There are patterns you can lean on in the courts but any one of them might give way if another one pulled on it hard enough. You're not responsible for what you do as a child, maybe unless it was really fucked up and you obviously knew what you were doing, and if you're an adult who definitely didn't know what you were doing maybe that grace extends, if you want to call it grace to wind up in the Boneyard, by stipulation clueless, and be buffeted by whatever outsiders are parking there with their sales pitches today. It's evil to hurt people, unless they deserved it, as long as that's why you did it, probably, and defending the innocent is actively good, unless the innocent is you in which case it's just neutral maybe, and of course you can't go too far, and you're responsible for what you do under whatever ludicrously fucked-up circumstances your life cooked you into, but less if you were coerced, but really everyone always has a choice, but it's just as culpable to bend the knee to the threat of death when you know you read Evil as it is when you know you read Good, so self-defense is not actually all that good of a defense, so to speak. And you have to feed the kids but you can't steal, at least not from anyone who needs it, and definitely it's worse if you're taking any chances on it turning violent for all that starvation hurts as bad as a stab wound, and any passing prick with at least one functioning testicle can make it evil to go about the rest of your life how you'd planned it instead of as a disgraced mother, it might even be evil to kill him for trying just in case you misunderstood something or he did, and it's evil for him too, maybe, unless he was too drunk to be responsible for his actions, but actually maybe a bit less if he can avoid knowing what he's done to you and drops a bit of gold on a worthy charity later, even if he gets scammed or the charity fails in all its endeavors, because that's the kind of risk that's all right to take but if you do something really reckless then you're going to pay for everyone who was counting on you to succeed. And you can rely on the righteous gods, for faith is a virtue, and when they fail you and you have nothing left to go on with, it's your own fault; you should have been made of stronger stuff, though asking Pharasma to go back in time and build you better has never worked, not even once.
The court is a big blundering asshole and it's unsteady enough that someone who can roll with its moron wobbling can use it to hit the devils where it hurts, sometimes.
Beatriu really tried, is the thing. She had only so much trying in her and she used all of it. And if running out of trying had killed her dead, if she'd run out of it in the beating heart first and not the withering soul, it'd be open and shut even for this deplorable beast of spiderweb rules, all the petty childhood harm simple to categorize as before the age of reason and the only real decision ever in her life to pour everything she had into that baby that should never have been gotten on her. But is Heaven going to show up for Beatriu? A simpleminded whore who when she was too old to work went and begged in the newly beggar-receptive streets of Westcrown for a startlingly long time till she froze one winter? Nirvana shows up, but will they treat it like anything other than Baby Owl's First Case To Practice Watching People Get Sent To Hell? The Boneyard won't want her, of course, and it's anyhow too late to find the one baby she tried for or even any of the ones she didn't, in there, even if being dead pulls together enough of the old Beatriu to manage it. Is Elysium aware she ever existed?
(The Maelstrom is not, collectively, very aware that Beatriu ever existed. But one person who knew about her in life made it there, and the same can't be said for Elysium. No Chaotic afterlife can pull itself together regularly enough to catch everyone. But he'll catch everyone he can remember.)
He smiles at the devil. The devil smiles back. You're allowed, in court, to smile at each other in the most vicious fashion, though you aren't allowed to pull out claws and fire. You're allowed, in court, to use the court process to beat the devil straight back home with a black mark on its record, because how dare it make itself a party to this case, how dare it try to touch Beatriu -
It doesn't always work, but Calistria's not Iomedae. You don't fight only when you're sure. You fight when fuck that guy.
"Of course," he says. "The only significant cluster of decisions in the decedent's life took place when she reacted to her first pregnancy. Events previous fall clearly under the standard childhood provision, being as she had no exceptional reflectivity or maturity for her age and species. Events subsequent to the baby's death, M'Naghten applies."
"While of course we don't have access to the timeline in which the child survived, all of the decedent's actions during the period when that seemed plausible as an outcome were aimed at it. Making enormous personal sacrifices - subjecting herself to displacement from her childhood home, abuse by her replacement guardian, opportunistic violence and violation from various authority figures and clients in order to get through school and make ends meet - to save a baby is Good; but if it's your own baby it's not spectacularly Good, in re whatsherface -"
"Well, it's better than the other way around and the Maelstrom does sometimes send counsel who know exactly what they mean but can't communicate it to me for love or souls," snaps the nosoi. "Maelstrom, continue."
The counsel for the Maelstrom beams at the devil, ear to ear, and goes on. "So, morally Neutral. And she spent this time where she was making the only significant choices of her life going against the wishes of her mother, the recommendation of the father," you are allowed to spit on the not-a-floor of the courtroom, if you don't make too much of a habit of it, and the owl from Nirvana looks affronted, the prissy bitch, have fun back home redeeming clerics of Asmodeus who like to knock up twelve-year-olds if you have any, if you've ever met one in your charmed fucking life, "of the baby, the prescribed societal course of action for a pregnant girl of her age and social position. Absolutely anyone would have told her to abort. The predictable legible thing to do that would have let her take up her assigned place in her civilization, would have been to kill the baby, either before or after delivering it, but Beatriu wouldn't. Chaos."
He can read Beatriu's mind, here, it's a privilege of the job. She is, as she always has been, locked in 4697. They asked her if she understood where she was and she did but she was imagining she'd caught the same infection that killed the baby. Esteve. Baby Esteve. He hadn't actually learned it, at the time. He knows it now, because Esteve has never left the forefront of her mind and it's right there. She prayed so fucking hard to Pharasma and Pharasma did fuckall. If Pharasma cared about any of the things they say she does, there would be no Urgathoa to steal into babies' little noses at night, but Pharasma's not so much something you can reason with as just... the biggest asshole you hit other assholes with. They asked Beatriu if she knew she could make choices that affected other people but none of her choices in the end affected anything that lasted. Has anyone ever asked Pharasma that question?
"If you find the M'Naghten cite unconvincing I'll say that she did live out the rest of her working life under the roof of a decidedly Calistrian whorehouse, at first covertly so - subversiveness is Chaotic - and later openly - claiming Calistria in broad daylight in a country that only loosely tolerates her and routinely debated sanctioning her worship is not exactly Lawful behavior. She did not have, and was justified in not having, the belief that she could keep any of her subsequent children alive by merely applying every resource available to her to the problem; trying that with more resources didn't work at all. Smothering them was quick and merciful; she didn't starve or expose or poison them. Babies smother themselves without even waking up all the time. But really, she wasn't present for any of that. She was not able - as a matter of incapacity, not a matter of judgment-relevant choice - to consider what was going on after the first baby died, in a lucid frame of mind. She made one choice in her life and I tell you it was Chaotic Neutral."
The Maelstrom went last in turn order. There's a little procedure after that. Closing statements. He just goes over everything over again; it's the one argument that might wedge itself under a wobbly leg of the hateful stupid behemoth of the system and knock it over onto the devil's fucking head. Nothing new here. M'Naghten and the one thing Beatriu did with her life that ought to have been fucking pleasing unto Pharasma, cursed be her name.
