"Why do you think you're Chaotic Good?"

"What, you mean, like, how did I get that way, or why do I think the Learned wasn't shitting me - okay sure obviously you mean the first thing. Okay, uh, it's pretty normal downstairs to be Chaotic, I get some of the abstract arguments for Law and I can keep my nose clean up here insofar as nobody's in my face but that's just not a way my life has ever gone historically. I would've maybe been less surprised by Chaotic Neutral? I haven't done a whole lot but most of the standout stuff is in fact stuff I didn't do, like, I didn't buy slaves, including by getting married, I... didn't kill anybody in dueling practice, like, I didn't get the risk down to zero, I zapped the other kids, but I also took the counterspells class and didn't set anyone on fire..."

"Why?"

"Is this supposed to be useful for Tanya somehow, she's the one who has to worry that Pharasma sends people to Hell for being drafted."

"It is supposed to; whether it'll be successful I can't say. Why are you 'upstairs'?"

"I was probably always going to come up eventually, it's not like it's peachy down there, and my mom is doing this thing where she doesn't want to remarry so she's stupid about money to make it impractical to buy a guy, and her mom will let her get away with that longer if there's not a wizard in the house who could be financially contributing and instead is helpfully begging for scroll gold all the time, and my little sister's got a few decades before she's in the same wedge and maybe in that time I can set up some way to extract her too, maybe both of them. But why now is Tanya showed up down there, needed the local knowhow to not wind up murdering people for not speaking her language or something, needed to be among humans so she didn't have to constantly project 'scary adventurer do not enslave', plus she can do cool things and I don't love this place unreservedly but it's less about the murdering babies than home is and she could bring the coolness of the things to the surfacers, uh, if there's a way for her to not get tortured for doing 'em."

Does any of this seem to be landing interestingly for Tanya.

Why is he bothering Belmarniss. Is it not enough that Tanya is going to subject her to the retelling of war horrors One. Thing.

It's incredibly reasonable to resent Pharasma. Every thinking being should resent Pharasma. Even if you're Good and you've known it all your life, Pharasma is sending people to eternal torture and it's not even working as incentives to stop people from being Evil.

The state of the drow is a terrible tragedy and someone needs to tell them they don't have to go to hell the Abyss and how to do it, but it can't be Tanya. Obviously. Maybe a year from now Belmarniss will decide to do it and recruit Tanya as her guard and Tanya will need to kill people to defend her - no, focus.

She thinks Belmarniss told her drow society was matriarchal at some point? Tanya's pretty sure she never told her that drow husbands are customarily enslaved. That's just. What. ...the most regressive societies on Earth could be described as enslaving all women? So - it's possible. Entirely and utterly moronic, for all the usual reasons not to enslave literally half your population even ignoring the harms and (separately) the Evil, but. There's precedent.

What does Belmarniss need to get her mother and sister out of there? Tanya can provide them safe passage, obviously. And it was her impression that a third-circle wizard can easily earn enough to support a family, and Belmarniss's mother is a mage in her own right. Is it about finding a place more welcome to drow, or about learning more before bringing her family? ...Belmarniss obviously doesn't want to talk about it in front of this stranger and Tanya can at least do her the courtesy of not thinking about it either, for now.

(...she was not going to murder anyone for not speaking her language!!!)

Belmarniss is an exceptional young woman. Among other things, she is exceptionally Good (i.e. prosocial). Tanya knew this before the alignment check, obviously.

Belmarniss correctly deduced that you should not enslave people, or kill or torture people, or kill babies (??). Despite growing up in a society where all those things are routine and unremarkable. That's very unusual. Tanya doesn't know anything about drow psychology or sociology, but it's obviously unusual in the sense that the rest of the drow population isn't like that. There's no enclave of nice prosocial drow living on the surface or in a separate underground city, or Belmarniss would have gone there. Granted, she was raised by her mother who seems to share her views, but that just pushes the question back a step.

If Tanya was reborn a drow, she too would want to leave. But would she refrain from harming others in the meantime? From participating in society in the way that was expected and encouraged and rewarded? If she didn't know it would damn her, or if she mistakenly believed she was damned no matter what she did?

Perhaps. But that is because she has lived in two functional societies. She'd know there was something to hope for, when she left. She could look at Taldor and know that it was vastly better than the drow and yet not good enough. She could plan for the long term, if the cost was merely annoying her grandmother or not having as many helping hands around the house. Because she knows what civilization is. She has an enormous tailwind propping her up. A platform from which to judge other cultures and to find them wanting.

If Tanya had been born as a drow for the first time? Well, the concept of 'the same person' might be meaningless if you regress them to an infant. But someone with Tanya's qualities brought up a as drow would simply be a model drow. That much is obvious. Tanya's innate qualities - as opposed to the ones she has cultivated - are learning the rules of the game and playing them to her benefit. By the time she learned there was another world upstairs that was meaningfully different, maybe read books describing the virtues of cooperation, she'd be too enmeshed in local society to leave it. And, of course, she'd be Evil.

