This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Jean Riudaure is not, in fact, a nice person.
It never bothered him, the way it bothered some of his classmates at the Imperial Academy of Magic, to practice Acid Splash on children, or to hold the whip over his less brilliant peers. He considers it, to be clear, pointless cruelty that even a perfectly selfish person should never do of their own accord. It just doesn’t help, to flinch at doing it, or to feel bad afterwards, and so he doesn’t. If he refused, he would only suffer for it, and his victim would not in the end suffer less.
(A flicker of thought—what would become of Cheliax if everyone refused the senseless cruelty at once—but of course Cheliax is set up so this can never happen—)
He is fifteen years old when he first dares to think that serving Asmodeus, even if one is aligned with him, is among the stupidest things a person can do. Especially if one is aligned with him; it’s Lawful Evil people, specifically, whom Pharasma permits Him to do with as He will. Obviously the one interest that all Lawful Evil people anywhere have in common is overthrowing the torturer who rules Hell before they get there; if they can’t manage that he’s not sure why they should be called Lawful (capable of coordination) or Evil (self-interested) at all! If the knowledge had been permitted him that Iomedae’s major aim was ending the horrors of the Evil afterlives, he would have been similarly baffled that She was allowed to call herself Good; surely that would only lead to a vast increase in the amount of Evil done in Golarion.
This is not, of course, a safe thought to have in Cheliax, and so he doesn’t have it explicitly more than once. He’s good at that sort of thing. It stays with him, nonetheless, as he graduates wizard academy with flying colors and heads to the Worldwound to repay his debt to his country and hopefully gain a few more levels in the process. He’s in the lucky half, or at least the smart half, and survives said process.
