"With that out of the way, may we please return to our previous topic? Which I believe was the feasibility of replacing the Evil nobility of Cheliax, and where replacement candidates might possibly be found."

"How are those elected folks faring? Are they just as bad or are they a different breed?"

Well the guy they got into a fight about earlier is elected, so.

"If we don't have enough non evil nobles, we should be finding ordinary people of good character to replace them. Most non nobles don't detect, so we can't just use that for all of them, but surely checking people who we are considering for a barony is even less work than checking the existing nobles. I doubt they'd have the experience to go much higher than that, but barons can be promoted to counts to fill holes and that leaves more low level roles. I know a number of territories alongside the borders to Nidal or the Whisperwood are already appointed this way, though without concern for the soul of those involved, and it's not unheard of for other counties to have adventurers marry a daughter and then rule. The elected folk are a good thought there - we're checking them for evil anyway, and after the convention they should have some experience with governance to fall on."

"Delegate Lacourt, of the four quarters of the convention, the elected seem probably the worst. But we already know that we aren't empowered to expel delegates from the convention, and they don't have any lasting power. They might be an argument against including any institution in the new Cheliax that encourages such naked power-seeking."

"Those non-noble delegates to the convention that are of good character would be fine candidates for titles." He's slightly tempted to make Korva a baron when this is over.

"I propose that people who believe themselves to be wise and Good apply for consideration for those roles made empty by the removal of Evildoers, and we check them, and if they're in fact Good then they do some kind of - training, to learn how to be a good ruler - nobles aren't actually wiser or more suited to governance than anyone else, they just get more education for it and adventure more and get stronger.

The Elected at the convention are Evil because of course if you tell people they'll have power to rule others and don't check if they're Evil they mostly will be. Or perhaps because the Archmage, servant of Evil as he is, wanted them that way."

"You speak of those things as if they're trivial to obtain."

" - oh, that's actually a major point." Here, at least, is an observation that won't make everyone hate her. "All of our educational institutions are completely Asmodean. I think talking about how to overhaul them when they open again arguably is the job of this committee."

...not that she's sure she wants them talking about that, either, but it would be hard to do much worse than what they have.

"Executing every teacher at Westcrown Academy would be a good start."

"Who says they're going to open again?"

"I think they should, if there's any way at all to do it without the material support of Hell. The old schools were cruel, and no doubt turned to Hell's purposes, but the desire for an educated populace is not a Hellish one. Aroden, if he lived, would also want us to teach all of our children wizardry that can learn it, and at least letters and numbers to the rest."

Valia does not care at all what Aroden would think about anything; he died and handed Evil more ground in the war of Good against Evil than any other man who ever lived, as far as she can tell. "It seems particularly important that students are not made subject to Evil teachers and overseers, but our rule that Evil people can't hold power in general should fix that...and if there is no one non-evil who is qualified to guard and punish students then I think it's better for the job to go undone, really."

"Why couldn't parents just teach letters and numbers to their own children? They should mostly all know how to read, and if they're being Evil about it that'll be covered under some of the ideas we already talked about."

"I don't know where you're from but out in the country a lot of us forgot whatever we learned. There's not much worth reading, or there wasn't."

"I'm not from the city and my mother knew how to read! ...she was a laundress, though, maybe that's why."

"That'll do it, they have those books."

"Even in the city children haven't got fathers, more often than not, and plenty haven't got mothers either. Of course Good parents will try to teach their children their trade, so if they can read they probably do a reading thing and will teach their children that. But if they don't or can't, that doesn't mean we should go back to enslaving all the children to try to fix it."

"I survived Chelish wizard school," he says, "and grown men who themselves wish to learn pick up wizardry far faster than schoolchildren forced into it and taught by rote."

"And I think it's less Evil teaching adults, because if you beat them most of the way to death they'll just leave...indentures are a problem but they should be covered under our primary proposal, having people indentured to you is a kind of power and should only be permitted to the non-Evil."

“I agree but I’m nervous about checking it… there are a lot of people who do indentures, and most of them aren’t strong enough to detect. We might need to find something that scales better than Pharasma’s spell, unless we think that with less powerful people it’s fine to just put them through a zone of truth since them slipping past is less bad.”

"The great Abadaran inquisitor is here. After this meeting concludes, presuming this committee votes for further investigation of options for identifying and removing Evil people in power, I will go ask him if as a powerful inquisitor he knows of any."

"Abadar's not Evil but he's not Good either, will his inquisitor care?"

(Whether or not there continue to be schools really should not be in the remit of this committee. He'll propose, in the next general session, a committee on reforming them specifically which is hopefully more sane than this one.)

"I don't know if his inquisitor will care. But I know inquisitors earn many powers of their gods for rooting out cultists and diabolists and so on, and if he has those powers but does not wish to employ them in our defense then maybe we can find an inquisitor of Iomedae who will."

Korva is about to suggest that schools could be, you know, voluntary, and then decides that yeah, you know what, maybe that topic is actually too important to be used as a distraction from killing half of the remaining adult population of Cheliax.

...which seems bad, but probably the Inquisitor won't support them in doing it?? Probably??

"Fine. Do we break here, and continue our business when we have a better sense of how many people out there are evil? The numbers there admittedly seem pretty relevant to what kinds of policies this committee should be pursuing for Cheliax as a whole, especially among the sortition delegates."