Alicornutopia

Assuming that the plan involved takes longer than a day, how much sleep would you be able to get? Would you need to get the minimum you thought you could still function on? Could you get a full 8 hours because you’d heard people think better with that much sleep even if you personally thought you might be able to work perfectly well on fewer?

You could pretty much sleep however much, the phrasing doesn't demand a lot of urgency.

But presumably I couldn’t take a several-years-long break to get a Ph.D. in ancient Chinese literature unless I could come up with some excuse for why having one might help? I might not be able to justify ancient Chinese literature, but I could certainly justify language classes and some computer science. Would that mean I could stall for years by telling myself I was working on it?

If the excuses don’t need to be very strong then the order is almost worthless, especially when applied to a mortal. I thought it might have problems, given that people rarely seem to use that kind of order, but that’s still interesting.

There isn't a *bright* line on excuses, but definitely no Chinese literature and probably not even many language classes or computer science.

Re: the currently-unanounced go not to the elves for counsel

Does Materia have Detect Good and Detect Evil? Can Boots recreate them or steal them out of a library? They seem like the perfect solution to knowing how much to trust a hypothetical repentance from Evil Maitimo. They might even lead to a real repentance where he otherwise would not have one.

Detect (Alignment) spells are divine magic in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder.

In any case I am deeply skeptical about trusting Materia's definition of """good."""

It would definitely be trivial to reconstruct them, given Detect Magic and Protection from Alignment, but, uh, yeah. Also, I have a weird feeling Evil Maitimo would detect Lawful Neutral on the weight of his accumulated good deeds, which are non-negligible despite him being super evil.

Do you really think he'd qualify as Lawful? He did do an awful lot of taking drugs to avoid deific scrutiny. I'm thinking True Neutral.

I was thinking that too, but the personal organization of everything into a big well-ordered, low-crime country isn't something someone who was neither lawful nor good would really care too much about, I think.