--- Atrog ---

Atrog had to go to court, to defend his teammate in front of a judge.

Frankly, he was surprised it had taken this long. At the same time, the details were much better than he had feared.

Weeks ago, on the day they hired Balron, Galanys had performed a public performance as a magician. The volunteer had been mentally scarred by it, as she made him believe that she actually sawed him in half and killed him. Or at least that was what he claimed, when he decided to sue Galanys for inflicting emotional trauma on him.

What Atrog had not expected was that Galanys accepted the charges, and admitted culpability. She said she really should have remembered that most people were much more risk-averse than herself. However, she argued that the charges were wildly exaggerated in their severity, and the fine the victim asked of her in compensation was excessive. Atrog was inclined to agree.

The judge had determined that this was a case where the severity of the crime depended in large part on people's intentions, as it was not easy to determine if Galanys had taken proper precautions, nor if the victim was exaggerating for his own benefit. Witness statements were famously unreliable in cases like these, especially since it was an emotion-laden event that happened weeks in the past. That made character references very important, and so the judge had invited all of team Nundru to give their statements. The decision would not be made today, but what they had to say, and the fact that they were going to swear oaths on their statements, would heavily influence the court's decision later.

This was not common practice in Atrog's experience, but not unheard of, either.

Even before today's hearing, Dov had made a strange proposal to the judge, and Atrog was very interested in hearing what would come of it. A foreign princess had absolutely no say in the Orukian judiciary, of course, but the proposal had sounded genuinely intriguing to him.

Dov had been raised to rule one day, and this shone through in her stance on the topic. She did not argue about what would be fair for Galanys, or fair for the victim. Instead, she was concerned about which principles would need to be upheld that could generalize to future crimes as well. She actually spent a day revisiting her forgotten memories to come up with her proposal. He knew from experience that she deeply disliked doing so, as it meant that her brain would take longer to adjust to her new brain chemistry each time she did this.

In Dov's opinion the root of the issue was that the law was trying to solve two separate issues at the same time. The 'punishment as a deterrent' and the 'punishment as restoration'. Both were valid aspects, and both need to be addressed. Unfortunately it was difficult to satisfy both at the same time without overdoing one or the other.

She said that it was not reasonable for the victim to ask for this much money. His emotional state was not more important than the sum of all the contributions he would make to society over several years. Ruling otherwise would encourage people to find excuses to sue over trivial matters, as that would be more profitable than working. That said, the punishment for Galanys must also be in proportion to her wealth. Otherwise there would be no reason for her not to do it again. As the saying went, if the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for poor people.

Compared to ordinary people her age, Galanys was now quite rich. She would be able to afford the fine, if just barely. She would definitely feel it, but it would not ruin her.

So Dov suggested a compromise: Galanys would pay the full fine, but the victim would only see a small part of it. The rest would go to charity.

That way rich criminals would be equally disincentivized as poor ones, people did not get a reason to make up accusations in the hopes of large payouts, and to top it all off something good would be done by the charity.

At first, Galanys had sounded quite upset by Dov's proposal. She felt betrayed, she had said. But to his surprise, the two of them had managed to talk it out, and now Galanys agreed with her girlfriend's suggestion. While she still didn't like it, she acknowledged that it was fair. Apparently, the two of them had determined by talking to each other that they held different views on loyalty and responsibility. Different, but not insurmountable.

Dov considered it very important to acknowledge your own mistakes and work on them. It was a religious matter for her. As such she found it admirable that Galanys had chosen to accept culpability, but was disappointed that she wanted to evade most of the consequences. To her, a matter of principle like this was more important than taking the side of her lover over a mere financial penalty that would cause her no permanent harm.

Galanys was not nearly as interested in these kinds of principles as Dov, and she found that reasoning process quite alien. She cared more about her friends than about abstract rules like these. And yet, her interest in studying psychology allowed her to look at the situation through Dov's eyes, and she decided to accept it. The two of them made up soon afterwards, and he had noticed no lingering resentment either. Atrog had been positively surprised that Galanys' strange interest in psychology was finally useful for something, instead of just causing problems. After all, she was only getting sued because she put on an absurd show where she pretended to saw a volunteer in half, and she only did that because she enjoyed getting a rise out of people.

