A/N: This is pretty much just me rambling and getting some thoughts out of my head while it's overcrowded with Fontaine stuff. Feel free to treat it as such.
Mechanics of Judgement
Standing together on a grassy hillside in Poisson, this was the first chance Lumine had found to speak with Neuvillette away from the oppressive scrutiny of the Opera Epiclese and the weight of the law. It was also likely that this would not be a reoccurring scenario - whether at the Opera or at the Palais Mermonia, there were eyes and ears and positions to contend with. Here, in this one moment, they were speaking as something like equals.
Asking after Childe had been something of a courtesy - she hadn't truly expected to be allowed to see him simply because she asked, but it would have felt wrong to pretend that nothing had happened at all. Neuvillette's insights into the Oratrice, however, were fascinating. Thought-provoking even.
As he spoke, Lumine's mind wandered to her last encounter with Childe before his arrest.
If the Oratrice had sentience, what were its thought processes? Were there things it would refuse to judge? Since this was the first time in history that the Oratrice had deviated from the expected outcome there were countless unknowns, unknowns that Neuvillette clearly intended to try to get some sort of clarity on, but was his thinking open-minded enough to get to the bottom of things?
"Can I ask you a strange question?"
"You may ask, but if it is truly strange I may not have any answers to offer you."
"You don't have to worry about definitive answers," Lumine assured, "Think of it as more of a… thought experiment."
"Well then, consider me intrigued."
"If you tasked the Oratrice with judging a tool used to commit a crime, would it oblige? What verdict do you think it was give? Guilty, for ending a life? Not guilty, for its lack of will or any functional capacity of choosing to do anything at all?"
Neuvillette stared, briefly stunned into silence.
"Oooh, Paimon's head hurts…"
Lumine chuckled, patting Paimon reassuringly on the head. She hadn't expected Paimon to even try thinking of an answer, but the questions themselves were probably a lot when she wasn't expecting it.
"Objects cannot break laws without human intervention."
She nodded. "That's probably what most people would say. It's the normal assumption to make."
But undeniably something was very wrong with Childe's sentencing. Even though she didn't know enough - hell, even Childe didn't know - she still knew more than Neuvillette did.
"But the Oratice has proved that in some way, somehow, its rationale differs from ours - from yours, specifically. I believe that Childe is innocent. You also believe it."
"I do."
"But the Oratrice doesn't. If you asked it to judge the Water from the Primordial Sea, would it also be found guilty?"
Airing her muddled thoughts as she processed them - to the Chief Justice of all people - might just put Childe under undue extra suspicion, but letting it swirl around in her mind unspoken would only keep her up at night later on.
The things that Skirk told Childe…
Considering his time in the Abyss, you could make the assumption that the power she spoke of would eventually manifest itself as Childe's Foul Legacy transformation. But that was too easy. Not only that, but Childe was far from the only person to ever traverse the Abyss - Skirk herself being just one of them. Abyssal power alone wouldn't warrant such cryptic warnings. Admittedly Lumine had never met Skirk, but if she was going to go to the trouble of teaching some kid to survive in the Abyss, she wouldn't dance around the topic of abyssal energies and potential contamination.
Besides, Childe's Foul Legacy was old news. The dim hydro vision in her pocket, however, was new and alarming news. If those two powers were at odds with one another his vision would have started acting up long before now. It was far more likely that it was somehow related to his odd moods and Skirk's mysterious 'it'.
If someone mentioned a whale to you, your mind would automatically think of the sea.
"Miss Lumine, this may be a more complex conundrum than you realise. I assume you have a reason for bringing it up, but the Primordial Sea is… Not something that can be easily lumped in with other inanimate objects."
Because it once nurtured life.
Regular water could also be said to nurture life: people needed water to live, plants needed water to grow. But water was still just water. Lifeless. Helping things survive was not the same as creating that life.
The Primordial Sea might possess a kind of sentience - even if not now, then at some point in the long-distant past.
"Neuvillette. If I asked you if the Primordial Sea was to blame for the disappearances… Could you claim with absolute certainty that it wasn't?"
Lumine had no way of knowing if the whale that haunted Childe's dreams and the power Skirk spoke of had any potential relation to the Primordial Sea. But the undeniable fact was that the Oratrice had sensed something inside of Childe that made it decide he was just as guilty as Marcel.
Neuvillette did not answer, his scrutiny heavy but not judgemental.
This wasn't something she truly desired or expected an answer to at that very moment. All Lumine wanted was to share her convoluted thoughts and place this wavering possibility in front of the man most suited to investigating before he found himself too stubbornly stuck on a single line of logic.
"Just food for thought," she said, freeing him from the pressure of answering.
Neuvillette nodded once, sharp. "Food for thought indeed."