one of the reasons it's so easy for reasonable people to disagree about whether it would work to do the same again elsewhere."

"So it seems kind of like Lastwall is saying — look, people aren't all the same, and sometimes the way they are is surprising, you can't just assume that they work the way you'd expect them to work, you have to check really carefully. And then they're out here saying — look, you can make a cathedral out of sand — and when you say 'okay, show me the cathedral' they... I think maybe the cathedral metaphor doesn't exactly make sense for this point. They're saying you've got to check really carefully and not just assume obvious things like 'criminals are more scared of being flayed alive than of hanging' are true, but they... didn't actually check carefully, even if they're telling the truth about the numbers they don't have a way of knowing whether their amount of murders is because how you execute people doesn't matter for deterrence or because of some other reason."

And it's really frustrating when they act like people are Evil for not just blindly trusting that you can build a cathedral out of sand but she's really said a kind of pathetic amount about that already.

"The thing that they checked was - do they have more crime than other places, using Iomedae's justice system, which sharply limits punishments to require more mercy and gentleness than most places do. And they have much less crime than other places. You could still assume this was for other reasons, of course, but - it means it's worth checking in more places, to have a chance at achieving the Good we're looking for. This is also what the archduke of Menador was saying; he adopted Iomedaean recommendations in Menador and did not find that there were more crimes."

"...but that could also be for other reasons. Like maybe people do less crime if they aren't trying to be Asmodeans, or something."

"Is that about Lastwall or about Menador?"

"Menador. For Lastwall I'd just assume that obviously you get less crime if almost everyone's Lawful Good. ...I guess also I never specifically made sure of whether Lastwall just ensorcels everyone to listen to Iomedae but I'm pretty sure the pamphlet that said that was making things up."

"I am pretty sure that they do not do that. But on the topic of everyone being Lawful Good - the things Iomedae did and Lastwall refined are things that, you can tell because they checked, work to make most people Lawful Good. I suppose I don't know if you think that's a worthy thing to aim for."

"...well, I think it's good to aim for everyone to be Good. I don't think it's good to aim for everyone to be Lawful, if the law says you have to do something Evil you shouldn't follow it. ... Probably if you had a country where everyone is Good, even the government, plenty of people would end up Lawful Good by accident? But if I were setting up a country all by myself for some reason I wouldn't be trying to make everyone Lawful."

"I think it'd be pretty hard for a country to aim for everyone being Chaotic Good, possibly even Neutral Good, just because of how countries work, but I suppose if I really wanted to see how it would be done I'd talk to - elves, perhaps, they're mostly Chaotic Good -

"Anyway. Because hurting people is never good, if you're hoping to help everyone be Good, it's counterproductive to have there be any more hurting people than you absolutely need enshrined in law. And reasonable people can disagree about how much you absolutely need, but the Good goal is to hurt people as little as possible."

"...but the Lastwall punishment rules don't even do that." Even given that they're inexplicably trying not to hurt murderers and rapists and so on!!!

"It's possible some place could manage with even less hurting people. I would love to see it done and would rejoice if it worked. Lastwall is actually ill positioned to make such an experiment now when it's already long-established because that kind of thing can be hard on people's Law, and Lastwall is full of people who care very much about that; but Cheliax must and therefore can perform many experiments, and we are called upon to shape them."

"...it sounds to me like you're saying that Lastwall cares more about making sure people are Lawful than about making sure people are Good, is that right?"

"No. But they do care about Law, and it can be fragile, and they will take different kinds of risks for that reason."

A lot of the parts make sense individually, at least if she just takes it for granted that they really don't like hurting criminals for some reason, but when she tries to line up the reasoning there with the discussion in committee she the arguments on the floor it doesn't really feel like it all fits together quite right. ...Well, maybe it does, actually, if she assumes that Delegate Cansellarion and the people backing him were just saying whatever they thought would get people to vote down the punishments law, instead of thinking about whether it actually made sense. But there's really not a good way to just ask if they were doing that.

"I think maybe — with what you were saying earlier about how different people have had different lives, and so they notice different things more — people from Lastwall, or Molthune, or other countries where it's not common for people to just hurt innocent people because they can, sometimes don't notice all the ways that it can hurt people if you give someone a punishment that's a lot smaller than than what they did."

"Please tell me about that, it's genuinely possible we're missing something."

She hadn't actually been expecting that.

"Oh.

Uh, I don't have a list, so I might forget something. And I might not be able to explain all of them well. And I know a lot more about how things were back home, so some of this might not apply everywhere. And probably lots of these are things you're thinking about and it just hasn't come up yet.

