if you are only born and bred to it [open]

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I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church.

- A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

They've announced the convention will resume on Moonday. The dinner before it resumes Carlota intends to invite all the members of her Safe Roads, Safe Villages committee, so that she can anticipate any objections and schedule an early Moonday vote, but that leaves the Starday dinner for conventional entertaining. She invites the dukes and duchesses she hasn't met yet, those counts and countesses she wants to compliment, and a few of the elected representatives who she trusts to be flattered to be in such company and then vote her way in the future.

Valentia is alive again! Still kind of torn up about the servants. Mostly because she failed in the mission that was assigned to her, and a little bit because she absolutely cannot bounce ideas for what to wear when their new host is entertaining off of any of the survivors. She hadn't really had to worry about this at Charthagnion Manor. She honestly finds Archduke Narikopolus moderately creepy, given she can remember what things were like three years ago, but for everything he's done, she has not heard that he's ever destroyed someone for wearing insufficiently fancy or feminine clothing to a gathering. Her brother once told her that he did torture a man to death for leaving a bone in a fish, but she thinks it was a guest's plate and not his own, which is technically speaking a positive sign about how he treats his guests. Sort of.

- anyway! Valentia brought her mother's sleeves of many garments (and still has them, since her corpse wasn't looted), so she can wear absolutely anything she wants. She tried wearing the kind of gown that the Duchess de Chelam does - slightly simpler, so as not to outshine anyone - but she's not used to the sleeves, and not used to the idea that she can simply take them off and be wearing her adventuring dress underneath. The dress fit her perfectly and was perfectly comfortable, but somehow she felt like she couldn't breathe, under all of those layers of fabric. Her body still felt like it might need to run at a moment's notice, and you can't run at all, wearing something like that. It wouldn't take a moment to remove the sleeves, but her lungs simply will not believe her about that.

So in fact she is wearing an adventuring dress to a social gathering. You could only very debatably call this a faux pas in Ilnea. It's tasteful! It's expensive looking! It's feminine! It is, objectively, very beautiful! But it's the sort of thing you could run in if you had to, and it's not what the Duchess is wearing at all, and she has no idea how much of a misstep it is in this company. She's gambling that it's less of a misstep than not breathing.