"Well I guess he has some other way to tell then. Doesn't help me."

"True. What's the punishment for that now, anyway?"

"Depends if it's a pattern or not."

"That's fair.  So, hmm, if I was having that problem... You can just wait. Notice someone annoying you, tell them to cut it out, wait until you've gotten over it, then go 'That was annoying, here's what the rules say you get for that.'  And if it's a whipping or anything and not just a bad chore assignment, maybe have someone else do it, just in case."

"...well that doesn't sound like it'd work at all. The first part. I could make somebody else whip people."

"What, you get annoyed with people and just never stop? That sounds unpleasant. How often does any of this come up, anyway?"

"No, I do, usually, eventually, but you can't wait that long to punish people."

"I suppose not. Then yeah, have someone else hold the whip – maybe have someone double-check that they've earned it, too, so you can't be handing that out more than you should out of a temper. And if you're angry when you're assigning people unpleasant shifts or something, that's much less of an Evil, at least."

"It really does matter how often, though. It's not like you can't ever do that sort of thing, just, it's gonna be harder to get out of Hell if it's every day than if it's once a month."

"What, are the deeper layers worse?"

"Well, you're doing all this saving the world from demons. You can do some Evil on top of that and still be digging yourself out of Hell, just, the less of it the better the chance it works."

"Some people have been here longer than me or even Artigas. Fighting demons all the while."

"It is really impressive, that Cheliax managed to run Worldwound forts that kept people Evil. But now that you're on the Lastwall handbook I'd expect that to mostly stop working. And it'll help to talk to me about what else you could be doing differently."

"If it's all stuff like 'being annoyed when people are annoying and also doing anything about it'..."

"There's smaller stuff and bigger stuff. D'you think you're getting people hurt less, with the new rules?"

"Not really? Artigas cut seven heads off, this one time, and he wouldn't've had to before. Or do you just mean me personally, because I don't think so but at least I haven't cut off any heads."

"I meant you personally. If you don't think so then something's not going right with this entire change, I'd really expect switching from Infernal rules to Lastwall's to result in less Evil..."

"Although if you happen to have any clue what those seven men were thinking, I really wish I knew that."

"Oh, they were stupid. They'd most of them been at #11 long enough to know he's the last man you want to challenge with 'what are you going to do, kill all of us'. But it's not like they came and confided in me first. The Lastwall rules are nicer than what we were doing under Asmodeus but there was a fair while in the middle, till Iomedae picked him up and then till he got his books in the post, and it doesn't seem nicer than that."

"Aha. Then maybe however much nicer things are now than under Asmodeus is still gonna be enough to get most of you out of Evil over time. What was better in the middle, though?"

"...so on my end I drew the short straw and I'm going to go gossip about you to anyone who pretends to have a reason to be in earshot, but you don't tell anyone anything except for the school thing, right?"

"Right," nod.  "If you tell me later I can talk about something then I can, and otherwise I can't and won't."

"So Artigas dropped all the rules that were costing spells from the wizards for Asmodean shit - stopped them reading people's minds mostly, so they'd have the slots, didn't care about heresy any more if it wasn't causing a whole problem. But if somebody did cause a problem he had this thing he'd do where -

"- it sounds so bloody stupid, but the man likes chess, all right, you know, the board game? And he can Prestidigitate like a wizard. He makes up a chess game and he makes the whole game about how whatever you did is stupid and will kill you and you'll deserve it. It sounds dumb, for this to work? Nobody talks about it because it sounds dumb, like, he plays chess at you, he cheats at chess to make a point of how you did something stupid, that's nothing, that's not a punishment. And some people it didn't work on and they got to get traded to #8 where the fashion is thumbscrews, the dumbasses. But if you can just let it land you can get along here all right, and nobody had to get, like, degloved. And he was still doing that, till he got the book."

"Oh is that what he was doing. I knew he was doing some kind of chess thing, but he didn't really want to tell me how it worked and I didn't push him. That... honestly that sounds great and I wish he'd keep it. But he doesn't want to be making up all the rules on his own – I don't know if it's more that he's worried for his Law or that it won't all work well enough – and that's why he's using the Lastwall handbook instead, and the handbook's pretty strict about its list of options. Maybe once he's gotten more used to running things Iomedae's way he'll decide he can make his own changes again? I'd be in favor of that."

"Yeah, well, he's not. This doesn't come up all that often for most people, but one of my fellows was pretty upset about it anyhow. It's worth it for the channels, but."

"I'd be upset too, if I'd gotten to have that and then I had to take the worst shifts instead. ...Maybe next time I need spiritual counseling I'll ask if he can do a chess version."

"But don't you have to pretend you don't know?" she smirks.