Rania had been shocked by this. She said that she had fully expected them to have a fight and break up their relationship. It would have been 'narratively appropriate' for them to refuse to talk to each other and worsen team dynamics, until a dramatic moment later where they would make up again in order to save each others' lives. Rania quickly added that she was happy for them that this was not going to happen, but she was also very confused. She felt like her adventure novels were lying to her, and she did not know how to deal with that.

Atrog did not know where to even begin to address this lunacy. Galanys and Dov were both reasonable people who could talk through their differences. They weren't caricatures from an adventure novel whose relationship only existed to create juicy drama for the reader to enjoy. He had explained often enough that real life was not like stories. Tonos was not that powerful, and people did still have free will. But somehow Rania adamantly refused to listen. Maybe Lilian could do it? As crazy as she was, she and Rania seemed to speak the same language, and the fact that Lilian was still alive after decades of adventuring proved that she must know what she was doing.

Rania's reaction aside, he was a little disappointed that the lives that would be saved by the charity did not really seem to factor into Galanys' reasoning at all. And apparently the plaintiff did not care about that, either. The court had notified them that the judge had shown Dov's proposal to him, and he had refused flat out, and would not even consider giving at least a small portion to charity. It was quite clear that the man was only out for his own enrichment, and Atrog suspected that he would be vastly exaggerating his emotional trauma during the hearing.

To his surprise, Rania also noticed that nobody seemed to care about the charity, and referred to this as the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics'. Atrog was happy to hear that, as it was a term from one of the books he had recommended to her. The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics was the somewhat cynical view that people were only responsible for other people when they directly interacted with them. Therefore it was ok not to give to charity, and it was fine to walk past a beggar without giving them anything, but only if you didn't make extended eye contact or exchange any words with them. If you interacted with something, then you were morally responsible for it.

Vherdes the Hedonist actually approved of it, and he was one of the most respected authorities on ethical questions in the world. He said that a more universal utilitarian form of ethics was 'far superior in principle, but infeasible in practice'. The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics in contrast was kind of depressing, but also much more realistically achievable by ordinary people. In Vherdes’ words, the perfect was the enemy of the good enough, and if enough people could be convinced to at least be nicer to their immediate acquaintances, then this would already make the world a better place.

Atrog was glad to see Rania show such an interest in the topic.

He was less glad to hear that the spirits apparently all had their own views on this topic as well, which had to do with anthropics.

He didn't know what that meant, and so he had looked at Balron for support. But the man had just shaken his head. That topic was beyond him as well. The gods only knew what the spirits were telling Rania about. There was a reason that shamans had a reputation for weirdness, after all.

These questions about morality and ethics were very important to him, and frankly he could not understand how anyone else could think differently.

Ever since he learned about heaven and hell as a young child, acting morally had been his highest goal. He just could not understand how any rational being could not make that their priority in life. Originally, Atrog himself had started acting more morally entirely out of rational self-interest, and not out of conviction. But it turned out that "fake it until you make it" could also apply to being a good person. And so he had grown up to be a person who genuinely enjoyed helping others.

In his opinion, even an entirely selfish person should be smart enough to realize that committing evil was just plain stupid in the long run. After all, everyone's time on Hyd was limited, while the afterlife was forever.

The transition into the afterlife was the crucial point. To the best of people's knowledge, a person did not move into heaven or hell based on a binary judgment, as people used to believe. It was more complex than that. Essentially, the deceased's soul and personality would be split apart and each aspect of it would be judged separately. All parts of your personality that were good would go to heaven, and all those that were bad would go to hell. There, the fragments of your personality would combine with those of compatible other people to form angels, devils, and similar beings. In essence, only the good parts of yourself would be rewarded in heaven, and only the bad parts would be punished in hell.