I think — I assume this is one of the things you're thinking about when you're riding around to be the courts, but — when you're talking about reasons why you might hurt people you talk a lot more about deterrence and not so much about protecting all the people who might get hurt later, if you're scared you'll hurt someone who did something really awful too much. Even if there's someone who cares so much about murdering innocent people or forcing themself on people or torturing people in the name of Hell that they wouldn't have been deterred no matter what the punishment was, they still can't hurt people if they're dead. And if you let them live then maybe next time they'll be carefuller not to get caught, or even if they stop breaking the law there's lots of ways to hurt people that aren't illegal yet — and if they've got a guess about who told them, they might target that person specifically, which — I mean, it would suck a lot no matter what, but it seems like that would suck extra much.

And I assume you'd execute them if it was obvious they were going to keep hurting people, but — well, sometimes it seems like paladins are... really hopeful, that they can get people to stop people from doing bad things just by telling them not to. And I think it's a sort of being hopeful that's going to get other people hurt, people who didn't do anything wrong.

—Uh, that's not the only thing, lots of them are less obvious than that, but I think maybe it makes more sense to go one by one rather than asking you to remember them all at once."

"You're right, I haven't been talking about that much. I was - relatively reluctant to execute people on assizes, since practically every Chelish criminal who comes to my attention is going to an Evil afterlife, and also since if I were as strict as I would be in a healthier society I'd be orphaning virtually every child in many of the villages I passed through, children who also didn't do anything wrong and have no other prospects of support. That's a major reason why we were sent out with so many mitigating considerations to apply. But if there's no realistic prospect that someone dangerous will be stopped by any other means, a swift execution is sometimes the best we know how to do. Imprisonment would also work but it's - such a luxury, to be able to do it, and I don't know if it will be possible in many places. I did work very hard to keep it unguessable who came to me with information but that only means I didn't leak the information, not that the accusers themselves didn't do so.

"I appreciate going one at a time."

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.)

"I did execute people. In Lastwall that's the maximum you get for anything up to and including calling demons down on your neighbors. I didn't have the equipment for long-drop hanging so I was beheading them - at one point I requisitioned a wand of Sleep but couldn't make it work for me, I seem not to be the right kind of sorcerer or something, so I gave it to someone else and did without. I castrated people, when they lived far enough away from the nearest site routinely visited by Archmage Naima that I could expect it to stick for a long while - it's been shown in other places that that works shockingly well even on preventing even things you'd think weren't related, at least if the general tenor of the criminality is impulse and not - philosophical in nature, though mostly I assigned it for things that did seem related. But, yes, I also whipped and fined people, and possibly those they'd offended were not satisfied, and would have been satisfied if I'd - let's see, what did they tend to call for when they were moved to call for things - staked them out on an anthill for two days. Paladins can't do that.

"Do you know what makes paladins fall?"

"...Raising people as skeletons to make them work the mines? And probably other things but that's the one that's specifically come up."

"So, we have to be Lawful Good. But the Good part is much stricter than the Law part. Law is in a lot of ways a fragile alignment, but a little lawlessness that didn't happen to directly touch on any formal vows I've taken wouldn't make the Goddess renounce me right away if I remained able to read Lawful throughout. And many, many Good people occasionally do something Evil. Not very evil, I'm not saying most Good people have a rape or a murder in their history, but at all Evil.

"Paladins can't.

"Not once.

"Which is even more difficult than it sounds, because if you're hewing to that standard, and getting information that instantaneous about what is and isn't Evil, it turns out that a lot of things can be Evil or non-Evil depending on how you are thinking about them when you do them. I can't be angry at someone when I behead him. I can't be thinking about how repellent somebody is when I'm castrating him. It might pass muster the first twenty times, if I were careless about it and let bits of those feelings feature in my motives at the moment the sword falls, but eventually, if I'm not perfect about it, I will accidentally hurt someone in an Evil way, and fall, and need to call off my rounds and go do a lot of prayer and reflection and Atonement - if having me back in the ranks is justified as an expense at all. That's why we had to take so many breaks from assizes, it's a lot better to do it and re-commit ourselves to our paths before you need the spell with the expensive incense."

That is a very confusing group of sentences!! It kind of sounds like she's saying that... Pharasma counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they're angry?... except that can't be right, that's just saying that Good and Evil don't mean anything. It matters how you're thinking about it, sure, but in the sense that it'd be Evil for someone to kill Delegate Ibarra because they're mad that he doesn't like Asmodeus enough, not in the sense that it's Evil to be angry at people for doing awful things. Which is... not exactly Good, being angry doesn't do anything by itself, but correct. People should be angry at people for doing awful things.

