Korva doesn't get deliveries; she walks around herself to get the lowest prices, or has Zara walk and get even lower ones. The delegate stipend is generous, sufficiently so that Korva is saving the vast majority of it in the hopes that it will markedly change her financial situation for many years, so she's only actually buying pamphlets occasionally. But she talks to people - the urchins old enough to remember school, and the wizards themselves, when she can find them, who if they weren't teachers themselves often know people who were. She's been trying to write up an education proposal that strips the school system down enough for people to be willing to reinstate it. And she does circle back around to the people who consistently give her the best material.

It's - sort of terrifying, to receive mail in this situation, but Theopho has no reason to destroy her and has seemed like a simultaneously sensible and decent person on the rights committee, and the offer gives her the opportunity to pick the place. Not that it necessarily matters very much if he's a powerful adventurer. Still.

She tells Zara where she's going, and to spend the evening in her favorite bookshop - whichever one that is, Korva doesn't want to know - and only come back inside later if Korva is waiting in front of the house when she gets there. She doesn't really think anyone is likely to care about Zara, but it seems a mistake not to protect the thing in the world you care most about just because you don't know anyone else to have a use for it.

Then she goes to the Plaza Goya and looks for Theopho, figuring there are probably people to talk to there, too, and she can occupy herself easily enough talking to them while she waits.

There's a fountain and a fair number of townhouses, which were probably very fine a century ago, somewhat nice fifty years ago, and headed on their way back to very nice in the last six months.

If she's looking around the square, the closed temple is fairly noticeable; it has a large set of double doors as the front entrance, and a heavy curtain falling down out a front window covering a large portion of the facade, neither of which any of the fairly-similar other buildings around the square have.

But around an hour before sunset, the door will presumably open

Oh, she doesn't want to have to go inside. People can do anything to you inside! She'd hoped he would be outside at some point, and then go in at some point, and she could catch him in the middle and avoid this.

But the rains will come harder again in not too long, so there's nothing for it, except to abandon her mission and not see him until the convention. She would have, once. Now, she... takes a full ten minutes to rally her courage, and pointlessly hope that he'll exit, and then she'll look inside, still ready to run if that feels indicated.

The door's still arcane locked, but it opens quickly at a knock.

"Ah, Delegate Tallandria! Would you like to come in?"

" - no, actually, if it's all the same to you. I realize it's raining, but it's not very much right now. But if you have some specific reason to avoid wanting to leave the temple, then -"

Well, she's not sure what she'll do, then, but she can consider it, or more realistically fail to consider it given the givens.

"...Ah. No, that's alright. It's arcane locked, but I can get back in quickly. The doors prop open easily, if we want to step out of the rain later, but by the fountain is fine. I'll just grab an umbrella."

He's back in a moment.

"So, I did want to thank you for what you said on the floor on the first day. Well-spoken, and calling out a duchess's... misrepresentations, can't have felt easy."

" - oh, I definitely spent the entire time feeling like I was going to die," she says, and somehow this comes out easily and conversationally. A part of her has also flagged that that is a compliment, and people only ever compliment others when they want something, which of course was really already obvious from the fact that he bothered to go to all the trouble of sending out a letter to her at all, but better late than never to arrive at a clearer intuitive understanding of the situation.

"But - I guess it felt like she was very committed to keeping as much decision-making as possible away from anyone besides the nobility, and thought that the sortitions would all be too stupid to notice this, and was prepared to move the convention to lynch anyone who wanted them to have a say in anything, and might have been able to, and I didn't really - I'm not sure what I thought, exactly. I didn't want to let her get away with it. And I thought you were one of the few people who had said anything reasonable, at that point, and it seemed like very bad practice to begin by removing all of the reasonable people in the room."

When she does it it's not to get anything in particular, which proves absolutely nothing about the general case, of course.

"She got most of what she wanted, she still controlled the format we'd use and set most of the committee chairs herself. But, yeah, that was... half of why I spoke up, with the other half being that I'm a closet radical in certain ways. And I was impressed. I think I would have been even if it had been someone, or something, else you spoke up for. ...And so I consider myself to owe you a favor, in a vaguely Abadaran sense."

" - I'm not really up on my Abadaran theology in particular, if that's important." She knows the basics, she used to have a little wooden Abadaran holy symbol laid out next to her Asmodean shrine, but is not immediately succeeding at using that knowledge to unpack what exactly this means.

