"That sounds like an excessively complicated system!  I think you should... do the right thing, that's what the right thing is.  I suppose it makes some sense to split evil up that way, that some evil is done by law and some by lawlessness, but I don't think you can split good like that.  Sometimes the law is good and then you should follow it, and sometimes it's evil and you should break it," he slows down briefly, clearly having some sort of feeling about this, "but it depends on the law, not on... your alignment, whatever that is."

"—Uh, I might've explained badly — Lawful people think everyone should follow the law, not just Lawful people. Alignment is — what sort of person you are? But it's not that being Lawful Evil makes it so people have to think a certain way, it's... if they didn't think everyone should follow the law, they wouldn't be Lawful? If you think people should sometimes break the law you're probably Chaotic or Neutral."

...She is not at all sure that that was actually a better explanation. "I can try to explain a different way if that didn't make sense."

"I'm... not sure what the point is?  I believe you that your village divided people's personalities that way, but I don't understand what's important about it.  ... Or, no, it's that you think people go to different afterlives depending on this, but is there some reason they couldn't have lied to you about that?  The whole system sounds made up to me.  Like they were trying to convince you there's something more important than the difference between good and evil."

"—That's not why I think it matters, people should do the right thing even if it means they don't get the afterlife they'd've wanted the most. But—" 

She stops to think for a moment. 

It... probably wouldn't be that hard to lie about there being Lawful or Chaotic people? Definitely not harder than lying about the entire country of Cheliax, so if that part was really made up, then maybe that part of alignment could be too. (Actually, if the whole country was made up, then the Asmodeans probably couldn't be Lawful, at least not the ones in charge who knew everything, because they'd have known they were breaking the laws for the rest of the country.) She'd thought there were ways to check with magic, but that could be fake magic even if the rest of it is real.

(And she doesn't think the whole country was made up, she doesn't think her mother was lying about studying in Egorian, but she's not admitting she had a mother who was a wizard, and sometimes it's hard not to forget that something he said has to be wrong, if it's something she only knows for reasons she's pretending aren't true.)

Either way, she thinks it... makes sense that the Asmodeans would want people to think that being Lawful was important? Not for the reason he said — the Asmodeans didn't say that being Good was unimportant, they said it was worse — but because they didn't want people going around breaking the law, or what they said was the law. That doesn't mean Mr. Dąbrowski definitely is right, but — he could be, it's not like with the healing.

It feels very important to her that she's the sort of person who'll do the right thing no matter what the law says. It doesn't feel like quite the same thing as just saying that she's Good. But... it can be important, and not be... true about the whole world? That feels like it makes sense but she's not sure she could put it into proper words.

"—You're right, they could've been lying about that, and if they were lying about that then maybe they were working with demons after all."

That still sounds a little circular - if they were lying about the afterlives then they were probably also lying about how demons are importantly different from devils or whatever exactly it is she thinks - but she has the main idea, and they've probably had enough arguing about complicated things for now.  "Yes.  I don't really know what they were doing - it's just that most of whatever they told you was probably made up, and it's important not to get stuck thinking as if they were right about how the world works."  Which must be a really hard thing to do - trying to think about the world and consciously take out all the assumptions you grew up with.  "Hopefully things here will start making more sense to you when you see more of them."

Nod.

"Did you have more questions about anything, so far?"

Not that she seems shy about asking questions, fortunately.  But she still seems... something.  Closed off, like she's scared or doesn't trust him - both of which would be entirely reasonable and there's little he can do about them.

She has kind of a lot of questions, really, but she doesn't think she's going to run out anytime soon.

"Why does the water here taste so, uh," (Bad. Cursed.) "strange?"

"Does it?  It seems normal to me, but I suppose it would have to.  Strange how?"

"...Not like the water the priest made, and not like the water from the lake either?"

"I don't think I've ever drank water from a lake - you're not supposed to do that, it can make you sick. So I guess I wouldn't know.  Spring water is fine to drink, have you had that?"

"...I had some rainwater that landed in a rock? As far as I could tell it tasted normal."

"I'm pretty sure I've also had rainwater and it also tasted normal..  Maybe they're adding some chemicals to the tap water and you're better at noticing them than I am?"

"What are chemicals?" (She's not really clear on what a tap is, either.)

"Uh... Technically everything's a chemical - everything that's a single substance, like salt or sugar or metal or water, they'll teach you all about it in school - but what I mean is maybe they add in a bit of some medical substance to keep the water clean, or something like that."

