rule of art

"You're on a quest for truth and justice. The same as anyone would say."

"It would be a crime," Cammuravi mused, literally, "if we were not."

"So, you might consider yourself more thoroughly examined than any other such person you might meet. You know yourself better than anyone else possibly could. You have berated yourself in ways stricter and harsher than anyone else possibly could, or would."

How was Ethel to know that Cammuravi had been unkind to himself? How was she to know that he had sometimes struggled?

Sometimes...oftimes. His current equanimous demeanor was the result - indeed, the culmination - of years of internal strife, peace warring against peace even as peace should not know how to be so martial.

And of course, looking and picking up after anyone else's clues was a surefire way to fill one's head with delusions of superiority. People whose names he didn't even know, but which he apprehended through careful combing of their belongings, their scattered personal effects that showed some sheer determination to change themselves.

It often hadn't quite worked. That was the trouble.

Ethel seemed to speak from a place of great experience and wisdom, as if she'd already long come over the wave. But Ethel, too, struggled. Ethel projected this precept of herself out into the world, and she did that well enough that none needed inquire any deeper.

Cammuravi himself did not inquire. He just...surmised.

Ethel refused to let herself take breaks. She held herself to that strictest and harshest standard that would swiftly fall apart under any closer scrutiny, but because she knew her own self, she could enact the most effective and acutest forms of punishment.

Oh, how very violent, this. The question was moreover pertaining to alternate manners of dress for male and female detectives, and how they ought to best present themselves along with their findings.

"If you can't wear the three-piece suit, Cammuravi, I will."

"But...would that be truly representative?"

"No. It would look good."