Huh, what's he up to, it sounds like a nice liberal reform proposal. 

She takes a few moments to think the law through, turning it over in her mind, and then claps. 

There's an exception for conscription, so he sees no reason to mind. This is a perfectly sensible decree to protect the rights of the accused, the sort that suggests that Bellumar was a reasonable appointment prospect for Her Majesty to choose.

He won't clap, but he will smile approvingly.

What a great law I drafted.

Alexandre could try to mess this up for fun but he won't because it would be rude to the Queen.

The new judiciary committee was influenced by the reactionary conservative nobility right?  So why does his proposal sound like a moderate liberal proposal protecting commoners?  What’s the catch?  She needs to figure it out to tell Thea.

There’s problems with the law, of course, but he knows the goal here and agrees achieving it is inarguably worth the price. He won’t say a word against the proposal.

Victòria is really confused! Delegate Bellumar is one of the Evil nobles who took over the Judiciary Committee, but the law sounds totally reasonable, maybe he's... trying to come up with an excuse to keep innocent people in prison for a week? But it's not like anyone would stop him from doing that now. Maybe the paladins came up with this one?

Is it really ambiguous that limiting detention for a crime might ban conscription? Is there anything else in that category? Bans requiring people to go to school, maybe, via the most expansive possible reading, but they were against that anyway, so that one seems fine...

Particularly if teleported….

the Lawful Forms of Conscription and the Corvée

Is it making it illegal for the archmage to force her and the sortition delegates to work at the convention?  She would like to go home, but would it stop voluntary working sortition delegates, like Oriol or Enric?

She gets up to get in line and get anonymity.

It is a nice proposal! Not only liberals are opposed to injustice.

Huh, is this one is basically aimed at her? She thinks through how it would have applied to her case. Forcing them to teleport her back to the coast... well, it'd have been slightly annoying to ride back to Westcrown, but hardly a deal breaker. Do they want to ensure any enemies that flee stay gone? Or maybe it's from the other direction, and they're mad she wasn't charged with a crime? Probably she should vote against it, on the grounds that any law her enemies want to have apply to her has a good chance of being something she doesn't want, but Alicia doesn't see an angle for arguing.

"This law protects criminals at the expense of honest men. Why should we limit our courts to holding people for a mere seven days while they conduct an investigation? If an investigation is so complicated that a criminal must be held for longer than a week, why should our magistrates not be permitted to allow such a thing? It is not unreasonable to want to do a thorough investigation, particularly in areas with limited access to truth magic."

Seven days is a lot longer than almost anyone would spend on an actual investigation before bringing charges, if they've already arrested a suspect, but that's not the point.

"You don't have to be done investigating in seven days, you just have to specify what crime you are investigating. If you think someone's a bandit, charge them with banditry and keep investigating."

If conservative nobles genuinely oppose this that raises the odds it is not a trick… but the nobles are well coordinated, a few bits of false opposition would be trivial for them to arrange to cover up the real trick.

She was being an idiot, she should check with Reuben Oriol first if he wants to stay before speaking up.  So she sits back down and whispers to him.

“Do we count as detained?  Is it sending us home?  Did you want to stay?”

"I think this is a good law. If the government wants to arrest your family they should have to at least tell you why as soon as they can, they shouldn't be allowed to just make people disappear and not even tell you what they did."

She is very obviously speaking from experience.

“She said most of what I was about to say. If they keep someone more than seven days, do they have to make the charge public? So family and friends can know what it is and whether to petition?”

"I am not prepared to require yet that charges always be made public. Sometimes there is a national interest in secrecy - say, if we've tracked down half a cult and are tracking down the other half. I would say in that situation you should always petition and hopefully that'll prompt either a release or at least an adequate explanation. And Judiciary can consider if there's a version of a right for charges to be public that would not unacceptably impede the Queen's people in doing secret things as they'll sometimes need to."

"This indeed seems a wise law, and one sorely necessary in those sad cases when those appointed by the old regime continue in their habits. But I worry that it imposes too great a burden on those who seek to protect order. It is often necessary to lock up a troublemaker for a short time so as to prevent their making trouble, and I should not like to limit that time to a week, nor to require a magistrate to get involved to lengthen it." 

That's just saying that the watch should be allowed to lock anyone up for any amount of time for no reason, which now that she thinks about it is indeed sort of fucked up.

"This seems like it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Actually, a lot of the laws we've been making have been more complicated than they need to be. Maybe it's a good law, maybe it isn't, I don't see how anyone is supposed to know one way or the other when it's too long to keep the whole thing in your head at once."

Skill issue.

The Sower is right, but Enric has already given up on actually understandable laws. He hasn’t given up on some right to public charges. Maybe the noble can afford to always send a petition, but ink and paper are expensive and finding someone who knows how to write petitions will be hard. Thats the judiciary committee’s job, though, Lluisa and the paladins can probably handle it.

