The girl in the front jerks a thumb at the boy behind her. "I'm Jeanine, he's Bernard, can all mice talk or just you?"

"All mice can talk to each other, but I am a rarity in being fluent in English, French, Chinese, Latin, and Mer-person. Now, Natalie daughter of Dr. Facilier?"

"My name's Nat, unless you're my sister." 

"Alright, Nat it is, aaaaand, Sasha son of Nobody? Is your parent's name in fact Nobody or is that the placeholder it looks like?"

"You wouldn't know my parents' names, so they might as well be nobody." 

It is distinctly less of a challenge than any other answer he has ever given on the subject, at least as far as the other kids in the room have heard. 

"More importantly, they're not in my class. But you are! You were all given textbooks; I don't like the textbook. If you were mice I would tell you to use it for bedding.

Now! Today we will be playing the Ultimatum game. One of you will need to participate. Can I get a volunteer? I assure you in this game it is impossible for you to end up worse off than you started."

There's ten seconds or so of silence before Nat says "Sure, why not." 

"Excellent, excellent, come up here. Would you be so kind as to open the top desk drawer? There's a bag of jelly beans in it."

She opens the top desk drawer, examines the jellybeans — they smell like the candy from the ride to Auradon — and eats six of them. 

"You can eat the jellybeans in a minute, Nat. First you have to give me an ultimatum. You make me an offer, how many of the now ninety-four jelly beans are for you and how many are for me. If I like your offer, we carry it out. If I don't, I grab the bag and throw it out the window and neither of us gets any. Is that clear to everyone?"

"...do I get to argue with you about whether it's a good idea or do you just throw the bag out the window immediately." 

"The original definition of this game specified no communication, but this is a goodness class. Unless I say otherwise, arguing is strongly encouraged."

She looks at the bag, and looks at Basil, and looks at the bag, and looks at Basil, and says "If I get fifty-five and you get thirty-nine that's still thirty-nine more than you'd get if you throw the bag out the window and no one gets anything." 

"Ah, but if I accept that line of reasoning, wouldn't I then also accept an offer of ninety for you and four for me? After all, four is also more than nothing. What would you do in my place?" Basil is clearly having an excellent time.

"If I were you, I'd accept anything, even if the other person offered four, because four is more than nothing and throwing the bag out the window is just wasting food." 

"Ah, but if people know that about you, or can guess it, they'll make you very small offers! By accepting anything, you give up the only power you have in the situation."

Sasha is making such a face at the idea of wasting food for the sake of having a reputation for being picky. 

"But I didn't make you a very small offer, so you can take it without worrying about making it clear that you'll accept anything." 

"Just so. Now, what do you other three think of this?"

"It's interesting that the selfish thing, the thing that gets you as many jelly beans as possible, also involves giving some to the other person. You could be good, and give them all away, or be evil, and try to take them all for yourself, but being fair works better than either."

You'd be fucking stupid not to take that offer, Sasha doesn't say, because that's the kind of thing that makes people keep watching you. You could be a little less obvious about the sucking up, he doesn't tell Jeanine, because he already knows they're all thinking it. 

"She offered you a lot," he says, and trusts that his classmates will know what he means. 

"She did! It was very close to an even split, which is generally considered the equilibrium solution. And as such", he says to Nat, I accept your offer, though as a matter of fact I don't actually like jelly beans and you're welcome to eat all of them, or share them with your classmates, as you like."

"I need to go get the supplies for the next lesson; I'll be back in two minutes." And with a series of leaps and some climbing he disappears into the rafters.

"Fuckin' weird," Nat says, and — Sasha's her gang already, they're not on the Isle anymore but it counts — puts ten jellybeans on his desk and five each on Bernard and Jeanine's and sits down. "So. What do y'all really think." 

Bernard says, "Thanks!", then scoops up his jellybeans and eats them.

"Yes, thanks Nat. I think he's a bit mad, but this is more practical than I was expecting a class on goodness to be, so, could be worse."

"He's a nut but yeah, it could definitely be worse." 

Basil drops down out of the rafters again. "Congratulations, you're all too paranoid to have actually believed I was gone, which successfully disincentivized me from spying. Also, you reached a mutually agreeable distribution of resources. That was scheduled to potentially take the rest of the class period, so you can all leave early, or stick around and discuss the subject more if you haven't anything more interesting to do."

....huh. 

Not that she wasn't already 100% sure they were being watched, but it's weird that he'd tell them that being paranoid worked. 

"Cool," she says, and leaves. 

Once Nat's left and he won't be the first to stand up, he'll leave too. 

Bernard is surprised Basil isn't more annoyed at them and thinks this whole "you can leave early" thing might be another trick, but when nothing happens to Nat and Sasha he exchanges a glance with Jennifer and they leave too.

