Iomedae will need a reminder of which are legal moves and then can at least reliably make those and not make ones that get a piece taken. She considers her moves for a while, partially because she doesn't know how to play chess and partially because he said while playing chess was when he could think best.

Well, making the game slower is not actually the way to make a game amazing at improving the gears of his brain, but he can think more moves ahead and explain how pawns work and tell her why she is not allowed to do that thing which puts her in check and so on.

She is not, on the whole, particularly good at chess at all, but after they've whittled each other down to fewer pieces she surveys the board consideringly and says 'you win in four, good game', which people who are new at chess do not usually do. 

"Was that...helpful for sorting out what policies you would change if you cared whether you were miserable?"

"Somewhat, although that was not the phrasing of the question I was considering. I do not - arrange to be miserable in the face of genuinely trivial obstacles to not being miserable - but may be idiosyncratic about which barriers appear to me to be trivial, and in particular probably have culturally miscalibrated expectations about in what ways other people are relevantly nontrivial, but being aware of that does not directly render me non-idiosyncratic or well-calibrated. I am accustomed to it frequently being the case that things more important than my internal state must and do override whatever my other preferences might be - the Worldwound is very cold, for example, and it would be in no way appropriate to prioritize nor encourage anyone else to prioritize letting me in before a security check was completed up to and including if my toes were about to fall off, because having a policy breakable for things like that is how you get succubi. There is potentially a wide range of things between that extreme and the opposite end where I will for example scratch my arm if it itches and I'm not actually sure what thresholds you're proposing to emplace where."

" - yes, you absolutely should not allow people to bypass a security precaution because they are in distress, the security objective is more important than not being miserable. Many things are more important than not being miserable. I am just not clear what, in this case, was more important than not being miserable."

"Various guesses crossed my mind about why the auras might be up by default some of which could have been more important. My reaction to it is I think rather bizarre - unless you've seen it before? - and I did not know if it might attenuate with practice or the mere passage of time, though that at this point seems unlikely; in which case this would have been a perfectly reasonable occasion to pass that time since I'm not doing much of anything else and did in fact find it impairing in the fighting retreat to the city. I had absolutely no idea how bringing it up might parse in terms of - what claims it might seem to be making about social reality or my status - or what effects it might directly have on those things, both of which I am also independently unsure of to begin with and therefore ill positioned to assess risks about."

"You can ask paladins for confidentiality, if you would like to discuss something with them and would like it not to be further reported or employed in assessments of you. It seems unlikely that you are more willing to ask for that than for the aura to be adjusted, but it is available as an option. ...for calibration, if a peasant I'd never met was stuck within the aura for an extended period and wanted to be excluded from it I'd want them to ask me."

"I did eventually ask you, just, only when it appeared to be affecting elements of the situation that mattered to anything besides how pleasant it is to occupy myself, because asking affects elements of the situation besides that. I didn't have any reason to believe it was worth the attention it would cost to parse the sentence so long as I thought the balance of the effects were wholly local to my internal preferences."

"...and the reason I would give why it is worth the effort to parse the sentence is that a lot of things that are wholly....local to your internal preferences....still matter."

"...at least once a month, sir."

"...no."

?

"I really think you should interpret the once a month thing as 'if this is not your highest priority at least occasionally, that is very bad for you', not as 'this does not need to be a priority at all except when it has been a month since it last was'."

"...yes, that seems like a reasonable interpretation of the rule, I have been assuming it's a self-maintenance instruction..."

"So yes, but - if there were someone who in fact suffered no consequences to their judgment or fighting skill whatsoever from being miserable all of the time, it would still be preferable that they not be miserable, and it would not be preferable specifically that they experience non-misery once a month, but whenever it could be cheaply purchased."

".........yes? I've already - said that in practice I wind up playing chess more than once a month -"

"And yet you still do not seem to be making predictions about what is worth someone's time from the assumption that you being miserable is a bad thing."

"...at steep enough exchange rates I do, I asked the other paladin for permission to cast Prestidigitation."

"I am sincerely glad to hear it. You are still speaking of this in a way that suggests some important gap in understanding but it is possible it is only a gap in communication."

"I am still confused but not in a way where I know what questions to ask."

"Sometimes I find it helpful to describe to myself - a great many situations that are all variants on the same theme, and contemplate whether I think there are morally important differences between any two of them."

"I don't recall that any examples of this exercise made it into the book, sir."

"Is murder wrong?"

"Yes sir."

"So if I am riding down the road and I see a man walking and I take off his head as I ride by, this was wrong?"