This Abyss-bound fool isn't so stupid he can't attempt cunning. What's his plan? ...Hmm, maybe?

Message to Barrister Oriol: Does this require the archmages to send the sortition delegates home?

This looks really bad! How is he going to - wait, no, he can just make up a crime to say he's charging them with, and when he's done with them he can say there wasn't enough evidence and release them. Seems like a good chance to earn some goodwill, then.

"I must agree with his lordship. For those men lawfully carrying out the Queen's bidding, this law will impose no hardship, and for those who work against her purposes this will make it clear when they do so."

She and Dia still don’t see the trick or the trap, but they’re sure the noble (Bellumar?) who presented it is one of the conservative nobles, and her gut instinct tells her there is no way one of them would give the slightest inch to commoners without substantial gains elsewhere.

He looks towards Duke De Fraga. His grace seems... in favor! Great, he's in favor too, and can say a few words to that effect without committing to any particular reasoning that His Grace might disagree with.

"I'm concerned about the collateral damage here. You mention the corvee as a carvout, and I think this is good, back back home the authorities would sometimes round up all the lowlives and put them to work doing something useful for once, and I want to be clear this is still allowed."

He didn't ever buy their labor himself, but it was good for public projects without raising taxes on people who matter.

"I think that that would, in fact, be disallowed, unless some other decree was passed making it legal, which would have to specify who was eligible and so on."

Well he's definitely going to vote against it then, but it's not worth picking a fight with a count over.

"This doesn't apply to orcs, right?"

"Well, it doesn't apply to enslaved orcs, because it says 'free subjects of Her Majesty', and it doesn't apply to any orcs that are...not subjects of Her Majesty at all, like if they're raiders from the mountains or something, but if there's a free orc who's a subject of Her Majesty, then it would apply to them."

Hmm, does it require the archmages to send the sortition delegates home? How uncharacteristically gentle if that's the intent.

Reply: It could perhaps be so construed, were one to read 'Detention' as extensive beyond the process of Justice; Élie Cotonnet is not the Crown, though the Crown under whose Auspices we Convene is of course the Crown; I would myself expect the Letter summoning me to have the force of Law. Though the last clause is Bellumar's and not Mine and I imagine a simple Clarifying Decree would nullify such a Requirement. Of course we should not ask the Queen to do our own jobs.

He's going to be polite about this, because Bellumar is a peer and he really seemed like a sensible fellow yesterday, but seriously, what the heck?

"I'm concerned about the effects here. Every limitation we place upon the guards who enforce order means they have less time to do their jobs and more criminals get away; I'd rather not leave thieves in the street for the sake of high minded indealism. And giving people the right to question justice is of less immediate concern, but the long term effects might be even more corrosive."

At first read this seems fine? But she remembers that the Count who introduced the bill was one of the ones she had suspicions of from the previous day, though she didn't remember exactly what he said or how suspicious of him she was due to those things. He wasn't the one who had spoken against worshiping Desna, at any rate. 

The arguments against hadn't raised any pressing issues. Maybe the bit about charges not being made public? If they're not public, who is being informed about what the charges are and why should she think that charges being written down somewhere has any effect on what happens? What prevents random charges from being made up and then dropped for lack of evidence? 

... She does not want to stand up and say words in front of this many people, especially when she's as confused as she is. Maybe it would be good to anyway. 

She wishes she'd gotten the exact words down, but she can't write as quickly as they read the laws, even when they slow down how fast they are reading. 

... Maybe whatever the alternative is would be worse, like with censorship yesterday. Most people speaking are complaining that it's not bad enough? 

I see. I suspect that was in fact the entire purpose of this law, in Bellumar's eyes, and the rest merely a distraction. Thank you.

Now, who does she pass that to... Joan-Pau? Carlota? Blanxart? Actually, send a runner to the President warning him first.

Joan-Pau, she decides. Message: I think this is a disguised attempt to force the President to send all the sortitions home immediately. That's certainly against my archduchy's interests and I think it's against the country's and those of everyone not from Bellumar's faction. I don't have any ideas how to respond, though, it's otherwise a good law.

"I understand your concerns, of course," he is answering the peer count. "But there are two directions in which confidence in the law can erode. People can doubt that they owe the law and the Queen their absolute obedience and be encouraged in questioning the Queen's decisions about what purposes to put her subjects to or implying that she needs a reason for anything she does. That would be a great ill. But also, they could develop the habit of relating to the Queen as demons relate to a demon lord, treating Her Majesty's decisions as unpredictable and incomprehensible, and therefore not doing what Her Majesty commands because they see no difference between obedience and disobedience. And this, too, would be a great ill. We must teach the people both that they owe their government obedience and that their government functions predictably, so that it is possible to obey."

