"Archmage Naima! Sorry, no, he was in Vigil as of this morning and we have not seen him today."

"Oh, that's all right. D'you expect he's still in Vigil? Anything I can usefully take with me if I head over?"

"I don't know anything more about whether he's still in Vigil. If you give me five minutes I can determine if there is anything waiting on transport to Vigil but I do not expect that's worth your time. There is nothing urgently awaiting it."

She misses her time not being so important. She will try not to be visibly disappointed about it. On the other hand Vigil will be happier to see her if she has a present, even a small one, and she would quite like for the Iomedans to be pleased to see her instead of annoyed, even when she does it without even determining what city they're in first, like this. "I can wait five minutes, it's not so much trouble in the middle of the night."

She'll take out her notebook and scribble a bit to herself about her pamphlet plans.

Then Crina will run and check what paperwork has been copied for eventual transfer to the Church and not transferred yet (most of it went back with De Luna and Cansellarion the previous day, but not all of it) and whether Iustin has finished his supplemental to the incident report (he hasn't, but it proposes a form letter he ought to send the Church and he can send the Church the form letter they just proposed he send them). Also there's some mail for Valia Wain. 

Naima can be presented with all of these.

"Cool. Thanks."

She knows how to teleport to Vigil without landing in a teleport trap these days. Here's some mail, is de Luna about?

In his home, where he lives. "Archmage Naima! What can I do for you?"

"I read your report! It was very nice. It did not include any recommendations for me, so I am coming to ask your advice in person, and also to argue with you about some things you said in it. I'm sorry not to have made an appointment, but if it would be interesting and not boring for you I would also like to invite you to some planning I am doing about how to fix Cheliax, and that's happening tonight."

"Of course! If we might touch on anything sensitive we shouldn't speak here, though, we can go into the castle and get a conference room. - Archmage, this is my wife, Iolanta. Io, this is the Archmage Naima. I may be out until morning." And he will get his coat on.

"Hello! I'm sorry not to have much time tonight, but we should talk later!" Did she know that de Luna was married?? This is a fairly embarrassing thing not to know. Someday she'll - oh, bother. "Actually I was going to invite you to my demiplane."

"That works too! Only give me a moment first." He will study her carefully for a moment to satisfy himself that it's actually the Archmage Naima and not an impersonator here to kidnap him.

Yeah, that's pretty valid.

She's mind blanked, of course. "Would you be willing to do your healing?"

"Sure, you got anything that needs - oh, forget it. My finger work, or is that too possibly illusory?"

He will draw his own sword and cut his own finger off at the highest bone. "Go ahead."

Bam. New finger, no spell or material component. She's pretty much the only person who can do that.

She is! He'll take her hand for the Plane Shift.

Cool. Plane Shift.

The main room of the Cotonnet demiplane is fairly carpeted in bedrolls right now, teenagers and secretaries and her own kids reading or sleeping in various corners. Her room is clear, though, and has a table set for tea. With an option for actual tea, if desired, because unlike Elie and Shawil and Catherine, de Luna hasn't had his politically valanced beverage privileges revoked, though she also has coffee and sobia and mango juice.

"To be perfectly clear, for me it's the beginning of the day, not the end, and you should feel free to tell me that I'm being very rude and you need to sleep first."

He'll take tea.

"I don't need to sleep yet, or every night, and I will notify you if you strike me as extremely rude. I am delighted you read the report, actually. There is not usual widespread interest in them outside the Church."

"It was a good piece of writing! I cheated, of course, I never have time to read things without magic these days. I did feel a bit left out, though. In hindsight I expect that you did not include recommendations for me because it doesn't actually make sense for me to have been responsible for staffing the convention, but in fact most of the staffing we did have when we opened was through me, and I'd like to think a bit more about what optimal staffing would look like. Elie did implement your suggestions for making bodyguards and general legal advice available."

