There's a tradition. It's part of my domain. Oh, the dragon is bleeding out and dying of its wounds, don't bother climbing down into that canyon. 

Could you always tell me stuff like this? 

I'm just going to tell you before I run out of divine intervention juice. 

....you're borrowing my voice, still, aren't you, to speak to me. I don't think gods use phrases like divine intervention juice but it's something I'd say. 

Right, yes, you're very clever. Anyway, you're at 5%. I'm going to tell you this is really incredibly impressive before I do literally anything else because otherwise you'll freak.

I'm the god of perfection. So I have a ledger. Every single person has a score of how much good they could achieve in the world if they made literally every choice correctly and spent literally every moment optimally since they were born, given their resources and constraints and abilities. If they were as perfect as they could be, pretty much. 5% is crazy, it's an unimaginably high score, I always like to tell my paladins when they hit it. Most humans are at a tiny fraction of a per cent! 

THE HELL DO YOU MEAN I'M ONLY AT FIVE PER CENT 

Lucy, normally I use a very large amount of you when I'm communicating with you. This is an unusual amount of me.

Please take this as an astonishingly vanishing rare achievement that is incomprehensibly good. 

And then keep doing better, obviously, because you want 100%, and you can always decide to 100% the rest of your life even if you didn't so far. But really, honestly, please be very proud.

Anyway I have to go check the boundaries of Creation for flaws and cracks and imperfections. Love you very much. Bye. 

NO COME BACK. FIVE PER CENT? FIVE? FIVE ISN'T REMOTELY OKAY

How am I even supposed to call for you to come back. You don't have a name. 

Fuck you. Five per cent is supposed to be good? After everything you've ever said to me? All that stuff about perfection? Believing in me? Fuck you. Fuck you.

Tomorrow I will make it six. Fuck you. 

I didn't mean that. Not after thinking about it for five minutes. 

Not after going down into the canyon and looking at the dead dragon and thinking how easily that fire breath would've killed me if I hadn't dropped flat right then. Not after retrieving all the glorious magical items from the dragon's hoard. This is enough to outfit me and twenty retainers. We can kill a lich, with all this.

Not after remembering you are my ally and my friend and my god, not because you love me but because you love what I love.You understand that everyone must be saved now. You understand that there are no acceptable excuses, that it is not enough for everyone to be saved tomorrow, or for almost everyone to be saved, or everyone to be mildly better off. Even when everyone else around me is telling me it's okay to be cowardly or lazy or cruel and only save most people, most of the time, most of the way. You don't shy away from looking into the dark.

I realise you maybe can't hear this so I'll say it again when I'm at the altar. Consider it a prayer, I guess. I didn't mean it when I said fuck you repeatedly.

I'm going to try and swear less, honestly. Going to work on that and also on getting that six per cent.

I mostly only swear at you because I know you will still not betray me no matter how much I do it, because you love the things I love, but it's not an excuse to treat you that way. It's a bad habit for me to get in, to treat anyone unkindly, even if they are my god.

Please don't ever say anything like that to me again though. 

Lucia is too angry to go back to the castle and told them that she has solved their dragon problem for them. She instead goes to the poorest part of the city and casts Create Food and Water twice, because that is the maximum amount she can cast that, and then sets up in a square and makes it publicly known that she is handing out Lay On Hands to anyone who needs one until she runs out.

She does this when she's angry because it is something she cannot really fuck up. And she gets to reconnect with people. Sometimes when she's spent too long in dark deep dungeons smiting necromancers and slaying dragons, she just needs to see a kid smile and look at her like she's the hero they want to be when they grow up, she needs to hear mothers say thank you, she needs to ask ordinary people about whether the harvest is going well and what the news is and whether they'd like to hear a song... and she needs to scout out what the next biggest danger is for her to smite.

When she's halfway through her pool (commoners are really very cheap to heal with only a point or two), a town guard comes up to her and informs her that she cannot do this sort of thing without the consent of the local Baron.

Lucia informs the guard that she is Lucia Brightblade, she just slayed the dragon that has been causing the baron so much trouble, and she does whatever she wants.

The guard has several questions which are not interesting. After they get through the boring and unimportant questions he apparently wants to know why, if she is capable of slaying dragons, she is wasting her time handing out bread rolls to slum dwellers. 

That's a question she needs to be able to answer adequately for her own sake even if she doesn't actually feel the need to explain herself to this city guard, so she thinks about it very carefully. 

"When you tell me that I cannot feed and heal the poor because I did not ask the Baron's permission, do you feel a sense of burning rage at the existence of injustice? Like this is an intolerable situation and you must at once find a way to fix it so that the poor may be fed and healed?" 

The guard does not. 

"I do. I feel it quite strongly. - And when you walk past the hungry and sick on the street do you feel a fierce sense of longing for a better world, an urge to help them that comes from deep in your soul, or a need to fix the world because your heart cries out in empathy?"

The guard admits that he does not particularly feel that way, and that in fact he thinks beggars on the streets are unsightly and ought to be cleaned out of civilized places.