He hadn't realized that until now but now that he has seen it it's obvious, so he will pretend he knew it all along. Message: Allow them to return home, I think, not force them. Have you already spoken to the President about this?

Sent him a runner, I don't think we need to rush him. Part 3 with 'shall upon the End of Detention' makes it mandatory to send them back, even if they want to immediately return with a third teleport. I think.

Victòria doesn't think she owes anyone her absolute obedience! Absolute obedience is for Asmodeans and people who aren't even trying to do the right thing. But she's pretty sure the law doesn't actually say anything that would make people feel like they had to obey the law just because it's the law so probably it's not a secret trick to make people more obedient.

That doesn't really resolve his confusion. Maybe the man has gotten really unlucky in what his county is like, and is overgeneralizing across Cheliax? But it's sane enough that they don't have to have this out on the floor, he'll send one of his aides over to talk to Bellumar's aides instead.

I think he can say that it's not a kidnapping if they want to stay, he responds. But I don't know what to say either. I suppose ask the President, if you can, if, should the law be passed, he'll consider it to apply to the meeting? If so I suppose we have a public debate on an amendment. He's not looking forward to a fight today, but you aren't always.

Hmm, Bellumar is still talking perfectly normal sense here. But so would Lluïsa be, were she plotting something. The count could well be admirably Mephistophelean—no, that's not admirable anymore—if so the blame is half on Lluïsa for not anticipating that angle in drafting, half on the Crown for putting sortition on shaky legal grounds in the first place.

It's not really bad, surprisingly; it doesn't throw anyone out of the convention, just permits them to leave. This is the first time she's ever failed at something and had it not have awful consequences for her.

Oriol wasn’t much help, he was even more confused by all the complicated language than she was, not that she can blame him.  She did understand that he wants to stay, so she’s up, disguised by magic, to speak.

“If I understand this correctly, and please correct me if I’m wrong… us sortition delegates qualify as having been teleported and this convention isn’t a conscription or Corvée?  So it would require them to send us home?  I wouldn’t mind going home, but there’s been plenty of good sortition delegates I’ve heard speak I wouldn’t want to be sent home against their will.  So I want to make sure this proposal wouldn’t send them home as well, that is, anyone that wants to stay, even if they were originally taken against their will.”

I'll ask... or not. I ought to get an item that lets me do messages myself, it's a Hell of a thing to ask my fourth-circle bodyguard to interrupt an archmage.

Wait, is that the trick? If the Evil nobles want to trick people into not kidnapping people, which it turns out was Evil, that's way better than a lot of things they could be doing, even if she's still hoping Delegate Iroria's proposal can stop the nobles from just outvoting everyone.

She gets up to get in line immediately.  She should have seen the trick sooner.  She hadn’t thought she would need her counter proposal, so it isn’t fresh in her mind, even though she’s rehearsed her wording a few times.

There are a lot of things he's thinking right now, but the most salient is that the convention has technically only been in business for four days. 

"I commend the effort to protect citizens from unlawful detention, and am at this moment conferring with the Queen to arrange for a royal decree to regularize the status of delegates conscripted to serve as delegates in this body. That is, this law will not affect the status of the sortitions. 

If you will suffer me to speak just a bit further – I believe I have made my opinion of attempts to disenfranchise other delegates extremely clear. It will not work. You will not profit by it. The delegates chosen by sortition are here because they represent perspective of the great majority of Chelish citizens who are neither by nature nor experience fitted to seek power, and who quite naturally prefer to avoid it. I know that many of you do not wish to be here, and I am grateful for your service and your sacrifice. An injustice is being done to you, and it is not one I would countenance in less dire circumstances. But these circumstances are dire, and your voices can, must, and will be heard." 

Oh, I meant to ask you whether it might be possible to let the sortitions optionally go home after a month of service, and replace the ones who leave with another draw of sortitions. De Luna made the point that willing sortitions might in fact have a higher rate of participation, and I think a month is probably long enough for them to determine whether they want to be here. Not that now's the right time to talk about that, it just reminded me.

Does this mean she doesn’t get to go home?

She’s already given up her platform to speak, so she can’t ask for a plain explanation of everything. 

Ah huh. He thought that might happen. He had a plan for it.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," he says to the sortition. "As the archmage says, this convention has no authority to free the sortitions or give you any choice over when or whether you return home. That would imply this convention had the authority to countermand the Queen, which would be in terrible error. Even the archmage, who some mistakenly imagine is a Galtan radical, is not so radical as to propose that this convention has any right to place any meaningful limit on the authority of the Queen to do this to you.