"Neither am I, really. But they have ideas about how to fairly reward benefits you receive. I would have paid quite a lot beforehand for your cooperation, so the Lawful Neutral thing, in their view, is to pay you anyway. I think they do complex calculations about it, but I don't really care about that. Ask for something I can probably do, and I'll tell you whether I think it's within bounds. I could get you a job doing most things a merchant in Westcrown need, with a boss who treats employees reasonably, or back you up on something significant in the convention, or get you out of the country with some money to set you up for long enough to find work there."

There isn't anywhere else in the world she wants to be, not really. Three years ago she might have said Lastwall, or Andoran, but now that Cheliax isn't infernal she imagines that Lastwall will be similar but with a better-maintained eye staring down at everyone, and Andoran will be exactly the same. A job that pays enough to have a house would be nice, but it's honestly impossible to imagine much of any future right now. And she might want help with the convention, but she doesn't know with what, yet. This is all assuming that the offer is genuine, and she doesn't exactly understand why it would be, but -

"I'd rather not make plans for after, really, I'm not very sure how many of us will be intact at the end of all this. May I save the favor?"

"Of course. I do expect that I'm not going to live in Cheliax in a year; either I'll be kicked out as a Hell-worshipper and go to Absalom, or depending on how a commune I'm going to buy turns out, I'll renounce her and go back to Rahadoum. So there's some expiration on my ability to repay it usefully."

"Sure, I understand."

"...while I'm here - and not, to be clear, in the mode of asking for specific individual quantifiable or savable favors - what things are you trying to get, here? I am at this point mostly focusing on trying to come up with a sufficiently cheap and non-infernal school system proposal that we can avoid abandoning general literacy, and determining what exactly should be done about the orphanages and the crisis levels of child abandonment in the cities, which a bunch of people seem surprisingly unaware of? And I guess at the moment I kind of think maybe someone should suggest a committee on natural resources to investigate how we should be handling mining, among other things, which sounds nice and unlikely for people to try to murder each other over, but I'm not really personally invested in it and not very sure who should bring it to the floor, or whether anyone will want to discuss boring stuff after - everything that's happened."

"I'm a bizarre person. I was born noble and would be fully in favor of abolishing the nobility entirely if it didn't mean removing protections against monsters in most villages. I don't think the law should care a bit what species you were born, let alone title, class, or wealth. I rarely lie because lying to superiors is dangerous and lying to anyone else annoys me on principle. I donate money to orphanages because it's Good; I buy halfling slaves and free them because I enjoy it. I've never read as anything but Lawful but my second-favorite god is Milani and I'm a natural antitheist even for the gods whose priorities I mostly like. I'd enjoy sabotaging Chelam's plans even if they were otherwise reasonable, just to keep her from getting power. It's all the same kind of principle to me but most people find it incomprehensible."

"But I'm not actually that ambitious. I'd like Rights to approve as much as we can get, and for there to be some kind of government where people other than nobles and clergy have a part in deciding what's legal and when there are wars and so on, and for everyone to be at least born free, not slave or serf or anything else. And I'd like to see people I like, like you and Enric Porras and the elf chairing Slavery, have the space to get things done according to your own values."

That... is, in fact, fairly bizarre, especially when held up next to the fact that Theopho is technically a priest (high priest?) of an infernal power. It's not that she knows anything much about Erecura, or that she especially doubts that she's lawful neutral, but that all sounds, uh. She's not especially sure what it sounds like. Chaotic Good, maybe, though she's not sure she understands Chaotic Good well enough to say what it's like either.

"I see. Well, I am enjoying the rights committee, and am looking forward to finishing up talking about torture and execution so we can talk about, I don't know, speech, or how much the government should mindread people. I think we're doing good work there. It seems... more capable of productive discussion, than some the other committees I've seen. I'm on way too many, and am kind of hoping that after all of this we can get the diabolism committee disbanded, though I'm not sure I'm brave enough to suggest it."

"Well, I'm sure not any help suggesting that. Speech should be a big deal, especially since I doubt the floor's going to look favorably on freedom of the pen after this week. Something for free assembly like the Archduchess suggested, likewise."