Is Select Oliva asking why she couldn't transcend her society and see that it was evil (she still has no idea what about it might have been evil) and rebelled or left it, like Belmarniss did?

What an incredibly absurd thing to ask or expect of anyone. Once in a thousand years, a pampered prince may grow up to be the Buddha. But if everyone must become the Buddha without being taught, Heaven will have a population of one.

The Buddha taught that it is exceedingly difficult to transcend suffering. Most monks who dedicate their lives to trying, fail. The Christians teach that the vast majority of humans burn in Hell. The drow think they're all damned from birth, and in a world where afterlives can be scried that must be at least broadly true.

Life isn't fair. It's up to you to do something about it. What are you gonna do?

It takes Tanya a few moments to pick her words.

"I take your point. That some people can transcend the society around them. I still don't know why, specifically, I am evil. If the standard is doing no harm, or doing the absolute minimum harm possible, even to enemy soldiers, or when they placed civilians in the way... Or having to go out of your way to help strangers instead of optimizing for mission success... It's easy to believe I..." Accumulated karmic debt. "I don't think the war could be fought that way, not with any chance of winning unless the enemy was doing the same, but maybe that's Pharasma's answer, it wouldn't be - unprecedented."

"But - that's just pacifism. You're asking me to fight another war, not to have the brilliant insight to first do no harm despite my society and its laws. That's what the Shelynites counsel, and evidently you disagree. If the war was to be fought then -"

...it's easy to see that slavery is wrong. That rape is wrong. If you're choosing for everyone and not just for yourself, you'd rather have a society with no slavery and no rape. But if you're born into a society that practices it, and you happen to be in a position to benefit - well, you can't change society. Even a Belmarniss can only leave it for a better one. And you can't just choose for everyone not to have war. You only get to choose whether to fight in it.

Is there something else that's equally obvious in hindsight, that they weren't doing and could have done? That Tanya, personally, could have done, without jeopardizing mission success? She did everything she could for the army. Should she have spent more time defending Russy civilians from Communist partisans? Refused to tactically sacrifice another unit to save the front from routing? Donated her paycheck to orphans back home instead of saving up for after the war? 

Tanya doesn't know how to be Belmarniss.

"Can you just tell me the answer you're looking for. Or is it really important that I have the brilliant insight myself." Tanya will work so hard if she's given an answer! She will follow every rule! She just can't come up with the right rules on her own!

"Tanya, I don't know what words will put that insight into your mind where you can use it or I would say them. The work of civilization is to lay down roads so that following their own incentives and their own amoral lean toward Law most people can make it to Paradise without having to be as exceptional as your friend, but that's hard in even the base case and you're so foreign I don't even know what accent to put on the advice. I'm going to suggest you take some books with you when you go, in case any of those work where what I can think of to say won't."

Books. Tanya can do books. She was going to read Iomedae's holy book, wasn't she? And - what was she thinking - she was in a hurry to start earning money and stop leaning on Belmarniss -

"I will read them. Do you think I should - study Iomedaean military doctrine or laws of war to compare with Germania or - is it hopeless, because I couldn't have made Germania follow a different set of laws, so I should have just abstained whatever the cost -" that's probably too concrete still. It's something he could have told her. Why do they have to run on incommunicable enlightenment and not a simple catechism

"...I came here to ask which technologies from Earth, if I tried to reinvent and introduce them here, would serve Good. I think I should still do that, even if I end up reading books for a few days instead of acting on those plans."

"My current best guess - and it is not, I stress, a very good guess, I really don't know - is that you conducted yourself lawfully and honorably within the context you had based on the rules you understood to be operative, and went about all decisions that were left to you from there with an incuriosity and apathy about alternatives or a favoring of your convenience that made you responsible for the harm inherent in war even if a creatively applied cleverness would not have found better actual tactics to undertake than yours. If that's right, then learning the laws of war Iomedae set down and that we've refined under Her auspices since then might still help, if the laws themselves are better by enough, but the attitude is what needs to change most definitely.

"Most technology, placed in the right hands, could be a great victory for Good, military or civilian - though of course they feed into each other, the military protecting the civilian that feeds the military - and runs some chance of falling into the wrong hands before the head start it grants the right ones has won the day. It is the kind of thing you can do aimed straight at Heaven if you want the right things out of it and might not budge out of Hell for if you are too absorbed in the wrong ones, so I do not think you should share any technology today, unless you have a very urgent one and would consider being turned to stone an acceptable way out of Hell."

... Tanya really doesn't think she could have intuited, on her own, the right thoughts to think to keep herself out of Hell while leaving all her actions the same. Thoughts aren't supposed to matter if they don't lead to actions! 

She is supposed to be curious? To care about and look for better alternatives, never mind that she doesn't know what 'better' looks like? Fine. Right now Tanya is very curious about finding a better alternative to not sharing medical technology just because doing so wouldn't get her out of Hell because she'd be thinking the wrong thoughts while doing it, or something.