All this law would do is require that any agents of Her Majesty, if kidnapping people for the purpose of their use as sortitions, obey a decree to be issued specifying how Her Majesty intends to conscript people. It does not limit Her Majesty from issuing any decree of conscription she chooses. Her Majesty has the right to require any thing she wants of any of us at any time. She requires no justification. She is Lawful Good and it is Lawful Good when she orders people brought from their homes to this convention, and it is Lawful Good when she orders them executed, and it is Lawful Good if she chooses to release them to their families; but it is her choice, and not ours, and this bill does not oblige her in anything other than clarifying how she intends to employ that power which is hers by right as we are all hers by right. 

This law also permits your families to petition the Crown for your release, but the Queen will lawfully and nobly refuse their petitions, as the state's use of you is of more importance than your freedom, your lives, or the desires of your families, and if you do not perceive it that way that is only because you are not Lawful Good like the Queen. It is, as the archmage explained, a matter with great costs to you but with benefits to the state of Cheliax, which is far more important than you are. 


I grieve for you, of course, I really do. I know that you were ripped away from your families and your homes without warning or justification. I know that some of you have already been put to death and that most of you are greatly afraid. I know that even those of you who'd choose to stay might wish you had a choice. I know that many of you would stay, out of duty or for the salary, and that the use of force to oblige you in this was not even necessary. But to give you a choice would be to imply your choices matter. You belong to Her Majesty, as I belong to Her Majesty. You are commanded to obey and maybe die for your country, as many people are, and should pray for the strength to obey and die nobly in the Queen's service, and you absolutely may never try to make a rule that you do not belong to the Queen and are permitted to leave. 

You heard the archmage: you are not important, next to the interests of the state, and it is right and Good for everything that matters to you to be stripped of you in its service."

His tone is the same pleasant, level, reasonable one he has employed throughout the debate.

Wow, Lluïsa really misjudged Bellumar just because he wants her executed, he's actually pretty good at this.

He supposes he should be grateful that the delegates are so manifestly unafraid of him that they won't hestitate to do that to his face. There's no need to rise to the bait.

That said: he doesn't understand why Cyprian is rattling his sabers at Andoran when Taldor is right there. 

She’s even more confused after Count Bellumar’s speech!  But his level pleasant tone (with a bit of subtle smugness) demanding absolute obedience is quite familiar, she heard it from the village Asmodean priest in quite a few sermons.

She really hopes the magical disguise works.

What an idiot, Count Bellumar has confused Lawful Goodness with tyrannical Lawful Evil… oh wait he’s being sarcastic to make a point?  And the point is… the Queen and Archmage are Lawful Evil?

Fernando wishes Bellumar could get a taste of what the Queen and Archmage would do to him if they were genuinely Lawful Evil.  Fernando doesn’t even care about sending the sortition delegates home or not, he’s just annoyed this noble clearly has no idea what actual Lawful Evil is really like to live and suffer under.

Yes, yes, point taken, grabbing a bunch of random peasants to drag here was probably Evil, but the thing is that it worked surprisingly well, well enough that everyone with any sense is probably considering how to replicate it at home and turn up all the underutilized Tallandrias and Oriols in their own territory. 

He hopes Bellumar's sarcasm about what is Lawful and what is Good will not lead anyone astray; Cheliax needs less confusion about what that means, not more, even if it is a neat rhetorical point. 

Message to the archmage: If you ever reconsider allowing dueling, do kindly let me know.

Oh, fuck off, the Queen does own them. What are they gonna do, scold her for it? 

He's making 'the Queen getting to do whatever she wants' sound Asmodean but obviously all Queens, Asmodean or not, get to do whatever they want. That's what it means to be the Queen. 

Lluc goes and gets himself one of those anonymity spells. Now he just has to not stupidly say his name or his committees or anything.

Oh gods there are so many people here.

"I want to go home," he croaks, and then he gets slightly more ahold of himself. "It can be as Good as the day is long to drag me here and notwithstanding I don't want it and if I'd go to Heaven for wanting it that wouldn't make me know how. I -

"I've got a girl back home who I couldn't have a wedding for, because the late lord of the place liked celebrating everybody's weddings in his own way. We've got a little girl and another one coming and I spent my hour of warning before I came out here picking out names, since I was going to miss it.

"All I have to say here are the things that any fool can say and that I want to go home. And if that second thing doesn't matter, if that's not one of the things we're supposed to say, then you could just replace me with some other fool."

"Galt's constitution," says Bellumar mournfully, "took two years to write."

She heads up.

"It sounds to me like, if the Queen wants us here, then the only remaining disagreement is whether we think city watches and local sheriffs should have to specify what work of the Queen's they are doing, when they lock someone up, or if they can lock people up for any reason or no reason, whenever any of them feel like it. I say they should work for the Queen. I'm voting for."

"I am grateful for your support of the bill, Delegate Tallandria."

