"No, I think most pay a great deal of attention to who they dislike and I am unusual in this respect."

"That's a relief, at least."  He would worry about whether that was insulting, except that apparently he doesn't need to.  "Or maybe not, it does seem like being you leads to much less trouble, but it's still... disquieting as a concept.  ...Does the question of why you're like this have a meaningful answer?"

"...I think I have always been odd but seminary was a refinement of some of my oddities into more useful shapes, apparently not all of them anathema to Iomedae."

"...This does not make me less concerned, but I think either you don't want to talk about it or it's too confusing a topic to easily get anywhere with, and in either case we likely have higher priorities. If you've been like this since seminary then I expect you will keep."

"It doesn't seem urgent," agrees Blai.

Nod.

"I've moved to worrying less about insulting you and so on, since it's apparently nearly impossible; please let me know if I overshoot and manage to be unpleasant to interact with, I really don't want to be."

"If I notice I will bear this in mind."

"I appreciate it.  Where were we... Right, empathy and the fact that it feels belittling but I still think it's sometimes necessary, and I need to find some way to make it land better. Which I am also unlikely to succeed at today."

"...Do you think anyone else here is the sort of person you could ask to tell me if I sound insulting or threatening or whatever else? Chelish people mostly don't seem given to, ah, informatively answering questions."

"...I can imagine ways someone might be able to elicit this kind of feedback but not ones that seem otherwise concordant with your presentation."

"I have no idea what sorts of things you're imagining, and would benefit from examples."

"Well, for example, if someone visited the fort and made a general announcement that they were going to do thirty pushups every time they accidentally insulted someone but would not notice on their own, they would have no shortage of opportunities, some of which would be real and all of which would clarify the lens of analysis."

Snort. "I could maybe experiment with something like that, but it doesn't seem likely to be very useful. It's important that the feedback mostly be true rather than driven by the entertainment value."

Nod. "The face-saving element is important."

"Ah. So it in fact has to be set up in a way that makes most of the feedback false, because if it was obviously mostly true then people would be too embarrassed to say it, because admitting you felt insulted or threatened is... in itself, like showing a genuine emotion, a sign of weakness?..."  Cheliax makes his head hurt.

"It is not essential that it be mostly false, exactly, only that there be a legible other motive to participate, which encourages insincere participation. It also helps if you are looking for occasions that you could have been parsed as insulting while leaving open the possibility that whoever you spoke to wasn't actually bothered themself that time."

"Mhm. But I'm right that being bothered is... embarrassing in itself?"

"...Only under some circumstances, surely? Or are Chelish noblemen not going around having peasants whipped for insults, because it would be embarrassing to have felt insulted?"

"The Chelish noblemen doing this are leaving open that it might not have actually bothered them."

"But the people I might ask to tell me when I sound insulting cannot leave this possibility open without me manufacturing them an excuse, why?"

"Some of them could pull this off but it would require a certain adeptness a lot of people haven't developed."

"...Yes, I do see what you mean."

"Ah, we started talking about empathy because you wanted to understand something about it, and I immediately got distracted by asking my own questions again. My apologies." Which he could presumably skip, the Select being the way he is, but not acknowledging fault seems a bad habit to get into. "Was that clarifying at all? Did you have more questions?"

"I remain unclear on what makes it a priority."

"Hmm. Let me think through a case outside of Cheliax, because there I'm pretty confident I know how things work, and then we can separately consider the applicability here."

"If someone came to me for counseling visibly upset about something they'd done or something that happened to them, and I didn't, hmm, act like I noticed this and cared about it, they would... well, assume I didn't care about how they felt... To be clear I'm thinking through this as I go, normally I just follow my instinct for how to talk to people rather than considering what would happen if I did it differently..."  He does keep pausing to think about it.  "So, if I don't care whether they're unhappy, what do they think that means? Well, probably that I don't care about them as a person at all, which implies... kind of a lot of upsetting things, really..."

"It... does?"

This question is deeply depressing to the point of the sheer disconnect being a little funny, and he's trying so hard not to show too much of that on his face.

"So, first, if I don't care about them then I'm probably just providing them with bad counseling, because people don't put much effort into work they don't care about. Maybe it's even worse than that and I'm actively counseling them badly for some reason, because why am I like that...  It's mostly that, really – why am I acting like that, am I just not Good at all, do I despise them personally to the point where I don't think they deserve for their lives to be better, I hope you can see how that would be upsetting and also probably frightening..."

"...you are saying that you have to provide emphatic signs of positive personal interest to avoid looking like you are personally out to get them as individuals to the point of falling short of the standards of conduct you operate by in your capacity as a paladin?"