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the nature of the setting really changes the sort of person you're often representing
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He's completed most of Nirvana's lawyer training program already. It doesn't take him very long to finish, as Nirvana counts time. A few decades, at most.

A few decades is a very long time when your best friend is being tortured in Hell.

He drills case precedent. (In his free time, he looks up obscure legal citations in volumes no one's touched in centuries.) He rehearses standard and less-standard arguments. (He rehearses what he would even say to him, if he gets the chance.) He takes part in mock trials with the rest of his cohort. (They bring in volunteers from the more experienced students to portray the other afterlives; he's silently grateful, and silently very confident that he'll never be able to pass the favor on, not even if it's just pretending to be Heaven.) 

The training program brings in all kinds of guest speakers -- azatas from Elysium, angels from Heaven, even once an arbiter inevitable. Former residents of the Isle of the Penitent. Former advocates who burned out. He pays close attention to every one of them, and silently wishes that they could move a little faster.

As he's approaching the end of the program, they start to let him take on trials of his own. They would do it sooner -- there's no substitute for arguing real trials -- but Pharasma's courts allow but a single advocate from each afterlife, and it's hard to countenance risking someone's eternity to train a lawyer a little faster.

In his earliest trials, he's assigned to unambiguous cases, so clear that even Elysium and Heaven rarely bother to send a representative. He drills his arguments beforehand, just in case someone shows up to raise a counterargument. He and his classmates go over all of their case transcripts afterwards, discussing they arguments he made and finding ways to improve. He gives one of his classmates a citation suggestion, and she gives him an odd look and asks where he even heard of In re Stone.

It's a good suggestion, if niche. She rewrites her argument.

By the time he's nearing graduation, he's assigned slightly more complicated cases. Still nothing where anyone is at risk of eternal damnation, of course, but cases where the outcome isn't predetermined. A cleric of Jaidi who could be lawful, if you look at it the right way, whose only preference between Heaven and Nirvana is the desire for her still-living children to end up wherever she does. An unexceptional employee of an orphanage, the sort of person who would usually be sorted True Neutral but shunted into Nirvana, save for the fact that he's good enough at childcare that Pharasma might actually want them for the Boneyard. A teenager who's clearly tilting Chaotic but desperately wants to stay out of Elysium. 

They don't all get sorted to Nirvana; that's to be expected. If he never took on real cases, he'd never learn.

Nirvana's lawyer education program has a tradition that the very last case you take before you graduate is a case where someone is probably doomed to the Evil afterlives. It's important, in this line of work, to know whether that's the sort of outcome you'll be able to endure.

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The petitioner in this case is clearly Evil, even when he tries to look at it from Axis's or the Boneyard's point of view. (He punishes himself, afterwards, but he'd be punished more harshly if he got to trial and discovered that the judge saw the case as far more ambiguous than he did.)

With this petitioner he's at risk of losing to the Abyss no matter how incompetent their advocate is, if he's not careful. That's not, actually, any better than losing a case to Heaven.

Presumably that's why he's on the case. If it were trivial they wouldn't have assigned it to him.

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She had purchased an Early Judgment once, from a travelling minstrel offering them at a discount. It was all very well and good to risk trouble with the law, but risking your eternity would just be stupid. The minstrel cast a spell and made visions of a vast forest dance before her -- "Elysium or Nirvana, if I had to take a guess, though some parts of the Maelstorm look like this too" -- and left her to go on her way.

A year later a cleric told her that that wasn't how the spell worked at all, that it was supposed to be a picture in her mind rather than an illusion, and besides, was she stupid, didn't she know that song-sorcerers couldn't learn that spell at all? She asked if she could purchase one from him and he told her that he wasn't in the business of saving fools from themselves. 

She didn't try again, after that.

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Given that half of the representatives at this trial look incredibly evil and the other half are animals it's possible she should have tried harder to get that Early Judgment.

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"Do you know your name?"

"Thea Teresis."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Pharasma's courts. Waiting for judgment."

"Does it sound to you like we are speaking in a language you understand, using words that you are familiar with, at a speaking speed you can follow?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand that you had, while alive, the capacity to take actions, and that those actions had effects on the world and on other people?"

 

 

"Yes."

"Do you understand that the purpose of this court is to determine your alignment and which afterlife you are assigned to?"