"Ah! I should have asked Elie more questions, to discover that. I'm glad that you're offering bodyguards and legal advice. Beyond that - it seems like it would be a good idea to have some people monitoring the convention and the city for Elie, and reporting to him on things like what bills people are planning to introduce so he isn't taken by surprise, unless that seems too - underhanded - to him.

Generalizing away from this specific situation - countries have an entire diplomatic apparatus. They have embassies to all of the countries with which they are on remotely lawful terms, and exchange ambassadors. So that when they have something to say, there are people whose job it is to know how to say it to that audience without causing grave offense or any effects that aren't the intended ones. I think that possibly archmages have all the reasons that countries do to have a diplomatic apparatus."

"This does seem likely. I actually also want your advice on how to expand operations on that front in other countries, I am about to attempt to beg a large number of favors from - well, approximately everyone for whom I can think of useful favors. But if you mean communicating effectively with six hundred Chelish people selected from every possible walk of life, I'm not sure anyone knows how to do that. ...we have admittedly not been giving that responsibility to any of the people I know who might."

"I know Codwin recommends dinner parties with groups of five to ten of them. It worked extremely well for him, obviously, but at the same time - it would be foolish for you and Elie to take Codwin's advice about the best way to personally kill a devil in single combat, being very differently specialized from him.

I know Iomedae would sometimes give sermons and then pay people for extremely detailed explanations of what they thought she was trying to say, and then repeat the activity until new listeners were walking away with the correct impression."

"Imagine having time for dinner parties," she says, wistfully. "Someone should be doing it, I suppose. I'd love to - which is not at all to say that I think I'd be any good at it, I am sure when I started I'd be awful. But it'd be, what, eight thousand gold, and some number of hundreds of lives."

"I would ordinarily think the Queen should be doing far more public and social events of this type but given the very unusual circumstances surrounding the Queen I feel reluctant to give her advice premised on her public persona. In general I hesitate to advise any of you in anything, really, because when left to your own devices you kill a great many dukes of Hell under confusing circumstances, and if that's what someone is doing most possible suggestions about what they should be doing instead will be in error."

"Well, maybe, but I don't have to take the suggestions. I may anyway, though, and I suppose that awkwardly may make you less inclined to give them. Ugh." Cannot say anything about her reasoning process behind killing a great many dukes of Hell. "In general almost everything I do trades off against tapping. It's very useful, and very lucrative, and very boring, and I am at most times trying to carve out time for more interesting work. In the past I've been very limited in how much time is left over after tapping commitments, and committed to rather more hours of it than I probably should have - for my own sake, if not for the world's. Hence the demiplane, which is really quite new. I have been thinking, now that I have it, about what I can do that isn't mindless. The thing I would like to do for the moment is rebuild Cheliax, and if I can, make the convention go well. Not because it's the most important thing, but because it interests me and is important to my friends. It's still a side project fit in around the tapping, and around remedy research, so the time I can spend on it out there is sharply limited, but I expect there's still quite a lot to be done even with that attitude."

"I do have Sundays free. In the past they've been fairly sacred and devoted to the children, but that's a little bit less true now that I can see them here. Any hypothetical projects which the children can participate in - such as a very particular sort of dinner party, I suppose - may have a little bit of leeway there. Apart from that, I can do things late at night, and I can speak to people in my tapping locations while I tap. ...normally I use that time for public appointments, but after reading your account of the questions the Church of Iomedae is fielding I am a bit tempted to attempt to speak to the crowds as a whole, or hire a rotation of other people to do it. I'll have to think about how much it's likely to affect throughput."

"If I had advice I thought you'd want to hear I'd share it, even if you decided to do something less wildly valuable to the world as a result! It's a poor ally who tries to start by guessing what they want you to do and then feed you only the advice that gets you there. It's more that without the faintest idea what moved you to any of the things you do I expect the advice to be no good.

I do think it'd be valuable for some people to - speak to the people of Cheliax and give them examples of what being a good person is like. It seems very harmful to them to have no idea what they are supposed to do. Spending time around you and your children might be actively better than just spending time around you, for that. I think people in Cheliax don't know what is ordinary instruction of a child and what is Asmodean tyranny over them."

