Well this seemed like a much more sane and restrained amount of risk to take before the final events of the morning, but he's hardly going to leave the convention in shame over it.

"Llei Napaciza, regent of the County of Ilnea, in Menador."

"Narcis Soler, cleric of Erastil."

Yeah, she's here too. Dropping infrastructure today, and checking whether this is the place for orphanages. And maybe also complaining about - okay, she'll try to be restrained about the complaining about men.

"Korva Tallandria of Egorian. Orphanage worker."

"Victòria, priestess of Calistria. —Just so everyone here is aware, Delegate Napaciza is Evil. The Diabolism Committee was checking this morning."

"Does the spell work normal on tieflings?"

"I think so? There were other tieflings who didn't show up as Evil. Which doesn't mean they definitely aren't Evil, they might just not be powerful enough to show up, but I don't think all tieflings look Evil to it. —I guess the other ones could be hiding it, like Delegate Ibarra was."

"Powerful enough? Oh - Josep Roig, merchant of Blackridge." 

"Apparently it doesn't work on people who aren't strong enough to be good in a fight! I don't know exactly how strong that is but I don't want people to assume that anyone we didn't find is definitely safe."

Josep is, of course, principally concerned with his personal safety here. It sounds like they checked everyone, and if he was Evil, they would know? But if they find a better way of checking, they might discover that he is Evil after all? Not doing anything to anger the Calistrian, got it.

"Many people are Evil; we have been less than two years free of Asmodeus. I certainly took more than two years to stop reading Evil after leaving Cheliax, and I was younger than the Count-Regent at the time and had less to atone for. In ten years which nobles still read Evil will be an important thing to note; for now, the Queen and archmages have screened everyone Count and up and removed those who needed removing, and the rest are our colleagues who have all the dignity of other reasoning beings. I doubt he is the only one here, either, merely the only one with enough dangerous duties to make him read on detect alignment."

Do people normally just randomly tell you about how they've done a bunch of Evil things? Why does this keep happening?

"If I had a good way to check everyone else here I'd obviously want to! Pharasmins can do it, but not all of them can, and they can't get a lot of people at once. I think— it's like Valia said, maybe when our committees get bogged down in stupid fights it's because Evil people are trying to sabotage us, and even if we can't just kick the Evil people off the committees like we did on Diabolism I think it's good for people to know who's definitely Evil so that if they suggest something terrible we'll know it's because they were Evil."

"Terrible judgment can come without Evil and vice versa, young lady. If this committee had no Evil members, it would be deficient. Whatever we propose here ought guide people toward Good, but it must be something that can be done by those who are currently Evil, or it will not work for the large slice of our citizens, perhaps even the majority."

"I can assure you, in any case, that citizen committees in Andoran get bogged down in stupid fights quite enough without Evil coming into it. If Select Wain believes this is the primary cause she is mistaken."

"...Even if everything you said were true, it would still be good to know that he's Evil! If the point is that we need to make not hurting your family really easy so that even Evil people can do it, it's still good to know which ones those are." Also she really doesn't think policy on anything should be set by people who light homes full of children on fire but that's obvious.

"Alonso. Halfling ex-slave who mostly managed to keep my family intact while enslaved." Maybe if he interrupts by introducing himself the Calistrian will get distracted. 

"Oh, well done. Hopefully it's a challenge no one will need your advice on shortly."

"I dearly hope so." But he's still planning to flee to Andoran where it won't be his problem. 

An older woman quietly sits at the table at the emptier end. "Lluïsa. Midwife, grandmother, and priest of Pharasma."

"That's everyone I saw sign up, then. Let's see, I took a list of rights from the Rights Committee that touched on the family, I can read those off as a place to start."

"Right to preserve your family; no intrusion on marriage by lords, no conscription of children.

Right to know the status of your family when you're separated by the government; noted as difficult to do.

Right of children not to be abandoned by their mothers and fathers, and of mothers not to be abandoned by their children's fathers, and possibly the reverse as well.

Right to compel a father to marry their child's mother, a bit part of the same as the last one.

Rights of orphans to good treatment, particularly noting being given to extended family or similar before being sold to orphanages.

Right to divorce. By consent, or if there is no child nor pregnancy, or if a priest hears the dispute and judges it allowed, and possibly unconditionally for wives."

"That certainly isn't everything, but it's a place to start, I believe."

These seem...... extreme.