The next time class meets, there's a tall partition between the two desks on the left and the two on the right. Basil is sitting in a mouse-sized armchair in the middle of the desk.

....kay. 

Sasha picks a desk more or less at random. 

Nat makes eye contact with him when she walks in the room and then sits on the other side of the partition. (Basil saw her play favorites last time. She's sort of curious if he'll independently figure out gangs or if he'll think something else is going on.) 

Jeanine looks deeply annoyed that Nat has messed up Bernard's ability to sit behind her. She takes the seat behind Nat and Bernard takes the seat behind Sasha.

Well, maybe if Jeanine and Bernard wanted to pick their seats they should have gotten there first. 

Well yeah, she's not going to ask her to move or anything. She did get there first. It's just inconvenient.

"Good morning, everyone!" Chirps Basil's amplified voice. Today we're going to be playing a game in pairs. Imagine, if you will, that you and the person across the partition from you have been arrested. The police give each of you a choice: you can testify against the other person, or remain silent. If you both remain silent, you both get one year sentences; if you both testify, you both get two year sentences. If only one person testifies, that person goes free and the other one gets three years. Now, without giving a decision, do you all understand the problem?"

Bernard and Jeanine both think about it for a bit and then nod.

Nat and Sasha nod too. 

(Gangs make this problem easy. He's glad he's across from Nat and not from one of the others; he knows what she's going to do.) 

"Excellent. Now, as you have guessed, we will be playing the game across the partition. Please write down on a piece of paper both your decision and your reasoning, and what you expect your partner's decision and reasoning to be."

Nat writes down "Testify, because I'm an asshole." 

Sasha writes down "Testify, because I know Nat." 

"Keep silent, because I'm not going to hurt Bernard and he wouldn't hurt me either."

"Keep silent, because Jeanine won't testify against me and I won't testify against her."

"I see you've all stopped writing. Now, turn your paper over and do the same exercise with the person diagonal from you. Bernard and Nat, Sasha and Jeanine."

"Keep silent, because I don't know Sasha and want to give him the benefit of the doubt in the hope he does the same for me."

"Keep silent, because if this were real Nat would find some way to get revenge."

"Keep silent, because I'm pretty sure Jeanine isn't Nat." 

"Keep silent, because fuck the police." 

"Capital! Pass your papers up to the front. And you can put the partition down now if you like, we're done with it."

(Jeanine gets up and puts the partition against the back wall.)

Basil reads the responses and makes a sound that is probably what a mouse sounds like cackling with glee. "Excellent, excellent, . Everyone ended up cooperating with each other, with the exception of Nat and Sasha, so let's go over that first. It appears that Nat picked "testify" as, let's call it an intellectual exercise." (This is clearly politesse for "to troll".) "And Sasha, you predicted she would do this and that lead you to do the same?"

"I did, yes." 

"Can you expound a bit on why your knowledge of her decision affected your own? There are no right or wrong answers right now; we're just exploring the space of lines of reasoning people can use here."

True answers include "If I'm the only one that gets betrayed then she got one over on me, but if we both betrayed each other then we can laugh about it and everything's cool," "Because I thought she'd think it was funny and I was right," and "Because I thought you'd think it was funny, and I was still right." 

The answer he gives is "Because sometimes trust means keeping silent, and sometimes trust means doing what you know the other person expects you to do." 

"It certainly does. Also I suspect it was an amusing gesture in the context of your friendship with Sasha outside the game. One of the common themes of these games is that it's hard to make the stakes high enough that they dominate external considerations, especially since the games last a few minutes and the rest of your life lasts for the rest of your life. If I may continue singling you out a bit longer, can you expand on 'Jeanine isn't Nat'?"

"I know Nat. I know of Jeanine in the way that everyone knows everyone but I don't know her anywhere near well enough to know whether she'd think it was funny or how she'd respond, and we're going to keep seeing each other for however many years we're at school here." 

"A reasonable consideration, and interestingly symmetric to Jeanine's reasoning about you. In other contexts, players who don't know each other tend to mistrust each other, and start out by betraying each other rather than look weak."

"If I were trying to look strong I wouldn't go around calling myself 'son of no one.'" 

Basil appears to have drawn a lot of implications from that statement, but addresses his next question to Nat. "Thank you. Now, Nat, you defected the first time and cooperated the second. Would you have switched the order if the partners were in the other order? That is, was it about cooperating with Bruce and not with Sasha, or was it about defecting first and cooperating second?"

"Both. I was going to do that anyway, but they were both expecting me to defect and fucking with Bernard is more fun than fucking with Sasha." 

"Extending the conversation beyond the bounds of this game and this classroom for a moment, what effects do you find you get from being deliberately unpredictable? Are there people you make a point of being predictable to?"

