"I can explain the process of Chelish seminaries if you really want me to but I'm not sure it will be enlightening."

"I can't tell if you're not answering my question accidentally or on purpose."

"Really, it's not that complicated. You know what they say, Chaotic Good is just as far from Lawful Good as Lawful Evil is."

"...You don't feel like the law is on your side, so you're treating the people who enforce it unkindly, by putting words in their mouth that they didn't say and mostly don't believe."

"I have a chess metaphor that I didn't get a chance to try before if you would prefer that by way of explanation," Blai tells Thall, "but really if you would prefer not to belong to the party under this circumstance that would be reasonable of you."

"I'm not saying that — I mean, it depends. I don't want to say I definitely won't leave if you explain, there's things you could say where I might. How about you try the chess metaphor."

Blai Prestidigitates up a board and a set. He assigns himself white.

He moves the queen's pawn forward two squares.

"Why did the pawn do that?"

What an excellent metaphor! She will take diligent notes!

"...should I assume that it wouldn't be helpful right now to argue with the metaphor?"

"I'm probably going to have to explain this more times, go ahead."

"—I think it's important to the metaphor that the pawn literally couldn't do anything else. But that's not true for people, unless you're telling me they've managed to find a way to Dominate people into being clerics that actually sticks, even if the other choices you had all sucked that doesn't mean they weren't there, even if your reasons for making them were stupid you must have had some sort of reason."

"He feels confused and upset, because he was willing to risk his life and go against the law to do what he thought was right, and he doesn't understand how a good person like you could choose to go along with something very terrible."

"It would be legal for the pawn to advance a single square, or to stay put and allow another piece to move this turn, but in any case my point is that the pawn's motives don't enter into it. You could imagine it to have them anyway. You could learn all about how the pawn was, before being assigned its uniform and its place on the board, deprived of sleep and water and information and alternatives. But this will not help you predict it. What will help you predict it is knowledge about how the player uses the chess pieces to project power onto the playing field. It is the case that Asmodeus can do this and it did not ever seem like a particularly interesting feature of the situation that some of it was me. - I don't actually think I'm a Good person, I think given the givens I am probably Lawful Neutral under Her aura."

"I don't know if the gods would say you're Good. But you're willing to help other people, even when it's hard for you."

"The gods don't always get what they want. Since I was born Asmodeus lost half his country. If you got sent to another timeline and somehow wound up back in cleric school, would you think 'oh, in that case I'll just be an Asmodean cleric again'—"

Blai makes a few more absentminded moves on the chessboard; the pawn is captured, and changes color, and is placed on the opposite side. "...no, I have made different commitments since then. But I hadn't when I was sixteen."

"What makes it so bad to be a cleric of Asmodeus, anyway?"

"He wants everyone in the whole world to be his slaves in Hell and get tortured forever!!"

"Whereas Iomedae is content so long as her slaves in Heaven obey her, without particularly desiring to torture them."

"—That's not true, the archons and angels in Heaven aren't slaves. Can you please cut it out for fifteen minutes."

It's actually been more than fifteen minutes, Blai thinks. That's not constructive so he doesn't say it.

"If you somehow wound up back in the past in cleric school, and you weren't a cleric of Iomedae yet, and you didn't have any... oaths not to serve Asmodeus, or other commitments like that, but you were still the person you are today rather than the person you were when you were sixteen—"

"...I have not formulated a plan for that situation and relatedly do not have a robust understanding of exactly at what point in my life I should ideally have done exactly what other thing."

"If an Asmodean took over back home, and they made a new law to send people to Asmodean seminary, and for some reason they picked me, and I was still an apprentice so I couldn't use my spells to fight back or escape, I would try to convince everyone else at the seminary not to serve Asmodeus. Which would work, back home, there are plenty of Evil people but they're Evil like bandits, not Evil like devils." (His tone suggests that he thinks bandits are so obviously less bad that it literally has not occurred to him that someone might disagree.) "I assume in Cheliax this wouldn't work and would get me executed but I would rather be executed than be a cleric of Asmodeus."

"Don't they have a spell, like Malediction but for Hell rather than the Abyss? I'm not saying it makes sense to go along with it but sticking around to convince other people is stupid, just take what you can carry and run."