"I don't think there's an epidemic of people raping their wives and I'm not confident that stopping them would be bad for their immortal souls. I just wanted you all to be aware of the constraint generally."

"I mean, if it's not illegal, probably it isn't chaotic to do it, whereas if people do illegal things they don't get caught at because they happen behind closed doors perhaps that's worse? I'm not sure if that's the position you're taking."

"That's one of the considerations. The other one is that it might be Evil, in which case we would want to stop people."

"Who decides if it's evil? How do you tell?"

"The alignment system decides. It's debated whether that's just Pharasma's personal intuitions or whether she's consulting a deeper principle. There are spells that can detect the alignments of sufficiently powerful people, and usually you test whether something is evil by having someone who is not evil do it repeatedly and then re-checking them and then of course hurrying their opportunity to repent if it turned out to count as evil. Sometimes you can figure it out from observational evidence. We determined that it should be illegal to rape your slaves through mostly observational research."

"Please don't try to get somebody to rape their wife for experimental data, Mirelótë might explode."

(Khemet and Hemaka glance at each other. Anaander snorts). 

"I think it might be one of those things where intent would matter anyway. We will look into it, we won't hurt anyone in the course of looking into it."

"I'd suggest you have a look at my Sudoku square -"

("It wasn't a very clever reference, I said -")

"- but he also goes in for torture so it probably won't tell you much."

He nods at someone anyway. 

His father comes in and receives the tablet in language-learning mode and starts playing with it.

"Lawful evil," Khemet tells Cor.

"Probably easy to pull off lawful if above the law no matter how much deception and betrayal you find convenient!"

He bites his lip, just slightly.

Snort.

Cor is not the least bit apologetic.

"Should I try the scry again or is it better to wait?"

"Can chipped Elves see in the dark?"

"...yes, but I was assuming the scry was like a camera, it's a little harder to make those do more colors."

"You can see through a scry with your normal vision."

"Oh." She accepts the ball and the others cluster around again and she tries it. "- well, she's out in the open now. She's purple with white hair. Otherwise she looks like Pelape and me. She's hiking with a bunch of people down a road in a desert. Nobody seems to be in a particularly good mood about it."

"Shall we send people to fetch her?"

"How will that parse, in local terms, especially if she's of a species people summarize as 'an evil race'?"