It was unclear what happened to the parts of your personality that were neither intrinsically good nor bad. Presumably they just followed the other parts of the person’s personality that they were most closely connected to.

Of course, the thought that one would lose a big chunk of their personality after death was somewhat disturbing, and people dealt with this in different ways.

Most people simply tried not to think about it, and got uncomfortable when they were reminded of it. He pitied them for their shortsightedness.

His own approach was simple: The closer you already were to an angel upon death, the less your personality would change when you entered the afterlife. He was not arrogant enough to believe that no part of his personality was bad. He had his vices, just like everyone else. But the important part was that his vices did not define him, and were not a part of his self-identity. When he died and these flaws were removed from him, he would welcome their loss.

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The citizens of Ossor took an entirely different path. They considered it a form of personality-death to turn into an angel. Their approach was to avoid entering the afterlife at all, by becoming undead. But this was not perfect, and it was well known that intelligent undead tended to deteriorate mentally as they got older. It was an open question why, but the fact that Vherdes the Hedonist was also undead and did not show any signs of mental degradation indicated that it probably had to do with the lack of a biological brain. Atrog knew he was not smart enough to understand the details on this topic, but it seemed like a reasonable explanation to him.

Because of this, the mages of Ossor really only traded one type of personality change for another. In Atrog's opinion, this was quite stupid. If you were going to change anyway, why not do it on purpose, and in a direction you are comfortable with? Turning into an angel made you a nicer person, while mental degradation just made you randomly insane. He was surprised time and time again how highly intelligent people could be so lacking in wisdom and common sense.

Many geniuses and aspiring liches lived relatively miserable, lonely lives filled with boredom and a lack of success. They were driven their whole life to achieve immortality, and many sacrificed their social life to achieve it. Worse, the vast majority of them failed in the end. Achieving lichdom was extremely difficult. And so they ended up dying of old age, having wasted most of their lives. And then they entered the afterlife, where their soul would be torn apart because it was not sufficiently good to be entirely remade into an angel, and hopefully also not sufficiently evil to be turned into a devil or demon.

His own approach was so much better: He spent his life helping people. Adventuring meant constant danger and a risk of death, but what did that matter to a person who was going to be reborn as an angel with most of his mental faculties and goals intact? It might be a bit arrogant to claim that one was a good enough person to be certain to make the transition, but he frequently asked both priests and academics for advice, and read a diverse selection of books on the subject. At this point he was as sure of it as any mortal could be.

Ensuring a great afterlife was quite obviously the most important thing anyone could strive for. What were a mere couple of decades of life, or centuries for some other species, compared to eternity?

Meanwhile, whenever he was not in danger he lived a very enjoyable life. Adventurers made a lot of money, and his acts of kindness had earned him many friends over the years. While he lived, he got to enjoy life. When he died, he would get to enjoy the afterlife. And if by some miracle he survived to old age, he had more than enough money saved up for his retirement already.

All possible paths led to success.

Well, almost all paths. There were still some things that could go wrong. One of those was the possibility of getting his soul captured and destroyed. As unlikely as this was, he had encountered that danger just recently. After his party defeated the Elder Mind Warper and Balron detected necromantic energies nearby that pointed towards captured souls, Atrog had been shocked and terrified. After all, he had not known that it was only a harmless artifact used by Dov's siblings to anchor their souls until they could be revived.

It had been the truest test of his convictions he had ever been through. It would have been too easy to come up with an excuse not to interfere. But he had chosen to intervene despite the potential danger to his own soul. It was proof that while he may have become a paladin for less than virtuous reasons, he had now become what his teenage self had only pretended to be. If you wore a mask for long enough, then you would eventually become the mask.

Now if only he had more success convincing his friends to take the same path. All of them took the usual approach to the afterlife that most people did: They wanted to be good people in the abstract, but when it actually came down to the concrete choice between donating to charity, or buying something fun, people usually chose the latter.

Galanys' decision here was a step in the right direction, and he was glad of it.