She had let a few people go past her in line while she wavered on speaking (she was trying to think of a framing that wasn't challenging Archmage Cotonnet), but hearing Lluc's speech and Count Bellumar's response, she thinks it is worth addressing.

"Galt went through several constitutions and was dealing with more disorder and chaos while writing them.  We've only been in session for 4 days now, we can consider accommodations for the sortitions after a few weeks and after seeing the royal decree clarifying the status of the sortitions.  Depending on the details of the decree, my proposal, to meet the Archmage's intentions with the four groups of people he has brought together, would be to allow sortition delegates that need to be excused to pass their vote to other sortition delegates, so that the total influence of sortition delegates is conserved and their voices well represented.  However, as I said, I think this matter could rest for a few weeks at least, so that we will have the perspective to take into account how much longer the convention is likely to last when recommending to the President and Queen that some sortitions be allowed to leave."

That came out wordier than she meant it to, trying to thread the needle of avoiding directly challenging the Queen or President while proposing something that was outside what they had indicated they would permit.

"As to the matter at hand, proposing reasonable lawful limits on detainment, I am in favor.  If someone is guilty, let them be charged, if someone is innocent let them go free, and a full week should allow enough flexibility for uncertainty or secrecy or other needs of law enforcement."

The line was pretty short, so Victòria didn't actually have much chance to figure out what she was going to say, but hopefully her speech will be okay anyways. It's not really surprising that an Evil noble would try to say that being Good means going along with whatever the people in power say but that doesn't make it right.

"What Delegate Bellumar said might be how being Lawful works, but that's not how being Good works. The Queen is Lawful Good, but that doesn't mean literally everything she's ever done is Good, and that doesn't mean she'd still be Lawful Good if she decided to stop being Good. Being Good means doing the right thing, not doing whatever the person in charge says to do just because they're in charge. If the Queen told you to go murder an innocent person for no reason, that would be Evil, and if you listened to her you'd be Evil too — like, she wouldn't do that, because she's Good, but if for some reason she did then her being Queen wouldn't make it right.

And it turns out that making the sortitions come here and not letting them was Evil? I was talking to an azata last week and it compared it to a less bad version of murder, and I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as murder or anything, but I do think it was Evil. And even if the archmage won't let us let them go home I don't think we should pretend it was actually Good, I think — I don't know how to explain this, but I think it's wrong to make innocent people have to pretend that it was right to hurt them?

Uh, like Delegate Iroria just mentioned, me and some of the other delegate have tried to come up with ways to make it so that normal people still count at the convention and the nobles can't just outvote everyone, without making it so all the sortitions have to stay even if they really don't want to, but if we can't vote on them either way I don't want to waste a bunch of time on them.

...To be clear, I think this is a good law and we should pass it, you're just wrong about Good."

"Why, Delegate, I would think that our noble archmage and our majestic Queen, who freed Cheliax from Hell, know far more than you or I about Good, and if they say that kidnapping hundreds of people to force them to participate in this proceeding is Good because its importance to the realm far outweighs their insignificant and pitiful lives, who are we to disagree? Who is an azata, even, to disagree? My conscience cries out as yours does, but when one's conscience and one's Queen speak in different directions, obey the Queen."

She doesn't actually want to be associated with Victoria.  Also, someone needs to explain to the Calistrian that every time she speaks in favor of something, there is likely some people that will oppose that something out of spite because they blame her for the riots.

It would be nice to just pass her vote off to Reuben and leave, but it doesn't sound like that is happening?

Maybe normal people's lives are insignificant to him, but that doesn't mean they don't matter!

Marit would really prefer it if his fellow members of the Judiciary Committee didn't attempt to disingenuously write laws that are secretly designed to make an entirely unrelated political point, but it's not like he didn't know that some people would be trying to do that sort of thing.

Can Victoria not detect sarcasm?  Or was that a cynical ploy to make Count Bellumar look bad by taking him at face value?  She thought Victoria wasn’t that subtle?

Count Bellumar sounds super Asmodean!  It’s probably sarcasm, but being Asmodean even sarcastically seems really suspect!  He doesn’t get in line to say anything, last time he spoke he sounded like an idiot.

"I think we should listen to the Queen and the Archmage, and not ask to go home if they don't want us to," she lies. "It's wrong to accuse the Queen of doing Evil things just because you disagree with her."

"Indeed. Some might call it slanderous, implying that the archmage and the Queen did something Evil. We are speaking of surprise unannounced forcible relocation and indefinite-duration conscription, not of something Evil like kidnapping and enslaving people."

It's possible that this would seem like a less ridiculously stupid thing to get people to bitch about if the archmage hadn't already burned down her orphanage and flattened her house, but as it is she feels like this is a pretty stupid thing to bitch about.

