Being dead is to being alive as having a host body is to being just a Yeerk alone, sort of. There is still sensation. Interpretable, even, if you put the effort in. But there's very little of it, and other things are missing that shouldn't be. A sense of place, of existing somewhere in particular rather than just in general. A sense of time. Maybe it has been an hour. Maybe it has been ten years. There have been interactions. Brief ones. Distant, bureaucratic.
And suddenly there is more sensation, things that parse as voices speaking, as people pacing and arguing with each other.
" - hear the jurisdiction argument first."
"If there's a finding that the jurisdiction argument might be decisive, we can hear the jurisdiction argument. I just don't want to spend a week on that and then go, oh look, Neutral Evil either way -"
"That's the rule for individual exclusions of short duration. Jurisdiction is prior to that - look, there's precedent, here -"
"I'll hear the jurisdiction argument. I recommend you don't take a week about it."
"Actions taken in the Material Plane but outside Golarion are not properly within the scope of this court. If you wanted to rule more narrowly, you could say 'outside this star system' or 'thousands of light-years away' or 'in a society not causally entangled with ours in any way', those produce the same result. Three arguments, the 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."
"That's an argument that can be raised in the case of each individual decision, that there's unusual uncertainty about the reasonableness of the defendant's state of knowledge, it's not a general defense to anything at all you do if it's far enough away."
"This is a jurisdiction argument, not a state of information argument, you can't answer a jurisdiction argument by saying we can remedy lack of jurisdiction by taking the case we don't have jurisdiction over and then trying to adjust for the court's own confusion -"
"Hell vs Izabetta's a state of information case."
"Does the court want clarification of my point about Hell vs Izabetta."
"Not really, no."