Xavier sees what Joan-Pau is doing and thinks this is hilarious.

He does think that there are many Rahadi who would support the reconquest, though one might need to select them with care - the cities are powerful centers of the Pure Legion, after all, and they may have families that fear reprisal.

Aniol thinks they need to get their own house in order before repatriating old territory. It's not that he doesn't see the appeal, but they still have a great many of their own unambiguously Chelish citizens bound for Hell for this reason or that, and have not even begun to decide what the government (apart from the Queen herself) will look like, and apparently some people think they are going to be trying radical reforms like forcibly and without compensation appropriating and manumitting all of everybody's slaves, which any Abadaran could tell you would be a wrongheaded idea and only the more so if you drag additional lands into it.

Alfons-Valentí is also capable of not insulting his fellow nobility and so sips his wine and murmurs an acknowledgement of the importance of caring for the core of the country as well, rather than anything about traitors and collaborators.

Mass manumission is probably a prerequisite to Andoran's return to the fold, and if it's all they hold out for she'll consider that a great success.

Andoran may change; it hasn't existed in its current form for all that long and older nations than it have radically altered. Twice. In living memory. They can leave it until later and cross that bridge when they come to it, perhaps when there's a budget to pay for the slaves instead of lawlessly stealing them.

Xavier thinks the longer they leave the provinces of the empire autonomous, the longer they will come to believe that the people of Cheliax are not their estranged kinsmen, but foreign foes, that this will harm relations when reunification comes, and that this may call for sacrifices in the name of restoring the Empire swiftly rather than allowing the bonds among its people to decay further.

Berenguer-Aspex is of a differing opinion. "Can't unshatter eggs, Xavier." Andoran, Rahadoum, Molthune, Galt - they're all their own countries. Their leaders won't settle down and be Archdukes, tomorrow or today.

Berengeur-Aspex gets a supportive nod.

... Joan-Pau thinks that while this may be true for Galt and Andoran, Rahadoum has many who would leap to join any state that didn't hang priests who offered daily channels, and Molthune is hardly under a stable government, not with so much of the population already upset with the state's land reform schemes and then made still more furious about the Lord Protector over his open alliance with diabolists failure to intervene in the Four Day War.

Carlota thinks that while Molthune is the most reasonable starting point some pessimists are overstating the difficulties Galt and Andoran pose. Cyprian is wedded to the Queen, after all, and Andoran is (nominally) ruled by a paladin who will probably just ask Iomedae whether the reunion of the Empire is Good or not - so they just have to make it Good - and (de facto) ruled by Morgethai, who in addition to the Empire being Good probably wants it to turn cartwheels. So be it. Some things are worth turning cartwheels for.

And how would one "just" go about making it Good? (Wouldn't it also have to be Lawful, to suit a paladin?)

Well, reunification would put a stop to all the piracy. That's Good. And Lawful.

And a united Empire would be more prosperous, and better equipped to address trouble when it inevitably again arises, and could perhaps reintroduce to Andoran, with the delicacy of a gardener trying to get a graft to take, those traditional values they jettisoned mistaking them for diabolism. She of course has not tested the waters with the Church - who's their senior delegate here, the Queen's friend Cansellarion? - but she thinks it's attainable. 

Would it actually alleviate Inner Sea piracy, though, or would it only do that if they also abolished slavery? Not that he's opposed, per se, but he's opposed to doing it without paying whoever's holding the bag of slips at the end of the day.

Back in his day the government hanged pirates instead of pinning medals on to them, and there was less piracy. It's possible this was just a coincidence, but he doesn't really buy it.

The piracy would stop because instead of being governed by Morgethai, who approves of it, they'd be governed by the Queen and she wouldn't. Carlota finds it a little baffling to spend much time worrying about manumission. It's not that she's fervently supportive - she expects the situation will end up much the same with different contracts whose subjects of course can't read them - but diabolists have no property rights, as a general principle, and everyone who acquired slaves under the previous regime is at least under suspicion of being a diabolist, it's not as if the recently resurrected are going around making acquisitions. It would be a difficult situation for the recipients of a diabolist's inheritance but truly, if she were the recipient of a diabolist's inheritance she'd give it all to Iomedae immediately and still not count her soul clean of it. She's not sure it's a kindness to the children of diabolism to make them also its beneficiaries.

"Well, it's no secret that when I was a child - of diabolists, as it happens, as most of modern Chelish folks are - I parted with my soul, and being stolen from isn't going to get it back for me, eager though I am to solve the problem."

Oh, he had not imagined that they were in such mixed company.

The new Archduke of the Heartlands is the inheritor of a vast estate that has been ruled by diabolists for much, much longer than the rest of Cheliax, and is not entirely sure that he has any money at all that will not taint his soul to spend. He is donating his entire income to the Church of Iomedae for the time being, and though he took out a loan from the Abadarans to cover his expenses, and spent some of it on hiring one of them to audit his finances for Evil, he does not currently have enough money to rent a house worthy of his station. So he's here, unpleasant as he expects cavorting with a bunch of recently-deconverted diabolists to be.

He arrives late, not to be fashionable but because in fact he only got back to the capital this afternoon. He's managed to acquire some fashionable-for-this-era clothes, but his speech is still distinctly accented in a way that does not immediately suggest any of the extant provinces of the Empire.

"Oh, are we discussing reunification?" he says as he takes his seat. "When I was born, the Empire was united, and I don't in fact recommend it."

"Oh, tell us about that, our lovely hostess has invited persons both recent and un-" since some people seem to only just be realizing that, he was invited, anyone can look up the fact that he wasn't dug up out of a statuary backroom or resurrected having died at a fetchingly young age a century ago - "and I'd love a firsthand history."

"Alfonso Blanxart," he's using his mother's name both for the obvious reason and because it's the source of his claim to the Heartlands, "onetime Count of Egorian before the Thrunes stole it. That was about 700 years before they stole the country. They were sorcerers, and everyone knew they were tieflings but couldn't entirely prove it, and the Emperor had no power to stop them, because he was weak, and far away, and corrupted by that pit of serpents called Oppara. Aspex did the right thing when he rebelled."

"That I have never doubted. But Oppara seems no better now that it governs practically nothing, and the old Empire was at its height when it was also at its largest."

"Of course; all empires are." Discussing history is so much better than discussing politics even if they're basically the same subject displaced in time. "Expansion and the project of Civilization give the ambitious something to do; when those cease, people who want power inevitably turn to petty, self-destructive scheming, or for that matter to pacts with Hell. Civilize Varisia, destroy the undead of Ustalav, restore our hold in Sargava, by all means. With three archmages to make Teleportation Circles for us we can have an empire on which the Sun never sets. But why should we force unity on other civilized nations that have no desire for it?"

"Why presume they have no desire for it? There are men of Andoran clamoring outside the doors, eager to be invited to this convention; the people of Rahadoum dare not speak their desires, but I doubt it is to die in childbirth; Galt began the process of reuniting the Empire nearly the minute they were independent of it."

"Does Galt want the Empire reunited, or does Cyprian? Galt was rebellious seven hundred years ago, and if Cyprian does succeed in making his marriage a marriage of empires, it will be rebellious again inside another generation. As for Rahadoum, I know little of it, but it seems a worthy experiment even if we must now deem it to have failed. Are we not all commanded to eventually surpass our gods?"