How to answer that. 

"Walking around with 'Definitely Not Evil Plots' written on my notebook lets me see who flips their shit and who rolls their eyes and who avoids me and who doesn't. I don't make a point of doing what anyone expects me to but there are people I don't make a point of not." 

"If I thought you were so foolish as to write down your plots I would be tempted to read your notebook, but that is neither here nor there. Now, Bruce, you cooperated with Nat because, and I quote, 'if this were real Nat would find some way to get revenge.' Who here thinks revenge is morally right and who thinks it's wrong? Bernard, you first."

Bernard makes a "You're asking me?" face, stammers a bit, and comes up with "Um, probably wrong?"

"But why do you think that? Every question I ask in this class comes with at least an implicit 'why'. I am not looking for parroted answers, as though goodness was a squeakeasy with a secret password. I am looking for moral reasoning."

Bernard is sort of always expecting to get ranted at, but definitely wasn't expecting that particular rant. Eventually he manages to say, "Be-because, Islanders think it's important, so, it's probably evil? I don't know, I'm not good at this stuff."

Jeanine is done watching Bernard be in the hot seat. "I think it doesn't matter if revenge is good or evil!" She asserts loudly. "Because if you don't take revenge people will think they can hurt you or people you care about with no consequences, so you have to do it whether it's right or not."

"Auradon is good. Therefore revenge can't be wrong." 

"There's such a thing as too much revenge, though. Like if you hurt someone way more than they hurt you, or if you decide to get revenge on someone for doing something they did to you as revenge and it goes back and forth forever, or if you get revenge and accidentally hurt someone who wasn't involved and now they're mad at you. You have to be smart about it even if it's good, and you have to do it at all even if it's evil."

Man, how did 'if revenge is wrong the Isle is wrong' get no reaction whatsoever. 

"And sometimes the fight just isn't worth it, I'd rather be stolen from than break a bone in a fight. — I think islanders are better at taking revenge on the people we actually want revenge on than Auradonians are." 

Reaction? Why would Basil react when he's finally managed to start a class discussion? This is great and he has no intention of interrupting.

"I think you're right, Sasha. Maybe it's because they waste so much effort trying to be good and don't think about what's practical."

"That too but I think more importantly I think they can't admit revenge is the thing they're doing because they think revenge is wrong, so they have to make up new concepts for the same thing and the new concepts just don't aim as well." 

"That could be it too. They resurrected people specifically to send them to the Isle. If you want to make sure that someone won't hurt you again, and that people know it's a bad idea to try, why not resurrect people you like and let the people you don't like stay dead?"

"I'm not actually sure that was about revenge, if you wanted revenge on my daddy what you'd do is not resurrect him." 

"Right! If you're thinking 'I want revenge' you can think about what would actually get you that, but if you're thinking 'revenge is wrong, instead we will have a legal code that punishes wrongdoers by sending them to the Isle' you wind up doing all kinds of bizarre counterproductive things. — obviously I am glad Nat's dad wasn't tortured forever and instead I got to know him and Nat and Celia but —" 

"But if you're Auradonian," she agrees. 

"Yeah, I'm definitely glad Nat's dad is okay now. It's definitely stupid though. If you're going to follow a legal code at all, you should make sure it doesn't tell you to do stupid stuff."

"For another example of what Sasha said, if you're thinking 'I want revenge' you can go and get revenge, but if you have to think about it as 'villains deserve to hurt' you wind up poisoning random kids instead of whoever you actually want to see hurt." 

Okay, in his defense Nat brought her dad up first. 

Yeah, and in her defense that was clearly what Sasha meant when he talked about Auradonians being bad at aim. 

Jeanine looks back and forth at Nat and Sasha a couple times. "Did somebody poison you? --I'll shut up if you'd rather not talk about it."

Ughhhhh he doesn't like this story but if they're gonna talk about it they might as well talk about it openly.

"Some Auradonian thought it'd be a great idea to try and murder a villain and got a ten year old henchman's kid instead. Or maybe they were just throwing away poison for some other reason and were careless, who knows, didn't make a difference to me." 

"That's awful--even if they didn't think enough to know there'd be kids--that must have really sucked, I'm so glad you're okay." 

Bernard looks like he's feeling guilty about something, but doesn't say anything.

You can both a little less with the sucking up, he doesn't say. 

"Anyway. The point of mentioning it was that Auradonians hate calling their revenge what it is so they call it deserving instead, but deserving is just really bad at doing the thing it's for." 

"It's a good point. And I still don't understand why they had resurrection magic and didn't use it on all the dead people they presumably liked, that's stupid too."

"Bet they used it on some of the people they liked." 

Bernard turns out to be capable of speech! "Don't they all hate magic? They can break their own rules at least some, if they do."