No, not at all. He stays for a few words with Iustin, and then moves as if to walk out the door rather than vanishing into thin air.

Blai catches up for him but waits to be acknowledged.

"Select. I'm glad you're back. Can I help you with anything?"

"I have heard that you teleport to your county on a nightly basis and that some of the Glorious Reclamation is posted there. Do they have anyone among them who would be capable of the introductory catechism classes I'm missing?"

"I do. We have a number of people who would be qualified... Lastwall has more," and in particular more whose other current duties involve catechizing priest candidates "but I think I could provide someone outside of convention hours, if you'd have the time for lessons."

"I need to attend the trial today, and tell Valia about it. After that I would like absolutely nothing better than to spend every waking minute catching up with whoever can least painfully be spared. I am deeply concerned about my lack of guidance. And hers, though I understand that of course she cannot go traveling now."

"Yes, failing to provide the two of you with instruction is one of the bigger mistakes we made that led to the events of Toilday. Have you spoken with Cantes and de Luna yet?"

"I don't believe we've been introduced."

"Ah. They're Lastwallers, in town to write a failure analysis for the riots. To identify all the places where different policy might have helped us avoid or mitigate them. I think they will want to talk to you before you go - the simplest thing, if you want to spend all your time studying, is for me to take you with me to Vigil tonight, and bring you back when the convention resumes. So ideally you'd speak with Cantes and de Luna today. I'm not sure where Iustin has them set up, yet."

"If you don't plan to teleport until this evening that leaves me some hours not already committed to the trial or to visiting Valia. Is a failure analysis a - standard practice -" He is very charmed by the idea if you know how to read Chelish people.

"Yes, we do them regularly. Usually with less time and resource investment and for smaller matters than this one."

"Should I seek them out to tell them when I'm available? What do they look like?"

"Please do. Cantes is older, Ustalavan, a little on the short side, clean-shaven. De Luna has - two arms. Brown hair, about your height, beard. Probably both in uniforms, but de Luna might be in armor instead."

"Does... Cantes not have two arms?"

"No, sorry, that was my mistake. They both have two arms, it's just that de Luna lost one of his and then spent more than a decade under a curse that stopped it from regenerating, and I am used to describing him as having one arm, that being his most striking physical feature until relatively recently."

"Ah. Will they be around the temple or should I find them elsewhere?"

"The temple, probably, but Iustin would know better."

"Where should I meet you this evening?"

"Here seems simplest."

"I'll be here. Thank you, ser."

So he goes back to tell Iustin that he plans to attend the trial, visit Valia afterwards with notes from it, and then travel with Ser Cansellarion in the evening, but that leaves some sections of the day during which he can speak to de Luna and Cantes.

"When did you learn that you had been selected for the constitutional convention?"

"I received a letter at my fort, and returned to Cheliax with the next Teleport wizard."

"Did you understand yourself to be invited, or required, to attend?"

"...If I recall correctly I thought that I was invited but in such a way that I would be ordered if I were in a formal chain of church command. I might have written for clarification on that if I didn't think it was a safe time to hand off the fort but I judged it to be a good a time as any."

"What was the first point at which you had contact with another priest of Iomedae, either a lay priest or a Select?"

"- after my own selection or before? I had met paladins at the Worldwound," and reconstructed his personality around some single-digit number of total hours of exposure to them! "before."

"Who had you met, what kinds of interactions had you had with them?"

"I don't remember all of their names. Both adventurers and permanent Worldwound-posted individuals of many types occasionally came through the fort for various operational reasons and some were paladins and most of the paladins were Iomedaean. They were usually not talkative." They usually pitied the soldiers and despised Blai and it was visible from yards away. "I learned some basic things that were justifiable as logistical communication about operational constraints, like that they were not allowed to lie and that they did not consider the Order of the Godclaw to be Iomedaeans in good standing because they considered simultaneous worship of Asmodeus and Iomedae invalid."

"I see. And after you were selected by Iomedae?"

"I don't actually know if Commandant Terzić is a Select or a paladin or a lay priest or just a martial officer, it didn't come up in our correspondence. In person it was here in this temple. I think Iustin may be the first one I spoke to but it was very brief, he handed me off to support staff to assign me a room."

"Were you aware that there were catechism classes that you hadn't taken? Were you interested in taking them?"

"Yes. Extremely. I did not think it was wise to leave my #11 - my fort - to seek them at Crusader's Fort when I believed my only task was to continue to operate #11, and there was no time on the way to the convention, the teleport route goes through Taggun Hold and I had to walk the rest of the way. The urgency has only appeared to increase since then and earlier today I approached Ser Cansellarion to ask him if I might accompany him the next time he teleports to get started on that."

"What was your initial impression of Select Wain?"

"...she's young. Not a child and of course she's been longer Selected than I have but - energetic and inexperienced. She resonates with different - features of Iomedae - than I do, ones that I don't understand intuitively. She can't read and liked me to read to her."

"Did you have concerns about her ability to perform her duties and represent the Goddess at the convention?"

