He should have expected.

A lot of people are going to be saying that this morning, and for the most part, they’ll be wrong. Westcrown had been calm since the bread riots last winter. They were teleporting grain into the city for the convention: prices were good. The city was crowded, certainly, but the delegates were spending money – and no one knew about the pamphlets until it was almost too late – and, really, why would a city that couldn’t be bothered to free itself from the shackles of Asmodeus and his servants for seventy years rise to the occasion now – 

Well. They hadn’t seen it all before. He has. 

The thing about Iomedeans and politics is that they just fundamentally can’t work with people. They do try. Sometimes they try very hard. It never works, and he doesn’t think it can outside of Lastwall: nobody else is good enough, nobody else is responsible enough, nobody else has that glorious shining purity of intent – which is really the thing that gets you. If you’re Chelish, it’s like a drop of water in Avernus. It’s being unafraid for the first time in your miserable life. It’s shutting up the mortal aching terror of eternity that’s kept you paralyzed since you reached the age of reason. It’s hope. It’s killing the bastards and feeling clean, clean, clean. It’s enough to make a man a little mad, the first time, or the first ten. 

He knew that.  

He teleports to the temple of Iomedae. Is there a senior-looking cleric about? 

Iustin is the senior cleric of Iomedae in Westcrown, and will obviously drop what he's in the middle of (organizing canvassing for the missing and not-yet-known-dead) to speak with the archmage.

That’s not necessary. 

“I don’t mean to take you away from your work. But if I don’t miss my guess, someone in this building is in the middle of conducting a failure analysis. I’d like to speak to them.” Deep breath. “I think I have made some very serious mistakes.” 

"Ah, yes. You want Cantes and de Luna, they're in the meal hall through - that door over there - do you need introductions?"

When Élie does not request introductions he hurries back over to the people he was organizing.

Cantes is an older man, retired eighteen months ago and prevailed upon to stop being retired when 1) Tar-Baphon was nearly released by the Thrunes and 2) the Worldwound became somewhat less of a disaster and freed up a belt to make him a touch less frail. De Luna spent most of the last two decades in enforced retirement due to missing an arm, but that got fixed a few years back and he's been at the front. He's here because he wrote the Galt retrospectives.

Élie does not actually know this fact about de Luna! That’s Second Alex! Witch book guy! The guy who wrote the book about witches, not the guy who was turned into a book by a witch! He didn’t come to his wedding because at that point he thought Naima was the Myrabelle entity, but he was very polite about it! Élie stole his arm back from the mad alchemist who’s now his son’s pet turtle! 

He’s still not having a good day – in fact, he’s still having the worst day of the past two years – but this might be less excruciating than he feared. 

“De Luna! I’m sorry we had to meet again in such circumstances. How’s the arm?”

“Archmage! Works like a charm, and I’ll warn you if that ever changes as it might portend poorly for that turtle of yours. What can we do for you?”

“I’ve been told this is where I can find the failure analysis for the events of last night.”

“Oh. It’s not done yet, we’ve only just gotten started -”

“Good.” He conjures another chair, mostly because he likes being able to do that. “What’s the process, here? Have you already done your interviews? Do we all go around in a circle and tell the class what we think we did wrong?”

Cotonnet wants to know the process? Cotonnet wants to participate in the process? De Luna was sure they were going to have to do the whole failure analysis without any interviews with the parties that knew the most about what happened and could have done the most to avoid it, because they’re monarchs and archmages. “We haven’t finished the interviews yet, many of the people we’d want to interview are dead or otherwise unavailable. The interviews are the first step, while everyone’s memory is fresh and before the report-writer starts to form any theories that might influence the interviews. Are you willing to sit for an interview, then?”

– Oh. Of course. They don’t want his opinion. He can tell them what happened, but it’s for the good people of Lastwall to tell him what he ought to have done. 

Whatever. He came here with a mission, and if he has to be condescended to by paladins, it’s not like he doesn’t deserve it. 

“Certainly. Now?”

“If it’s convenient. Ah - let’s start at the beginning. In the leadup to the convention, a large number of 'pamphlets' were being published in Westcrown, can you tell us about… no, actually, sorry, that’s not the beginning, is it? Can you tell us about how the decision was made to have a constitutional convention?”

Ah. 

“...I have a demiplane where time passes at ten times the usual rate. Do you want to do this there?”

“- yes. Yes, that would be incredibly useful.”

Then he can plane shift them, after telepathically alerting Naima that he’s heading into time dilation. 

