She's technically working here under a different name and face, Galtan wizard assistant of the Queen's Liset, because of course she couldn't be seen around here as herself and she needed frequent access to the Queen. The pamphlets have not particularly slowed.

An Unseen Servant opens the door for Ione. Lilia is halfway through a scry; she's good enough at those to turn in her seat and wave Ione in.

"My recommendation to the Queen was that you avoid this plane until the convention is over." In case of Geb. Ione's the only one of them who possibly can; everyone else has gobbled up their titles and teleport routes and obligations here in Westcrown.

"You're not wrong." She pulls up a seat across from Lilia. "Shawil's been called away on Important Axis Business, so I'm tagging in. I've heard that the convention's on pause due to riots, but I don't know much more than that. What's going on?"

"On the second day of the convention Valia Wain, the passionate young Select of Iomedae from Pezzack, having been greatly disheartened by the Asmodean holdover nobles and Alexandre Ibarra who she'd actually like if she'd learned things about him in a different order and the priest of Erecura, gave a speech saying that the work is not done and that in cowardice we condemn our children to it and that Evil will die by pitchforks and stones and that her recommendation to the Evil nobles is that they run far away and not come back. This was dutifully spread throughout the city as the will of Iomedae, and then further mutated by revolutionary enthusiasm to introduce innovative additions such as 'all who die murdering diabolists in the streets go to Heaven!'.

Obviously they started the rain up as quickly as feasible, and got Cansellarion's men in to patrol the city the next morning, but the mobs managed to do an impressive amount of damage in the window of time that they had. About a dozen delegates died, and many more lost family members and staff. Naima's raising them but she's worried this will delay her paying enormous sums of money to Asmodeus." Lilia was against hurrying to change out the money supply. She thought they could come up with a twenty year plan for it and it'd be fine.

(Lilia is not under the impression Asmodeus rules Hell. Some things you don't speak, even in secure rooms in the palace, even to an ally.)

"Wain has been arrested for incitement, her trial is tomorrow. They're exploring charges against her allies in the convention, too. Other instigators are being executed at approximately the pace the system can bear. The Convention, when it paused, had been on the brink of banning slavery, so people started trying to ship their slaves out, so Her Majesty closed the ports, which got people even more panicked, especially as it coincided with more blessed pamphlets urging merchants and investors to flee the city. If you are in the mood to make a lot of money Teleports are going for extortionate prices in the Miratanza.

We haven't caught everyone who led mobs or authored pamphlets or took the chance to do real violence. Riudare's been helping me when he has spells free at night, and we still haven't. Someone went and did a well-executed and well-timed string of murders of Mammonite cultists and has dodged by this point twenty scries to find him. Everyone hates each other, and is frightened of each other, and is desperately frightened of the Crown. I spend my evenings identifying pamphleteers responsible for more and more creative rephrasings of 'to battle, people of Westcrown'. There's flooding because they don't feel safe yet letting the rains up at night. We believe five delegates have fled the city and will have to be kidnapped back when we're ready to demand their presence again."

Lilia is not a very expressive person but she's angry. It is an angry briefing.

"Wow that's a mess." Unfortunately, most of it is not the kind of mess improved by terrifying shadowy murdercats, which is really the kind of problem she's most suited to solving. 

"For a start, I can help with the scries." It seems hypocritical to take issue with whoever's killing Mammonite cultists. She seems to recall them all feeling just fine about their well-executed and well-timed string of murders of infernal cultists, back in Isarn. Not to mention how she was mopping up cultists of Belial just before the convention! Whatever. She rummages in her bag for the crystal ball.

"How long til the convention starts up again?" She'll probably be the one on kidnapping duty when the time comes. Joy.

"Day after tomorrow." She can share a memory extracted from a corpse of who they're after, which is all they've got. Twenty failed scries on that little might just be 'reasonably powerful person who was in disguise'. "We want to get Wain's trial done and know what kind of horrible consequences of every possible verdict we'll be dealing with - I told her to just rig it but she refused - and I think people are working on - reflecting on how to get the convention restarted on a better foot."

"What is even the point of being queen if there's a situation where your subjects aren't sure what you want done about something, and you know this, and you care about the outcome, and you can't just tell them what you want them to do."

She focuses on the memory and peers into the crystal ball. It really isn't much to go on.

"That's what I said. No matter what happens, people will assume it's the verdict she ordered. No one will ever believe otherwise. So why not just actually decide what outcome would be good, and do that?"

It's that her mother has friends. That's Lilia's primary diagnosis. Her mother has friends, and her mother likes having friends, and everything else including the fate of everyone in Cheliax is less important to her mother than being in philosophical accord with her friends. Lilia's not her friend, and Ione's not her friend. They are useful tools. But they're not archmages who read her mind and still trusted her, so their advice can never offer the satisfaction of friendship.

"Until the convention actually establishes a new set of laws, the only law there is is the Queen's will. I don't understand why she's so insistent on pretending otherwise, it's just going to confuse people."

Ione has spent the last year and a half trying to figure out whether she's Alfirin's friend. Their interactions have been - awkward, since Nex broke the charm. It's hard to shift to being an equal after a lifetime of subservience.

Part of the problem is: Naima and Elie might trust her, but Ione can't. Or maybe - she can, and the things she trusts her to do are things Ione isn't sure she can accept.

"What better foot are they hoping they'll manage shift to in two days?"

"Well, for one thing, they got halfway through abolishing slavery and should probably still force through a vote on it. Beyond that -

I think they're not guessing the mood of the delegates right. If Valia doesn't hang that'll be all they can think about and if she does they'll want to go after everyone who ever spoke to her next. Every person I've mindread regards the freedom of the pen as a despicably evil intervention of the Archmage for the destruction of the city, I don't disagree, and the question is just whether they'll vote to ban all publishing or do something slightly more moderate than that. I have heard discussion of proposals to reintroduce torture before executions, to march the whole city through a Zone of Truth and hang ten thousand of them, to place everyone under magically enforced oaths of loyaty and obedience like Lastwall does-" That's not exactly what Lastwall does but that doesn't stop the proposer. 

"A man who narrowly escaped a mob is a single-issue voter, and Èlie now has a convention on his hands that is a single-issue voter against its own existence and his rule of it. I think he understands that he needs to offer them - more clarity and direction - and I think he is underestimating the degree to which they only thing they want to do with clarity and direction is to take their country back from all of the reforms he introduced."