What. This is very confusing. 

- why is he still dead - he doesn't know how long it's been but surely longer than it takes to cast Resurrection - where's Carissa - also dead, presumably - or at least he hopes so, it's also hard to retrieve his memory of what was happening when he died but he knows the alternatives are all worse - 

It's so hard to keep track of what's happening, there are voices saying words but it's a struggle to string any of it together into a coherent timeline. 

It seems like it's probably important?

Mhalir isn't even sure if he can speak but he tries anyway, "you have Alloran," and then he stops because whatever is going on here this probably doesn't help his case at all, but - it's true and relevant and so he's saying it, that's the sort of shape he is... 

"Pause to speak to our client -"

"Granted."

"Do you know your name," one of the voices with associated vague impression of officiousness and dustiness says to him.

That's a weird question, why wouldn't he, but he answers on automatic. "Mhalir four-three-seven-six." 

"Do you know where you are."

"...No?" 

"Filing a request for accommodations under the Fair Trial Act -"

 "Yes, yes." Impatiently.

"He was briefed!"

"There's no procedural defense to not meeting the first six provisions of the Fair Trial Act, and conducting a trial while the defendant doesn't know where he is is a very clear -"

"The request was granted, argument on it will cease."

Someone addresses Mhalir again. "Does it sound to you like we are speaking in a language you understand, using words that you are familiar with, at a speaking speed you can follow?"

"Yes." Which is confusing, come to think of it, because he's not wearing a host body right now. In fact, he doesn't think he has a body at all. "I - am finding it hard to remember what was said in order, though. I know I am dead? Is this how it is supposed to work - I thought it would just be...magic...?" 

"It's got to be the species thing," someone says. "The appropriate boosts to working memory look different."

"I'm working on it."

"The court requests an investigation into why this wasn't determined before trial."

"The court will recall that we're pretty godsdamned overwhelmed right now, which is in part the defendant's fault -"

"That's prejudicial."

"Sorry. I'm missing my best friend's funeral."

"That's prejudicial."

Someone...does something... and now Mhalir is sitting in a room with six other people at different desks. One of them is an angel in a pressed formal military uniform of some kind; one of them is a spinning ball of interlocking bits of metal, one of them is a scowling devil, one is a cat, one looks like an aged and dignified human and sits at the nicest desk in the middle, and one is in the corner, perched on his desk, taking notes. 

"Do you know your name," says the cat.

"Mhalir four-three-seven-six." Did they ask him that question already? He thinks so but it's already slipping into the indiscriminate fog of 'not now.' 

"Do you know where you are."

He looks around the room. It's still not quite clear how he's doing this, because he's still not in a host body, but - magic, presumably. 

"Somewhere in the Golarion afterlife. You are - deciding where I will go?"

He was about to ask if they were deciding whether he would go to Hell, but one, he doesn't read Lawful, and two, he doesn't know if there still is a Hell. 

He vaguely wants to apologize to the one who's missing their best friend's funeral but he doesn't know which person at which desk that voice corresponds to. 

"Yes," says the cat. "Every soul is entitled to a trial, at which it is decided which afterlife matches their actions and choices while living. The trial takes place in the Boneyard, the Neutral afterlife. You are allowed to speak at the trial if you would like. Does it sound to you like we are speaking in a language you understand, using words that you are familiar with, at a speaking speed you can follow?"

"Yes." 

"Do you understand that you had, while alive, the capacity to take actions, and that those actions had effects on the world and on other people?"

"- Yes." This seems self-evident enough that he's confused why they're even asking.

"Do you understand that the purpose of this court is to determine your alignment and which afterlife you are assigned to?"

Mhalir starts to say yes, and stops, because he's suddenly overwhelmingly sad and confused.

"I - I thought Aroden would raise us..." He trails off, too late, unsure how much information the court has and whether he should be trying not to reveal things - but surely it's pointless, surely they can read everything out of his mind anyway. "Carissa, my host - is she here - can I talk to her..." 

It's sinking in, now, that he's still dead. That the court is talking about where to send him, on the assumption that will be permanently.

He's not the same alignment as Carissa. If they both stay dead, he won't ever see her again. 

"You will be able to talk to other petitioners in your assigned afterlife after your trial has been completed," says the note-taker in the corner, from rote. "Trials are sometimes delayed in the case of an imminent anticipated resurrection but in this case there is no imminent anticipated resurrection."