"Elie didn't, so in fact I know exactly how that particular thing is. I cannot imagine that personally observing me with my children is a solution that solves that sort of problem on any particular scale, though. Though it may go a little way in solving the problem where people keep thinking of Elie as a demigod."

Elie is a demigod under some of the more reasonable definitions of the phrase.

He does not say that. "I do think that social ties often allow people to learn and communicate many things they're unwilling to via formal channels."

"Well, yes, but I don't know that I have much special advantage at forming them, if the goal is to teach the people of Cheliax to be good. But it may be that a few people feeling that they know us personally and aren't petitioning a deity is still very useful, and maybe dinner parties with children will go some way in doing that."

"We were putting together a pamphlet about our marriage, actually, that being another thing the people of Cheliax seem very confused about. I don't know if it'll help at all, but it seemed worth trying."

"That does strike me as a good idea. I have worried it will take a long time for the damage done to the family in Cheliax and Andoran and Galt to be undone."

"I think it's really fantastically applicable to a Chelish case, virtuous heroine notwithstanding. A woman with a baby, unwilling to abandon him even at the cost of engaging in quite insane behavior, terribly in need of a provider and protector and advocate, and terribly suspicious of all possible men who might fill the role, apart from the one who was dead and moved on. And a man who absolutely never imagined himself as a father, but who is respectful and decent and protective when called on, and finds that he's quite happy to raise a child that isn't his by blood, if only he can be assured that the mother actually wants to be with him. And yes, granted, they do quite a bit more opening portals to Bachuan and closing portals to the Abyss than most married couples, but the core of it is - achievable, from a Chelish starting point, in a way that many models of virtuous marriage are not."

"Yes. That seems very useful to articulate to people. They are very eager to have examples to work from, and so far I do not really think anyone has provided them any."

"Oh, a few people have. There are a good handful of foreign clerics working in Cheliax these days, even without counting the flock of Abadarans that moved into the Longmarch, and people are publishing foreign books. Not enough, of course, and I admit there's little explicit direction about who to listen to, from either the church of Iomedae or the crown, which as far as I can tell are the only two sources many people in the cities recognize as worth listening to."

"The Church will likely try to publish more, but frankly it does not play to our strengths, and we'll be doing it more in defense of the interests of our allies than because it seems likely to be a successful humanitarian intervention in its own right. Maybe I am too pessimistic. If Codwin ends up feeling able to advise us that will probably help."

"Oh, I'm really quite excited about - oh, you were in Vigil, you haven't heard! They passed a censorship law today. And ended halfling slavery, of course. Anyway, they're allowing old books, and they have some complicated insurance scheme for publishing domestically without a censorship board, and I have no idea how that will go. But books approved by the censors of lawful allied countries are allowed with much less friction, and I think we ought to try to flood the market with better materials. Lastwall, I imagine, is overstretched, but I think Osirion is very well positioned to expand and begin censoring works intended for distribution in Cheliax. We'll have some trouble finding enough people fluent in Taldane, but I mean to try to hire a handful of Osirian censors tomorrow and see if I can set them up with copying houses in all the major cities. - in general I expect that publishing will be a very powerful tool for informing the people of Cheliax, much moreso than in other countries, and I'm hopeful that the experimental censorship law will make it profitable, where it wasn't before."

"I'm very glad to hear that! Lastwall's public services including the censorship offices are indeed stretched thin right now, but Osirion's laws have never struck me as unreasonable except where they touch on Osirian politically sensitive matters."

"I'm not sure I'd say never, but I think we can certainly improve on the current situation.

On the subject of what you need, if you don't mind me opining on it - you talk in here about training lay people to answer an extremely limited number of stock questions, but I think you can do much better. Firstly, in a Chelish context, a list of stock answers to stock questions ought to primarily be a small book. They can read! Nearly all of them! And they're out in the streets of Westcrown going half mad for lack of anything worthwhile to copy, right now.

