She nods. "You are definitely the type to get along with Abadarans! ...I was mildly surprised He didn't cleric you last week, honestly, though now I'm glad he didn't."

"Oh, I would make a terrible Abadaran. I appreciate them but I am not one. I do not have the correct - virtuous acquisitiveness."

She tilts her head thoughtfully, considering. "Huh, yeah, I can see that. I really appreciate His church, as an organization, and the kinds of people who are happy there are neat. It's such a straightforward and digestible worldview."

"They're very predictable after you listen to one for a few hours - are there any at your usual fort or have you encountered them some other way?"

"We have one full-time at the Garrison, but I'd talked to them in Absalom, growing up, and yeah. When I find a new one I sometimes like to ask them what their least orthodox economic opinions are - usually it's things I can't follow very well or care that much about, but it's almost always interesting, and sometimes they explain it well enough that I learn something new."

"Oh, that's a good question, what sorts of - check - sorts of opinions have you gotten out of them that way?"

She grins. "'People should be able to bid on becoming the next king or queen'. 'Abadar should sell cleric circles'. 'Minting new coins is theft from owners of existing coins'. 'Whorehouses should be taxed to help fund orphanages'. 'We should just tax bandits relative to their claimed area and then leave them alone'. 'The Church of Abadar should use an internal currency backed by dormant dragon eggs'. 'It is wrong to sell things for much less than they are worth'. 'Dragons hoarding gold helps keep the value of gold from dropping, which is good'. 'Dragons hoarding gold helps keep the value of gold from dropping, which is bad'. I want so badly to put those last two in the same room but they're both first-circles employed in cities a thousand miles apart, so it's probably never happening..." She moves a pawn forward to block the check.

"You could encourage them to write letters to each other, it'd be time-consuming but it could get them a few exchanges deep into the argument."

hey no fair I'm already crushing on you stop making me want to kiss you "Oh, I really should! ...Mail from here will take a while to get all the way down to Almas, but it'll get to Nerosyan sooner... I'll write them both just in case." She's grinning from ear to ear.

"And you need to keep copies, so you can send off replacements if one is lost - do you get Scrivener's? -"

"Yep! It's very popular among song-sorcerers." Keeping copies is a good idea she would not have thought of!  ...so is the move he just made - she's forced to trade a rook for a pawn! She frowns at the board. 

"I'm not much for card games so have tended to spend my downtime on correspondence and it comes up a lot, Worldwound mail is not reliable. It's a lot of hands it has to pass through and very little way to follow up on who exactly must have lost a letter."

She nods thoughtfully, wondering if it's the card games or the company. "What kinds of correspondence? If you don't mind my asking." Also can she capture that bishop pretty please? She brought both knights to the party.

She can if she wants to lose one knight and then have to either lose the other one or be open to a check. "Some about magic - seminary doesn't cover all the higher-than-first-circle spells, most people never get them - and more about the nature of Law."

She does not want this, but only notices the problem after she lost the first one! (Sorry, knights.) "The nature of Law?" 

"Do Good people not talk about the nature of Good all the time, I sort of assumed they did and that it was similar apart from the details."

She shrugs. "Some Good people do, definitely. It's... not a topic I tend to seek out actively; it comes up enough on its own." And as conversations go they're usually trite, sometimes off-puttingly self-congratulatory, occasionally extremely distressing, and only rarely actually interesting, to her.

"I think find both Law and Chaos more conceptually interesting than Good, if I'm being honest?"

"I suppose that makes sense. Well. Most people aren't all that interested in it but occasionally there's someone else curious about figuring out what Law demands in more detail than not accidentally winding up in the Abyss and we - set each other puzzles and try to answer them and explain what our intuitions might mean in a more generalizable form."

Law puzzles... "Can I hear one?"

"Oh, things like - suppose your unit is under orders to investigate reports of quasits in the woods but not to engage. You believe it to be the case, based on the reports, but were not given contingencies about it being the case, that this is because the quasits may be able to do some horrible blood ritual if they collect a casualty, and fail to clarify, perhaps because the orders came by Sending and no followup was possible. If the quasits ambush you and kill your squad leader, and you cannot get out with his corpse while harried by quasits, do you flee to avoid engaging, or fight them to make an effort to prevent them from having access to the body?"

She tilts her head, thinking. "I would say fight, if it's not a hopeless one, because at that point engagement has already happened and fleeing gives them the casualty you suspect them of needing... but I'm sure I'm missing some of the considerations."

"Generally most of the conversation is about which considerations one would find most decisive in either direction, yes, and what policies arranged in advance would eliminate the need to solve this class of puzzle on the fly."

She nods. "I wonder if anyone makes Chaos puzzles! ...though admittedly I have no idea what that would even look like."

"I'm not sure it's the sort of thing that admits of puzzling. Evil doesn't really, either."

She shrugs. "I got to meet a travelling Kofusachan, the year before I left Absalom, while I was singing at a bar in Tiantown. She said that to her, Chaos was about - trusting in herself as a process, trusting all the possible people she might become to make the best choices without being weighed down by rules and conditions she shackled them with. How did she put it..." 

Her voice drops in pitch and slows down a bit, presumably imitating the woman in question. "Law is stable, and it is good for institutions to be stable, so that the people who must interface with them know what to expect. And of course there are many who find comfort and meaning in trying to make themselves be stable in the same way. But I know that I will be wiser, kinder, and better informed in a year than I am today, and so I have no need for stability and no desire to place unnecessary constraints on any of the people I might someday become."