Tetula arrives at a government building and says to the most official-looking person she can see, "Hello! I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be a delegate to the constitutional convention!"

The most official-looking person she can see is a lawyer in a very fancy robe* who's been consulting on the preexisting legal code who looks down his nose at this new graduate daring to speak to him so informally. She dares speak to him so? A mere first-circle wizard? He considers having her whipped but if she's a delegate she might be able to get revenge later. "That's none of my concern," he says, and sweeps past.

(*: Yes, he's a wizard, yes, he's soul-sold, no, he didn't get executed when the new Queen swept it, yes, this means he has ten times as much work to do and ten percent of the people to do it with, do you have anything else to trouble him with?)

That worked less well than hoped!

Is there a guard? Or perhaps a person with a sign that says THIS WAY TO THE DELEGATES?

There's absolutely a guard! You need guards, given what the streets are sometimes like.

"Hello! I'm pretty sure I'm a delegate but I don't know any of the procedures here."

"Yes, ma'am," he says. "Please wait here." (The procedure is to call his boss.)

What a good procedure!

She looks around the government building for anything interesting. She hasn't gotten to wait in government buildings before and this is a new and exciting experience!

The government building was recently retrofitted, which is why there isn't a big statue of an impaled angel right in the middle of the hallway! Instead it's just big and bleak. There's some Iomedaean and Litran flags up occasionally, but they don't take up much space.

Meanwhile, the guard wants to tell his boss that another delegate showed up, and his boss shows up. She's got a bit of a Galtan accent, having been working for Her Majesty since before She was Her Majesty. "You're the delegate?" She looks at the young woman. Not a noble. "Elected or religious?" The people they teleport in are usually Arcane Marked.

Tetula examines the flag of Iomedae-- it's very pretty! she's never seen a flag like this before!-- until the boss arrives. 

"Religious. I think. I wasn't elected, at any rate."

This is going to be one of the interesting ones, she can already tell.

"Then why do you think you're a delegate?"

"I woke up this morning with a new cleric circle and a strong feeling that someone in my dream had given me the message that I was supposed to be a delegate. I assume that's religious? I don't want to make assumptions about who can and can't give cleric circles."

Of course it is. "Sounds like a god. Do you know what god gave it?" She's guessing Desna but may as well ask before she goes and tries to get one of the Queen's companions to deal with this irregular delegate.

"I don't have... a name?"

... Okay, yeah, this is probably something for that regicide the Queen's good friend, Élie Cotonnet.

There are some intermediate levels of management handling matters for the constitutional delegates, otherwise the Queen and Archmages wouldn't have time for all their other important matters of state, defending the realm from monsters, inscrutable archmage things, or whatever else it is that people like them do. "Fate" Solos (Short for "Aroden's Fate") is the senior bureaucrat in charge of the delegates representing extraplanar busybodies presumably because, having been raised in Rahadoum, he has a combination of education and impartiality in religious matters that many others in Her Majesty's service lack.

"So you don't know who sponsored you," he says, once the situation has been explained. "Is there anyone you pray to regularly? What spells and powers have you been given?"

"I recognize one of my spells, I have Charm Person. I didn't cast it because I didn't have any particular reason to charm anyone and I don't know if I need a focus to cast it."

Most clerics don't get that. Could be Shelyn, or Cayden, or - most of the powers in Hell, who would probably not be so bold. Aura sight shows her as Chaotic Good, so -

"You appear to be a cleric of Cayden Cailean. Do you wish to represent him at this convention?"

"Is... not knowing anything about him going to be a problem?"

"...How literal are you being, when you say 'not knowing anything about him'?"

"He's... the useless, incompetent drunk who ascended to godhood on a whim, worshipped only by fools and the debauched who mistakenly call "pleasure" what is actually indulgence of their weakness, and the fact that anyone worships him shows the fundamental feebility of good and the inevitable triumph of Asmodeus? --Also I have had very nice dreams with a recurring male character for the past four years and that character is also the man who told me to go to the convention so I can extrapolate?"

What a creep. (Cayden, that is. Tetula has givin no indications of being a creep.)

"That is - a perspective. A more traditional Caydenite perspective is that he is a god of bravery and liberation, a god who commands, approximately, that you do not let any earthly rules or authority stand in the way of doing 'the right thing', a god of freed slaves and of the people who fight to free them. And also a god of drink and revelry.

...All that said, no, it's not a problem for the convention if you don't know very much about your god. If Cayden wanted someone who knew him better he could have picked someone who knew him better." Maybe not, actually, given Infernal Cheliax, but that's Cayden's problem. "The only question is whether or not you in fact want to represent him."

"That sounds like the right guy, all right!"

"...will the other Caydenites be upset that someone who doesn't know any theology is going to be voting with them?"

