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In the middle of self-recriminations about preparing stupid spells, Blai appears in a cemetery.
It's dark, so it takes him a Light spell to notice that it's a cemetery, but while the range of headstone styles is unfamiliar the spacing and the inscriptions give it away. It doesn't look super actively haunted, so it's not an emergency, but he keeps one hand on his holy symbol and one on his mace as he picks his way across the grounds, looking for buildings or something.
"It can't be common to be formally non-Evil. The fort has a Holy bow, and if you pick it up and you're Evil, you notice that it objects, that's just worth it if you're a good enough archer to begin with and you're shooting at the right kind of demon. Though I guess it's not impossible people were routinely picking it up and finding it didn't mind them and they just didn't tell anyone for fear they would be promptly ordered to torture a camp follower to death."
Her eyebrows lift slightly as she processes that one. "—right, because being able to take an objective measurement of someone's moral character, in a society ruled by Hell—hm. Don't like that."
"You'd have to make someone shoot the bow a lot to be sure of this any way besides them saying so. Alignment detection spells only work on people who are strong enough. There are a couple of oblique ways to get this information about weaker people but mostly only if you're prepared to risk killing them - types of damage that are choosy - or I guess you could make them pick up the bow while you were reading their mind but we did not in fact make a practice of that."
"Yeah. It's still... a disquieting implication, even if it's obvious in retrospect, that... the existence of the objective measurement means that it can be an institutional target, that people can be made to conform to if they're observed to deviate."
"Clerics can be up to one 'step' away from our gods, but - it is understood that Neutral Evil people will get the choice to appear in either the Chaotic Evil or the Lawful Evil afterlives, the Neutral Evil one having offended Pharasma, and that they'd choose Hell, so Lawful Neutral is the - threat model, for Asmodeans - but there wasn't really a lot of checking. Serving Hell is a pretty Evil thing to do."
"But they're not just resting on their laurels in that regard, are they? They're actively trying to get people to do more evil than they otherwise might."
"Yes. I think less at the Wound, there are other obligations there. And they exaggerate the practical availability of both of Detect Thoughts and Malediction."
"Fourth circle spell for sending someone to Hell in a way that bypasses Judgment. In practice pretty much reserved for people caught defecting in a way that would normally call that into question, like if they were clerics of a Good god or committing espionage for a broadly Good-aligned power."
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