"Are you satisfied with the accommodations," the dignified man says to the cat. 

"Yes," says the cat. 

"Then let's get this started. Jurisdiction-"

"I present the court with three arguments that we don't have jurisdiction over Mhalir's actions before he reached Golarion's star system," says the angel. "First,  from Elysium vs. Ellostar, -2334 - in cases where we have very limited information beyond that directly coded in the soul about events, we lack the resources required to issue conventional judgments. Someone in Katheer kills a rival. We evaluate his situation, his intent, the victim's situation and intent, the local laws, his understanding of the local laws, "the bulk of the information required to determine whether a killing is lawful and whether it could have been reasonably understood to advance a chosen value system is contained not in the subject's mind but in his environment", that's from Hell vs. Izabetta, 2117. Second, jurisdictional overlap, other parts of the universe have their own gods and in some cases their own courts with remit over the souls of the dead -"

"Mhalir was subject to none of those," says the devil.

"If we interpret the law as suggesting that we have jurisdiction conditional on no one else having it, the court will have to do fact-finding on whether that's correct, fact-finding that in some cases the court lacks the resources to satisfactorily conduct, Axis vs Helen, -1820. If we interpret our jurisdiction narrowly, as existing not over the set of all worlds that we do not know to have another legal system but as existing over our own world only, then the court does not have to go try to figure out what other jurisdictions Mhalir may have at various points been subject to. Constraining those domains in which the court must conduct fact-finding to those in which the court has the capabilities to do it to consistent standards of accuracy is one of the primary justifications for jurisdiction, Axis vs Aspex, 4103."

"Axis vs Aspex considers statute of limitations, not spatial jurisdiction, and has historically been narrowly construed," says the whirling ball of gears. 

"Technically," says the angel, "there is not a meaningful difference between temporal and spatial limits to jurisdiction, when we're talking about other star systems."

" - that's persuasive, I'm concurring," says the whirling ball of gears.

Mhalir is more able to track what's going on, now, having a visual helps, but he's also having trouble because he feels suddenly, overwhelming, scared and helpless and tired and sad. 

Trials are sometimes delayed in the case of an imminent anticipated resurrection but in this case there is no imminent anticipated resurrection.

He wants to ask how the fight went in Hell, if Aroden is alive, but he's also scared to know the answer. And he's not sure it'll help anything, here, that devil looks very upset and angry. Understandably so even if Aroden died seconds after he did and they lost the war with Asmodeus, because they had already melted the entire first circle of Hell and much of the second.

And it sort of doesn't matter who won, because he's not headed for Hell, anyway. Presumably he'll end up going to Abaddon, the Neutral Evil afterlife, and probably his soul will be eaten and he'll cease existing, and it won't matter at all what else happens in the rest of forever, because he's already lost. 

Mhalir misses Carissa. He wishes, desperately, that there had been time to - what, say goodbye? 

Vaguely he remembers that he might have said something, before, at some comparable point to this. 

This time he stays silent. 

"Third point on jurisdiction, in general we find adult souls participating in large-scale warfare and conquest aware of, or culpably ignorant of, the existence of Good and Evil, and evaluate them on the grounds that they knew, or could have known, about the existence of the afterlife system. We've modified criminal procedures considerably based on this assumption, over the last ten thousand years, from a baseline where the existence of Good and Evil wasn't widely known, see Heaven vs. Celeolis, -6412 -"

"A nonstandard cite from eleven thousand years ago?" the devil snaps at her. 

"I have the transcript here if the court and arguers want to consult it."

The dignified man accepts a sheet of paper from her. So does the devil. 

The angel continues. "The evaluative standard for persons effecting large-scale change in the world presumes they 'knew or should have known' what Good and Evil are and what probable fate those they killed would face, Hell vs Lee, 3409. In order to conduct an evaluation of actions taken under the reasonable, defensible, justified and presumptively correct assumption that there was no Good and Evil and no afterlives -- from the perspective of a universe that does have them -- we would be "inventing a legal standard from a perspective we cannot reasonably inhabit", Hell vs Zhu, 2281."

"That's not a standard cite either."

The angel passes out more transcripts. 

"Do we have further contributions on jurisdiction," says the dignified man. 

"No, your honor," says the angel. 

"We concur," says the cat. 