Why did they let anyone from Taldor take a title?

Okay, he sees where Bellumar was going with this. It's stupid, unless it works politically in which case it was just moderately annoying, but he hasn't taken leave of his senses. Obviously everyone will vote down the amendment now that the point has been made.

They might kill her just for wishing the government hadn't made her come here?

"Apparently I'm here because you value my input, so: I want to go home. I'm not going to speak another word at this convention that isn't about how I want to go home. I will abstain on every vote that isn't about when I can go home. I suggest other sortitions come up here and say the same."

He did not pay the guy to say that but he really should have thought of it.

"I don't know anything about the sortitioned delegates, but I do know that just yesterday, we passed their ban on slander.

"Everyone on this floor today heard that debate. Every one of you listened as His Highness d'Egorian proposed the slightest exception. Nearly half of you voted against even permitting true statements unconditionally. His Excellency de Cerdanya assured us this was unnecessary. The bill might sound unjust! Nevertheless he assured us that the magistrates would employ their discretion to not try any case where the accused caused no true damages. He stated the Queen's prosecutors were permitted discretion over what cases they would bring. This was supposed to avoid the obvious harms from the minor possible rumors. This was to avoid such obvious foolishness as the Acts of Iomedae being called slanderous for naming Tar-Baphon a lich. To call your enemy a lich would be a scandalous claim in almost every case! Nobody would simply accept this. However, to press such a case would be obviously absurd, and so we were told the magistrates and prosecutors could use their discretion to avoid such over-broad applications of the law.

"His Excellency Bellumar knows the intent of the law as well as any here who were not on that committee. He is the one chairing the committee on the judiciary. He chairs the committee which would set the rules on that discretion. He chairs the committee which constrains the laws we pass to be reasonably interpreted as we intend them, when we go too far with our words.

"Now he tells us that implying the Queen's actions could have been evil is slander.

"Perhaps this is the sort of minor slander which his Excellency de Cerdanya said would be overlooked by the prosecutors. Perhaps it is slander for which no magistrate would charge a fine. Still, he tells us this was 'implying that the archmage and the Queen did something Evil'. The bill we passed but a single day ago imposes penalties up to exile from Cheliax for any who 'clearly and intentionally imply' a scandalous or malicious claim. Is doing something Evil scandalous? Is it malicious? For if so, he tells us his interpretation of the law. He believes that was in fact slander. Will he say otherwise to the judicial system we have tasked him with forming?

"I do not wish to hold anyone here who would not want to be here. Everyone who does wish to be here, though, should consider this record of our recently passed bills. First we passed a ban on slander which they assured us was not to be taken too far, and not even a day later his Excellency Bellumar tells us he believes it applies in the broadest of senses. Was this intentional? Perhaps not! But still it is so. Today a proposal attempts to change the Convention, despite the archmage explicitly banning such action and without stating it in the bill. Even if it is unintended, was such Mephistophelian precision in the reading of every bill not supposed to be left behind with Infernal Cheliax? Yet now we must watch for it with every word in every proposal the floor hears.

"Perhaps we should accept this. Perhaps there is no way to improve things avoid such careful shading of the law, to make a constitution which supports honesty and straightforwardness over deceit and trickery. But now is our only chance to change that for the next four decades, and I would not watch us fail without even making an attempt."

“You must have misheard me, Delegate, as I did not say that the statement that the Queen has acted Evilly was slanderous, but observed only and quite obviously that some people might say it was, and I certainly did not say that this is “not merely slander but slander that should be considered on the floor”. I think our words matter, and choose mine carefully, and I encourage you to in the future try taking notes, or checking with a friend, to confirm you have not misheard me and then repeated something very different than what I said and indeed inappropriate to say.”

In most countries Ferrer's speech would be charged as treason, actually, but that's not a fight worth having on the floor.

This is exactly why her other idea for a proposal is needed.  But she doesn’t want to introduce it now with this context, and she thinks introducing an unrelated proposal while another is already under debate violates what little procedure the convention has.

"Can we, for a moment, pause in our debate about the Good and Law of the government to discuss the proposal in question? Count Bellumar has introduced a law to limit the ability of the enforcers of the law to detain someone without telling him why they are doing it. This seems wholly reasonable to me. We can debate whether or not we should go further, but no arguments have been made for why we should not go this far that are appropriate for the people of a Lawful Good state. My only modification would be to suggest that the last line should read 'the Lawful Forms of Conscription and the Corvée as authorized by Royal Decree, originating from her Majesty, the Constitutional Convention, or such Institutions of Legislation as they may establish,' as we may well find ourselves with an Assembly or Senate by the time we are done here and it would be a shame to have to amend the law for them to collect taxes in work as well as in coin." 

