"Getting Abaddon to show up here's gotta be chaotic, it changes things. That's my statement, okay?"

"Pharasma vs Calistria, the Lawful afterlives having a better lawyer training system than the chaotic ones does not make the trial system unfair. I will accept your argument. Maelstrom, you're next."

What's really disappointing about this behavior is that this is actually above-average for an Abyss representative.

"Despite the petitioner's efforts, he did in fact make some advances in the field of interesting explosions exploiting locally-underexploited physics. Furthermore, he did so while thinking that large locally-underexploited-physics explosions were really, really cool. I don't have much to say about moral alignment, there were some good intentions and some good results and some evil results and it's plausible that it washes out to Neutral."

At the nosoi's gesture, the agathion speaks. "Thank you, your honor. Nirvana mostly concurs with Heaven's claims. The case for Good is very strong, while the case for a non-Lawful systemic alignment appears weaker. The main argument that hasn't been advanced there is that the petitioner's Law was, yes, established in an environment where they were essentially enchanted in a way that promoted Lawful actions. That environment did not coercively promote Good actions, but the petitioner pursued Good anyway, making their Good moral alignment more a result of their choices and values than a Lawful systemic alignment. Furthermore, suppose that Abaddon does somehow have a point regarding counterfactuals. If so, Nirvana holds that enabling unrepentant committers of Evil acts to access a Good afterlife is, so long as the Good afterlife is prepared to accept them, a Good action, and that it's possible to defy laws re death and soul manipulation in a Chaotic Good manner."

"I concur with Heaven and Nirvana regarding moral alignment. I'm personally under the impression that the petitioner would be able to acculturate well to any of the Good afterlives, suggesting that even if they're only borderline Chaotic on arrival, they might well become more firmly Chaotic later."

Ey pauses momentarily when the judge starts passing around copies of Abaddon's report, but once the judge doesn't call for silence, ey continues.

"I don't think we have adequate information to determine systemic alignment. I think we need to question the petitioner after we resolve the question of moral alignment. The protean has a point regarding chaos, but I'm not confident in it."

"That concludes opening statements. As seven of the representatives have noticed, we now have copies of Abaddon's report alleging to be regarding a second instance of Griffith. Does anyone object to a brief pause to review this?"

…

"Alright. We're taking a brief pause to review this."

The document claims to be from 'Suaal', wherever that is, and contains descriptions of several incidents involving a 'Griffith of Erlonn', whoever that is.

The first is a report on 'Erloria' leshies repairing each other's souls and reincarnating each other, a practice which Griffith of Erlonn is alleged to have participated in. For some reason, death from senscence there is associated with accumulated soul damage instead of Pharasma's decree that a soul ought to return? At any rate, this practice allegedly violated local law.

Griffith of Erlonn and eir adventuring party was also allegedly involved in the destruction of several psychopomps. They also made a lot of anti-psychopomp statements.

Griffith of Erlonn and adventuring party plotted – with conspirators including a demon lord! – to neutralize their local Lamashtu. During this planning process, they had the capacity to research the effects of killing a god on that god's realm and servants, and chose not to do so, displaying indifference to those their actions would affect. Sure enough, when they neutralized Lamashtu, this caused the destruction of all of Lamashtu's specialized servitor demons, a numerous group. This was brought to Griffith of Erlonn's attention through dreams ey believed were accurate, and this did not cause em to regret eir actions.

There's also some records of transferring prisoners to Heaven – a dragon, a medusa, some others. Griffith of Erlonn checked in with Heaven regarding the status of these prisoners, and Heaven confirmed that they had still not repented.

"So, this is an interesting set of claims, but even if we were here to judge a person who committed the actions described here, which we aren't, I don't think it'd be an open-and-shut case for Neutral Evil."

Griffith looks focused. "Your honor, I have never killed anyone, and the idea of killing a person is deeply abhorrent to me. Given … this … I think that … the idea that I am the same person as someone who unrepentantly killed thousands of people … is mistaken."

"Your honor, the petitioner seems to be missing a concept that's key to conceptualizing his actions, even in the absence of the effect he was under. May I explain it?"