"She's arguably even less catechized than I; I'd had time to read through the whole Acts and she couldn't have even had she owned a copy. I had imagined that after a few more days for things to settle down something might be arranged to educate us both together here in Westcrown - I sent a letter asking for someone to meet me here for that purpose, you can see my copy if you like, but never got a response - but I did not expect it to become a problem so early or so dramatically."

"When was that letter sent?"

"I posted it just before I left Fort #11, so that would have been... a month and a half ago."

"We'll try to figure out what happened to it. DId you hear Valia's speech on the floor?"

"Yes."

"What was your impression of it?"

"I - actually found it very difficult to concentrate on it."

"...difficult to concentrate on it?"

"Yes, it... I have been assuming you're aware of my previous background, is that correct?"

"We are."

"And for some reason for much of the speech I was dwelling on seminary even though that was twenty years ago, I'm not sure why. I had been planning to revisit it under less chaotic circumstances, maybe with Valia that evening, but I was murdered on my way home."

"Were you expecting riots in the streets of Westcrown that night?"

"No. I was aware that I had been denounced in a pamphlet but Valia's speech postdated that publication and I didn't realize that the various pressures would build up like that on that day."

"Did you take measures in response to being denounced in an earlier pamphet? Did you discuss your security with anyone?"

"I prepared spells aimed at nonlethally escaping violence derived from the denouncement, but had already used my Calm Emotions earlier that day on an unrelated incident. Everyone who knew the context of the denouncement was too busy."

"Did you consider hiring security?"

"I thought about it after I'd been murdered, not before, and have come to the conclusion that I probably can't afford it because I don't have the ability to personally vet an inexpensive person's trustworthiness with my safety, being as the reasons someone might want to see me unsafe are so complicated."

"Do you think that you'd have handled the riots substantially differently if you'd had more information that you have learned since then?"

"I have been told that I ought to have been willing to use lethal force. Then Valia said that didn't sound right to her and I haven't been able to catch the fellow who told me so to clarify if that was doctrinal or personal opinion or complicated in any way."

Valia Wain really needs to stop venturing theological opinions. He makes a note, actually, of the fact that she is still apparently venturing them and someone is apparently taking them seriously. "It is certainly permissible to use lethal force to prevent your murder by a mob, though better not to have to, and permissible to adopt a reasonable range of tradeoffs between efficacy and lethality of the methods available to you. Even if one in some sense deserves it mobs rarely disperse and go home having murdered the deserving, and of course priests of Asmodeus even without any intervening complications deserve the rule of law the same as anyone else. I would observe also that an unwillingness to use lethal force may be substantially more limiting than a strong preference not to kill anyone; were I attacked by a mob I would endeavor not to kill anyone, but I wouldn't rule out actions that might kill someone, it'd just be a consideration when comparing them to other options."

Blai mulls that over, nodding slowly.

"I believe the plan is to urgently get you at least a lay priest advisor, though I don't make personnel commitments and so cannot make promises about them. Myself and Sir Cantes are charged here with assisting however we can, with the incident report as a secondary priority."

"Oh, I had been under the impression that you were here only for that with anything else you found time to do being incidental, that's good to know though I do expect to be departing with Ser Cansellarion before I have any further opportunities to take advantage of your presence."

"Other countries tend to find it objectionable if we show up only to do incident reports so we are directed to be generally useful enough they are glad of our presence, and secondarily about our own work, particularly in a case where much of the fault evidently lies with the Church."

"I hadn't been speculating about what might have been otherwise requiring Church officials' attention - though I had begun to suspect my letter was lost en route."

"Everyone's very busy but I think more importantly did not know what in the world the Archmage Cotonnet intended to do here and therefore how much might be at stake in it. I do suspect that your letter was lost en route because receiving no reply to such a letter would be highly unusual and because postal routes at the Worldwound are not reliable. You'll be able to read the final report, once it's written."

And he has more questions nailing down the exact timeline of everything, and questions about Blai's day to day at the convention, and questions about Blai's impression of the availability of Lord Cansellarion, of Iustin, of Feliu Tauler, of the Iomedaen lay priests assigned to the Archduke Narikopolus...

Feliu actually did a great job of not seeming like talking to him was keeping him from fourteen other urgent appointments but he's mostly staying with the guy he's bodyguarding and doing healing out of a different smaller building so it wasn't easy to find him on an incidental basis. Cansellarion does not receive this compliment specifically though he was receptive to taking Blai along on a boots trip. Blai hasn't really talked to the lay priests and now supposes he never will. Iustin tries to be available and as a result is at all times harried by people who really want to convert to Iomedaeanism and have been trying to get an appointment to talk about it every day for the last six months and Blai is hoping that once he's capable of taking some of those people off Iustin's plate it'll be a little easier but he doesn't even know how long the classes take.

Does Blai have questions about the whole situation, or his own takes on where mistakes were made?