“Thank you, Archduke, an excellent modification. This law passed Judiciary unanimously and I hope that no discussion of the plight of our fellow delegates will distract too much from the case for it.”

He will give Count Bellumar a very polite nod and then get back to his seat.

“If we’re talking about the actual law again… It shouldn’t apply to orcs just because they aren’t slaves yet, that’s not fair to the baron. Makes it impossible for him to keep order. Sometimes it’s more than a week until the paladin shows up, you see?”

“If I capture a bandit I will charge them with banditry even if we subsequently have to wait for a paladin to try them on the charge; your lord can do the same. Perhaps no orcs should be free subjects of Her Majesty but that would be a matter for a different law.”

Lluïsa is a bit uncomfortable with Sirmium's implication that these laws will stand past the actual constitution without being otherwise ratified or adopted!

(It's a good law and she likes it, but come on, really?)

Probably the convention that just made all Chelish halflings free subjects is not going to turn around and declare that orcs can't be. He is nevertheless idly trying to work out what would even happen if it did. 

She's going to go and stand up and say something even though she hates this but she hates what the Count is saying more and this is important. Nothing terrible happened when she asked her question earlier and she got the proposal changed the way that she wanted, but it was a small point and this is a bigger one and there's more places that she might be misunderstanding something. 

"I wanted to second the Archduke on this proposed law. I do think we should go farther, and agree that we should go at least this far.

For additional protections, I wanted to repeat the earlier concern about whether charges would be public - without them being public, it is hard for others to know if this law is being followed. I am also concerned that nothing in this bill prevents law enforcement from saying that they're investigating people for made up crimes even if they don't have any real reason to believe that people committed those crimes. Maybe that's a different proposal about how we make sure that people who are supposed to enforce the law are following the law. But that still might not help people because this proposal doesn't say anything about whether the suspicion that someone committed a crime needs to make sense or be a good reason."

She's not sure if she's saying that right but maybe giving a concrete example like 'what if I said I suspected the Count of treason, how could anyone tell whether this was the kind of suspicion that counts here, if I was law enforcement' would be slander and she's not sure that that would make anything clearer. She's getting turned around thinking about it herself.

"And - I know the Archduke asked us to pause our debate about Good and Law, but - I wanted to remind everyone here that it is possible to be Good without being Lawful, and we all know it is possible to be Lawful without being Good. Asmodeus was. And it is better to be Good than Lawful." 

Urgh that all sounds so trite and shallow and she's so bad at explaining what good is to people when they don't already know themselves. She also wants to say that they shouldn't follow bad laws and instead they should just do good things but this seems unlikely to help and maybe if she says that they'll make it illegal to say that and it would be better if they didn't do that. Probably it's not already illegal somehow. 

Clap clap clap!

"At this time, I think, we will vote on the proposal. The Judiciary committee appreciates your time and your consideration, and will take your further proposals with us for consideration this afternoon."

Well, he's obnoxious but it's a good law and probably the only trap was the fact it'll very very briefly ban the sortitions. In favor.

Xavier is in favor of all the parts that the archmage will permit to take effect.

This sounds like it annoys people he dislikes, so he'll vote in favor.

Seven days is a reasonable limit and she doesn’t think there are any other traps, in favor.

Victòria was arrested three days ago and it would've really sucked if the guards could have just kept her there forever without even accusing her of anything! She's not sure this will actually prevent that but it seems like it can't hurt. In favor.

So she doesn’t get to go home?  She’ll vote yes in case the Archmage changes his mind.  It probably won’t help, but it probably won’t hurt.

Lluïsa loves drafting laws, it's great, it's pointed and specific, it makes things a lot easier on lawyers having to deal with the things she dealt with last week.

The assembly will probably vote it down 599-1, because the assembly hates good laws that do one specific valuable thing and loves terrible laws that ambiguously kill everyone in Cheliax. But at least it has her one vote in favor.

This makes his life slightly more inconvenient without benefitting him at all. Against.

Against. Maybe if people vote down the long complicated tricky laws they can get some good, understandable laws that aren't full of traps.

He is still not particularly happy about Count Bellumar's attempt to sneak legal trickery past the Judiciary Committee, but the arguments in favor of the law still apply. In favor.

In favor. She prays quietly to Pharasma.

It seems like a reasonable law, and he voted for it on committee, but he's nervous about attempting novel legal experiments even if they seem reasonable on their face. Against, but he won't be unhappy if it passes.

Against. There’s no call for this sort of nonsense, especially since it won’t even work like Count Bellumar seems to have wanted.

She thinks she's supposed to support this one as long as she's not hoping the archmage will let the sortitions leave. She can't even leave yet anyway, she needs to hear back from her husband and save up money from her stipend to pay for Ot. She votes in favor.

This law has nothing to do with astronomy. None of them do!