Surprisingly, the person who he had the most success convincing of his viewpoint was Rania. He had not expected her to be receptive at all when he first tried to teach her that life did not work like story books. Rania still sometimes referred to people simply as "Bad Guys", as though a person's entire life history could be summed up as simply as that. But she had improved markedly in the short time since they had met. He was quite proud of her for that.

He still did not quite know what to make of her. She was clearly more than met the eye. When they first met, he disregarded the possibility that she was a supernatural creature because the base rate of deluded people was much higher than the base rate of powerful beings infiltrating mortals. You did not even need to know the exact statistics on this, it was just common sense. And yet, so many people fell for tricks like this and founded cults. He had initially been worried that Rania might be such a cultist, but he had let her join anyway because she saved their life and seemed very genuine in wanting to help.

But after all that she had done, he had changed his mind. There was something strange to that elf. Her refusal to talk about her experiences with the Coros all but confirmed it. Theoretically it was possible that the Coros threw her out and she just loitered around all day and now claimed she couldn't talk about it. But this didn't match her personality at all. At this point, he thought it quite likely that something about Rania was genuinely supernatural. It was so very frustrating that she refused to talk about her past, and got upset whenever anyone pried. He was torn between respecting her privacy, and needing to know for the safety of the rest of the team, as well as other people.

For the umpteenth time he found himself thinking about how to address the topic without Rania just clamping up immediately.

He was still thinking about this when the group reached the court building, and the clerk addressed them.

"Welcome. I see you are adventurers. I'm afraid that weapons and armor are not allowed within the court building. This includes spellcasting components. Should magic be required during the court procedure, materials will be provided."

None of them were surprised by this. Atrog deposited his weapons with the clerk. He had not even bothered to put on his armor this morning, since the court building was luckily quite close to his home. It was important to be prepared for anything, but putting on heavy armor was quite time consuming and time was valuable as well.

Balron clearly did not share that opinion.

The professor spent some time getting undressed, then deposited several bottomless bags. He kept several more, claiming that they did not contain weapons. Naturally the clerk went to inspect them.

"What is all of this stuff?" He asked in dismay.

"Do you want an itemized list, or was that a rhetorical question?" The dwarf replied. "I do have a summary in my notes."

Then he handed over a piece of paper to the clerk.

Atrog was annoyed with Balron for holding up the group like this. Preparations were important, but this was just ridiculous. At least it was funny to watch the clerk's facial expression as he went over the increasingly strange items.

"There are wooden stakes here. Those are weapons. You will have to remove them." The clerk said.

"Actually, according to precedent set by Drokk vs. Wildstepp, wooden stakes are classified as building materials and are not prohibited. I read up on this beforehand."

"And what were you planning to build with them?"

"Nothing. They are for staking vampires. But their legality does not depend on what I plan to do with them, only on what they are." Balron replied confidently.

The clerk continued going through the bag.

"...this is literally a sword." He said.

"Yes it is. It's also a clerical item of Shallor, and doubles as a spellcasting focus. There is a special exemption that permits clerics of Shallor to take these items with them."

"I have never heard of that god before. You are one of his clerics? My notes say that you are a professor."

"I'm not surprised. He is not a very popular god. I got ordained about seventy years ago specifically so that I could carry this. You would be surprised how often it comes up."

The clerk looked like Balron had grown a second head, but he continued his inspection. Atrog was very glad that he had planned a good amount of extra time. Being late for a hearing for a character reference would not exactly be ideal. He was bored out of his mind. Rania spent the time reading one of her adventure novels, and Galanys joined her to ask about the book. At least Dov seemed to be having fun, looking over Balron's shoulder and taking notes. She was obsessed with getting better, and always liked to learn new tricks. He hoped she would not end up just as obsessed as Balron once she was done copying all his preparations.

When they finally entered the courtroom, Atrog noticed that the audience was much bigger than he would have expected for such a simple case. Maybe the presence of a foreign princess as a character reference had attracted attention?

They took their seats on the bench designated for them, along with the lawyer the court had provided for them.