Maybe she's saying that Iomedae doesn't want people to be angry? Except she picked Valia, not as a paladin but as a regular priest, she could just pick only regular priests instead of weird priests with extra rules.

If Delegate Saiville isn't allowed to be angry at people who actually deserve it maybe that's why he kept getting annoyed with her for disagreeing with him, he needed somewhere for the anger to go and — that's a stupid and pathetic thing to care about, and not even relevant.

Maybe she's saying that if you're really angry you might end up hurting people more than they deserve, and that counts as a little Evil, and then you get kicked out of being a paladin? That would make sense, except it doesn't quite line up with the words she said, but maybe she just explained it badly? (Victòria thinks this sounds like kind of a dumb problem to have, but maybe paladins have a harder time than her with not accidentally hurting people too much or something.)

"...and so if you aren't sure how much is the right amount to hurt someone, you try to go for the smaller amount, because it's a lot harder to Fall by hurting someone less than you should have?"

"That is... basically true but in a way where I think you missed my point."

"I have more than one guess for your point but most of them don't make sense."

"Well, maybe one of them is close in a way I can clear up."

"That Pharasma randomly counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they feel angry while they're doing it, except that's just saying that Good and Evil don't really mean anything. That Iomedae really doesn't want people to be angry, for some reason, except she picked Valia as a normal priest and Valia's angry sometimes. That people who are angry might be more likely to hurt other people more than the right amount."

"Pharasma... does that but it's not random. It's... related to how you said that if someone hurt a guilty person, but it was at random, like if a bandit accosted them because they were convenient and it had nothing to do with their crimes, then that wouldn't be satisfactory. That's an extreme example of the same thing. Iomedae does not specifically discourage anger and it is not forbidden to experience it and there are many contexts in which it's quite safe; assizes are bad for paladins in part because dispensing justice isn't one of those safe contexts. People who are angry are more likely to hurt other people more than they ought to, but if I've already decided to behead someone that's not really a fashion in which I'd expect to have a problem so it's not related to the train of thought I was describing."

"That's not the same thing!! It's Evil to be a bandit, it's not Evil to feel angry at someone. Or if it is then that's also saying Good and Evil don't mean anything."

"It's not Evil to feel angry. It's often Evil to hurt people because you are angry."

"...I think usually people do things for multiple reasons. I guess if someone were hurting someone... only because they were angry... and not for any other reasons... that would probably be bad?" As opposed to, for instance, because they're avenging actual wrongs that person did.

"Only because they were angry and not for any other reasons is definitely an Evil act, and I don't know the exact mixes that do and do not count. It's just something I have to be careful of because I can't afford even one Evil act so I need to make sure that whatever plan I'm using won't let one slip over hundreds or thousands of repetitions."

...Victòria is going to go ahead and assume that there's something more complicated than just "occasionally Pharasma randomly decides people are Evil for being angry when they hurt someone" that Delegate Jornet just doesn't know about. 

"...I'm assuming this isn't why you said that but I think I understand now why you want to stop using paladins as judges. And it seems like a good idea now when it didn't really before."

"Oh?"

"...Well, if all the judges might accidentally stop being able to be judges just by thinking about something wrong once that definitely seems bad. Also the thing you said earlier about not having enough punishments but that sounds easier to fix."

"We're not losing many, but it's - bad for us, and, yes, a fall does interrupt a circuit as well as everything else about a paladin's life."

Nod. "Uh, do you remember where we were?"

"I brought up how paladins fall because we were talking about how various punishments communicate about how seriously I'm taking a crime. I can't do something that's badly motivated and there are kinds of punishments that cannot be well-motivated. Like -

- I don't know how this example will land but you could imagine someone saying the punishment for some crime should be getting raped, I don't know if the Asmodeans had that on the books but it was evidently happening informally left and right -"

"That's definitely not okay!!!!"

"You're right, it isn't."

"During the punishments argument I was thinking — there could maybe be some punishments where it's like that, where it's wrong to do to anyone no matter what. But I think that's a different thing from — in any particular case, which punishments shouldn't be used because they'll hurt someone more than the right amount for that case — and the punishments that it applies to won't be quite the same. ...I don't know if I said that in a way that makes sense."

"I'm not confident I understood, I'm sorry."

"Okay. Uh, I can try again... so, earlier you were talking about how figuring out which punishments should be allowed is hard and complicated, but there's still right and wrong answers, but the answers are right or wrong for... reasons that might be different in different situations? Like, they might be different between Lastwall and Cheliax, even if you don't think they actually are different. And I think that's a different thing from... punishments that are just always wrong because they'd always be wrong to do to anyone no matter what, like rape or Malediction or things like that. And some punishments might fit one but not the other. Did that make more sense?"

