"So, you three found a magic snake, decided to enslave it, and seized this shrine to do so. I'm with the snake on this one."

To Dyva and Tarka, "You guys want to just take their stuff and leave them to the snake? There's a chance at least one of them will survive."

"I was wondering what the plan for dealing with them was. Not like we could leave them to hang around menacing the village. I like it!" 

"It is agreeable to me."

The druids had a small camp, with simple shelters arranged around a fire. Going through their pockets and bags for valuables yields a modest but unimpressive amount of coinage and some cheap jewellery, but Dyva finds that they have been harvesting and preserving various useful herbs and plants from the local forest. She can't identify everything perfectly, but everything wrapped up and stored is only a couple of bags of material so she takes it all, foisting them onto Ossa. If it was worth preserving, probably someone in the next proper town will be willing to buy it or find a use for it. 

The snake doesn't seem like it's going to escape imminently, so after packing up the loot and herding the druids into the center of the clearing, Sida destroys a few more of the runes on the circle and books it.

Hopefully this is a good idea?

The snake is certainly not considering pursuit it's top priority, but with the whole party getting out of there as quickly as possible, it's hard to tell what exactly happens. There is a scream, which might be considered a good sign. A sign of some kind, certainly. 

Once they've reached a safe distance, Sida says, "Probably we should have had more of a plan going into that."

"I was hoping you had a plan. It seemed like you had a plan. It still does seem like you just executed a plan. And I did not want to get in your way if you did have a plan."

"I did have a plan, sort of. I was making up as I went along, but there didn't really seem to be many other options than what I did. Just, maybe it could have gone better if we thought about it ahead of time."

"Oh, I feel like things went pretty well? We didn't really have the intelligence needed for a more complicated plan than that, did we?" 

"I'm not entirely sure if you mean intelligence as in knowledge, or intelligence as in cognitive ability. One of the reasons I dislike this language, but anyways. I was kinda confused about the social-philosophy stuff and realized pretty much immediately we should have thought about it first. Like, that villager was probably telling us the truth, but we didn't know for certain and should have had some idea of how to evaluate whether or not those guys were in the wrong. Which I did, and I think I made the right choice, but it was stressful and annoying and could have gone better. We also didn't think ahead of time about what was an appropriate response to their hijacking the shrine. I think releasing the snake made sense, but possibly wasn't very safe for us. Maybe it would have been better to randomly select two of them to die, one to live, and set up the snake to escape the circle after a couple of hours so it wouldn't be able to eat us."

"Ah, I mean intelligence as in strategically relevant knowledge. I assume we were just going to kill them, because the villagers seemed legit and were willing to pay us to do that?" 

"Uh, if you want people to surrender to you, they need to expect to be better off if they surrender than if they don't. And if you're not willing to lie—which I don't want to and it doesn't work in the long term anyways—that means they need to actually be better off on average for surrendering. If they hadn't surrendered, we probably would have just killed them all, and instead they got to face the snake and possibly not die. Which is better, I think, if not by much, and I didn't see much reason to give them more than that."

"... Oh, huh. I guess so? I'd think the fact that like, most people haven't heard of you, you're mostly just dealing with the common pool of expected responses to surrender, right? I guess in the long run a reputation for mercy is advantageous but that wasn't really the sort of thing which gets you a reputation for mercy?" 

"It's not about mercy, it's about not giving people cause to regret doing the things I want them to do. And I may have miscalculated that, if they had a better chance of surviving us or a worse chance of surviving the snake than I thought, but if I got my estimates right I succeeded in making it slightly better for them to surrender than not."

"Well yeah but if that doesn't cash out in people actually knowing you're like that then it doesn't do anything for you, right? Most people do not try and do that." 

"Most people do not try and do that. I think it's some combination of that strategy not working as well in this world as in mine—for a variety of reasons—and people just being stupid. And also because of the religious aspect, that plays a pretty big role. Personally, I am planning on, but not expecting, to become a great name eventually, at which point having such a reputation for honor would be immensely valuable. And if I do succeed at making it home, whatever people here think of me will form the basis of their expectations for my entire culture. So this has the potential to matter for me a lot more than for most other people. But even if that weren't the case, I would still behave honorably, because that's the kind of person I want to be. If you're only honorable when it's convenient for you, you're not really honorable, and you can't honestly say you are."

"And even if not for any of the things I just mentioned, you two witnessed what I did and me killing all three of the druids after they surrendered would have given you reason to distrust me. Although maybe you haven't realized how yet."