" - for context, none of those have been discussed by the rights committee at all, they are the product of an attempt to brainstorm every right someone might want. They haven't been through a step where anyone comments on or removes the unworkable ones."

"That's something of a relief." 

"Yes, my apologies for not clarifying, Delegate Tallandria is correct."

"Shall we proceed with such a step, then? The right to compel marriage seems particularly unwise to me."

"Especially since there's no guarantee only one woman would be trying to exercise it--which might not even be the father's fault, this soon after the dissolution of the Thrune regime; slaveowners have been known to require that slaves have children by specific partners for various reasons, and I've heard troubling things about how human sorcerers have been treated in some places." 

"I agree. A solution to an important problem, perhaps, but not a good one."

"The right not to be abandoned seems to aim at solving the same problem, and seems wiser, though I should like more clarity on what counts as abandonment."

"I think that one was Delegate Tallandria's idea initially, what were you thinking there?"

AAAA

"- uh, I think when I suggested it I specifically flagged it as something that I wasn't sure the government could actually do anything about, or that necessarily made sense to handle as a right. But - a majority of children in Egorian don't have fathers, or barely do. Maybe one in ten don't have mothers, either. The orphanages are in a state of near crisis, worse than they were under the Asmodeans, for lack of funding." And lack of realistic expectations, but. "I think it's very tempting to blame this on the mothers, since mothers are the ones to take the final step in abandoning a child, and I think a lot of people are doing that, assuming that the problem is located in women's laziness. But all of those children were abandoned by their fathers, first, in much greater numbers. It seems to me that the biggest concern that Cheliax has, on the family front, is finding a way to make men support and raise their own children."

"I don't know what a good system for that is. If I thought we could do anything I'd probably make it illegal to sire bastards at all. But this seems - very unlikely to get past the floor."

"I think probably it wouldn't have helped anything if my father had been made to marry my mother? But I guess I don't know for sure."

"Well, ideally, having to experience consequences prevents some number of terrible decisions in the first place, and people hold off until they find someone they want to have a household with. But - yeah. I don't know how to legislate men not being awful."

"A flat fine. Paid to the mother, with her choice to accept the money or the man's proposal, if he chooses to offer it. If he cannot pay, indenture him, and the mother receives the money paid by the man who buys his contract. If he can, the man's life is not overly disturbed, but the woman is compensated. I doubt this passes the floor, but I would vote for it, with certain details."

- what???

"I think he was a wizard student? I assume that specific situation isn't going to really come up anymore but I don't think that plan would work well for men who don't have the money and do have some other reason where they're already committed to something else in a way where you can't easily say 'go be indentured instead.'"

Shrug. "A wizard student is employed by the government, and can be very easily obliged to work for longer, in addition to the work needed to pay off his existing debts. The more difficult case is a man who is already married and supporting other children. I don't see a comfortable solution that lowers the number of abandoned children on five moments of thought."

"Of course, this system gives women more reason to bear bastards, especially if not coupled with any prohibition on smothering the children when they exist. And the whole thing is effectively offering a woman the option between payment or mere forgiveness with no compensation, unless and until the government regains an opinion on what it means to marry someone in the first place, or any limits on divorce immediately afterward."

"Lashes with a simple whip*, at the request of the mother? If she is appeased by gifts, she can decline to request it, and we need not set a specific fine. Shame and a little pain are good encouragements toward reformation, and discouragements from erring in the first place."

This favors noblemen who have the strength of adventurers, but he didn't specify the number of lashes and can fix that if he's called on it.

*i.e. not a barbed whip or cat-o-tails that can maim if it hits right/wrong

"That system seems very... personally adversarial."

"...I think the two of you might be solving different problems?" Or the evil titled Hellspawn is messing things up on purpose, that's always a possibility. "Lashing the father is a good solution if you're trying to get him back for hurting the mother, and having him marry her or pay her isn't, since marrying her isn't really a punishment necessarily and the money would hurt him way less if he's rich. But it's a bad solution if you're just trying to figure out what to do for the child, which I think is what Delegate Napaciza is getting at?"

"A fine does both. It provides very little reason for the nobility to change their ways, but you will not, realistically, convince the nobles to give up having mistresses. Requiring that they provide some compensation to all the women who bear their children is a more plausible improvement. But for men of ordinary means, a fine is painful - more painful than being whipped, in many respects - and both encourages responsibility and compensates the mother and child."