"We might disagree about how to categorize some things but I agree that the categories exist."

"...and I think sometimes when paladins talk about something being torture, or about torture being bad, they mean the first thing, and sometimes they mean the second thing? But I'm — guessing a bit, at some of the things people meant today and yesterday."

"That's a good verbalization of why I've wanted to conduct much of this conversation without using the word, yes. It'd be hard to come up with a definition of 'torture' that definitely excluded whipping the way Lastwall does it and didn't have to refer copiously to how necessary or customary or restrained it was. It's inflicting pain because it's painful, and if it's in the hope that it will achieve something else in the process, so too is torturing people for information, which is forbidden. So - yes. Sometimes they mean that the tradeoffs do not seem to them to turn out right, but they could in principle be convinced if they learned a compelling set of facts; and sometimes they mean that there aren't any things they're willing to buy at that price."

Torturing people for information seems different, you might accidentally torture an innocent person. Also sometimes people being tortured will start lying even though it won't stop them from being tortured, which is really confusing but she's seen it.

"...did you have other things to say about torture and punishments or should I ask about some of the other things I was confused about?"

"Go ahead."

She flips through her notes.

"So, with the conscience exemptions to conscription we were discussing in Rights today — I assume you're going to say that those are for... people whose conscience notices bad things about war more than most people, or something along those lines? But it still seems like, any given war is either Good or Evil, someone's conscience might notice more of one or the other but you're still either conscripting people for an Evil war or letting them out of fighting a Good war."

"It's more complicated than that. For one thing a lot of conscription isn't necessarily about a specific war. Someone could be conscripted for a standing army, and then it could get into battles or not without any individual soldiers being able to control that. They could be conscripted for a war and then it could change in character over time, if more combatants enter the fight or if one side presses an advantage. A war can have an excellent cause and involve a lot of Evil in the details - the retaking of Cheliax was essential but the Rahadoumi and Galtan troops did not have the discipline to avoid looting and attacking civilians in Ostenso and Corentyn. It can be a purely defensive posture like maintenance of the border with Belkzen but tend to inculcate Evil habits, like automatically thinking of any orc as the enemy even when individual orcs and part-orcs can often integrate well as neighbors. But even if it is for a specific war of predictable scope, and even if it's the case that the war is definitely either good or evil, to implement a policy about it, everyone making decisions in the course of handling that policy has to agree on the facts, and they won't. The one fact that the conscript has more information about than anyone else is what their conscience has to say about war - whether they are in extra danger of Evil habits, whether they will be able to withstand the pressures that tend to make soldiers rape and pillage, whether they would be abandoning responsibilities at home that are unusually important to them, whether they will be able to becalm themselves after their service is over and return to a civilian life without carrying home a violent mindset..."

Now she feels kind of sick but at least her question got answered. You would really think anyone with a conscience at all could just not rape people. 

Flip flip flip. "Uh, next question, people keep talking about 'virtue' or 'being virtuous' and it seems like they mean, like, three totally different things...?"

"They probably do, there are a lot of virtues and many pairs of them pull against each other."

"...Some of the ways people use it don't seem to quite line up with that. Like, sometimes it seems like they just mean 'being a good person,' or sometimes it's... something about sex? I think?"

"Not having sex that risks a child out of wedlock, or, more broadly, not allowing any room for suspicion that one has any sex out of wedlock at all, and points between the two. The former is genuinely important; the latter can be a way to support people who don't naturally care about it in treating it seriously at all, though it tends to chafe Chelish sensibilities in the Reclamation's collective experience."

Well, people suspect her of having sex all the time, it really seems like that says more about them than about her. And presumably the people saying confusing things about virtue understand that sometimes people get forced, but even if you ignore that completely it doesn't really make sense to say that everyone who goes to wizard school is a bad person just because they're basically all sleeping with each other.

...Probably if she tries to explain that Delegate Jornet is going to just assume she's upset because she's a whore or something.

Flip flip— "Maybe related to that, one of the delegates on Family is from Osirion, and a lot of the time he says things that are confusing. But it's not so much that I have questions exactly, and you're not from Osirion anyways, so I'm not sure if you can make what he's saying make sense."