"I should probably have sent an additional copy of the letter from Taggun Hold - sending two in the first place would have had them in the same bag the whole way, not much more likely to get through, but one from Taggun Hold might have worked fine. I am... beginning to wonder if I should have been more upfront about my history..."

"It seems like it might have been productive and might also have seemed very dangerous, in a situation as precarious as this one. I do not see any immediate counsel on it. Any errors you see that other people were making?"

"...I think Valia should not have made the speech without managing to get five minutes of Iustin or someone's attention."

"That is definitely true. Though a habit of ours, in these matters, is especially if a catastrophic mistake is made by an inexperienced person to ask why an inexperienced person was even able to make a catastrophic mistake. If you give guard duty for an important prisoner to a drunken fool, and he lets the prisoner escape, he has erred, but it is often more productive to figure out why he was there to err than to advise him in sturdier character."

"I assume there is a very good reason to consider uncatechized Selects to be outside of the command chain such that we could not be given orders."

"I think that the main advantage of your being inside the chain of command is that there would have been someone specifically responsible for you who considered it their job to make sure you were able to do yours, and it would have been possible to assign such a person even without them having any authority to give you orders. To join the Church one takes oaths, and it is a great evil and injustice to coerce people into oaths, among other methods by telling them that they are expected to do it automatically and without particular reflection or obvious alternative courses."

"...are there meant to be obvious alternative courses?"

"Yes! Some people make the choice on reflection to not join the Church, but to work independently, or to join some other order or organization or the service of some specific person. If your desire was to continue to serve in the Chelish military at the Worldwound without joining the Church, or to join the Reclamation which is in good standing with the Church but organizationally independent, or to go off as an independent adventurer, or to sign up as the Queen's bodyguard, all of those would be perfectly reasonable courses which a person might on reflection decide was right for them. And it is, in fact, your duty and not anyone else's to decide what you want to accomplish with your life and in which capacity you'll be able to get it done."

Thanks, he hates it. "Understood."

"I would generally recommend to a new Select that they join the Church, or at least do the training to join. But -" the way he usually makes this point is "if you just obey Iomedae because She chose you how do you know you wouldn't obey Asmodeus if He did" and he should....avoid saying that, here. "In the early part of Acts Iomedae declines to join a number of paladin orders because She doesn't think that the vows capture what she wants to dedicate her life to. And that's very commendable, but also very unusual. Most Good and Lawful people, if they're presented with a course, and it's not too far off, and no specific effort has been made to inculcate the virtue of using your own will and picking the actual best course, will just swear themselves to a good reasonable one that presented itself as the thing they were supposed to do. And if Iomedae had done that the whole world would be ruled by Tar-Baphon now. ...and if Alexaera Cansellarion had there'd be no Reclamation."

Nod.

"If you had a staff of five people how would you want them specialized?"

"- before or after I have taken enough classes to be useful at the temple in nonmagical contexts?"

"Assume immediately." Assume this interview lands on the desk of a personnel manager marked 'MORE URGENT THAN WHAT YOU'RE DOING UNLESS YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE 'GEB MIGHT KIDNAP THE CONVENTION' SITUATION'.

"...a bodyguard, like you said. Possibly two. A scribe, I take notes in convention meetings but I am not as fast as a professional. Someone to go over my catechism with me so I wouldn't need to prevail on Ser Cansellarion to transport me to one. A runner for various errands, so that I could focus on said catechism instead of doing my own shopping and so they could go fetch me any context on what the other committees are covering before they explode on the floor."

"If you had ten?"

"...I'd begin to be worried about finding places to house them all and convert another one of the defunct Asmodean temples, which would hopefully occupy some of them until I knew enough about what I was doing to run it."

"All right. We're going to be here working on this and other matters for the next while. You should feel free to consult us as needed."

"Am I correct in assuming that there is no real chance of a bodyguard appearing out of thin air?"

"Not today. Possibly tomorrow, I'll see what I can do. Today if you'd like you can stick with me, I offered to help with some of the canal zombies after this and then was hoping to catch someone on the city watch who can speak to how they were so flat-footed."

"If you happen to have a sword I - no, that's probably a foolish use of the channels."

"I do carry a sword. We're on the channeling rota now but I don't know what that implies about whether the city's actually adequately covered."

"I think some people come in just because, it's always packed, but actually I used to be able to channel energy through my mace, and I think it will... no longer work with the mace, nor be useful for most things I might want to attack."

"I have no particular familiarity with how it works for clerics who've changed gods but you are welcome to experiment with my sword if you'd like and have the channels free. I'm not too worried about the canal zombies. I may look like I have never voluntarily left a library, and that's not very false, but I put in my time at the front too."

"I only get the two a day, I shouldn't experiment with them any time in the next year unless something more difficult than canal zombies crops up especially since I don't actually know how to use a sword per se. But I would like to join you."

Then off they'll go. De Luna in fact prefers libraries to monster-slaying but he's a paladin of Iomedae and will do his job, if there are zombies in the canals.

It's nice to have something straightforward to do before he has to beg off to go attend the trial.