Aspex Pujol likes to think of himself as a prominent figure, in his community. 

In a sense he's right. All his peers, and most of his inferiors, know who he is. They're just less impressed with him than he thinks they are and/or ought to be, because Aspex Pujol is about as competent and clever as he thinks he is, but significantly less Splendid than he thinks he is, and has a high enough opinion of himself that people mostly think he's obnoxious. People put up with him anyway because he is in fact sufficiently more clever and competent than annoying that it's generally not worth throwing him to the Church, and he doesn't ask questions when someone wants him to obtain something for them that would technically be illegal if not for this clever loophole that Aspex Pujol has found in the law. 

Someone would probably have thrown him to the church eventually anyways, if only because someone else found out about one of those discreet purchases and it became expedient to throw all the blame on him, but it hadn't happened yet by the time the regime changed. 

Aspex is summoned by the business community of Cypress Point to be informed that they've selected him to be elected as their delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Nobody actually knows what that is, but the Queen is involved, somehow, which means the whole thing is obviously not something any Chelish subject of sense wants to touch with three standard-issue ten-foot poles end to end. 

"That's ridiculous," he protests, "I'm obviously not a suitable candidate. I'm only forty; while that's certainly a fine age to be handling business, even the important business of shipping on the Inner Sea, it's far too young to be handling the important business of government."

The informal chair of the group, a high-end tailor who finds Aspex more exasperating than infuriating, gives him a Look. 

"Send my father," Aspex continues. "He has far more experience than I do."

A soft murmur travels through the room. It's not an outrageous suggestion; nobody apart from Aspex Pujol stands to lose anything if the Queen takes issue with his father and decides to have the whole family killed; and the man has been retired from business for decades. Nobody has seen him except at services in years, and even then only because Aspex doesn't want to take the chance that the priest will decide that the man's obvious senility is a facade to cover for heresy. He's sufficiently oriented to reality that he can give a coherent answer to anything you say to him, but he's convinced, at all times, that it's some point at least twenty and often as much as fifty years in the past. He follows along with the service perfectly, but he hasn't once addressed the current priest by his actual name instead of one of his predecessors'. 

He is, frankly, becoming more and more of a liability every year. The man refuses to die on his own, despite his advanced age, and the only reason Aspex Pujol hasn't done something to fix that yet is that he has sons of his own, who he really, really doesn't want to give ideas. 

Aspex ends up having to make a handful of business-related concessions, but in the end everyone agrees. 

And so it is that Aspex Pujol, senior, is elected as delegate to the constitutional convention.