"I'm not from Osirion but I've served with people who are. They lean very hard in the direction of not allowing any room for suspicion that one has sex out of wedlock at all - between a man and a woman, that is, it's very popular there to make the premarital period a bit less burdensome with same-sex affairs. Respectable Osirians are never alone with an unrelated member of the same sex, ever. I think they achieve very low rates of rape this way in addition to low rates of every other way bastards are conceived, but it's hard to be sure because while the Osirians have remarkably good research and recordkeeping no one else does."

Wow, that sounds like it would suck. Like, less rape would be great, but... she's trying to imagine never being alone with a man and just completely failing. What the fuck.

Flip flip flip. "What did Delegate Ardiaca actually do that people are so mad about?"

"Conde Ardiaca broke his oaths to his superiors in order to take a personally loyal army to Cheliax to attempt to aid the reclamation. It... was a Good thing to do... but if you are not sure that you will always and forever agree with Conde Ardiaca about what is and is not Good, you might not want him to have a lot of power he might again behave unpredictably with. Very few people and no human countries are skilled at 'do as you are supposed to except for the one time it is really incredibly Good not to'. He got it right... that one time... and now no one is sure they can ever trust him again."

Oh! Good for him!

"Well, I trust someone who'd break an oath to do the right thing more than someone who'd do something Evil just because they'd made an oath about it."

"I'm not surprised."

Flip flip flip. "Why does Lastwall's illegal orders list not include anything about ordering someone to do something Evil? Like, I know sometimes people don't agree, but there's some cases that are obvious, is that supposed to be covered by the other rules or is it just allowed?"

"Because people do not always agree on what things are Evil. They do have quite a lot of protections for refusal to do things on the grounds of conscience, but when everyone agrees that something is Evil it will just... tend to be a crime in Lastwall and thus covered by it being illegal to order a crime."

"Oh, I didn't realize people there were also allowed to not follow orders even if they weren't illegal."

"...that is so far from how I would put it that I don't think I can even say it's basically correct, can you say more about your understanding of what 'protection for refusal on grounds of conscience' might mean."

"Like... if someone gives you an order and you think it's Evil, you can say 'no, that's Evil' and not do it and they can't have you tortured... or, uh, punished in ways that aren't torture? Even if it's not an illegal order. Uh, they might make you say it under a truth spell, if they've got enough, so that you can't just say you think everything you don't want to do is Evil, but I'm not sure either way there."

"...the protection is mostly in the form that a court will generally, at the trial for disobedience of a direct order that one will definitely still have to have, accept conscience as a large mitigating consideration like being enchanted would be."

"...Back home I would not have... gotten a trial... for disobeying an order from someone who could give me orders. They'd've just given me whatever punishment they felt like. ...And if I'd tried to say an order was Evil they'd have... laughed in my face, probably? And then punished me extra."

"...well, nothing about that is really all right, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that."

She had in fact noticed that growing up in a country ruled by Asmodeus was bad!

"...and so when we were talking about illegal orders it didn't occur to me that Lastwall might have rules for not following orders that aren't illegal."

"I don't think we can import it all at once. It relies on a lot of other things. Iomedae's people settled Lastwall, they took it from the undead and were already her crusaders and loyalists, and I think you can get there incrementally but you'd have to start with something much more basic. I'm not sure that person Sower Soler spoke to can't get his exemption from conscription on the grounds of conscience but it may be the only thing of its kind in Cheliax for the next forty years."

That's not exactly what she was going for but she doesn't know how to explain the thing she was going for. She nods.

"Any other confusions I might be able to help with?"

"...I'm still confused about what Delegate Saiville was saying yesterday but it kind of sounded like you didn't think you could help with that."

"I think you should probably not try to follow up with Ser Saiville and vice versa, it seems like an expensive purchase of little understanding."

Well, it seems like it could be really important, if he's going around telling people they're Evil for defending themselves because they didn't care enough about not hurting the people attacking them. ...But probably someone else would do a better job of explaining it to him, if she tries to explain it he's probably just going to get annoyed at her for questioning him again.

Flip flip flip. "I can't think of any other things I was confused about but I might have forgotten some. ...And I just realized I never explained the thing I said earlier about how I was brought up Asmodean, is it alright if I do that now?"

"Go right ahead."

...Now she has to figure out how to explain this without sounding like she's saying that the Iomedaeans are basically Asmodeans. Which they aren't, at least apart from Chosen Artigas, just, it seems like the sort of thing that's easy to explain wrong.

"...So, you were talking earlier about how you think I shouldn't assume people have stupid or Evil reasons for things, even if the thing they're suggesting really sounds stupid or Evil. And I hadn't thought about it specifically until you said that, but... I was raised Asmodean. It would've been a mistake to assume the Asmodeans had secret good reasons for things. And maybe if you're dealing with people who aren't Asmodeans, it makes sense not to assume either way, but — anyways. Uh, that's not why I brought this part up again.

