"I do not believe we are being observed but can make no guarantee of it."

"I don't think they'd want me to tell you on that assurance. I'm sorry."

"There's no need to apologize. Did you intend the speech to be repeated outside the halls of the convention?"

"Yes. Or - it's hard to keep track of in my head now because I didn't intend what happened, but - I did intend that people would know what I thought about the convention, and about the people of Cheliax. Because half of what I was scared of was that we were being - used to say that the government was all right when it might not be, so I wanted people to know what I thought of that - we talked about distributing the speech as a pamphlet, and I would probably have done that if not for Feliu, who found me after it to say he thought it'd cause riots if it was repeated in the streets. That hadn't occurred to me. So when Laia asked if I'd give it to a crowd at her church - she does pamphlet readings - I told her no, not until we had a version that the Church was sure wouldn't cause riots.

But I did expect - people would hear about it, and trust the convention less, and be right to, and know that they couldn't expect Norgorber cultists or nobles appointed by Abrogail Thrune to be solved for them by someone else."

"Do you know anything about how it did in fact wind up repeated in the streets?"

"Well, lots of people in the room had copies, and lots of them presumably had assistants and so on. I assume someone thought it ought to be a pamphlet and went out and started selling it without any leave from me, nor would I ordinarily have assumed I had any grounds to object except for - then some other people turned it into an even more inflammatory version that just said everyone should go kill all the evildoers right away and they'd go to Heaven for it. I....really didn't expect that. I made a point in the speech of - carefully distinguishing various things - thinking it'd matter."

"So you did distribute some copies to the room, or do you just think people were writing it down as you spoke?"

"We did distribute copies in the room. The other speakers had done that and I liked the idea even though it doesn't help me personally because there was always so much happening at the convention. If you could read it seemed really convenient to have it for your records already."

"After you finished the speech, what happened?"

"- a lot of things that were incredibly confusing at the time and are somewhat less so in hindsight. Ibarra said that when he burned children to death in their homes it was not murder, because it was war. I think that excuse only counts if you couldn't have avoided burning children in their homes, it's not like it just becomes okay to kill people if you declare war first, but other people spoke first so we didn't get back into it. The Hellknights said they were reforming and becoming Iomedaen. - I don't know if that's true but I thought it was encouraging that they said so. The Archduchess came and spoke and said - well I hardly remember most of what she said because one thing she said was that Pezzack rebelling was wrong and we should have just let the Asmodeans rule us and it was our fault everyone had died because we'd rebelled when we shouldn't have and I was so angry at her I didn't even hear anything else she said. I handled that badly enough it would probably have been a major disaster even if the riots hadn't happened, I called her a coward and a collaborator.

Then the Duchess of Chelam said that we should rebel against Asmodeus but not against our Lawful Good queen which was the first I'd heard anyone take what I said as 'we should rebel against the Lawful Good queen' but I was just confused and didn't take her meaning. Then some other nobles took the floor and insisted we stop debating the speech and talk about tax policy, and they did that before Lord Cansellarion could say that the Menador nobles appointed by Abrogail Thrune have supervision from the church and are trying to reform, which was by far the most important thing anyone could've said.

Then I left the floor and Feliu found me and explained that he was worried about riots if the speech was distributed, and that the speech was calling for rebellion against the Queen."

"You mentioned that you decided not to try to publish the speech as a pamphlet after speaking to Feliu. Did you change any of your other plans then?"

"Well, I also told Laia that I wouldn't give it as a speech. And in the committee on excising diabolism I told everyone that if we did find any people engaged in worship of Evil gods and so on we had to tell the Queen before trying to deal with it ourselves. I was still confused about how - say Ibarra, he said in front of half a dozen people that he was a Norgorber cultist, he bragged about how the whole city knew, it seemed implausible the Queen didn't. But I was following Feliu's advice and Feliu thought it was important. So I told the committee that. 

If I'd thought there'd have been riots of course I'd have done something to try to stop them. But I didn't. Maybe just because everything felt very ordinary. I stayed late at the convention getting the judiciary committee's notes read back to me. And by the time I left - 

- I guess it was cowardly not to try to stop the riots? But it didn't seem like it'd work. I wasn't armed and it was so loud that when I did try to get peoples' attention to ask what was going on no one could hear me. So I just followed them and healed injured people."

"What time did you leave the convention?"