"Ideally, we would find a way to discourage irresponsibility, encourage actual fatherhood, and provide something for children born under circumstances where the father's further involvement would only make things worse. But these may cut in different directions."

"You could make it a - tax benefit of some kind, being married."

"I think — it kind of sounds like you're assuming marriage is usually always good? And I don't really think that's true."

"It's possible to do any good thing wrong. But even a bad marriage is better than kids starving."

Victòria is not at all sure that this is true. "I think bad marriages are usually worse for the woman than the man." 

"I'd believe it. So? A toddler can't go out and get himself a job."

"—well, if a man's the type to beat his wife and children senseless for disrespecting him, I don't think they're better off for having him there."

"Would you marry a man like that for a tax benefit?"

"...not on purpose? I think I'm maybe losing track of all the different ideas people have suggested."

"Then we'd need divorce, which as my wife has insisted to me-" She nods firmly from her seat taking notes. "-we certainly need in some form anyway."

"Bad marriages are very bad, and wives need some way of escaping them," she says, "Osirion is good for the children in every way we could ask for but that, and I am not at all sure it is worth it even if we can't do better."

Soler clicks his tongue. "It's normal to have some arguments, spots where it's not smooth. And I know that's not what you mean, but some young lady who's been married only the once, does she know that's not what you mean? Does she know whether she's got a case of something you work through and not something you drop everything and damn the consequences?"

"I trust this committee to develop a reasonable notion. One of the versions of that right suggested was 'if a priest hears the dispute and judges it allowed'. I have heard Erastil has chosen many men this year, and that Pharasma has many midwives as well."

"That'd be all right by me. So long as she can convince someone who knows it'd be rotten to get it wrong."

"I don't think women should have to go to a priest about it. If a woman is married to a man like that, and there's some delay before she can talk to one — over on Rights we were talking about how a lot of villages don't have a full-time priest right now — then she'd be stuck with a man who's a danger to her. If things are so bad that she'd rather divorce him, even though it'll mean getting by without his income, I think she should be allowed to. If a man wants to just abandon his family that's a different story."

"So, admitting that we tackled these topics in the wrong order, does Cheliax currently... have... a straightforward definition of marriage?"

"Round where I'm from it's pretty much moving into the same house together."

"Does this mean we are debating whether you need a cleric's permission to move out of someone's house, any time after you move into one? After how long?"

Sigh. "I suppose if I say how it works whereabouts I live you're going to have some dreadful news about everywhere else that a constitution can't hardly fix, aren't you."

"Most likely, Sower. I gather that Asmodeus's hold on the villages was always much weaker than the towns and cities, and if your village was one of the exceptions I daresay you wouldn't have been picked by Erastil. But please do."

"If one of my married kids tried to come back to me and their mama, we'd certainly want to know why. If I thought they ought to turn right around and apologize I certainly wouldn't let them in. And if my neighbor had their grownup married kid loitering around their house they'd know what i thought about that unless I had a reason not to think it, too."

"Ah. I wouldn't usually expect someone to move back in with their parents, in Egorian. It's - not uncommon to live with a rotating cast of different girlfriends at different points, or rent a room somewhere with someone who's no particular relation."

"—so, I think some relevant context here is — the divorce rights are a....... rephrasing....... of something I suggested. When I suggested them, I was thinking — at least back where I'm from, I don't know about where you grew up, there's no one that would stop you from getting divorced? Assuming you weren't trying to leave the lord's son or something, which is kind of a separate problem.

And I've heard, I don't know how true this is, that in Osirion women basically aren't allowed to leave their husbands at all, and that seems really bad, it's important to me that we don't say 'well, Asmodeus let people divorce, so no one should be able to' — some people in the pamphlets say that, I know the pamphlets can be kind of silly sometimes.

So when I initially suggested the rights, I said that women should be able to divorce their husbands no matter what, only they got written down a little weirdly so I don't think that totally came through. And then I was thinking, for men— well, if both of them agree on getting divorced, it wouldn't make sense to say they have to stay together. And if they don't have any children, and the wife's not pregnant, then... I mean, that's just normal, why would you want to ban that? And then— if they do have children he'd be abandoning, then maybe sometimes he has a good reason or maybe he doesn't, that's where I was thinking you'd bring in a priest to decide.

...anyways, the important part is, I was thinking of it as, obviously anyone can get divorced right now, when should we say they can't. And it sounds like maybe that isn't how everyone else was thinking about it." 

