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.)