"I don't know. I know I looked outside and saw it was already starting to get dark and was angry with myself, because I don't think the city's safe to be out in after dark, and started running home. And found Blai's body, halfway between the convention hall and the temple."

"When did you first become aware of the riots?"

"After I found Blai's body there were a couple other injured people in the streets, who I healed, and then I followed the sound of shouting in the distance and saw a whole crowd of people. From where I was you couldn't really see anything about what was going on. I tried to get someone's attention and ask, but it was too loud and also - obviously a very dangerous situation. I doubled back to get to the temple another way and found more injured people in the streets, and dying ones, and dead ones. Then there was an announcement by magic, that everyone should disperse and go home - I guess I should have obeyed that but there were more dying people, and some of them were in the gutters and when it started raining I was worried they'd drown. So instead of dispersing I started trying to drag the dying people out of the gutters."

"And then?"

"Some other people showed up to help. The Archduke of Sirmium, I learned later, and his men. We walked most of the island to make sure we hadn't missed anyone still breathing. Then Feliu said I was being arrested for the riots, and took me here."

"What has happened to you since being brought here?" Probably not relevant for the report but worth asking anyways, especially if anything bad has happened.

"Feliu stayed to keep watch, as the guards - well, no one has harmed me. The Archmage Cotonnet and the Archduchess d'Ravounel came by to speak to me."

"Alright. I think that covers the events. Is there anything you can think of that any agent of the church of Iomedae, or yourself or Select Artigas, or Archmage Cotonnet, or the queen, should have done, which would have led to better outcomes?" Including the queen on that list is wildly optimistic but Vittorio Cantes is sometimes a wildly optimistic man. "To be clear, it's good to suggest things that would have helped even if you're not sure they'd be worth the cost, or think they definitely wouldn't be worth the cost, or things that might have helped or might have done nothing, or even things that might have helped or might have made things worse, especially if you can point out when you're uncertain about the effects or the costs."

Anything that anyone could have done? That's just....all possible things, really. "Well, if the Church had told me not to go to the convention, or alternatively to come a month early so I could learn more about the world, or if I'd talked to Feliu earlier, that would have done it. If I had listened to the people who told me not to go to the convention, or if I'd arrived earlier to get more of a sense of what was going on - I tried to arrive earlier but I didn't want to leave Pezzack without a priest and then there were summer storms that delayed the ship - if I'd noticed sooner obviously that a bunch of things didn't make sense to me and that in war you've got to keep going anyway but in politics you don't, you can just go do something else - if I'd learned to read - also if I'd just been right about what was going on and not missing anything important but I'm not sure if that counts since it's not as if you can tell someone to just be right instead of being wrong. I was trying. I told the Archmage Cotonnet I should have not come to the convention and focused on learning to read and learning about Iomedae and the world instead, and I think that's the most straightforward thing I could've figured out.

It would have been very easy for the archmages or the Queen to prevent this. They could just have warned us when the convention started that the situation in Westcrown was fragile and that it was important not to say things indelicately, or in a way calculated to anger anyone. They could have not let people go publish hundreds of copies of the speech, if they thought it was a bad speech. The Archmage Cotonnet was right there, and if he had thought the speech was going to cause problems he could have just stopped me in the middle of saying it. Or called on Lord Canselllarion to come up and speak next, because he was planning to explain that the speech was wrong, but he didn't get the chance to. Or they could have given security to the people who the speech placed in danger. Or they could have done...magic? I don't know if there's magic that would've helped. Or they could have held the Constitutional Convention in a city that was not on the brink of a riot, or not in a city at all, so that our debates couldn't - spill over. Or they could have not held it. Or they could have let actual priests of Iomedae attend it."

"If the church had assigned you a staff of five people when you'd arrived in Westcrown, what would you have had them doing?"

" - I guess figuring out why there were so many Norgorber cultists and Erecura priests and Evil nobles running around and whether there were any good routes to do anything about that and whether it was a good idea to make a speech saying that it was a bad thing, and reading a bunch of history books and all of the pamphlets so we knew how things were getting distorted in the city and knew that it wasn't - in a very stable place and that lots of terrible lies were spreading, and teaching me about Iomedae, and doing the thing the nobles do where they have people who work for them listening to the committees they're not on so nothing surprises them."

"Thank you, I think that is all the questions I have... Do you have any questions for us?"