"I'm only on the one committee now and it's not meeting today, I have time."

"So, apparently there's a pamphlet going around saying that the reason for the riots is that the two of us, uh, tricked Valia into writing a speech that would cause riots, for some reason. Except they didn't know our names, I guess, so instead it said that the guard should just arrest every song-sorceress and Calistrian they find until they get the right one. Anyways, Delegate Bainilus was the one who showed it to me, she was worried that the two of us were going to get attacked, she said she'd show it to you too if you wanted.

...She thinks we should get bodyguards. I'm worried that we'd just get the bodyguards killed too but maybe that's a silly thing to worry about."

Oh dear. She probably should have seen it coming but in fact she didn't and she's not even sure whether any of the people she was tracking as wanting to get rid of her are even involved.

"I think getting bodyguards would probably be safer for you, if you're really worried about them getting hurt you could tell them to run away if there's too many people for them to keep you safe from? But.." and how to word this without saying something outright incriminating, "having them around would come at costs to stuff like privacy. Or for sneaking around, it'd be harder for me to run away invisibly from a fight if there's someone else running with me."

A bodyguard she trusted would be worth taking anyway but she in fact doesn't really trust the ones at the convention, especially since they wouldn't even have being paid as a reason for loyalty.

"I've been assuming nothing I do anytime soon is going to be private from the Crown anyways." That's a little incriminating but hopefully only a little, and it's the sort of thing that might be true even if she'd just helped with the speech and not burned down a school. "And I don't know how to turn invisible."

It's not just the crown, though she'd definitely rather make it more inconvenient for their investigators if she could, it's anyone with money.

"It's one of Calistria's domain spells, I think, but I don't know if you have that domain and you're only first circle anyway. Mostly the thing I was getting at is - there are a lot of ways I'm harder to kill than you are and I don't know if the same calculus applies to both of us, which is why I think you should probably get one and I'm not sure if I should."

If the Crown is watching her it means she definitely can't do crimes and count on not getting caught, and that's the main thing she wants to keep private anyways, she's not doing a lot of complicated secret politics.

"Delegate Bainilus thought it might be a good idea for us to go in together on the guards and stick together. ...Although that would probably get pretty inconvenient, if we had to bring each other along everywhere, so maybe that wouldn't actually work. Also that was before we knew the archmage was giving out guards to everyone so the reasons might not apply anymore."

"I definitely think it's worth considering going to and from the convention together, since that's the one place everyone knows they can find us. Do you have a copy of the pamphlet? - or, no, that's illegal now. But probably that also means that the risk of any vigilante action from it is mostly only in the next few days, since it's now illegal to keep circulating it."

"Delegate Bainilus didn't give me a copy but she said she'd show you if you wanted. ...That was before all the laws got passed about what people can say and write but I think she'd probably show you anyway and even if she won't I don't think she'd get you in trouble just for asking."

Alicia doesn't know much of anything about the archduchess, but she did a good job making up for her first impression at the trial and that she gave any kind of warning at all is an encouraging sign. Considering that she also overcame Victoria's general opinion on nobles... well, asking does sound safe enough. She'll make sure to phrase it carefully anyway but that's just common sense.

"I'll see if I can find time to meet with her, then. You said there was a second thing?"

"Over on Rights we were working on coming up with a new law for theater that makes it so that the publishing law doesn't accidentally ban all of theater, and we were hoping to have some more Shelynites take a look at it to make sure it's a good law that doesn't have a bunch of problems that we missed."

She offers a copy to Alicia.

She reads it over, and then does it again, frowning.

"I'm not an actress of playright, so you'll want to talk to someone who is for that part - Laia, maybe I don't know if you were introduced - but it doesn't seem obviously terrible. The thing that makes me most nervous though is that there just aren't very many Shelynite clerics in Cheliax and lots of them aren't involved in the theater either - it seems like this law might end up saying 'there are only 5 pairs of people in cheliax who can approve plays, everyone else is out of luck.'"

"We asked Laia for help with it but she left before we finished all the wording. Are there other people besides Shelynite priests who'd be good to have in that role, I don't want to have it be just the old Asmodean censors deciding..."

Well, yes, obviously the right solution is just not doing censorship. Unfortunately though they've already lost that fight, and things haven't changed enough in the past few hours for it to go any differently a second time. 

"You could try making it any good priest? I expect you'd get more Shelynites than any other god interested still, but it might help a little. Otherwise... I'm not really sure, having to work with an ex asmodean censor is a pretty big drawback. Maybe you could allow non clerics if they apprentice under a priest for a few months and then the cleric vouches for them knowing what they're doing?"

Enric is now in the conversation, because it is now unambiguously about laws and not about secrets and trouble. Though he still thinks they shouldn't say no to guards.

"We have something like that in the law, if I remember right. Says it's one censor and one priest of Shelyn or someone a priest of Shelyn vouches for. So Laia or another priest can vouch for however many people."

"If you've got a way to make sure no one tries to run a play that'll cause riots without making it so that it has to get past one of the old censors, that would be great, I'd love to cut out the old censors entirely, but... I mean, you heard the sorts of things some of the nobles were saying on the floor, they'll never vote for it if we don't have something that'll stop people from deciding to riot about a play."

“Oh, so it does. We could try importing them from another country? That sounds expensive, so I don’t know how much it would help, but it might be better to at least have the option of hiring censors from Galt or Andoran or Osirion if the alternative is nothing getting published. Outside of that, there’s nothing that’s both obviously an improvement and that I think we could pass.”

"We talked about that on committee. The problem is that they won't know what sorts of things might cause riots here, so it would take a long time to train them properly and you'd need to find someone to train them — which brings us back to the Asmodean censors problem. But there's not that many of us on the committee, there might be a way we haven't thought of."

Alicia thinks it over again, but - it's a hard problem, and not the kind you can just chart a third route around with some obscure trivia or finding the right angle to talk someone around from. This puts it rather thoroughly outside her core competencies; it won't prevent her from generating any ideas, but it does mean she doesn't really know if it would work at all.

"The closest I can think of is - there's some song sorcery, for making people better at - doing things, not fighting things but things that take skill. I don't have any idea if it would help with figuring out what would cause a riot in a country you haven't lived in, though, or if it would be enough. I guess maybe Andoran might be similar enough to Cheliax their skills generalize with a bit of help? If we could find enough song sorcerers or if it turns out it's one of those things wizards have a way to do too?"

Thoughtful frown. "It seems like it'd be hard to know one way or the other, like, if it helped a bit but not enough you wouldn't know until there was a riot."

And much harder than that to get something the nobles couldn't just go up there and claim would definitely cause riots without any evidence.

"I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful about this."

"No worries! Thanks for the advice anyway, I'll pass it along to the committee."