"The priest said the water he made wouldn't make people sick, but I don't know if he was telling the truth."

He half doesn't want to get into another confusing conversation about how these people either pretended to do magic or possibly had actual demonic powers, when he doesn't know enough about either to tell which it was, let alone explain it well enough to make sense to her.  But he should at least find out more about what her life was like.

"How did that work?  Did you see him make water or did he just say he did?"

If she had a circuit priest, she probably would have seen him make water sometimes, even if it weren't quite as often.

"I saw him do it — not every time, but some of them. He would hold his hands over the cistern and wave them like so—" She demonstrates as best as she can. "And he'd say Create Water, and then water would appear. About this much" (she makes another gesture, around the size of a beach ball) "at once, but it's the kind of magic he could do as much as he wanted — uh, as opposed to the healing. Healing's first circle so he could only do it a couple times a day."

"He could probably fake that if the cistern was just connected to a water pipe and he was good at tricks, but... I don't know."  It doesn't seem much like something demonic magic would do.  Unless there was something wrong with the water, maybe, and she did say it tasted different...

He wants to talk to the priest about all this.  He's not at all sure he should.  He trusts the seal of the confessional, but she has no reason to, and it would... feel wrong, to do something she wouldn't want just because he thinks it's safe.  And he can't really ask her, because he doesn't know her nearly well enough to be sure she'd say what she wanted rather than what she thought she should.

"I never saw anything like that, but I guess he'd've probably have tried to keep it hidden." She's pretty sure she'd've noticed if there were pipes for the small one in the manor, but the cisterns in Sofrituró would've been bigger, so it might've been harder to tell. (Magic can turn things invisible, but if he was hiding pipes with magic it means he could do some kind of magic.)

"I imagine so.  ... Anyway, see if the water at my house tastes strange too, and I'll see if I can figure anything out about it."

Nod.

She... should probably ask some of her other questions, she thinks. What she most wants to know right now is what the point of locking people in prison is, rather than killing them if they did something really bad or some smaller punishment if they didn't, but it seems like it might be a bad idea to keep pointing out that they haven't had her executed for stabbing someone. 

"Who are Mary and Pontius Pilate?"

Oh god, he's really not going to be any good at explaining these things.  (A note for his next confession, that.)

"Mary is the Mother of God-- uh, no, I should probably start earlier than that.  God sent his Son to become human and die for our sins," he finds his voice slipping into the ritual cadence and phrasing without meaning it, because when do you actually have a conversation about this instead of affirming it in church?  "Mary was the human woman who through a miracle gave birth to the Child Jesus who was God's Son.  She was without sin, and was taken up to Heaven at the end of her life.  We pray to her a lot.  Jesus grew up with her and her husband - that's Saint Joseph - and when he was an adult, he started telling people who he was and how to live better lives.  Pontius Pilate was the governor who sentenced him to die on the Cross.  For..." what for, exactly, really? The story doesn't focus much on it, reasonably enough given that it had to happen in any case, "causing unrest with his teachings, I think.  Politics."  Bit of a wry smile.  Even back then, they had politics.  "...He didn't really want to, and I think he regretted it afterward."

That's still really confusing!

Why did their god send Jesus to die for other people's Evil deeds? (That makes it seem like he isn't just Pharasma but worshipped as a man, that's kind of the opposite of how Pharasma works. ...Of how she thinks Pharasma works, but if Pharasma liked to punish people for random other people's Evil deeds she would have expected the Asmodeans to make a bigger deal out of it.) Also, how does a god become human? She didn't know it could work like that rather than the other way around. (Can gods sleep with humans??) He said Mary was human, but also they pray to her, does that mean she's an ascended god? (Maybe that's what a saint is?) He did say she was 'taken up' to Heaven, which is kind of a weird way to talk about someone being sent to Heaven, so that seems like it could fit together. The part about Jesus being executed for stirring up unrest makes sense, and probably suggests that the church here really is Neutral rather than Lawful, but she doesn't see why it matters if Pontius Pilate didn't want to, or felt bad about it. Even if he felt bad, he still killed someone because of what someone else did!!

"Is it common here for gods to turn into humans? I'd never heard of that happening before, only the other way around."

That one's easy, at least.

"Well, there's only one God.  So nothing he does is common, exactly.  ...Unless he does it a lot, but he only did that once."