And I'm not sure if I can explain the next part right, but — the reason I'm mentioning this is — sometimes, you guys come across like you think everyone should agree with everything you guys say just because you're the Church of Iomedae, even if you haven't really explained it, and even if you're asking people to believe you about a sand-cathedral, metaphorically. Maybe on accident, I'm not sure." (She doesn't really think it's an accident, but it could be.) "And — this is the part I wasn't sure how to explain — it would have been a really bad idea to agree with the Church of Asmodeus just because they were the Church of Asmodeus. And... some people did anyway, but... a quarter of the people at the convention are priests? And, uh, I think most gods are not going to pick people who will just automatically follow what a priest of another god says even if it doesn't make sense. And so I think you'll get more, uh, potatoes, if you acted less like that during the floor arguments, and tried harder to actually explain your reasons."

Also it would be nice if they stopped assuming anyone who disagreed with them during committees was being stupid or Evil but it would be really pathetic to keep bringing that up. Or, uh, whatever they call it in other countries when you get all bothered by something stupid like that.

"I think it is a mistake to trust Asmodeans to have reasons that are not Evil for Evil-sounding things because the Asmodeans were Evil, announced this, had an explicit policy of both being and encouraging others to be evil, and did a lot of incredibly Evil things all the time. I can see why it would have inculcated a more general habit of mistrust but I think perhaps it might serve people better to have a habit of mistrusting people who might be Evil, which is not true of paladins or any priest of any Good god. On, at least, topics where the question is Goodness and not factual accuracy or which tradeoffs appeal. And I don't think any of us will be as offended by occasional checks to make sure we haven't fallen as the nobles tend to be about the truth spell bickering they've taken to doing, if you wanted to ask for those when particularly alarmed. Paladins are easiest to check, anyone with Detect Magic can just watch us Detect Evil enough times that no one could be doing it at first circle, no costly spells expended.

"I am interested in how we can be better received by the people we're talking to, if you have more concrete suggestions, but 'less like that' I'm not sure how to do, let alone tell the other Iomedaeans to do."

That would really be a lot more convincing if Iomedae never picked priests who'd tortured innocent people to death in the name of Asmodeus, or at the very least if her other priests were willing to acknowledge that was a horrifying awful Evil thing to do instead of acting like it was ridiculous to trust Iomedae less for picking someone like that. Or really if she had any reason at all to think that Iomedae cared about anything that actually matters to her rather than about confusing god-potatoes. But she already tried explaining that part once and it didn't even help.

"...would one of the other paladins have a copy of Delegate Cansellarion's speeches? The one he gave during the punishments argument and the ones he gave during the Molthune argument. I think it'll be easier to be specific if I can point out, uh, specific things."

"...Select Artigas or his assistant probably do."

"...so can you, uh, ask him to borrow it, or..."

"Yes, I'll be right back." She goes into the temple and comes out again a bit later with the transcripts.

Flip flip flip.

"Okay. I'm going to do my best to explain but I don't know how well it'll work — actually, you know who you should really be asking, Feliu, I bet Feliu'd be great at it. If I don't explain it in a way that makes sense maybe see if you can track him down and ask.

Anyways." She holds out Delegate Cansellarion's first set of speeches from the Molthune debate. "I thought this speech was pretty good but I'm not sure how well I can explain why. It... gave reasons? It wasn't just saying 'oh, we're the Church of Iomedae, you should listen to us?' I guess some people might not believe him about what he said, but it's not a sand-cathedral sort of thing, he's not saying anything that makes no sense if you actually think about the world. It's not because of the part at the beginning about how he's only speaking for himself, if he'd left that part off I think it'd still have been fine. But the people who just want to listen to the Church of Iomedae no matter what can still listen to him, and the people who care about doing the right thing but aren't trying to listen to the Church of Iomedae will think 'wow, it's really bad how he tried to stop the paladins from coming to help kick out the Asmodeans.'"

She switches to the page with his speech on torture. "This speech is... the sort of thing I was trying to say you guys shouldn't do as much. Like, I was there for the speech and the Rights meeting and I talked to you, and I'm still not sure whether he was saying 'it's Evil to use punishments that hurt people more than the right amount, my best guess is that some of these punishments hurt people more than the right about' or whether he was saying 'there's some punishments that are always wrong to do to anyone no matter what, some of the punishments on this list fall under that.' And — I think there's a couple problems, actually, but they're kind of linked?