"Certainly that has never been true for nobility. And I knew it wasn't true for the peasant farmers in Andoran, even though the laws are permissive in theory, and it sounds like it mostly wasn't true for their counterparts here in Cheliax either. We are looking at culture as much as law, in this committee, and it is not true that divorce was permitted by culture even where it was permitted by law."

It's kind of complicatedly true for nobility but he doesn't really want to talk about that.

"And, on the other hand, there are plenty of other people who had weddings, and did not for one moment consider that it would prevent them from leaving, and left. And far more people who shared a house for a month, and then moved on to sharing a house with someone else."

"Where I come from, marriage is... an agreement. Between families, usually, as much as between two people. A husband and wife agree that they will have children together, and that those children will be cared for and taught the father's business, and usually that the wife will also assist in that business as much as she is able. Living together is normal, but not required, especially since business often requires that the husband travel. Even apart from travel, though, I know several people who mostly live in a house on the other side of town from their wives, with a mistress. They do not, in so doing, stop being married to their wives, and their children with their mistresses are mere by-blows and not entitled to a share of their legitimate half-siblings' inheritance."

Disapproving headshake.

"Nobility are similar, though I can't say I know any nobles who maintain their usual residence with their mistress. Noble divorce is breaking a treaty between very small nations, as much as it is a personal matter."

"Indeed. The scale is smaller, for us merchants, but the nature of the arrangement is much the same. Though I do not know that the law needs to recognize this, necessarily. Under the old regime, it was not particularly recognized, and for all the faults of the old order, I do not think that was one of them. When divorce is punished by social opprobrium and loss of reputation, it does not seem necessary for there to be a legal punishment as well."

Rich people are fucking wild. 

"At the point where a tenth of children are being raised by the state, our existing culture here is clearly not working."

"A tenth!"

Josep doesn't see why this should be his problem, or indeed why the state should be doing this in the first place. If mothers have no orphanage to abandon their children at, they'll either bring them up or smother them, and he is fine with either. Maybe fewer women of the working classes would sleep around if the crown was less determined to free them from the consequences of their actions.

Probably he should not say this in so many words to the orphanage worker though. She seems like the kind to feel so very sorry for the women who sleep around and are surprised when this lands them with a pregnancy, and she's better at talking than he is.

"Is it truly a tenth? Gods. Of course you're right that we should do something. I merely meant that, whatever our solution is, it should not break the part of the existing culture that does work. I do note that... if my daughter or sister were to sleep with a man she was not married to, and without any promises made to her about the upkeep of her children, I would think her unpardonably foolish. In my family, women are raised better than that. Perhaps we should try to emulate this spirit for the rest of the country?"

"Apparently at least a tenth of Chelish children are not being raised better than that!"

"Oh, do the men keep promises, where you come from?" She asks Roig, acidly.

"Perhaps we are considering different kinds of promise? Certainly if a man were to solemnly promise a woman marriage or support for her children, with witnesses, and then broke his promise, I would consider him at fault, and perhaps even consider it to be a proper legal matter. But if you mean the light promises that every man makes or implies when courting a woman, which are not truly meant to be kept... well, a woman should know better than to believe those."

Alonso is judging this man and an ambiguous number of other humans SO HARD. Obviously promises are meant to be kept. That doesn't mean they usually are, or that a woman shouldn't be careful about them or anything, just, also the man in this situation sucks. 

"Are we here talking about 'of course I'll marry you darling' or do you mean 'I swear your eyes are more beautiful than the moon'. Those are very different."

"I think if a woman is sleeping with a man she's not married to, there's usually going to be some sort of reason for it? Like, in the wizard schools it's practically a requirement, if you tried not to you'd end up failing all your classes. If a woman were just doing it for fun, she'd just touch herself, obviously, it's a lot nicer than lying with a man. Maybe we could try to figure out what the reasons are that women are deciding to lie with men anyways?"

"...I did not know that about the wizard schools. That seems like something we should perhaps change."

"There is a schooling committee, and I suspect its result will be that we will not have any official schools after the convention reviews their recommendations. Dear, you reviewed reports from Augustana in earlier days?"

"Similar situations of women being largely compelled to use sex as bribes were common among the urban poor. Less so among the merchant classes and villagers."

"I think distinguishing between different grades of promises is silly, if we're relying on men to have shame about breaking them. My sister was married - had a wedding, with witnesses, when she was seventeen. And when her husband left her? My parents laughed in her face, for keeping a child before she'd lived with him for enough years to guess that he might stay. Promises without teeth are for foolish little girls, and where I come from, there is no other kind. Little wonder no one waits for them."