"On the first point we hold that the bounds of our uncertainty do not cross the zero point," says the ball of gears, "and reasoning from the lower bound in that case is preferable to throwing the question out entirely.  We concur on the second point, disagree on the third, you can treat murder in a world without an afterlife as precisely equivalent to someone in our world who is trapping and destroying souls, for which there is an established evaluative framework -"

"And approximately eight different applicable principles of nonequivalence," says the cat. 

"I object on all three points," says the devil.

"Noted. I'm going to rule narrowly on jurisdiction, as Heaven proposed -- actions taken in worlds not causally entangled with ours, by agents not natively ours, spatially and temporally distant enough to inhibit serious fact-finding, are not under our jurisdiction, with no implied precedent should any of those conditions fail to hold."

"Fine," the devil said. "In that case, Mhalir's first action of interest to this court was appearing, from the ether, already in possession of a slave he was torturing, and kidnapping and enslaving twenty more people. Evil, several magnifiers present."

"Also several mitigating factors," says the cat. 

Mhalir isn't sure if he's expected to say something here to defend himself.

He...doesn't feel very inclined to, right now. Arguably he should be trying very hard to - something - arguably this is one of the most critical and high-stakes moments of his, not life, of his death, deciding the fate of his soul... 

But he's very tired, in some deep way that has nothing to do with the physical body that he currently lacks, and it's hard to feel anything except helpless in the face of forces beyond his comprehension. 

He remembers that he was confused, and scared, and trying to make the right choices, but 'right' from a framework of wanting his people to win the war, and from an information state he very shortly later realized was incomplete. 

He waits to see if they're going to ask him any questions. 

They take a while to get around to it. Another hour of arguing through everything that he did in Golarion, from first contact through teleporting himself and Carissa into vacuum while invading Hell. They seem to mostly know what he was thinking and what he was hoping for without having to ask him. 

"I have to say, I'm not seeing Law," the dignified man says, once they've gotten through the whole record. 

"We're fine with Neutral Good," says the angel. 

"We're fine with Neutral Evil," says the devil.

"Do you regret anything, Mhalir?" says the cat.

"Yes." Mhalir regrets so many things; in this moment it feels like he regrets his entire life. All he ever wanted was to keep the promise he made to the stars, and he tried and failed to do that, over and over, and failed in ways that were far worse than if he had never tried at all. 

"I - regret Alloran. I knew I was wronging him very badly, I thought it was - a worthwhile tradeoff and - I was wrong. I regret not - noticing my confusion sooner," and he means in Golarion but he also means back in the Andalite war, noticing that his assumptions about his enemy were wrong.

"I - regret - that Seerow is dead..." That's not an action or decision he made, per se, even now he's not sure if there's anything he could have done then to turn history onto a different track, but he wishes so badly that he could instead have lived in the hypothetical world where Seerow never died. "I - I wish I had known sooner how to..."

Mhalir doesn't have words for the concept he means, it's all tangled together in his head, the things Iomedae said to him but he's not sure he understands them even now. He wanted to get an Atonement, he remembers, or was considering it, but probably that wouldn't even work when he doesn't understand Good, or what having allies means, or - something he can't even name because he doesn't understand it and he's too tired to try anymore. 

"A lot of very bad mistakes, which he corrected course from, sometimes into other mistakes, but - always trying to save as many people as possible," says the cat. "Neutral Good."

"A lot of enslaving and kidnapping people, culminating in blowing up an entire plane to secure an alliance to win a war he knew by then he shouldn't be fighting," says the devil. 

"Fighting Evil is Good," says the angel. "Heaven vs Tarelet,1253."

"Murdering a bunch of people in their homes because they're Evil specifically isn't Good. Hell vs Leurdorfell, 2096," he snaps back. 

"The necessary conditions of Hell vs Leurdorfell were that the defendant did not have in mind a mechanism by which the killing would overall make the world a better place inclusive of its effects on those killed, was not acting in alignment with an organization that did have such a mechanism in mind, and had alternatives to bring about the aim he hoped to obtain by mass executions of orcs. In this case none of those hold."

"Hell vs Leurdorfell proposes a balancing test: how much Good achieved? How much harm done to achieve it? Mhalir did lots of harm with good aims in mind, but did he achieve any good at all? Ever? At any point? Would the settlement in Hell be less satisfactory to Good if he had stayed out of it? No Good achieved, then the other arms of the test aren't even relevant."

"Carissa's not in Hell, and otherwise would be, that's Good achieved, enough to consider the other provisions of Leurdorfell."