Well, it's a law for letting people out of gaols more often than they're ordinarily let out of gaols. For.

Against. It’s not going to hurt him much, but it doesn’t really do anything for him either and votes aren’t a signal of anything anymore.

This all seems like a bunch of nobles fighting about a law that barely actually does anything. Abstain.

The guy had a point about sortitions going on strike but it's not like anyone gets to know whether or how Lluc votes. For. If Bellumar just wanted to do all this to embarrass the archkidnapper then fine, Lluc will help embarrass him.

For!

Blai has no idea how to reason about conscription or sortition or anything like that which is anything less than blatantly plagiarized from the incident report, but this doesn't apply to those situations. The situations it does apply to, it seems good. For.

That was really boring but the guy who proposed it seems like kind of a dick. (The convention is great! They're giving him so much money and sooner or later they'll find a way to give everyone a lifetime pension or a permanent tax break or something!) Against.

In favor. It’s a good law to have, to force all the corrupt magistrates to commit to a crime that may be proven or disproven.

Yeah, he can imagine ways being arrested could have gone down where he'd have needed this in place. For.

Maybe if you have enough well constructed law about how to perform justice then the paladins can stop doing it. For.

Was the secret to getting Chelish people to do nonawful things, all along, 'construct situations in which they can do good things they don't care about and incidentally attack people they don't like'. It doesn't seem very repeatable but it worked out well here, as far as he can tell. In favor.

Abstain.

For, though not without some reluctance. If you’re trying to embarrass the archmage by passing a law to expose his hypocrisy you have to actually pass it.

Does this mean no more forcing people to give up their children to faraway schools till they come home bloody and nightmare-eyed or is that out of scope. Well, it's a start, anyway. For.

In favor. It's a good law, sortition shenanigans aside.

Jofre actually sort of thinks sortition's a sweet idea, it's not like you can get most ordinary people to talk to you by going to their place and having a conversation with them and it seems like you can get quite a lot of them to talk and also vote by sortitioning them. For criminals... well, Jofre spent a long while as a criminal, and slightly inconveniencing people for arresting him would not have been protective but it wouldn't obviously be antiprotective, he guesses... but then again it'd mean everyone'd know what he stood accused of, though the crew all knew... most people aren't ship people though... oh, this is confusing, abstain.

They talked about this thing a whole lot and it sounds good to Kicharchu! What a Great Work.

It's not like it's hard to have a record of what somebody's been accused of. If you're in a terrible hurry you pick whichever of "disorderly conduct" or "treason" is more appropriate and follow up later. For.

Wait, he's still not sure what the Good thing is to do here? But it seems like this mostly helps who've been arrested, and most of them probably did something, the Queen got rid of all the bad laws already. And bandits and murderers and so on are Evil and Chaotic, so helping them is... bad, right? Against. 

It has the form of real law which does things because the procedure is correct rather than trying to skip steps out of an infatuation with the outcome. Jaume likes it.

It doesn't seem like this would have particularly impeded them in executing Delegate Barro, who was after all arrested for a very obvious and loud set of murders. So sure, she'll vote for it.

For. He wants to be able to say he supported it because it's a good idea completely separate from the fact that it bans the sortitions.

For.

Against. Sometimes there's a bloody Nidalese and they need squared away and you don't want them let out again just because somebody was sloppy.

Abstain!

Abstain.

For, let's do it.

For. He doesn’t think that His Grace is checking how he votes but part of being a loyal subordinate currying favor is that you actually do what they want, sense motive exists

No one actually said anything about what she said except that Judiciary will maybe think about it, which she doesn't actually believe, but that's fine and doesn't mean she should never say words at the convention again. At least no one responded to the bit about Law and Goodness with a lot of oily words amounting to how perfect obedience to tyranny is Good actually. Getting the last word on that is probably Good even if they weren't very good last words? 

Desnia really, really doesn't trust the Count who proposed this but the Archduke seemed fine and supported this. She hopes there's no other tricks here besides the one to send sortitions who don't want to be here home. Which... seems fine except how the people whose side she thinks of herself as on oppose sending them home. But it doesn't matter because the archmage said it won't do that. If she's understanding all the pieces right. 

For. She hopes she didn't vote for anything bad when she wasn't paying attention, she's not sure whether she voted right here and she was paying so much attention! 

The archmage just said this has no effect on when he goes home. Abstain.

Loads of people got arrested for the riots, right? Have they all been charged? He's pretty sure they haven't all been tried. This seems like a conspiracy to get some noble's anarchic servant let off free. Against.

For, denying the man a 'victory' is not worth it.

For. It's still a nice proposal.

For. Significant step towards just justice.

Passes, 276-172.

"Thank you all." He'll take his seat.

Wow, she just drafted a law and it passed. Cheliax's first well-written law, possibly ever.