Secondly, if you're fielding almost entirely questions about the basic nature of good and evil, you don't need Iomedans at all, you need people with theological training and a limited Iomedan stamp of approval. What you want is a small army of Sarenites, and their acolytes. Chelish people don't recognize them or take them seriously, and won't go to them for guidance, but it's very easy to set a handful of them up in an Iomedan temple and explain that Sarenrae is a great ally of Iomedae's, and that you should trust her clerics on matters of what actions are good and which are evil, and thereby offer individual confession even if you've only got a single Iomedan for the whole city. You don't need a trained Sarenite to stick to a handful of answers you could read in a book. At most you will want to give them some cultural guidance and some notes in the theological differences between your churches that they ought to flag, but given that much I think it will be extremely rare for talking to one for an hour to make a Chelish person worse, without you needing to limit the topics that they can talk about."

"I would be delighted to vouch for a small army of Sarenites but I do not know where I would get such a small army of Sarenites."

"Oh, I intend to beg one off the Padishah Emperor. I've never begged anything off an Emperor before - Aspexia excepted, I suppose - but given the large number of Keleshites I've saved, I expect we can get him to agree without all that much fuss. It's rather a flattering request at heart, I think. We beg him to offer the great wisdom of the Keleshite Empire to the Avistani barbarians, who don't yet know whether murder is evil. We can bribe him with copies of Keleshite books, if necessary, though I realize if you offer something to an Emperor you have to claim it's tribute and not trade, or a poor gift that doesn't compare to the splendor of what the Emperor can offer you, or something like that."

"...indeed." He's smiling broadly. "I think that's an excellent idea and we would be happy to handle the logistics of connecting an army of Sarenites with the parishoners who come to our temple seeking guidance on the Good."

Oh good. She sips her tea.

"In general I think I have built up quite a lot of potential favors from all over the world, without particularly meaning to. Under ordinary circumstances, given that I have already collected massive amounts of money for them, I would be quite content to let the benefits accrue to everyone. But given the situation in Cheliax, I think I am instead going to call in as many as can be usefully called. I'm still figuring out which ones those are, but I expect there are a lot."

"I think there are a number of situations where the need is much more dire this year than it will be in ten, which is often a good situation for calling in favors. I would not recommend compromising the preparations for Geb about it, but - I am not sure what Geb-related favors you could even be asking the Padishah Emperor instead."

"Right? This is what I said to Elie. There are some favors that one might conceivably need more for something else, but there is simply nothing in the world that the Padishah Emperor is ever going to be able to offer anyone that is more valuable than an army of Sarenites in Cheliax this year.

Anyway, I'm not an Iomedan. It's not as if I was carefully hoarding a favor from the Padishah Emperor to spend at the best possible moment in the first place. I am not carefully hoarding favors. But I have them, and if everyone is going to go around being miserable about Cheliax, I would prefer it if they didn't need to."

Is everyone going around being miserable about Cheliax? Iustin seems fairly miserable. Alexaera seems mostly tired. The Queen - he would not have been able to tell if the Queen was miserable. 

Her husband certainly is, and naturally that probably matters most to her. "Let us know if we can be of any more assistance."

"No, no! You're doing fine. I didn't call you here to - well, I called you here for help, but only in the sense that I ought to ask for advice from someone who knows what they're doing every now and again. And to argue with you about your specific view of conscription. But I intend to solve Cheliax's problems as far as I can without particularly calling on Lastwall for aid. I really prefer not to call on anyone for aid, especially not people who are already doing important work. I think quite a lot of people could be better directed right now - but despite your delightfully scathing commentary, in general Lastwall is near the bottom of the list of groups who need to be better directed. Everyone else, though -"

She has a world map on one wall. She highlights Ifsahel as the capital of the Keleshite Empire. (She uses gloves. The great Archmage Naima cannot prestidigitate things on her own.) Then she highlights other places.