"Quickly."

"Thank you, your honor. Griffith, in the absence of magical effects it is typically possible for people to make inaccurate statements intentionally. For instance, if this court did not have a Zone of Truth effect, I could have claimed to be a crocodile. This behavior is how Mireia Rasdovain got you to work for her, and may be involved in Abaddon's report."

"Thank you, Nirvana representative. That does contextualize things. I wish I'd figured it out earlier."

"That's very reasonable, but it's not your fault that you didn't."

"I don't think we can take this as a given. If we look at In re Vicky Austin, it was found that her display of willpower against a compulsion to take Evil actions she was unprepared to resist was Good, which implies that the absence of such displays over an extended period must therefore be Evil. Many enchantments break or become more brittle when forcing a subject to take actions 'against its nature', and thus failure to resist a novel enchantment-like effect is evidence that actions taken under that effect were not against the petitioner's nature."

"While that's evidence from a mathematical perspective, it's not very significant. Compulsion resistance can show actions to be against someone's nature, but is not the only way to do so. We have a clear reference for the effect the petitioner was under: Gullibility, which does not become easier to resist when pushing someone to act against their nature, merely when presenting claims whose belief would be against their nature, and so you would need to establish a claim where believing it is itself an evil act, regardless of evidence."

"Such claims do exist. For instance, In re Quixote found that, while the petitioner's actions in the context of his belief that silver dragons were soulless puppets of Hshurha were comparable in many ways to the way Good adventurers often behave towards mindless creatures, his actions were nevertheless Evil, which suggests that his belief was Evil."

"In re Quixote introduces a test which we could go through. However, I haven't seen evidence that the petitioner actually has beliefs which are even plausibly immoral to hold, so this seems like a digression."

"Unfortunately, that seems plausible. Hell has been having some very pointed conversations with Mireia Rasdovain."

(Rasdovain was either soul-sold or Maledicted. Nirvana had assembled the bare outlines of a case based on her effectively withholding valuable resources from Cheliax. When petitioners whose best case for non-LE is in that genre go to Hell anyway, as happens unfortunately often, things tend to go particularly badly for them. Also, this remark is probably going over Griffith's head, and now is not the time to explain it, Griffith is doing acceptable work here and shouldn't be distracted.)

"Returning to the matter at hand: One of the questions in this trial seems to be whether the petitioner's Lawful actions in life count towards his systemic alignment. If, while no longer under the effects he was under in life, he nonetheless endorses his Lawful actions, this is very simple to resolve, so I'd like to check this now."

Ey turns to the petitioner. "While alive, when you did not attempt to mislead others, it was because you could not do otherwise, and when you followed laws, a significant factor was your belief that you would almost certainly be caught for violating them due to inability to conceal such violations. How do you feel about those actions now?"

"In terms of my understanding of Law and Chaos, I'm satisfied with the actions I took while on Earth. Some of the laws in the Fractious States, where I lived, weren't ones I agreed with, but I think adhering to them was reasonable for me and contributed to a healthy society, and I think making false statements to people who don't have the capacity to evaluate those statements is very bad."

"I am rather displeased by my actions in Cheliax. I'm not sure what scenarios to evaluate here. I think refusing to tell them anything would have been better by my values. I think giving them false information to waste their time would have been good by my values if I could have managed genuinely unhelpful false information which I probably couldn't have. It'd be nice if I'd fled the country to somewhere it wouldn't be harmful to contribute to, but I don't know if I would have been capable of it even fully informed of everything. It's plausible that L-, uh, Mireia Rasdovain would have forced me to produce useful information if I hadn't volunteered it and prevented me from running off, in which case the right thing to do plausibly would have been committing suicide before she figured things out. If Cheliax had abolitionists I could have joined I would have wanted to do that."

"Uh, for clarity, it's my understanding that violating the laws of slave states that pursue evil goals on the international stage is what plenty of people from my world think is the right thing to do and that it's not an, er, significant norms violation, that the defiance of some portion of right-thinking people is basically something you, uh, ought to anticipate when you decide to have widespread slavery or such.

"Does that clarify matters for you?"

"Not very Lawful."