One is that people don't all agree on what counts as torture, like when Rights talked about it we didn't all agree, so maybe some people thought he was saying 'it's not okay to flay people alive' and were like 'nothing on here is anywhere close to that' and some people thought he was saying 'it's Evil to ever whip anyone' and they were like 'that's obviously stupid and wrong' and some people assumed the lions thing was fine and voted for it even though they were trying to listen to him. 

Another is that... he doesn't really give reasons? He just says it's Evil, which is... the sort of thing I was talking about, saying that people should listen to him just because he's the Church of Iomedae. And depending on what you think he's saying to ban, it might be... the sort of thing that people's conscience's disagree with... because lots of people think that people who did worse crimes or more crimes should get a worse punishment, because" they deserve to suffer more "the worse a crime is the more important it is to deter it. Related to that, he's... saying you can make a cathedral out of sand, and that everyone should just trust him that it's totally possible, but he hasn't actually shown us the cathedral if that makes sense?

And then also" hopefully this is different enough from the parts that were frustrating her that it won't sound pathetic "depending on what people know about the Lastwall laws, they might think he's calling them Evil even if he's not, and if they think it's for a stupid reason it might make them not believe him about the rest of it — like, let's say there was a person who'd heard that Lastwall counts it as torture to not feed people, and they didn't realize Lastwall doesn't count it as torture to make your kid skip dinner for one night, so they thought he was saying they were definitely Evil for that, or something — and obviously that doesn't mean you shouldn't say things are Evil when they actually are, but I think it would be helpful to... only say that if you mean to?

So I guess in terms of specific things you guys could do differently, you could... explain things better, so people know what it is that you're saying, and so they have a reason to listen that's not just that you're the Church of Iomedae, and so if there are any... sand cathedrals that are true?... people'll actually have a reason to believe them."

"Torture is very hard to talk about coherently. It is true both that it's Evil to hurt people more than you must and that there are harms that no amount of must can justify. He gives - several examples, of various places and what they do and what results they get, I'm not sure how much more evidence you want him to bring forth in a speech he didn't have long to prepare - I admit he is not very specific about exactly how Taldor and Molthune punish people but the number of ways men have come up with to bring one another pain is far too long to go about reciting on every occasion, that's much of why we collapse it into the word 'torture' even though it's not a very good word. I'm not sure where in the speech you think he could be interpreted as saying Lastwall is Evil? - or do you mean that people might think he was calling his audience evil? A lot of them are, not for sending a child to bed without supper once but in many cases for things they do not yet know to be Evil because they were brought up Asmodean.

"Ser Tauler is not making his home here at the church and is sometimes a bit scarce, and while I'm glad he was able to communicate effectively with you I'm not sure I would count on his style working well for a greater number of people than the Lord Marshal's. I could be wrong, but it could also be that he just happens to suit your understanding in particular well, or that he's good at talking one-on-one but his turns of phrase adapt poorly to public speeches."

"I don't know what he'd've needed to say to get people to believe him about the sand cathedral, I'm not the one trying to convince people you can build a cathedral out of sand. You already said Lastwall only tried it one way, it might be there's nothing he could say to convince people." On account of how what he's saying makes no sense!!!

"—And yeah, I meant, they might think he was saying they were Evil for that. Probably some of them are Evil, and some of them aren't — Korva's not, we checked, and she doesn't really seem unusually Good — but either way it doesn't help if people think you're calling them Evil for something that's not. Like, let's say you say 'it's Evil to whip kids for getting bad grades,' and some people are like 'no it's not' and stop listening to you, that sucks but it doesn't mean you should've pretended. But I think that's different from, like, you say something that sounds like you're calling something super Evil that isn't, and people decide you don't know what you're talking about.

...but, I mean, I also can't make you change anything, if you're fine with the number of potatoes you already have."

"...I'm not sure why you expect whether someone 'seems' 'unusually' Good to you on a brief acquaintance to track whether they are more or less Good than their neighbors?...

- we are never fine with the number of potatoes we already have, but I do not know how to take your advice nor am I confident it would get us additional total potatoes."

What, so if they're trying to tell people you can build a cathedral out of sand, they want people to believe them even if they didn't really check, but they're not willing to believe other people about things they actually did check? ...That's not really surprising, it fits with how they want people to listen to them just because they're the Church of Iomedae, and it was Valia's idea to check Korva but Valia isn't here. 

"...It seems hard for explaining things on the floor in a way that lets people actually understand what you mean to get you less potatoes, unless understanding you makes them agree with you less."