"I said that already."

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"Looks like everything's in order, then. Advocates?"

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He could try to have her stipulated as Evil, but if he does that every other advocate will be united in trying to show her non-Lawful. If there's even a remote possibility of her being judged as anything else then the Nirvana advocate could be a useful idiot for keeping her out of the Abyss's hands. Nirvana's attorneys hate to close off doors, no matter how absurd those doors might be.

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If the devil isn't going to be the first to talk he's definitely going to take advantage of that! He's not about to let a perfectly good opportunity go to waste by not trying to win, where would the fun in that be.

"Right, so, she's clearly Evil as fuck, right? Murder, blackmail, running a crime ring, the whole deal. Then you consider the 'crime ring' part of that and you've got Chaotic too. Seems pretty obvious to me."

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"Your Honor, Hell disputes that it is 'obvious' that this woman is Chaotic, and indeed that she is Chaotic at all.

"The Abyss has raised a number of arguments in favor of her being Evil, to which Hell adds her attempt to frame an innocent man for her crimes. We do not disagree with any of that. But attempting to argue that her being a criminal makes her intrinsically Chaotic flies in the face of precedent and neglects the context of her crimes. Ac--"

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"It's not just that she was a criminal! She was literally running an entire criminal organization! That's not just one crime."

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"I am speaking. Do not interrupt me."

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There's something about the tone of voice, or maybe the phrasing, that's half-familiar. 

It's probably just a coincidence. There are countless devils in Hell.

But -- he needs to know.

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"As the Abyss just pointed out, she was running a criminal syndicate, not merely partaking in miscellaneous violations of the law. No crime is intrinsically Chaotic -- Norgorber himself is systemically Neutral -- but criminal organizations are particularly unlikely to be Chaotic when compared with other forms of criminal activity, due to their typical structure, their tendency to enforce strict codes of conduct on their members, and their function in some locations as quasi-governments. That's originally from In re Kuzuryu but it's well-established precedent at this point.

"The implication that criminals are presumptively Chaotic is also dubious even discounting the unusual nature of her criminal activity. Murder is illegal nearly everywhere, yet murderers are commonly judged Neutral or Lawful Evil. Asserting that the mere act of breaking the law makes someone unLawful is a child's misunderstanding of Law at best."

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...He also needs to defend the petitioner. Figuring out whether this is Milites can come later.

"Your Honor, Nirvana disputes that this woman is Evil."

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"Of course you do. Nirvanans, am I right?"

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"Like I was starting to say, this woman may have killed someone, but that doesn't make her Evil. The person she killed was literally trying to kill her first, and she was defending herself, which is well-established as non-Evil in most circumstances. In this case it's particularly unambiguous, since she wasn't even trying to kill him, even though he was attacking her. She pushed him away from her -- again, while he was trying to kill her -- and he fell into an ornamental fencepost and died from his injuries. Even describing this as 'murder' is a stretch."

He is ... going to hold off on arguing about all the other things until he has to. He's pretty confident he can get the judge on his side about the thing where she killed someone, and less sure whether he can persuade them about everything else.

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"Sure, maybe it was an accident, but it's not like she ran off to find a cleric."

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"That seems like awfully much to expect of her under the circumstances, just saying."

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He hates everyone in this courtroom, with the possible exception of the judge. At least Axis sometimes manages to be tolerable.

"Your Honor, Nirvana's characterization neglects several relevant factors, such as the fact that she was familiar with the lethal potential of her surrounding environment, and the fact that she immediately attempted to cover up the murder rather than securing magical or non-magical healing, reporting what happened, or taking literally any actions whatsoever to mitigate the effects of her actions.

"Killing in self-defense is non-Evil in isolation, but it can still be Evil under certain circumstances, such as if the killer continues to use lethal force when their safety is assured, as articulated in In re Kuwata, 3559. This woman did not continue to attack the victim, but she did knowingly take actions that made him more likely to die even once her own safety was assured.

"Furthermore, Nirvana has neglected to address numerous other factors which are sufficient on their own to support a finding of Evil. Hell moves that, given the lack of response, those factors be taken as conceded."

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"Uh, Nirvana objects to doing that! We don't think any of those make her Evil either! I was just focusing on the murder first."

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