"I agree that we need to have some kind of justice system that is capable of enforcing any kind of law consistently. I just - "

"Well, I think getting anybody to follow any rules is currently Harmattan's job, and apparently he may be planning a coup? Which is kind of understandable, given the current situation, but it still seems like the sort of thing I should probably do something about. Do you have any more details on that?"

"I didn't mindread him, I just planted an associate - I work with some called elementals and outsiders who I brought with me and who are exploring Drezen helping me situate myself. They reported a secret meeting in which Harmattan, who had been hoping that you were dead after you failed to reappear when expected, called off some plans to seize power in light of your return, while reassuring his counterparty that the plans would probably still be put into place, just not quite yet."

"Wow, okay. Yay. I should probably figure out whether this is a demon cultists thing, a Mendevian bureaucracy not liking anyone not of themselves thing, or an actually taking issue with the ways in which I don't know what I'm doing thing, in ascending order of my sympathy for him. But every time there's a problem with discipline he advises me not to punish anyone and instead give people better working conditions and pay, which Dorgelinda then tells me is impossible, so either way I'm not incredibly optimistic about him being able to solve our other problems. ...maybe if I convince him it will then result in better working conditions and pay, but -"

"I am probably going to have to solve this problem myself, aren't I. Great."

"It does seem like fundamentally a diplomatic problem. Conceivably it would be partially addressed if you were to indicate that you know and aren't particularly amused, and have other, more trusted parties charged with retrieval of your body were you to in fact die. - your advisors should be willing to give you advice within constraints, not just tell you what would be convenient with infinite resources. It is reasonable to expect of them that they describe to you a number of options that expend different resources or different amounts of resources."

"The only advisor from Nerosyan who has demonstrated any ability to do that is Dorgelinda. This is part of why I liked her. They do pull in other people to discuss options with when there's a serious decision to be made, but, uh, I'm not sure they're used to thinking in those terms."

"Well, you have the option of requesting more advisors from my commander's forces, though I do think it's important for there to be some people who have local context on Nerosyan's politics among your advisors."

"Yeah. Agreed. I just wish they weren't all - "

Horrible. The word she's looking for might be horrible.

"Any indications that Captain Odan or Lady Konomi are actively conspiring against the crusade?"

"I have not had very much time to look, but have not yet found any indication of that."

"Okay. I think... I am inclined to talk to Harmattan. Also I need him to investigate and do something about the Kuthite, something should really be done about that immediately. Inclined to tell Dorgelinda that I want her help running an investigation, try to figure out which people are involved, and then confront her afterward. Inclined to get my charter so I know what things I'm legally allowed to do, but at this point we're waiting on word from Nerosyan about that. And - I hate the option where I and a few other people personally try to come up with a consistent set of rules and penalties for breaking them. I am not at all convinced that I can come up with something that isn't horrible in one direction or the other, or in both at once. But it seems like consistent penalties are probably a necessary element of this, I am not sure that we effectively have anything of the sort, and I don't think there's anyone I particularly feel justified in delegating responsibility for that to. So I guess I'll have to go with a plan that I hate, before I can tell everyone that we're taking crime and corruption seriously now."

"So - obviously one option you possess here is to adopt the Shining Crusade's legal code, and bring a few dozen of Iomedae's people to enforce it. I am not actually advocating that, though if you want to do it I will make recommendations on how it can best be done.

The reason that I am not recommending it is that - to the extent that the Shining Crusade got things right, and I do think that there's an extent to which that's true, we did not do it by adopting an existing legal code from a completely different context wholesale and then telling people to get used to it. What happened was that Iomedae sat down and spent many confusing and disappointing and exhausting years trying to figure out what She thinks law is, and what it's for, and when it makes things better, and what it's not for, what problems you shouldn't try to solve with it, what kinds of systems break under what kinds of conditions and how to repair them when they do.

You can have the end product of that, if you'd like. It's a pretty functional end product. But - the thing I see you trying to do, right here, is much more like the thing Iomedae did than 'adopt the laws Iomedae made' is. And it will be very hard, and I bet you will hate it, but- I think it’s the right thing to do.”

"Yeah. That is my instinct, whatever my instincts are worth. I am sure your legal code is better than anything I will come up with, and equally sure that if I try to adopt something that someone has handed me, without me feeling like I need to take personal responsibility for the contents, just because it's the done thing - well, I think that's probably half of how we got into this mess in the first place."

"I would - probably like to at least see a list of what penalties the Shining Crusade even uses, though, and under what general circumstances."

"Absolutely. I think I will ask someone to bring the whole thing through, so that you can - in individual cases see how others solved the problem you're trying to solve, as a source of ideas for your own solution.

The Shining Crusade does execute people for murder or desertion or selling military secrets to Tar-Baphon, and for theft or embezzlement on a scale that costs lives, and would as a matter of policy execute senior officers for - more things than that - conveying false orders, lying in formal reports, abuse of power, giving unconscionable orders - though that thankfully hasn't come up. There are mitigating considerations - ignorance, youth, manipulation, lack of malicious intent, impossibility of a similar future incident - and it is rare for someone to be executed if any of the mitigating considerations apply. But - the ultimate resort of any state is death or exile, and for a lot of people it's not hard to see that exile means more people dead in the long run."

"That makes sense."