"The Sarenites are the most obvious ask, I think. Rahadoum owes me personally more than perhaps anywhere else, and the primary thing we ought to ask them for is druids, if Rahadoumi druids will countenance enriching Chelish farmland. Northern Garundi druids are generally much easier to work with than any of the druids I've met in Avistan. Thuvia is still badly depopulated and has fields going untilled, which it seems there ought to be a solution to, but I'm not sure what it is. Osirion, of course, we want to direct towards scaling up their censorship bureau, so that it can handle Chelish publishing demand. 

I really am not sure that people in general have noticed how important Chelish publishing is. I wasn't thinking about it either, before today, but - in almost all societies besides Absalom and the breakaway Chelish provinces, copying books is primarily the domain of priests. Not exclusively, of course, but there just aren't very many wizards. In Cheliax, my best guess is that between two and four percent of the population is capable of copying books. In the cities it may be as high as ten or even fifteen percent. There's no organized push towards it, because of course under infernal rule publishing foreign books was generally illegal, but - Cheliax ought to be exporting an utterly massive number of copies of foreign books, undercutting clerics across the world and freeing them up to do other work. And making money through honest labor, which the Chelish population sorely needs right now."

"Are books valuable enough for that to really employ - I suppose paper is getting cheaper these days."

"It is! And will get cheaper still, now that the demiplane can increase Elie's fabricate output. I really ought to work with him on figuring out how to translate it for Wishbone, then I could do it at night, too. We actually nearly destroyed the economy of Tephu with it. I'm hoping that a donation to the scribal academy and a request to retrain large numbers of people as censors will go some way in getting them to forgive me. Assuming they don't change the law, which is the main thing I'm worried about. But assuming stability - look. Literacy is up in Osirion; in the Sphinx valley I expect more than half of the young men can read. We are experimenting with private schooling in the Junira. In many places books are luxury items, but they're sought-after ones, and Chelish teenagers can churn them out at a fraction of the price of what they cost in most places.

I expect that the ideal number of copy-wizards probably is lower than what Cheliax produced. I don't expect that it will employ all of them. But it is a valuable skill, and it will do them quite a lot of good to put it to use making ten thousand copies of the Acts and The Birth of Light and Truth. ... and then ten thousand copies of something else, because I think they can probably quite cheaply turn out ten thousand books a day, if we can supply them with paper, and I do think there's demand for it. A large chunk of the demand might be in Vudra or Po Li, but the ones who can cast comprehend languages can fulfill that, too."

"Are you planning to start this yourself or are you just suggesting the business opportunity to someone?"

"Oh, I'm planning to hire existing Osirian censors and get leave to use the old urban schools for copying centers, organize what transit I can, offer piecework pay as low as it'll go, and then watch someone else notice that they can get a piece of it if they pay the copyists more. Someone'll notice eventually, but they may need a demonstration."

Naima and Elie both have that quality Iomedae is in her histories sometimes depicted as having, where she keeps doing entirely impossible and novel things and then casually presuming that lots of other people did do them or will do them, as they weren't that hard and were plainly worth the trouble. Perhaps what it takes to become great is not just the tendency to do things but a deep felt sense that the things are obvious and that it's kind of odd no one's gotten around to them. "Maybe in the long run a great many fruitful enterprises will turn out to be possible when a state has as many wizards as Cheliax does, though I admit I can't think what exactly would be even partly as valuable as laundry and copying."

"Oh, in the future I hope that a significant percentage of the children who would have been wizards in Infernal Cheliax will instead become remedy alchemists, but that rather depends on how the next several years of research turn out. The hope is to cut childhood illness deaths by half, but I shouldn't brag before anyone has demonstrated the possibility.

I do think that lots of people are being excessively dismissive of general education as a worthy goal. I suppose I understand it, if people are thinking of Chelish schools and not Osirian ones, but it's really much easier to communicate things if everyone can read."

"I don't think it's an unworthy goal in principle, it's just a very expensive one. Lastwall tries to do two years' education in Vellumis, so that more children pick up their letters and the teachings of the Good gods, but outside the cities I don't see how it'd be done at all."