"If we're tracking down any men to make them pay up to support their families that would be the kind to start with."

"Yes, that seems wholly appropriate. A man should not be able to abandon his wife so simply, that is lawless and dishonest. If the community they reside in cannot prevent him, then the law must."

"Alright, so, looking at the original proposal, can anyone think of a justified reason for a man to divorce his wife that wouldn't be covered under both of them wanting it, or no children and no pregnancy, or a priest hearing them out and approving it? At least for the kind of marriage that's... more than just moving in together, I'm not sure if we can make laws for the case where that's all they did."

"Well. His wife could be an evil sorcerer."

"Many, if we're including the nobility. But the norm there is already to sign a very thorough contract covering all eventualities beforehand. Any standard divorce law should apply only to situations in which no such detailed contract exists. If a couple desires something else, they can hire a lawyer beforehand."

"Probably most priests would say it's okay to leave your wife if she's an Evil sorcerer? Unless she ensorcelled the priests. But if she can ensorcel all the priests I don't know if there's anything else that could stop her, and probably she'd ensorcel him if she tried? Do you have another idea I'm not thinking of?"

"As the Count-Regent says, I think the nobility would object to the divorce rights being applied to them, and where they seek divorce, would want their liege, or the Queen, to be the judge of difficult cases, rather than a priest. But I think Avenger Ferrer is correct and the remedy there is, first, to arrest the enchanter and try her, or him, for their crimes, and then use other methods. I think we can trust the committee on rights and the judiciary to consider ensorcelling minds to coerce them to behave as if married illegal."

"In seriousness, I think 'my wife is an evil sorcerer' is the sort of thing that you want to be able to take into account after abandonment has occurred, not something you want to have on a list of valid reasons. Just pointing at - someone will have a good reason to run at some point. You want to have a step before any penalties where you check if that's what happened."

"That makes sense to me."

"It seems better, to me, to oblige a man to care for his divorced wife and their children than to simply forbid him to divorce her. It comes out to much the same thing in many cases, but I should not like to forbid him to remarry if he can support both his old family and a new one."

"He should have to tell the prospective new one that he bailed last time so if she doesn't like his explanation she can turn him away."

"Agreed."

(Llei has been feeling so uncomfortable.)

"I think that is better, if we can properly enforce it. I am not confident in the capacity of the state and the clerks of the nobility, at present, to track all former marriages or abandoned children and enforce payments. Especially if any men flee their village or town of origin."

Come to think of it that's a problem with his earlier suggestion about flogging or gifts, especially if he'd elaborated to the multiple points in the child's childhood version. Hmm.

"I don't think we should enforce it retroactively. Just - going forward. It sounds like most marriages aren't recorded anywhere, so is it possible to - introduce an office where contracts can be kept on file, or something? Or give that job to an organized church?"

"The little boy who used to be a lantern archon has been teaching all of us at the temple of Erastil to read where we don't know it already, could be useful for that. I think in our right form we do weddings only we're starting from not much."

"That the scribes and bureaucrats who work for the state and the nobility have not been purged as thoroughly as the nobility were, is partly a matter of having less authority, but mostly a matter of them being equally difficult to replace, man for man, and far too numerous. I didn't have enough to start, and even if I had, I have had to dismiss quite a number of them as too Asmodean - maybe Mephistophelean - to be trusted with any responsibility. I am not just concerned with tracking past matters, but with future ones as well; it will be a good half-dozen years at least to replace and reform our staffs, and maybe a dozen years or more, before they're up to the challenge."

Sigh. "Well, if we can't record promises, I don't see how we can hold people to them." It seems sort of implausible that a country with Cheliax's literacy rates doesn't have enough people qualified to record which people have signed a standard marriage agreement, but on the other hand it sure doesn't have enough orphanage workers, either. Actually -

"However much work it is, though, it seems worth asking whether it ultimately pays for itself in less need to run state-funded orphanages. Raising a child seems much more than ten times as much work as recording who's meant to be responsible for one."

"Surely a woman petitioning for support after abandonment can bring witnesses to the marriage or agreement, instead of having it necessarily be recorded in a central register, if this is too difficult."

