This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
King Drum Thornfiddle sits in the chair's seat. He is so pleased he remembered to bring his cartoonishly large clockwork gavel.
(No one appointed King Drum chair but why would anyone else be chair? He's the king.)
"I will now call this meeting to order."
"I think we ought to make a distinction between races that are already part of Cheliax, but might wish for independence, and races that are already de facto independent, and have their own governments, but might wish to be under our protection; and we ought to decide which races are which. Of the races represented here, I think halflings belong to the former category, forest people, gnomes, and strix the latter, and orcs are more complicated, since there are both orcs that live among humans and orcs that live apart from humans."
"I don't think the forests need protection usually. Or, not against other humans. A portal to Hell sounds terrible and I don't want to speak for the Whisperwood, but if the taxes would pay for... paying an archmage to close it... then a forest that didn't pay taxes could, uh, keep the money and pay the archmage themselves? What matters to us is not fighting with others in Cheliax and keeping our forest. And then we could give you things like plant growth, I don't know if counts as a tax."
"Forests are complicated because they take up a lot of land in the middle of our territory and they often make it very difficult to get between our cities. Protection isn't the only thing that we might ask you to pay for, but I do think plant growth is an acceptable form of payment."
"However, all I'm currently asking the committee to recognize is that the forests are not currently meaningfully governed by the laws of Cheliax, that their inhabitants are not by default citizens, and that further negotiation between Cheliax and the forests ought to happen outside this convention."
"Delegate Kicharchu, I apologize for excluding your people from my earlier enumeration. I think that kobolds are not currently meaningfully governed by the human government of Cheliax either, but you will most likely need to come up with some way of policing yourselves if you want this to continue to be the case."
"There needs to be someone who can speak to the humans on behalf of the kobolds—even once the convention is done—and they also need to be able to tell the kobolds that certain things are wrong, and most of the kobolds need to listen to them. And they need to say that attacking or stealing from humans is wrong, and punish anyone who does these things so that they don't do it again. If kobolds cannot stop other kobolds from hurting humans, then humans will have to stop them."
"I agree that we can't do all the negotiations now. I can't promise things for Ravounel Forest, only propose them, and I expect there will be more negotiations like you said. This convention is for setting the highest laws of Cheliax, and a specific deal probably isn't that, so what we can recommend to put there is that we want peace and trade and cooperation and should try to negotiate and make deals instead of fighting."
"Would you all starve, if you couldn't steal from humans?" He hopes kobolds don't eat humans but they probably do.
"Things do not grow, very much, in the sewers. Farther down there are drow who grow mushrooms. They do not like stealing either. But they cannot be listened to if they say, 'starve!'."
"That's" a disaster, how do you make peace with people used to getting their entire livelihood from theft "very unfortunate. I think all that's in this committee's remit is to declare that the kobolds, like the people of the forests, cannot currently be considered citizens of Cheliax but that we seek peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with them. I hope that actually comes true some day."
"There are kobolds in the forests who hunt their food. You could move to a forest if you wanted to. But it would probably be hard to adjust, I don't know what your life is like right now."
"I mean the other kobolds. I haven't been to where you live and I don't know how different it is from a proper forest," Feather explains. Talking to very different creatures with varying takes on language is totally within her skillset!
"I would like to come up with a definition of citizenship that isn't just a list of races, and makes provision for someone who wasn't previously a citizen to become one, but that seems likely to take a while and many of us have other committee meetings to attend. I move to adjourn until tomorrow."
"That sounds good to me. I think we've made good progress!" Which is to say, progress towards Good.
King Drum Thornfiddle gleefully bangs his overly large clockwork gavel. A door opens and a little bird emerges and says, "I now pronounce this meeting adjourned."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
