"I- I'm not an idiot. We're enemies, even if you meant it your companions wouldn't let me go. You just want me to let my guard down so I won't see it coming."

"She means it and we mean it. If you attack us we'll have to kill you; if you leave the city we'll leave you alone." She makes two copies of the "my hands are not on my sword" gesture.

"We definitely won't kill you if we agreed to let you go. I would fall for that, and Iomedae would be right to do it. But are you sure it's a good idea to agree to this, Brenda? They're a demon, and we already know they killed people earlier to get that body. How can you trust that they're not just going to do it again as soon as they get away from us?"

"I know it's a risk, but--if we kill them because otherwise they'd kill us because otherwise we'd kill them that's really stupid." She looks at the demon. "Why did you come out here, anyway? What were you hoping for?"

"We were ordered, and I didn't want to die."

That's not the whole story, of course, but he's pretty sure that if he mentions he was looking forward to eating some corpses that's the kind of thing that makes scary crusaders with swords more likely to try and kill him and not less.

That's almost certainly not the whole story, but--it's a part that rather makes the rest irrelevant, doesn't it.

"Could you go back? What would happen if you did?"

"I'd die, I can't cross the wardstones without help."

What, they do damage both coming and going? That seems like a design flaw. On the other hand, it compensates usefully for the way it's dangerous to pursue demons back through the barrier because they can concentrate force inside it.

"I didn't realize. Asking the question more broadly, then: can you imagine any future in which we don't kill you and you don't kill anyone else? Can you convince us that that's a future we can get?" She's already committed to scrying Minagho regularly, but that's not going to scale.

How could he possibly survive without killing anyone ? Less people, sure, if he has enough corpses there’s not even that much reason to unless someone orders him. Maybe if there  were only demons around so he’d only have to fight them, but then someone stronger would just kill or recruit him again. He’s still kind of tempted to tell her to let him go and that would be fine but the paladin seems too smart to fall for that.

”If I could go back to the abyss far away from the rift? Or went somewhere where everyone was really dangerous, or I was a prisoner?”

Ideally she’ll agree to the third option and then he can just escape later.

She looks at Seelah. "Is the first of those feasible, if he can't go back through the barrier? Is the third?"

"Sending people to other planes is a pretty powerful spell, but you could probably afford to pay someone to do it? I've never tried keeping a demon prisoner so I don't know how difficult it is besides harder than killing them, but either way they could be broken out."

She needs to learn wizardry, then she'll have so many more options for solving this kind of problem. 

"Well, we can bring him to Hulrun and see what he says. Maybe he'll be willing to hold him long enough for me to get someone to send him home."

"I know it doesn't scale. I can't do anything that scales right now but I'm working on it."

"I don't know if that would be very good for him. The abyss is already pretty bad for demons, but I think Hulrun would just kill him and then he wouldn't have any chance to get better."

"The eagle's watch might be able to keep him prisoner for a bit without getting Hulrun involved, but what I'm more worried about is the other demon. They didn't even try to surrender, and I don't want to leave them here while we go take the other one somewhere else since I don't know how long it'll be until they wake up and wander off to kill someone else."

"I would have been fine killing the other one if Ember hadn't been faster, he was clearly trying to kill us. I think that means I should still be okay killing him now. Ember, would it be--unfair to you, being a bad friend--if I killed him now?"

"I don't know how to help them from here, or make them see how lashing out at the people around them is just hurting them too, so I think if you leave them there they'll start hurting other people again once you go and that would also be bad. But... they're still a person. I don't think being unfair to me or not is what should decide if they get to live."

"That's a really good point, it's just--if they had tripped on a rock and knocked themself out, I'd just kill them, because every minute we spend trying to find other solutions is a minute other demons are killing other humans somewhere else in the city." (Unless this four-way conversation counts under Time Enough For Love, but she doesn't think it does.)

"But I'm not killing that guy" she points at the still-conscious demon "because he chose to talk instead of fighting or running and it feels--unfair--to repay that by killing him. And if you made the other one sleep because you thought you had a way to avoid killing him, or because you thought it would be better to leave him there unconscious even with the risk, it would be unfair for me to--decide in favor of killing him over your objections, when he's still right there for me to kill because of you."

"I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not in charge of this group and if you want to do things one way and I want to do them another way I shouldn't get to automatically have my way just because my way is more permanent."

"I don't usually think about my decisions like that, but this sounds important to you, and if it means deciding not to hurt people who are willing to try to do better that's also a good thing. Thank you for listening to me and giving me a chance."

"You're welcome. Do you want to talk to--" she looks at the demon. "I can't just keep calling you 'this guy', that's stupid, what's your name? Or I guess I can keep calling you 'this guy' if you don't want to tell me."

"...You can call me Drovidra, if you want," the vermlek replies, in the voice of someone who would really rather not have been asked that.

It's like it's impossible to have a polite conversation with someone when the topic is whether you're going to kill them and their friend. What a fucking surprise.

"Ember, do you want the five of us to all go to the Eagle Watch so you have more time to talk things over?"

"That sounds helpful. If I encounter paladins on the way over on my own, I'm not sure I could get them not to kill Drovidra."

She then turns to the aforementioned demon, and decides to resume as they walk.

"Some people like to say that mercy and forgiveness are only for the strong, because you have to be good enough that your opponent can't hurt you to offer it. But I think this is just a sad way to look at it, because the whole point is that you don't have to fight in the first place. If Brenda and Seelah and I disagree on what to do, we don't have to fight or threaten each other about it, just like you didn't have to fight us to survive. Sometimes it's a bit harder than that, and you have to take care of yourself too, but two people can always just decide to try to stop hurting each other and learn to heal from their hurts."

"But if you weren't strong enough to put him to sleep, you would have died back there. And an incubus would just take your head off anyway, they like hurting people if they can't fight back!"

While Ember learns about the reasons why people don't usually try to talk things out with demons, Seelah is going to go kill the other one. A blow through the neck shouldn't even be painful, though she'll stab them a few other places to make sure. They'd probably get caught by the guards before they did too much damage, but probably still leaves room for people to get hurt.

"That's always a possibility. I got these burns because someone didn't want to take that kind of risk, and didn't trust it when someone else offered it to them. But hurting everyone around you to protect yourself is even worse as an option, and it doesn't even make you any safer..."