"Just to record marriages, I think we can manage. In villages where few men would consider leaving this seems enough. I worry that the kind of man who thinks little of abandoning his wife will also think little of abandoning his other responsibilities and fleeing to the next barony or the nearest town, or turn adventurer or bandit, and if he must pay if he remains, he may do so even more than he would have before. Tracking that seems very hard. Though you are right that so is running orphanages to a remotely humane standard."

"I don't think it's true that a large number of these become adventurers or bandits. In some places, maybe. But - my anger earlier was not directed at my sister's husband. He was seventeen and fell in love; he was twenty and fell out of it. My sister expected him to stay, but few people thought that he was being more unreasonable than she was. He was perfectly ordinary. If marriages are recorded by the state as conferring any particular responsibility, like real contracts, then maybe people will treat them as such."

(Soler makes a face.)

"If Andoran is any indication, it helps somewhat. Within a generation, at least. Their young men often desert their responsibilities, and not always through divorce, which is in my view rather too easy there from either side. But many of them do stay."

Her expectations are tragically low but this was predictable and it probably wouldn't help to say so.

"It's like trying to build a house on a turtle. Maybe it likes it where it is." Headshake.

"Perhaps we should be teaching people to build on turtles," says the quiet old woman, "Even in my village not every young man is a good boy who does as he ought."

"What do you mean? - uh, by teaching people how to build on turtles, not about some men not doing what they should."

"I don't really know. But I think it might be better to plan for unreliable men, than to try to convince them all to be responsible. ...We'll still need orphanages."

"I think that's what we're doing now. And we try, but - ultimately, it's just telling women to be ready to raise all the children alone. Or to stop having them. Which I'm certainly sympathetic to, but I think a lot of people would object to the family committee coming out with the recommendation that Chelish people stop having children."

"If a lot of people don't have parents and the orphanages are the parents of last resort maybe they should be signing off on marriages, in cities at least."

"Are they all run by the churches, do we know? That's normal in Andoran, mostly Sarenrae with splashes of other gods."

"No, I don't think so. They were all state-run, before, and there aren't enough new churches to pick them up. The one I work at is Iomedan, but only very technically; the church staff only come by occasionally." And are almost always upset when they do. She's honestly unsure whether the orphanage itself is state or religious; Egorian was taken by the Glorious Reclamation troops, and she can't very well tell which things are state or religious, these days. "I don't know the exact financial structure, but my impression is that many are still state-run, and worse-funded and staffed and equipped than they were before."

"Then it does not become the same thing as asking the priests, but that is a mixed blessing. I don't trust all of them to not be Asmodean, by accident if not on purpose."

"I can do something to help this personally, I think. I will write to my friends in the Sarenrite church back east. For orphanages just out of Thrune control, they will find lay priests, at least; at least one per orphanage in the major cities by winter, and many of them first-circle, I expect."

" - what, all of them?" It cannot possibly be that easy. "They're not centralized, there must be a hundred in Egorian alone."

THAT IS SO MANY CHILDREN JUST LYING AROUND. WHY ARE CITYFOLK LIKE THIS

"...Maybe not quite that many. But they'll try." And possibly they'll focus on Egorian and get all of those.

It seems so implausible that this is just on offer, as if nobody knew about it and the moment they did they could all have new staff.

On the other hand that is, uh, precisely why she got herself onto this committee. It's just very confusing to get what she wants without even having to yell at anyone.

" - well, it would certainly make an enormous difference, if you're right. Thank you. The staffing difficulties are such that every bit of help is lifesaving." Probably literally.

"It is an important priority of Sarenrae and Her church in the Inner Sea. If they don't come, it is because orphanages in Andoran and Taldor can't spare them. I think, Delegate Tallandria, that, while I expect we'll find it painful, we ought hear more about conditions in the orphanages, as you know of them."

ERASTIL THERE ARE CHILDREN JUST LYING AROUND. VAST RIDICULOUS NUMBERS OF THEM. DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS.

Yeah. Okay. It's very upsetting, and she's not going to be able to be absolutely perfectly calm while she talks about it, but she can tell them about the state of the orphanages. About the endless struggle to keep them clean and fed when they're constantly shitting themselves and stealing one another's food, and the need to feed newborns goat milk if you don't have orc slaves, and the way that the babies wake each other up at all hours of the night, and the way that key staff stay all through the day and all through the night, and get only very broken sleep for years on end, and then can only respond to children and staff the way that people do when they haven't really slept in a year.

She can go on for a while. As long as they need, really, or until there's no more time to meet.