The Two Questions

Beneath Ieris, the City of Spires, coils the infamous Darkweb, the prisons and dungeons of the Ieran branch of the Church of the Hundred Saints. Its interrogators have a most curious practice, which they call the Two Questions (though few know of this practice, and even fewer of its name). A recalcitrant prisoner is strapped to a table, and asked a question. A crowbar is kept handy and applied to the upper extremities of the prisoner if no answer is obtained (in order to "pry" one forth?). Once it is, the crowbar is brought down upon one of the prisoner's lower legs, and the resulting breakage examined in faith that the Father provides his insight through the wound. If the tibia is shattered, the interrogators know that the prisoner's answer was truth, while if the fibula is broken, the prisoner told a lie (or a "fib," if you will, from whence the term derives). By now it is, of course, evident why the practice is known as the Two Questions: most prisoners have only two legs - though, indeed, it is rare that more than two questions are needed for the Church's purposes. It is thought that the interrogators have grown very skilled indeed on exactly how the crowbar's force is applied and which bone breaks, though to say so to any interrogator or ecclesiast is to invite accusations of faithlessness (and perhaps worse).

- From the writings of Erbius the Lorekeeper, Magus of the Fifth Order