"You'd have to ask them but I don't think so. Cayden Cailean doesn't have a lot of formal theology."

"Oh! Well, in that case I'm happy to learn more about my god and participate in the creation of the new Chelish government!" she chirps. 

She is really unreasonably perky for a Chelish wizard. Well, for anyone, but especially for a Chelish wizard.

He can't really imagine waking up one day with his head filled with a divine command to - do anything, really, it doesn't matter what - and not resent it horribly, but somehow either the gods find people who won't mind or make people who won't mind. Either way he's not supposed to do anything about it as long as they are in fact as enthusiastic as they reliably seem to be.

"Mmhm. Here, I have the address where one of the other Caydenites is staying... And, ah, next time you see him please tell your god to stop sending delegates, he only gets three and you're the third."

"I'll do my best to tell him! But I won't know if I succeeded, I have set intentions to ask him things before and I've never remembered the answer in the morning. --Although now I got an answer to a question I didn't even ask, so I guess all those other questions were less important than me being part of this convention!"

He's starting to suspect this woman is not actually Chelish and he should probably flag her for a more thorough investigation. "Can I take your name, for my list?"

"Tetula Ferrer!"

Great! He writes it down. "Is there anything else I can do for you, Ms Ferrer?"

"I have some logistical questions but I probably shouldn't take up your time with them!"

When Tetula was sixteen years old, she defied her mother.

It would be a better story if she'd defied her mother about something grand and heroic. If she'd stolen food to feed one of the beggar children, for example. Or taken a beating for her younger brother, the latest time her mother was allegedly angry about his insufficiently respectful tone of voice and was actually angry about her husband messing around with other women. Or even if she'd tried to defend the cook, who was doing her best given that she lacked the Telepathic Bond that would be necessary to keep track of Tetula's mother's changing moods. 

In fact, the subject of Tetula's last stand was that she didn't want to wear a gold-and-emerald hairpin, because she didn't care how expensive it was or that her father had only just reached the rank in the guild that would permit his family to wear it, it clashed with her hair. 

Her mother beat her, and called her a horrible and ungrateful daughter, and beat her again, and threatened to never buy her another present, and beat her more, and took away all Tetula's jewelry, and beat her more, and beat her brother to be on the safe side even though Tetula was too Chelish to care much about her brother's welfare, and locked her in her room with nothing to eat, and took away all of Tetula's clothes, and lit all her books on fire page by page in front of her, and beat her again for good measure. And Tetula fought back with an unreasoning, animalistic hatred.

An as she sat, shivering and naked in a bare attick room, nearly fainting from hunger, accumulating beating after beating for missing school, remembering the way the page of her favorite novel had curled in the flames, she realized-- her mother had overplayed her hand. The beatings hurt, but they also meant her mother was running out of ideas. Why else repeat something that obviously hadn't worked? 

Her mother couldn't kill her, that would be embarrassing. Her mother couldn't even keep her from school much longer, that would be embarrassing. This was it. This was everything her mother could do.

And-- Tetula looked around the room-- this wasn't so bad, was it? The patterns on the wood were beautiful, and so was the way the ants moved, and as the sun set and the light shifted they would make different patterns, equally beautiful. She knew all kinds of songs and poems and stories she could recite to herself, and she could do mathematics in her head and even try to hang a cantrip. Lots of people wanted to be locked away from the world in a quiet room so they could focus on their work, and here she was, getting it absolutely free!

Tetula thought to herself, very carefully: I am the luckiest girl in the world. 

And as long as she believed that, her mother couldn't make her do anything. 

But it was a better trick than that, wasn't it? What could her teacher or the priest or the baron's daughter in her class or Queen Abrogail herself do to her? They could inflict pain on her, they could humiliate her, they could take away everything she loved, they could starve her, they could imprison her, they could kill her. She'd had four of those already and they were nothing. And death took you to Hell, and Hell was just another bunch of liars trying to trick you into obeying them so you don't realize they don't have any power at all and never did. 

No one would ever make her do anything she didn't want to do ever again. 

She would practice. She would sit in this room and think of three hundred and three things that made her happy in it (number one: that she had the chance to hone this skill, number two: that she had something to keep her mind busy...). Her surface thoughts would be orthodox, if strange: look at how happy she was to be in Cheliax. She would use her freedom carefully, strategically, and not fritter it away on hairpins because she was so desperately to have a say in anything at all.

And only she would know that she was the luckiest girl in the world.

--

Three hours later, Tetula came down and cheerfully apologized to her mother and put on the hairpin and thought to herself that she was so lucky to have emeralds and gold when other girls didn't, and so lucky that her father was a soft touch and would buy her replacements for at least two books now that she was cooperative.

That night, she had her first dream where a smiling brown-haired adventurer called her beautiful.