"Osirion does the whole Sphinx river valley, but of course Osirion is very dense and very, mm, geographically organized. And even then, four years to Cheliax's ten, and only for boys. Government schools, anyway - as I said, we're experimenting with private schools for girls and boys in the Junira, and interest is relatively high so far. I think that as fabricate obviates a great deal of women's work, we'll find ourselves with a female workforce quite suited to instructing young children, if we can give the first generation the basic instruction needed to maintain it in the future.

I really think that educated people are capable of quite a lot of things that are economically valuable, and that particularly in urban areas, basic instruction likely pays for itself. It's just that Chelish people mostly do not exemplify this at all, because the vast majority of them do not yet have a functional conscience, and therefore can't be trusted with any work that requires one. But this is fixable. I think."

"It seems to have much improved already in the other formerly-Asmodean states, though I do think the damage was most intense nearest Egorian."

"The cities in general, I think, though Egorian is probably the worst. But certainly I have met Andoren and Galtan people with functional consciences.

Admittedly, the idea of women who used to do weaving being freed up to teach small children works much better in Osirion than in Cheliax, which had already hired large numbers of women for various things and which may literally have been getting large amounts of clothing from hell? I'm not clear on this. In any case, we probably can't tackle educating the children very well until we have tackled raising them.

- which reminds me! I meant to ask you about your conscription recommendations. And argue with you about them, but if you have suggestions for making the situation less inconvenient for pregnant and nursing women that don't prevent them from participating, I'd certainly like to hear them."

" - well, I don't think you should forbid their participation, but I don't think you should oblige it. I would expect that many of the factors which affect how gravely they are harmed by it - or whether they benefit by it - to be very individual, so if you make it their choice you will entirely avoid egregiously wronging any of them."

"Now, see, there I do not agree with you at all. If we were working with Osirians I probably would! But - one of the first nursing mothers we picked up literally stabbed Elie with a knife. I come to calm her down, and it turns out that she's been made to bear five children before the age of twenty. All but the last of them dead, because her employer keeps forcing himself on her and then won't give her time to feed the children he creates. Can't leave, she has an indenture that gets a year added to it every time she gives birth. Doesn't have enough milk to keep the child alive on her own anymore. There's simply no sense in which leaving the girl in that house is a favor to her, no matter how intensely she insists that she doesn't want to leave it. And maybe it's also unfair to make her attend the convention! But I don't see that the convention ought to have dozens of men just like her employer, and none of the people they hurt.

I don't want to claim we're not harming anyone. I think that we certainly are, and that it's part of why the stipend is so high. But I don't think that the people who are being harmed correspond very well at all to the ones who would have agreed to go if we had asked permission."

"- I think you should certainly get that woman out of that house and to some place that can help her. But I worry that you are - setting, in Cheliax's laws and customs, a horrendous abuse of people, the evil of which is presently disguised because no one knows how things are supposed to work when they're not evil. 

It is often very important to women in Lastwall to have their mother or their sister present for labor, and a midwife they trust, not a hired stranger. It's a very intimate, frightening, difficult matter, childbirth, and especially if the baby dies it is a great comfort to know that everything was done that could be done. I think it is a great evil to oblige someone to endure childbirth in an unfamiliar place and among strangers. I know that you permitted the sortitions to bring some people with them, but - if my wife were conscripted she wouldn't ask for her sister to come along too, as she'd be expecting her sister to watch the children at home and she can't bring all of both of their children, they have twelve between them. And she could hardly ask the village priest to come along without leaving the village without a priest. She would go alone, and labor alone, and if there were any complications be touched and prodded by strangers at the most vulnerable moment of her life, and then care for the baby alone, and obviously in the haze of caring alone for a newborn contribute absolutely nothing to the legal arguments, and reasonably likely she'd never bring the baby home as cities are pits of plague - all towards absolutely no gain of the state - not that, in fact, I think the state has any right to do that to its people even if it does gain by it."