“Catherine and I always planned to hold a constitutional convention. I pushed for it to happen now – she wanted to wait longer – but there was no question that we were going to have it. We both believe in a monarchy whose power is limited and delineated by the will of the people – she does, I mean, I’m not a monarchist, but one does occasionally have to be pragmatic about these things.”

He looks appreciatively around at the time-dilated demiplane. Lastwall would kill for one of these. Only volunteers, of course, but quite a few volunteers, if there came about an opportunity to kill volunteers and get a time-dilated demiplane. “What were your goals for the constitutional convention? What did you consider a likely outcome, a good outcome, an unusually bad outcome? How was the decision about timing made?”

Do they do this to everyone or just people who they’ve already decided are raving anarchists? …Probably everyone. Damn paladins.  

“Timing’s the easiest. I wanted to have it now because the work of rebuilding is never going to be properly done, and if we didn’t pick a date we’d put it off forever. People don’t like to let go of power once they’ve got it, even Good ones. 

My goal was to produce a body of laws dictating the form of the government of the new Chelish state. We all knew we had to balance representing the real interests and desires of the Chelish people with the fact that the Chelish people are mostly evil and have no notion whatever of representative government. I expected the convention to produce a constitution, and I expected that constitution to be very seriously flawed. An unusually good outcome would have been – but I don’t know if it makes sense to talk about what I’d want in a constitution. We’re not finished yet. In fact, we’ve barely started. 

Speaking of public order, then – I knew there was a risk of riots. My real concern there was food prices; we’d arranged to have extra grain teleported into the city during the convention. Housing’s harder, since the new construction is already proceeding as quickly as it can. I was ready to have some of my people start casting mansions daily, if it came to that. I didn’t think bread riots were likely. I thought we’d done enough to mitigate them, and we’d have time to respond if we were wrong. 

I wasn’t worried about the pamphlets. We had a trickle of them all summer. There was one on the first day calling for lynchings with names and in some cases addresses; nothing came of it. I spoke to the author and he didn’t strike me as the rioting type. Angry, certainly, but not desperate, and not even particularly bloodthirsty. You can tell when you’re talking to someone like that – they write a good game, but they’d never be the first to pick up a pitchfork. I thought that individual attacks against some of the city’s more prominent former diabolists weren’t unlikely, but nothing on the scale of what happened. 

An unusually good outcome, then – I mean, within the range of reasonable expectation – would have been for the convention to run its course with no interpersonal violence at all between or towards delegates. In actual expectation, I thought I’d have to break up a few fights. An unusually bad outcome – well, we could all have been kidnapped by Geb and raised as his undead slaves. Still could! The day is young.”

"Quite." He's going to have to remember to raise that concern with the governing council, because 'The archmage Cotonnet mentioned in an interview that he was worried Geb might kidnap and enslave him and his constitutional convention, but Cantes never mentioned this to anyone apart from including the interview notes in the report appendices that nobody ever reads' is not something he wants anyone else to have to write in their own report a couple months down the line. Also the underlying atrocity might be preventable with notice.

"Can you describe the processes by which you picked delegates to the convention, and how those processes were decided upon?"

“There was a conversation. Myself, the Queen, Naima, Ione, and the inquisitor. We all agreed that the first Galtan constitutional convention should be the rough model – elected delegates, the higher nobility, and representatives from all the non-evil churches weighted by how widely their gods are worshiped. I was worried that the sort of people who could win elections in Cheliax would just use threats and bribery – but we couldn’t very well not have elections – so I suggested picking some delegates by sortition as well, to make sure we’d represented the important “not single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of power” demographic.”  

“How was the decision made to, as one of three representative of Iomedae’s church, invite Select Wain?”

“...Iomedae had ten seats in the weighting and two empowered clerics in the whole country. There wasn’t anyone else.” 

"...Only two? What about the Glorious Reclamation? On that point, is it only clerics who could take the seats, or would you accept paladins or inquisitors as well?" If a bunch of Iomedan Select didn't just move to Cheliax this past year, Cantes has a lot more questions about where they did go. Probably not for the archmage.

“We did consider asking foreign priests for some of the churches, but we realized very quickly that that wasn’t tenable – there’d be so many more of them. It would defeat the purpose to have the laws of Cheliax written by people who had no intention of living by them – and it was my understanding that none of the Reclamation clerics or paladins except Cansellarion wished to become Chelish citizens.” 

"...None of them? How was that understanding arrived at?"