"Yeah. I'm hopeful, given that peaceful speech was one of the first rights she suggested, but - I don't know what to expect to happen when we reconvene. I might ask Archduke Blanxart about disbanding the diabolism committee, or - would consider it if I had any idea how to contact an Archduke without gravely insulting one by asking, which I'm not really sure is possible. But I expect he wants the committee dissolved too, at this point."

"He was one of the deaths, I think. So he has credibility. On the other hand, I checked, and he was indeed born Alfonso Thrune i Blanxart, so maybe less. On the mage hand, Alfonso Antoninus Iomedae Thrune. So, really, depends how much attention people are paying. Which is probably not much, alas."

"I don't have a good read on the man. I guess I don't have a good read on anyone, really, apart from - well, the people on the rights committee a little bit more, I suppose. But the nobles are hard. I keep half losing my mind realizing I've now spoken to four out of five archdukes, and then remembering that I'm probably going to say something stupid at some point and one of them will murder me on a whim after all of this is over. But we'll see."

"Maybe I'll just put it to a vote and see if the diabolism committee is willing to gracefully disband itself, after this. It's an awful room to be in, is all."

"The Archduchess was by all reports a genuinely popular Lord Mayor despite complying with the nastiness her duties required for proper Asmodeanism. Sirmium is a general, pure and simple, as far as I can tell; a good one, but he's a soldier first and last. Menador's a warrior, like most of his nobles. The Inquisitor is the Inquisitor. And nobody knows anything about Blanxart because he was in the stone garden* for a thousand years. I haven't managed to look into most of the other nobility, beyond a few dukes and duchesses, and the raised ones are mostly more mysteries. It does seem like diabolism was set up to... catch all the crazy. And then you got 'rewarded' for your insight by getting made chair."

(*There's a folktale about this that's a cross between Rip van Winkle and the beginning of Rapunzel with stealing from a witch's garden. Theopho is not actually aware that it's also literally true in this case.)

"Oh, I'm not the chair. Valia Wain was the chair. I think I spent most of the last session staring into the middle distance in horrified silence. I can't say I'm particularly proud of how I handled things, but I'm also not sure what I should have done, or if anything could have been done. Still feel kind of awful for letting down the guy who wanted me to be a voice of sanity on it, though."

"It sounds intimidating. That was Count Ardiaca, right? He may have been playing some kind of game, I wouldn't worry too much about disappointing him."

"Oh, he absolutely is. Also, actually, caught up with me afterwards to offer me a job after all this, but when I told him this was very generous he looked horrified and ran away, so I'm sort of unclear on whether I'm supposed to be acting as if it happened. But I think he did want to avoid a hurricane of bloodshed, and I'd like to have avoided the hurricane of bloodshed, and it's difficult not to regret having been an utterly useless piece to move for the sake of stopping it."

....why is she telling him all of this? Is it a charm? He could have done a charm behind the door. She felt way better after he agreed to talk outside, and of course she knows why, but it was sudden and marked enough that she was still surprised by it. It feels good, to talk about things, but that's no reason at all. Negative reason, really.

Supposing she is making her own decisions. Why?

Because Ardiaca wanted a piece to move, and it is a good thing, really, to be a piece; not merely to have a favor to call on, but to be ongoingly useful, and worth moving other pieces to protect, if the others won't be lost. Maybe it's two-faced and disloyal, to be a piece for more than one person, or maybe it brings more protection, or maybe it depends on if you get caught. 

Because Ardiaca didn't want information, for some reason, possibly because he already has everything she could possibly give him - but she isn't wrong about the principle, the idea that information is valuable. And because Theopho is giving her information, too, and she does not know everything. Because they are not chess pieces, in the end, and even pawns can move any way they like, if only one step at a time, and only once before the pieces behind them cut them down for their disloyalty. One should still know which steps one might be willing to step out of line for.

.....and because being spoken to like a person is nice. She's very stupid. But she can be aware of her own stupidity, and keep track of how she feels during the next rights committee, and decide then if the stupidity is wholly in her or being provoked. And see if he gives her more, now. If he does, it is still transactional, and immediate transactions are safer.

"Probably some Chelish assumption Ardiaca only half picked up on. Asmodeanism is abstractly horrifying, if you're not used to it. ...Nothing in the committee transcripts looked that obvious, as a place to speak up, though I heard Ibarra made himself a stage play's ridiculous villain and showboated in front of the baby revolutionaries, in some unofficial session, which was probably a disaster and maybe avertable."