"It is easier to find an empowered Pharasmin cleric in Westcrown this month than it is almost anywhere else in the world. And I dispute that women who can pay are more likely to lose a baby in Westcrown than they are in most villages. I don't have complete record coverage of Westcrown, but I have it for Sothis and Katheer and nearly have it for Oppara, and they're not, not when I'm doing my job. This is not to say that some of the babies won't die - they will - but I don't expect them to die at elevated rates.

I don't dispute that taking a woman away from familiar surroundings when she gives birth is a harm to her, in most although probably not all cases. I probably wouldn't forbid someone from bringing their sister and twelve kids, honestly - the stipend is enough to cover it, for people without very expensive tastes - but most people insisted they didn't want family members, because most people thought we were going to kill them.

I do dispute that there is no benefit to the state. The benefit is that while I think you are qualified to speak for your wife's interests, I have mindread a lot of Chelish people, and I broadly do not believe that Chelish men are qualified to speak for the interests of Chelish women, even in those cases where they're married or raising children together.

And I think that now that they're here, a significant number of sortitions who would have refused to come if given the option are now beginning to contribute and find that they do care quite a lot about what the government is allowed to do to them. I think my primary objection is that there's - simply no way, with our current skills, to communicate to those people beforehand what a constitutional convention is, or what it means that they've been chosen to attend one.

I admit that perhaps this means that we ought to require a relatively short trial period and then re-draw sortitions to replace the people who want to go home in a month, or something."

"I think you would reduce the harm very greatly if you insisted they try it for a week and then permit them to leave if it is very terrible for them.  A month is - long enough your young children won't recognize you, long enough you'll no longer be able to nurse them. 

It makes sense to me to want the population of Chelish mothers represented by Chelish mothers, not their husbands. Or their non-husbands, in many cases. I agree that the state has an interest in that and that the mothers do too. But I think that Chelish mothers who chose to be there will do a better job representing their interests than Chelish mothers dragged there unwillingly."

" - yes, but it throws everything off, statistically, if you allow women to refuse and don't allow men to, or you decide that you're only accepting people who agree to go before going across both sexes. That's a very selected group! Most people either refuse, or appear to be too terrified to refuse! And a much larger number of people seem to be okay with it now that it's happening. I think filtering for people who wanted to be here before they saw it mostly filters for people who trusted the Asmodean regime, which is a ridiculous anti-filter that defeats the entire point."

"That seems like a good reason to have them try it for a week, and if who refuses to keep going after a week is skewed by sex and position, then you can draw more from the sex and position you want to represent more. If there should be seventy Chelish mothers at the convention you can keep selecting them until you have seventy."

Sigh.

"This is admittedly what we did with slaves. I worry about what doing it with more categories does to the numbers, but it's not fundamentally ridiculous. We can't easily check whether someone is a mother ahead of time, though, just guess at sex from the name, which itself isn't always reliable.

I think a week might have worked in the hypothetical case where we hadn't shut the convention down for half of the first week. I know you're going to say that the interruption is evidence that Westcrown is very dangerous and that pregnant sortitions ought not be asked to endure it, but none of the pregnant sortitions died, and I don't think this is coincidental."

"I do think it's coincidental and you got very lucky! Several of the halfling sortitions were killed, yes? What share of the halfling sortitions are pregnant?"

"I don't know that any of them are, there aren't that many! I suppose I expect that some of their hangers on are. The halflings are a bad example because I think they're the single most enthusiastic demographic we have, and most of them did ask to bring their whole families and a couple friends besides, because it came with free freedom."

"And that is their chance to take - and I'm glad so many of them took it - but that none of them were expecting children seems a matter of coincidence, unless halflings have different patterns of pregnancy than I imagine."

"Less than a coin flip - there are just not that many halfling sortitions - but I suppose I agree that part is fundamentally down to chance. I do think that offering everyone housing in the palace to everyone who wants it going forward makes things safer."

"It seems likely to, as will the censorship and slander laws. I also expect some retaliation against delegates after the convention, but still - it is probably possible to make reasonably physically safe."

