After his conversation with the Duchess, Alfonso goes to find the Countess of Seguer, who, based on a brief conversation he had with the druid Feather that afternoon, spent her time on the Forests committee being, actually, less of an enormous bitch than he would have expected. Still, it won't do to have the Committee on Nonhumans and the Committee on Forests issue wildly conflicting recommendations; that just leaves it up to the floor which of them to go with, and he doesn't trust the floor.
"The main effect of inviting all these savages certainly seems to mostly be time wasted explaining things to them. Your proposals sound reasonable to me. I think that the people on forests would vote in favor." No comment on the non-people on forests.
"If someone is capable of hearing an explanation at all then obviously we should try to explain before we move to killing them." This woman makes a great show of wanting to be an Iomedaen but she has no idea how Lawful Good is supposed to work and it's not supposed to be his job to teach her. This example is going in his inevitable letter to Lastwall.
"Obviously someone should but I don't think you need to grab every single high ranking person in all of Cheliax away from their lands before the situation at home has stabilized and make them all do it personally in one on one conversations!"
"Obviously the convention shouldn't have been so soon. I think other people have already tried explaining that to the Archmage Cotonnet. As for explaining civilization to the druids, or trying to, there used to be an Arodenite order that did precisely that. They made few outright converts, but they got us logging and Plant Growth and a semblance of peace. Now there isn't anyone who will even think of it as a thing that might need to be done until it actually comes up. My experience is that this is true of almost everything in Cheliax you can possibly think of."
"I did try negotiating with my nearest druids for Plant Growth. They killed the envoy, because they're fucking savages."
"Likely any previous 'envoys' entering the forest in living memory were there to do the same to them. The advantage of the convention is that the druids willing to show up have already been selected for being willing to attempt peace."
"Unfortunately that seems to me they were selected for being delusional about what the actual barriers to peace are. ...well. Feather is delusional. Tiumfane seems like a sensible person and we voted to get his Hell portal closed and dragon slain, though anyone who thinks votes can do that is as delusional as Feather is."
"In general this convention does not seem to understand that they cannot order Cotonnet to do things. Legally speaking we could probably order his companions who are counts to do things but, first of all, if they obeyed it would be because they planned to do it anyway, and second, I don't think that's even the sort of thing we're here for."
"At any rate, I'll try to explain some things to Feather if I have a chance. She didn't seem obviously delusional to me but perhaps we never got onto the subjects she's delusional about."
Seems like a waste of his time but it's not her place to tell him so. "Yes, honored Archduke."