Tail-twitch. "Hey now, I've turned over a new leaf. From here on out I'll only be stealing from demons and cultists, perfectly legal."

She chuckles.

"Thank you."

"Need anything else while I'm here?"

"Do you have any information on how the other Desnans are doing?" Apparently it's relevant to his party comp.

"Last I heard they were helping some civilians get back to their houses. I don't think the Prelate's gotten to them yet, he's been pretty busy dealing with cultists who've already been apprehended and making sure no one tries anything here in the Defender's Heart."

"If you ask me, they'd be better off leaving while they've still got the chance. They don't get killed, Hulrun doesn't have to deal with the horrible scourge of people disagreeing with him, win-win."

"They've got a temple here, they must have coexisted with him for a while."

"He's not usually quite this... like this," she says, in the tone of someone who'd been planning to finish the sentence with 'quite this bad.' "He's never gone after me for praying to Desna, or anything like that. But even at the best of times he doesn't really trust anyone who doesn't follow Iomedae, and especially not anyone Chaotic."

She looks down at her hands. "He's trying to do the right thing, but he's very scared all the time, and he's hurt so many people that he's started thinking of it like they don't really matter. He can tell when people are only pretending to be his friends, but he can't tell when they really are his friends, especially if they're very strange to him. And so he ends up hurting people who only wanted to help, but that only makes him more scared, because he sees it as a sign that all his fears were true, and it means everyone else has to be afraid of him all the time, because they don't know whether he'll decide they're his enemies."

It really seems like the Desnans could have avoided all of this by not breaking in to do magic to the Wardstone. 

Could they though, it's not obvious how much functional choice remains when you definitely got a real vision from a god. Who then punctuated it with butterflies. Maybe their thing would have worked. There is Good work that cannot be done Lawfully and it is spending Desna's budget.

"Regrettably, inquisitor boy was unwilling to participate in my survey of theological knowledge. I am so curious how he would have compared to the typical Mendevian crusader!"

"Why, how does the typical Mendevian crusader do?"

"Exceedingly poorly! Many of them have no grasp of even basic theological points discussed in the Acts of Iomedae, let alone anything more complicated. Even such elementary facts as Iomedae's primary areas of concern often eluded them; of those willing to answer my questions, more than one in ten informed me that Iomedae is the goddess of fighting demons."

"...Is that really so bad to say? I mean, she does want us to fight the demons."

Nod. "What's really important is that their heart is in the right place, not that they've spent a lot of time studying theology."

"It will limit their ability to respond in an orthodox fashion to anything irregular, though I can imagine additional facts they could learn that would make that worse if picked up in the wrong order."

"Most people aren't dealing with anything complicated, they're killing babaus and so on. ......The Prelate might need some reminders that Desna's still on our side, even if she's Chaotic. But he's a special case, most people aren't usually in charge of enforcing the law."

"There is Good work that cannot be done Lawfully, most obviously spending Desna's budget. The vision appears to have been authentic and we do not know that whatever Her people would have attempted wouldn't have worked, safer and sooner and cheaper than what we did."

His honest best guess is that it wouldn't have, at least not without another vision. He's not sure how Select Artigas pulled it off, but it didn't really look anything like what they were trying. But maybe the backup plan of Aranka putting him to sleep for a couple minutes would've been enough, or maybe they couldn't have done it on their own and really what needed to happen was for Hulrun to believe them in the first place and bring in the fanciest Wardstone-fixers in Mendev.

"Don't let the Prelate hear you say that, next thing you know he'll be having you burned for heresy."

"You know, I did ask the Queen for a code of Mendevian law to read and she did not seem to think such a thing existed, so I'm not sure how anyone complies with laws as non-commonsense as those about heresy."

She fidgets awkwardly. "Well, I think most people just try not to spread lies about the Good gods, and that's good enough."