"—Well, what would I say to them? 'I'm having a problem I could solve easily by just being a Good person?'"

"So perhaps it would help if there were a standard script."

 "Maybe, sir, if I'd really been thinking about it."

  "Why do you even want to have paladins doing... whatever it is you care about?"

"I do not specifically want this. But if paladins can't do it that means Evil's being done by whoever has the job instead, under my command, and it's merely not obvious each time, and that is worth fixing if I can think of a way."

  "You can't win a war if everyone's got to follow the paladin rules. Even Iomedae didn't try to do that."

"I am not planning to make everyone follow paladin rules. Small incremental improvements are probably all I can hope for here."

"You could ban alcohol. ...It would be really unpopular, but you could. Some of the paladin orders do."

"I am alas using alcohol to patch other problems but it has crossed my mind. Certainly drunkenness on duty would never be permissible."

"Well. You can Fall even for things that happen off-duty. —Sorry if that's not what you were looking for, all they told me was that the Knight-Commander wanted to speak to Fallen paladins."

"Presumably off-duty you would not be around prisoners? Perhaps I misunderstand you."

"Banning alcohol won't help with prisoners unless people are already breaking the rules. It might help make people less likely to do Evil things in general."

"I follow you. Anything else I should know?"

 "They checked me over afterwards, and I was strong enough to read in my own right and still Lawful Good, and that was — upsetting all by itself. Because I'd had time to calm down and think about what I'd done, and by then I felt like I didn't have any right to be Good."

  "It doesn't really matter what you do because either way we're all going to die.'

 "I don't think that's true."

"I don't know how to explain this, but — I don't know how much thinking about paladins will help with making everyone else do less Evil. If you had a man who went to see the whores every day, and one day he realized what he was doing was wrong, but he wasn't perfect, he still went occasionally, that's a lot better but he still couldn't be a paladin."

"I am not trying to make everyone into a paladin. If he goes less often he will do less harm; it remains useful to know that a paladin can't do it even once because that makes it unambiguously an evil act."

"I don't know if he'd definitely Fall the first time if he was in an order that allowed whoring, but none of them do, even the ones that allow drinking or gossip or things like that."

 "I think he would even if it were only once. It's not like anyone ever needs to go whoring."

"At any rate that is somewhat tangent because there are not duties I need to know to whom I may assign them that involve whoring. What would be a good standard script to allow someone to ask for - a more visible support to their conduct than Iomedae Herself is, if they needed that or thought they might?"

 This is not actually the most miserable conversation this person has ever had but it's up there! "I don't know, sir. —The problem is that being the sort of person who'd give in to the temptation to do Evil is bad, and that makes it harder to talk about. Maybe if it were for anyone who had noticed they were feeling impulses to do Evil, even if they felt sure they were strong enough to resist them, something like — 'I've noticed myself feeling tempted to,' and then describe whatever it is, 'and although I know it would be wrong to act on these feelings, and I don't intend to betray the trust the Goddess has placed in me, I want you to be aware so that you can place me where I can best be used.'"

  "Just what this crusade needs, a column of paladins lining up to tell their commanders they thought a whore was pretty."

 Confused blinking.

"...I'll consider that. Thank you both. Dismissed."

The ex-paladins are visibly relieved that this conversation is over. They leave.

He might need some of Ser Tirabade's valuable time on this one. He has SEEN HER handling stuff that was not if literally a budget at least highly relevant to the concept of a budget.

She salutes. "Knight-Commander. How can I help you today?"

"I am confused about the extent to which paladins are under circumstances that do not require, say, immunity to disease, kept insulated from certain duties. Do you think this is actually necessary or something that adequate training and support could permit more flexibility on?"

"I expect that would be possible in many though not all circumstances with sufficient training, yes — the Eagle Watch assigned paladins to some duties that conventional wisdom in the Mendevian army would have considered unwise, and so far as I was able to observe our paladins were not unusually likely to Fall. —Though we were not entirely free of such incidents, to be clear. The main issue I foresee in expanding that to the entire Crusade is that it would in fact require quite a lot of resources to cover every paladin in the army, particularly given the army's, ah, preexisting institutions."

"What kind of resources?"

"Time to carry out the training. Instructors who are capable of teaching people how to carry out their new duties in a manner befitting a paladin, teaching small enough groups that they'll notice if someone hasn't absorbed the material or is temperamentally unsuited to the work. Commanders who understand both their men and the relevant constraints well enough that they neither decide it's simply not worth the risk of assigning paladins to those roles nor assume that any paladin who's been through the training can definitely be assigned to any of them. Ideally, enough qualified personnel that we can have the paladins initially supervised in their new duties by someone who will notice potential problems before it's too late, and enough slack that we can actually provide them with the supports we know to help — putting them in groups that understand their duties to include supporting their fellows in holding to the necessary standard of conduct even when fewer men would be sufficient for the assignment itself, ensuring that they're getting enough sleep and that their duties aren't so heavy that they're incapable of completing them all, and so on."