Immediately after sitting down, Balron retrieved some small stones from his pocket and attached them to the bench, where they adhered on their own. These were actually mirrors. They were painted over to be non-reflective and seemingly pointless for other people, but Balron's glasses allowed him to see through them. This gave him a way to see the entire courtroom without turning around. They also contained enchantments that created recordings of everything they saw or heard, which made them useful for surveillance as well.

"*Seriously, Balron? We are in court. This is disrespectful.*" He told the dwarf telepathically.

"*Yes, we are. Recording court processes is not illegal. We probably won't need this, but better safe than sorry.*" Balron replied.

He knew that the professor would not budge on this, and in the end it was a harmless quirk, so he left it be.

The court process itself was just about as boring as Atrog had expected.

When he was called upon to speak, he explained to the court how he knew Galanys. He talked about how they had saved each other before, and that he trusted her with his life and the lives of his teammates. He explained that she had much lower risk-aversion than normal people, as was typical for adventurers. This made her underestimate the effect of her performance on the volunteer, but she was neither callous nor negligent. It was a genuine mistake.

The others gave similarly glowing testimony, and he was glad to see that none of them lied.

The court procedure was interrupted a few times by remarks from Rania. Luckily the judge was apparently used to dealing with shamans, because he took this in stride.

First, Rania was upset that the court did not ask for character references from Whiskers, Pebble, or Aranea. The judge simply stated that the testimony of spirits could only be accepted on review by an independent, unaffiliated shaman. Since no such shaman was requested ahead of time, they would be unable to accept the testimony. He also clarified that Aranea was an unawakened pet and not a spirit, and therefore was not eligible to give character references at all.

Next, Rania suggested just summoning a Lawkeeper to ask his opinion. She apparently did not understand just how expensive such a summoning was. It would only be worth it for much more serious crimes.

Finally, she suggested simply trying to stab Galanys with her arrows to see what happens. That finally got the judge to lose his composure. Luckily he listened to Atrog's explanation of the Arrows of Bad Guy Slaying that Rania had acquired. The judge gave a long-suffering sigh, mumbled something about shamans, and then declared that the arrows constituted untested magic items and were therefore not admissible as evidence.

When Rania suggested she could test them first by just stabbing some convicted criminals, the judge simply pretended not to hear her and went on to the next topic.

After their statements, the plaintiff's witnesses gave statements of their own, praising the virtues of the victim.

This was somewhat derailed when Balron pointed out that the victim was a student at the university where he taught, and he knew from his colleagues that he was known as a troublemaker who was suspected of cheating on exams.

Additionally, their claims that the victim had not been himself since the incident fell flat when it turned out that he had not even tried to seek therapy for his supposed trauma.

It looked to Atrog's eyes like the plaintiff's lawyer was about to start crying.

After that, the plaintiff described the events of the evening as he remembered them. Galanys countered by explaining about her eidetic memory, and corrected the precise location and timing of every single event the plaintiff mentioned. She then offered to repeat all of that under a truth spell.

The use of truth spells in court was a hotly contested topic of current politics. The Coros had only recently made it feasible, and politicians were understandably reluctant to effectively make their judiciary dependent on the claims of a company. But offering to undergo such a test yourself was sure to reflect well on Galanys.

They then spent a considerable amount of time on cross-examination. It was boring, and felt quite pointless to Atrog. It should be obvious to anyone that the plaintiff was exaggerating.

That was when Balron suddenly pinged them all telepathically with their prearranged signal for 'ambush'.

"*Audience is drawing weapons*" Balron communicated.

Atrog noticed that the Bailiff was drawing his club as well. The man's reaction speed was unexpectedly fast, and his eyes were locked on team Nundru instead of the assassins.

"*Scenario 16. Assassins in the audience. The bailiff is in on it.*" He thought at his teammates, already moving.

None of them had weapons except for Balron, but this was not unplanned for. This was similar to being ambushed at night, while most of them were asleep, and he had drilled them on how to handle that situation.

In the privacy of his own mind, he sighed. He was going to have to apologize to Balron later. Placing those mirrors to see the audience had been foresight instead of paranoia, after all.