"I do. And I suppose I also see, in a calculated sort of sense, the reasons why preparing for slaying the next dragon might be a better use of my time. Many people can feed the poor, and fewer can slay dragons; feeding the poor only helps a few people today, whereas slaying the dragon will cease its reign of terror over many thousands and keep people safe from it for however many more centuries it might have lived."

So, the guard wants to know, why listen to that inner voice that says to waste her time on sick children?

"If I ignore the voice enough, I worry I will kill it - it is a delicate thing - and then I will become like you."

The guard is offended.

"And then I will think it is an ordinary and sensible sort of thing to do, to tell people that they cannot feed the poor because the Baron said so, rather than an unconscionable horror. Rather than a thing that makes me conclude I must overthrow any Baron who dares think himself higher than the moral law within me and the stars of heaven above me. And if too many people become like that, it will be possible for such Barons to reign, without immediately being torn down."

(The guard looks like he thinks he is sort of supposed to arrest Lucia for that but he does not particularly think he's going to win a fight with a paladin who can cast Create Food and Water twice so he'll go for reinforcements whenever he gets out of this really annoying conversation.)

Lucia heals the sick when she's angry because it's something she really can't fuck up; disease is bad, she makes the disease go away, the world gets better, there's no wrong choices. She has to admit, she kind of fucked that up in an entirely predictable way that she knows she fucks up when she's angry. It was deeply satisfying to tell the guard he was entirely too comfortable compromising with sin, but it probably didn't help anyone.

Chalk that up on the list of reasons she's merely at five per cent.

She doesn't actually want to fight the baron's entire guard missing half of her spells, and she spent a chunk on the road back from dragonslaying and a chunk on helping the poor. A sensible person would skip town. A perfect person would give a speech so incredibly persuasive that the Baron just reformed without any need for bloodshed.

"Sorry," Lucia says because that's a good start. "Just - you have to listen, when your heart is telling you things. Otherwise it'll stop telling you things. Most important is to not do things that hurt your heart, because it'll stop telling you things faster. It should hurt your heart to serve this Baron, and I'm sorry if it doesn't, but... you can still learn, if you want to change what you serve?"

Yep, she's going to need to get better at being persuasive. 

A sensible person would skip town. A perfect person would somehow reform and convert the Baron without bloodshed. Lucia, no matter how much she tries to be a perfect person, is ultimately still a paladin. She has a toolbox with a hammer in it and the hammer smites evil.

So the guard goes to fetch his reinforcements, and Lucia does her best to clear the civilians out of the streets and persuade the children that no they really don't want to watch from the windows, and she gets her Shield of Faith ready and sits in the centre of the street sharpening her sword.

"I killed that dragon," she informs the Baron when he shows up on his horse. (She wishes he didn't bring the horse. Killing horses makes her feel bad and not hurting them makes her life difficult.) "I don't actually think you want to pick a fight with me. I have a really magic sword and a really magic shield and some excellent magic armour and - I'm just checking you know what a high level paladin is?" 

"You're one woman. I have an army. If you somehow did manage to fight me and win, the entire kingdom would be after you."

...ah, so that's what finally makes it the right time to overthrow the king. Convenient if the call is made for her, she supposes.

"You very temporarily have an army. If I kill you then the army has a wide variety of options, and being a dragonslayer and all, I also have - well, know the location of - a kind of inconceivable amount of money. I'm offering-"

(She has to stop her little speech to speak the final words of that Shield of Faith because, as predicted, he's trying to kill her now.) 

Lucia's small army is on the way to the capital. She's found a little valley to spend the night, her people have filled it with a forest of white canvas, and she's walked through the encampment checking on the welfare of every guard and cook. There's a strangely peaceful beauty to the pennants lying still in the wind, the spears piled in racks, and the golden pink hue in the campfire smoke as the sun dips gradually below the horizon.

It's finally time to settle down for the night. Her own tent is no different to anyone else's - a white canvas square with just enough room for her armour and her bedroll and a little writing desk. There's no time to write; she wraps herself in her cloak and curls up in the bedroll.

Just about everything aches. 

This is the most dangerous night. This and tomorrow. 

Danger? Where? Monsters? The king ambushing us? 

No. I have pretty limited foresight, but it tells me you Fall today or tomorrow. If you could not do that, that'd be great? 

Today is literally - the easiest day I've had in a long time. Didn't have to kill anything. Nobody's squabbling, the army actually seems pretty much united behind the goal. We have enough supplies. The terrain's been easy and the sunset was gorgeous. I was thinking we might even take it a little slow tomorrow so everyone gets a break, and maybe I could get a chance to write home -

oh. 

Well maybe a perfect daughter would make time to write home. Maybe it's a sin that I haven't. 

You weren't writing home just now, though. You were curling up in your bedroll because you're exhausted from the march and the fighting and the leading and you thought you ought to get enough sleep so you could start bright and early tomorrow. I can read your thoughts. 

Yeah. But I overthrew three barons and I'm on my way to overthrow the king and I still spent an hour yesterday trying to find the fucking lost stuffed toy for one of my soldiers' kids. I'm so fucking done with not having enough sleep and now my god is telling me I'm going to fall right when I thought we'd earned a slow day. 

Can I catch a break actually? For once? Can I catch a fucking break?