"She otherwise might not be dead. Killing someone who makes Heaven and might if killed at a different point in their life have gone to an Evil afterlife is not a Good act, Abaddon vs Xar, 2554." He holds his hands up to the sky, his tail twitching. "If he hasn't done anything at all that had Good effects, there's no balancing test."

"I concur," says the cat.

The angel raises an eyebrow. 

"I concur," says the ball of gears. 

"You're playing at something," the judge says irritably to the cat. 

"We argue," the cat says, "that Mhalir has in fact done something that has large Good effects, which is releasing Alloran in Nirvana."

"Manumission of a person you enslaved in the first place cannot grant you in the eyes of this court more credit than you lost for enslaving someone in the first place," the devil says automatically. "Boneyard vs Ket, and Abaddon vs Tarrenar, and Hell vs Dialis, and -"

"The enslaving him is not the remit of this court, the releasing him is," says the cat. 

"That's abusing the jurisdiction ruling," says the devil. 

"I am inclined to agree," says the judge. 

"- but regardless," says the cat, "I identified the action with large Good effects as releasing Alloran in Nirvana, not as releasing him generally. In releasing him in Nirvana, Mhalir took on considerable personal risk and expense in order to cause Alloran to be in a Good afterlife situation, in the hopes that this would make the world better, for example by Alloran realizing the war was unnecessary or being able to communicate with the Good gods."

"Which didn't happen," says the devil. 

"The general intended effect -- the release making the world much better -- did happen. The specific intended effect didn't, but intending one Good outcome and achieving a related one suffices, Nirvana vs Greer, 2280, which explicitly considers the relevance of a Good effect intended generally but not specifically to Leurdorfell."

"Not a standard cite."

"I have the transcripts. Also Nirvana vs Eluar, 2471, where it was concluded that the defendant merited partial credit for the Good done by his released slave since he had released the slave in the specific hope that his bravery and courage would inspire him to the defense of Taldor, and his bravery and courage instead inspired him to slay a dragon."

"Also not a standard cite."

She hands him some more paper. "And Nirvana vs Sidduo, 4520, which finds the defendant merits credit for paroling a criminal in the hope that he would be able to feed his indigent family before they starved, as even though the defendant was unable to do that, he became an adventurer, raised them, and founded a soup kitchen..."

"I have heard of none of these cases," the judge says irritably. 

"Your honor, Alloran designed us a computer system so we can search through all of the cases for which transcripts exist and automatically see the most relevant ones. I recognize that at the moment it presents a slight inconvenience to the court but it also means that research for trials can happen much faster, so there are fewer delays, and much more accurately, so that relevant precedents are respected and widely known. Nirvana and Heaven have been using it for cases since the Godwar began. I have the transcripts here for the cases I just referenced. They're good law. I'm not trying to sneak anything past you."

"We want access to that," the devil says. 

"Build your own," says the cat. "Your honor, I argue that Mhalir released Alloran to Nirvana believing that if he became Good it would make the universe a better place, and that happened, and I have 6,468 more cases like that if you want to satisfy yourself there's enough precedent for counting it -"

"I don't want 6,468 more cases like that."

"So - enough Good done, then, to consider the other provisions of Leurdorfell?"

"Let me read these."

"It's not a fair trial if you have access to those and we don't," says the devil. 

"The Lawful afterlives having a better lawyer training system than the chaotic ones does not make the trial system unfair, Pharasma vs Calistria," says the angel, "it's applicable - do you want a transcript."

"I know Pharasma vs Calistria and I'm damn glad you're missing your best friend's funeral, you sanctimonious feathered-"

"ORDER," says the judge. "I'm very sick of this. Fine. He did some Good, we look at Leurdorfell -"

"Had in mind a mechanism by which the killing would make the world a better place, working closely with Iomedae, lacked alternatives to bring about the desired end, inapplicable, we fall back on Tarelet," says the cat instantly. 

"I concur," says the whirring ball of gears.

The room gets fuzzy, and then the sensory input he's getting stops resolving as a room, and then it's very quiet.

Mhalir - has very little idea what just happened. There was a lot of happening and it got very fast toward the end and then it stopped and -

...Your honor, I argue that Mhalir released Alloran to Nirvana believing that if he became Good it would make the universe a better place, and that happened...

In the midst of grey weariness, he feels a single note of satisfaction, that in the end, even if it wasn't a specific plan he carried out that achieved a particular goal, at least something worthwhile came out of this entire goddamned mess. 

- where is he - ?