"Different people understand things in different ways. I'm glad that Ser Tauler made sense to you. There are hundreds of people on the floor and most of them aren't you, and I don't think that you are so similar to so many of them that we should tailor all our floor speeches to a style that worked well for you that I do not understand well enough to tell the other Iomedaeans how to do. If I happen to see Ser Tauler in a situation where I can talk to him for a few minutes I may bring it up."

That's not even what she said. She's kind of tempted to stop trying to explain this and let the Iomedaeans keep not getting their potatoes. (Half their potatoes are stupid, anyways.) But probably if she does that then the next time they're trying to argue for potatoes she does care about they're going to mess it up, and then she won't get any potatoes.

...Now she's upset about the people who want to make naked women fight to the death and sell off the winners again. She doesn't even know who they are. ...And in any case that's not going to help explain things to the paladins.

"I think maybe I explained that badly, let me try again. Do you, uh, agree with me that probably lots of people who heard Delegate Cansellarion's speech didn't really know which things he was saying were bad or why? ...and that this is a bad thing?"

"I think it is likely that he was not well understood by a number of the people in the hall. What I'm not sure about is whether there is an accessible way to make that number smaller next time."

"Well, I don't know if he can make it smaller, but if he wants potatoes I think he should try. When I say he should try, like, actually saying what his reasons are, you think that won't help, because... this is the best he can do at saying them? Because you think what he did say should be a good enough reason to vote against the law and people shouldn't need another one?"

"I think he said some things about what his reasons are. Saying more things about that would trade off against other things. He might have had to wait to speak to gather his thoughts, and even if that would have turned out fine compared to getting up as soon as he did, he couldn't know that in advance and won't next time either. He might have said something that someone wanted to disagree with in more detail and distracted the conversation from whether it's acceptable to turn people to parts to instead talk about whether his sources in Taldor or wherever were reliable. He might have spoken for another paragraph and something in that other paragraph might have been as confusing for someone other than you as what he said was for you, just because it would make the whole speech less simple and less short - a lot of people seem to specifically mistrust anything that takes too long to say, and he cannot lie so he cannot shorten things in any way that makes them false and just hope people understand he was speaking loosely. I do also think that the listed torturous punishments being Evil is a perfectly sufficient reason to vote to forbid them, but I know that not everyone in the hall will vote for things just because there are perfectly sufficient reasons to do so."

Delegate Cansellarion can't lie?? Wow, that sounds like it would really suck, is there no way for one of the archmages to fix it for him? Or is it can't, like, he's Lawful and he made a really stupid oath... this sort of thing is why it's kind of stupid to care about being Lawful, but she's not going to try to convince a paladin of that.

"...If he's worried about taking too long to think of all the things he wants to say, maybe he could try writing out his speech in advance? You're on Rights, you could've told him that there was probably going to be a big argument about punishments." 

In hindsight that would've been a good idea for Victòria, too, except for how it wouldn't have mattered because she didn't get the chance to speak. She's pretty sure her sermons from back home were mostly a lot better than the speeches she made up in ten minutes in her head.

"But, uh — so I agree that people shouldn't vote for Evil laws. Obviously it's bad to vote for Evil laws! But that goes back to what I was saying earlier, about how you guys act like people should always agree with you just because you're Iomedaeans." It didn't work because Delegate Jornet thinks people should just ignore their consciences if their consciences disagree with a priest of Iomedae, and probably it won't help to explain it again, but she's not sure what else to do.

"Not voting for Evil laws is only the same thing if none of you are ever wrong" or lying "about which laws are Evil. And maybe you think people should be assuming that, but anyone who'll vote against a law just because a priest of Iomedae said it was Evil would've definitely voted against the punishments law, unless they were so confused they didn't even realize that it counted as torture, and you'd have to be really stupid not to realize that. And I don't actually know how many people thought you were wrong about whether the law was Evil, versus how many people thought it was Evil and just didn't care, but clearly there aren't enough people who agree with always listening to Iomedaeans no matter what to actually get you the potatoes you want. So if you care about potatoes it really seems like you should try something else."

"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?"

"I can't think of anything else."

"All right. Have a pleasant evening."

"You as well."

And she doesn't have anything else planned for the night, so she's going to head back to the temple of Shelyn. Maybe she can see if Laia will let her paint some wasps near the other animals that've been going up on the walls, that sounds like a lot more fun than talking to a paladin.

Laia thinks one wasp is probably enough to start but how about right over there, there's room for a nest in this tree too.

One wasp is fine. She can't manage anything anywhere near as good as the gorgeous unicorn, but she got some practice repainting the temple back home; she can paint a reasonably competent wasp's nest and a little wasp guarding it.