"I was going to ask you to judge whether they were urgent, and the risk of them being turned to evil! Or whether they were harmless enough to use to make money and then donate that money to Good causes! If you think I shouldn't do anything until I have the appropriate mindset - however long that takes, if it ever happens - how is that not standing by while others are harmed? ...I don't understand your comment about stone."

"People who are petrified do not move on to any afterlife. Lastwall keeps some people who want to turn against Evil but do not think they can properly escape it as statues for this reason. It will last until the statue is destroyed. Another thing you could do is seek an Atonement; they require expensive incense but the church is liquid enough to front the cost if they expect a success to result in your providing valuable information or services. Atonement is a spell which updates your legible alignment to reflect a change of heart, if you've successfully had one. - obviously you should be checked again cheaply before trying that in case this has already happened in the last few days. The usual use case for Atonement is restoring spells to fallen casters where it's clear that that's not happening without the spell's support. But it does work on other people."

"A way to delay going to Hell - while insensate, I assume - is... probably only as valuable as the chance I won't ever go to Hell as a result. Or that conditions in Hell improve in the meantime. I assume that's not very valuable at all." But it makes sense that people who think things can't get any worse will try anything. After all, you can't take your money with you when you die, and if you just got told that donating all you have is not enough... But that's not rational, not if you can't feel the years passing.

"I don't understand. I thought - figuring out how to change my thoughts - would, could make me stop being evil. You're saying I'd still detect evil, and Atonement fixes that? Then why check my alignment again? What causes the difference? ...to be clear, I'm not making my information or help conditional on your paying for a spell." Because that's very obviously not the Good thing to do. 

"I don't know if you'd still detect Evil right now. You've clearly been thinking very hard for the last few days. We can ask the nearest paladin to check, for free, right now, if you want. Sometimes the formal reading lags an efficacious change of heart such that someone who dies reading Evil will wind up in Paradise if we check on them later - this can also happen as a result of a surprising success by their advocates in the court but those tend to end with the petitioner in Nirvana, not Axis or Heaven. If you want to know before you actually show up in Axis or Heaven that this has happened, but you still detect Evil when you have a paladin check, Atonement is the spell for that. It is a little more useful for people who aren't strong enough to read, because the spell reacts differently if it worked or not, and most other ways of checking a weak person's alignment could easily kill them."

Tanya has been thinking very hard but she doesn't feel like she has any results to show for it? Other than resolving on pacifism at least until she understands better what violence is permitted, but the Iomedaeans think that's wrong! "I might as well check if it's free. Paying for an expensive spell can wait until I - until people I consult start saying it's strange I haven't made it yet. And until I can afford to pay for it."

"I don't understand why you don't seem to be interested in anything I have to offer, or even in hearing about it. Even if you're right that it won't get me out of Hell because of my - mindset - it could still help other people. And if I earn a lot of money I'd donate some of it. Are you really just - trying to preserve my option value for when I can use it better, and not weighing actually helping other people right now at all? I don't understand how that works, for it to be a Good thing for you to be doing?"

"Well," he says, "you could tell me all kinds of things, but I couldn't tell anyone else. I could only try to convince you to tell someone else, and I am not so good at convincing you of things, or so well informed about the state of any of the obvious places to put a new revolutionary advance, as to think that's obviously the best use of our time. You will still be able to tell someone else afterwards and I'd want you armed with the best possible understanding of why you might or might not choose to do that."

"...to convince me to share an innovation you'd need to convince me that it will serve Good and not count as Evil on my personal account if it goes wrong. That it wouldn't place me in great danger and is the best, the most Good thing I could be doing. All these things seem easy to achieve if your church, with its correct mindset, owns the project, makes all decisions and takes responsibility for them, and is the public face for any blame. I'm not saying I'm ready to sign everything over to you, but I don't understand why you're not trying to convince me to in order to accomplish Good from your own perspective!" Is he simply underestimating her? Despite the obviously unbounded potential of novel technology from an entire other world?! Is he just an underperforming officer retired to serve as a priest and she'd get a better accounting of them if she went and talked with their actual army?

"I could teach people how cure or prevent diseases without magic," she almost snarls. "I could revolutionize communications, transportation, logistics, sanitation, everything that grows the economy and makes everyone richer and better off. The Abadarans are going to give me a report with various options, and I'll check a lot of different things and, yes, read your books, and do my best to figure out if it could be Evil, and then if I don't find something better to do I'll do one of those things. The Abadarans and Shelynites and maybe soon the Pharasmins are advising me on that. I came to you because I hoped you had something novel to add. I was advised to read your holy book and I admit I haven't had the time to do it yet. Maybe it would help me understand what your church is actually trying to do. There's Good and there's Law and you don't sound like the obvious combination of the two but I don't understand what you are instead."

"If there is something in this world killing which would be unambiguously good - not a person, a terrible beast threatening people - I could do that. If there was an army fighting a war, a cause, and making them win would be very definitely Good, I could do that. If you don't have one of those, then what the fuck do you think you're doing raising armies in the name of Good?"

"Tanya, you are weird and hard to talk to and this guy has noticed that you are weird and hard to talk to, give him a break."