She might just kind of hate states. Not that places that aren't states seem to do much better. Maybe the floating island people have the right idea. She hates it when there's any indication that she might actually agree with the Elysians about anything important.

"I - do want to talk more about handling desertion at some point, because I'm not sure that our early recruitment - or really our continuing recruitment, if I think about situations like Wintersun or the Neathers - was done in such a manner that it makes a ton of sense to conceptualize of - I do not think that a lot of people knew what they were signing up for. I am not sure that I knew what I thought they were signing up for. And some people didn't sign up, they were rescued. Or they were sent to be worldwound guards as a penalty for minor crime, and then shuffled into the crusade when the crusade existed, even though crusading is actually way more dangerous than holding the barriers. If you look at our top people - Daeran doesn't want to be here, Galfrey effectively threatened him into serving. Woljif doesn't want to be here, he was in prison in Kenabres and was let out temporarily because we needed his help to get people to safety. Most people consider him to have deserted and been forgiven with no penalty, but he never actually signed up, he just kept following me around because he thought that it would protect him from the Inquisition. Nenio has never indicated that she considers herself to work for me. Ember is a sweet, sweet child who shouldn't be allowed to enlist in anything, and who represents at least a quarter of our teleport capacity. And I think there are, unfortunately, a lot of rank and file soldiers here who joined under conditions that were around that messy, don't have any clear understanding of their responsibilities to the crusade, and whose paperwork has been handled even worse than mine has. I would like to not punish them for being only moderately heroic."

"Of course, the flip side is that if they all went home, we probably couldn't hold the barrier. So - I guess this just works out to the observation that part of why we need our own code is that some laws only work if every other aspect of an organizational system has been at all competent or decent to people, or has resources that we don't have."

"Absolutely. You want everyone who will be subject to your rules to make an agreement they understand, and to go through training to make sure they understand it. And it's normal to have different arrangements for powerful adventurers whose help you need. The Shining Crusade made side arrangements with wizards who don't want to take orders and clerics whose existing commitments may not allow it. It doesn't make sense, and it'd be cruel, to hold civilians who were conscripted to the standards of trained soldiers. But you may decide you mostly want to solve that by turning them into trained soldiers, because desertion will still lose you battles and wars no matter how comprehensible it is or unconscionable it'd be to punish."

"Working on it. Or, well, trying to. I am unfortunately not very much like a trained soldier, which I imagine doesn't help."

"I expect that I can be of significant assistance there. And we can send more people with that skillset."

Nod.

"Okay. Sunhammer. That sounds like it could be an emergency any day, and is something we need to handle immediately. My biggest concern is whether apprehending him and questioning him will allow him to trigger the soul traps. We could try to collect them all first, but it'd be hard to do secretly, a bunch of people have them and some of them value them a lot."

"With your permission, Knight Commander, it seems like a good situation for a Dominate Person in his sleep tonight."

"...yeah, that sounds pretty ideal if you know how to do it."

"I do. If nothing goes unexpectedly, I'll have him disable any contingencies and name any allies first and I can then send him to you to give a summary of whatever his plans were so you can figure out how to most straightforwardly disable them."

"Makes sense. But I think I should be there in case anything goes wrong, it's not something I'd normally send someone to deal with alone."

This is only a little tiny bit because she wants to see someone cast a spell she hasn't seen.

"As you prefer. He is presumably a powerful spellcaster, given the ability to make the trapped rings. I imagine it likely that, while there's only an Alarm for visible magical defenses, there are also some he's successfully concealed from my ability to detect them. I think we should similarly assume he can beat my Nondetection, and possibly Nenio's. I propose to have some termites chew me line-of-effect through the walls of his house to his bedroom, at which point I can cast the spell from outside the range of the Alarm and hopefully also other traps he's put in place. If he's instead sleeping in a demiplane then this is above my pay grade in my capacity as a mage and we should instead surprise him in the street and try to stab him to death before he gets a spell off."

Oh wow, some people are actually experienced adventurers and can just come up with plans like that.

"That sounds like a good plan to me. Tonight, then."

"I guess that leaves the Baphomet cultists under the chapel, who I should probably also do something about. The easiest thing is probably to alert the Iomedan inquisition, this is theoretically what they're there for. It's probably possible to do better than that with more thought, I guess."

" - I would propose that you come up with a bunch of rules for the Iomedaean inquisition and then notify them they may only operate if they can ensure compliance with those rules within their organization, but I don't know the political situation if you offend them, or whether they're in fact Lawful enough that'll work."

"I suspect... some of them would be lawful enough if everyone had a clear sense of my legal authority, but I don't think anyone does, and I don't know enough about the specific people I'd be communicating with. I mean, other than Hulrun, who I don't super want to hand anyone over to. Also I think the political consequences of outright stating that I think I have the right not to hand people over to them might be fairly dire, while I'm unclear on what powers I actually possess. I think I am probably not going to do that. I am a little tempted to tip off Anevia and tell her to wait until they commit a crime, except that currently our dungeons have Kuthites, apparently, and we barely have rule of law at all! So I don't know why I'd expect to do any better than the Inquisition, under the circumstances."

"The only other thing I can think of is to have someone strong enough to defend themselves go be intensely chaotic good at them and see if we can talk them into making better life choices, but anyone's guess what the odds of success on that are."