"I'm a little worried that it's not entirely possible to protect them from each other while allowing them to wander the city and get away from us at any point. But at least they have the option of a fairly secure location. We did start using your anonymity suggestion, and it is seeing lots of use, although I'm not sure I expect it to actually be enough to prevent retaliation between delegates entirely."

"I don't think it is inherently a wrong to people to put them in danger for the benefit of their state. I suppose I think that a state which puts its most vulnerable members into danger is doing it wrong, but I acknowledge that you are ultimately doing it in an attempted defense of people like them."

"Mmm. I really did like the report, you know. And I know the entire project seems insane on the face of it, and you're being very helpful in making suggestions about how to make our insane project less destructive. It's probably just that I'm a former conscripted nursing peasant mother."

"I am aware that it worked out exceptionally well in your case. I think some people would say that that makes up for all the other cases, and I don't myself believe that exactly, but - it is an important fact, that it can work out that exceptionally."

"I think some people very much need to be in a context other than the one they fell into, for a while. Maybe not most people, and maybe not most of the contexts that monarchs and archmagi and even well-intentioned Abadaran law enforcement officers drag them into, and maybe the people of Cheliax have only ever experienced it under positively awful circumstances that dragged them away from any of the remaining good in their lives, but - I would not have gone with the Inquisitor Shawil, if he'd asked me without blowing my life up first.

Will it lessen your ethical concerns, if I convince Elie to agree to cycle the sortitions who don't want to be here at the end of the month? A weekly basis really is quite logistically challenging, and wouldn't be much time to get their bearings at the convention even in the best case."

"It would certainly lessen my concerns."

"I think the point about explicitly time bounded obligations was a good one, though I'm a bit unsure how best to apply it otherwise. The Galtan National Assembly took... years... to produce a constitution, and certainly I don't think we ought to tie up a bunch of random people for two years. I'm tempted to suggest a guaranteed break for the main harvest season in three months, but of course it'll delay having a constitution if they haven't got one by then, and either increase the time we go without most of our nobles or increase the time they spend traveling. Perhaps it's less of a concern if the sortitions can continue to say that they're done each month. We did also compensate the families, so there ought to be some ability to hire help for the harvest.

....should maybe give people the option to request that their families be relocated to Westcrown, if it drags on and they don't want to leave."

"That seems like a reasonable step. I do think that ...the nobles who are counts and above mostly went through some scrutiny, right, and are the only people responsible for holding accountable all the barons and minor lords, who mostly did not go through any scrutiny? It seems like it would do an enormous amount of harm to have them tied up in the capital for years."

"I don't particularly disagree. On the other hand I think it's also quite corrosive not to really have laws, and that our convention is so far moving along at a frankly alarming pace. Who knows, maybe we'll have a constitution much sooner than previous examples suggest. I believe Cansellarion is coming up with a skeleton for one. Possibly shouldn't be, but he's welcome to use the demiplane for it if it helps."

"I will inform him he should take you up on that. It's - quite the experiment you are undertaking. I hope very much that it works."

"So do I! 

The staff who slept here are going to spend a good half-day helping me determine how to move world resources towards Cheliax before the children wake up. I will probably scatter them to the four winds on diplomatic missions around one in the morning, after we've determined what exactly their diplomatic missions ought to be. Would you care to help us hash it out, or should I be getting you home? I do think you'll be better at it than most of us, we haven't really very much experience with asking governments for things."

"I would be honored to help. The Church also has a designated liaison in Oppara who asks that all our Oppara-related endeavors go through them, I don't know if you were planning to interact with Taldor at all."

"Oh, probably, though I haven't decided how. I try to be nice to Taldor whenever I'm nice to the Keleshites, and we're about to be very nice to the Keleshites. Sort of. I am sure we make the Pharaoh very nervous all the time."

"Mmm," says de Luna in the manner of someone who wishes that his country's biggest problems were allied archmages doing independent international diplomacy and also is not capable of being nervous because he is a paladin. "Well, I'll see whether I can help."

Oh, excellent.