"Fair enough - that's why mercy, though. Reputations have to be legible, and following a unique code of honour is good and all but it doesn't spread like a reputation that easily cashes out to real terms." 

"I don't understand social-philosophy very well and am pretty underprepared for the circumstances I find myself in and I'm mostly going off of what I remember learning about and what I'd expect people from home in situations like mine would do, but. At it's core, it's supposed to be basically a single thing. Which is that you keep the commitments you make, and in situations where you definitely would have made a commitment, you normally want to keep those too. Like, I asked those guys to surrender, if words mean anything at all there's an implication there that surrendering is something I wanted them to do and something which might be in their interests to do, so if I hadn't acted the way I did it would be sort of like I was lying, or implicitly lying, when I asked them to surrender."

"...I'm not explaining this very well because I don't understand it very well, and I'm definitely not going to do a perfect job implementing it. Um, if I were the kind of person who went around breaking my word, and lying, and betraying people, and so on, but I said 'don't worry Dyva I wouldn't do that to you, you can trust me', that would not be very plausible, because 'willing to betray literally anyone except Dyva' is incredibly arbitrary and transparently bullshit. The more complicated someone's purported commitment process is, the more difficult it is to verify, the less predictable and dependable they are, and the more likely it is that they're just picking whatever is convenient for them at the time. And if you start with the idea of 'what would it be useful for people to believe about the way I will behave' and generalizing it by getting rid of all the arbitrary boundaries, you end up with something that best translates as 'trustworthiness' or 'honor'. At home, people would recognize this as a simple, primitive thing. Someone who cuts in line at the grocery store is also more likely to lie to their spouse. Someone who finds someone else's lost wallet at the train station and mails it back to them is also more likely to keep secrets, when keeping something secret is the honorable thing to do. Stuff like that. I suspect that this will seem a lot more complicated and illegible to people here than it does to Hadarites, where this idea is a core part of the culture, but it's how I intend to act anyways."

"Pretty sure I know a lot of people for whom 'trust and rely on only this single-digit number of important people and screw the whole world' is in fact how they work. But I wouldn't trust any of them with anything that mattered, so you have a point. My point is, that you're going to encounter a lot of people in your life that aren't going to sit down for a discussion of ethical philosophy when they assess you behaviour, so if you can frame it in terms like local honour and mercy that makes your life easier even if something gets lost in the translation, or you end up obligated to do a few things you might not otherwise do for the sake of your reputation." 

"Trusting only a single-digit number of people is fine and makes perfect sense in many cases. Only being trustworthy to a few people is suspect. If you simply don't make commitments to most people, that's probably fine, but if you're perfectly willing to break agreements made with people you don't care about, then the agreements made with people you do care about are a lot less meaningful."

"Your point about framing my behavior in terms more legible to local cultures is a good one, and I would appreciate any advice you'd have about how to do that. Although the notion of doing things purely for the sake of making people think well of me is offensive to my instincts, so I'll have to take some more time to think about it."

"It's never really been a focus of mine. Figured I'd end up spending half my time in southern countries where necromancy is somewhere between reviled and outright illegal, so having a good reputation, eh. Not worth the effort. But it does seem like if you want to seem like you're giving people a good deal by surrendering, that you shouldn't half-ass it by saying 'well, technically that made their odds of survival better', unless you want to pair that with a general aura of terror and particularly dire consequences for the people who you do have to kill to the last, which doesn't really seem like your vibe." 

"It sounds like you're thinking of this in terms of what moves to make to get people to believe certain things, which at a high level is sort of what this is about, but it's not really the way I think about it. To me, substance is what matters, not appearance. And the substance I'm targeting, the person I'm trying to be, is someone who acts according to a coherent principle, not someone who does whatever they think will cause other people to like them, or fear them, or whatever."

"Well, fair enough! I hope it works well for you!" 

The party continues to return to the village, where they are rewarded with a modest feast and a purse of gold; the reward is less profitable than the loot, but this is not a rich little village in the middle of nowhere.

Their travel continues after that, continuing through the hills and then back down to the main river valley. After another week, in which the weather continues to decline, and occasionally threatens to snow them in before they get to their destination, they finally reach the foot of the mountains, where the last and greatest of the ancient locks is present. It is a shining structure of white stone, consisting of seven locks in order that collectively raise the boats or wagons loaded onto barges halfway up the outmost mountain, to where the river's source has been re-directed to the underground port that is the first true city of the Kingdom of Locks - Gol-Viorum. It has been looming on the horizon for days now, when the sky is clear enough to see it.