Desnia follows close behind him, smiling back. She’s glad he gets to be outside soon. 

Here's the atrium. Phew. He plops himself next to the azalea. Anyone else here yet?

Lucia waves happily!

Roger is reading some transcripts of another committee. But he's here.

Josep arrives right after Jofre and Desnia.

Who is that and why is she here. Maybe she's the sailor's girlfriend and he's about to send her on her way while he does actually important things? Unlikely, but one can hope.

Present. She brought her sun hat this time.

Ignasi is unfortunately present, not that he wants to be.

"This is Voyager Desnia. I'd like an Abadaran too but haven't been able to catch one yet," out of doors so he can think straight, "but it's Trade and Travel, so. Voyager, do you want to introduce yourself?"

“Good afternoon, everyone. As” oh no she doesn’t remember the title for clerics of Gozreh, is it going to be a snub that he called her by her title but she’s not calling him by his “Delegate Jofre said, I’m a cleric of Desna and have been since before the war. I used to deliver messages and sometimes goods for smaller towns and villages. I’ve been in every archduchy in Cheliax, though I’ve spent more time in the western half of the country. While I’m more familiar with the travel part of this committees mandate, I also have some experience with trade throughout Cheliax. Do you have any questions for me?” 

That sounded - experienced, she thinks. Except the slip with title, if anyone noticed her brief pause there. Experience with trade defined very loosely, though it can probably stand up to some questioning. 

Ignasi is obviously not going to say anything that might offend one of the priests in power.

"Since we already voted to abolish travel passes, I'm not sure how much role there is for further travel expertise on the committee," which seems like a politically palatable excuse for excluding a bloody Desnan.

“I hadn’t realized the vote on that had already passed that this committee! What’s the text of the resolution? When do you plan to bring it to the floor?”

Ahhh. Is it a resolution? Or is it called a different thing when the committee does a thing and then sends it to the main convention? Jofre had made the committee sound undecided on this issue but maybe she had misunderstood him. And maybe this guy is right and she’s not going to be that useful here but she wants to try and see if she can do more useful things in committee than when bills make it to the floor where it’s much harder to engage with them. 

"We got bogged down in definitions, but we were for getting rid of them, it was just unclear how to word it exactly."

“So it sounds like I could still be helpful there. And I do have some experience with trade even it’s less than travel. Does anyone else have any concerns?”

Does it sound like she’s trying too hard? This isn’t quite the same as talking her way past checkpoints but it’s not not similar. 

"Well, let's put it to a vote, if nobody's got more questions," says Jofre. "I'm in favor."

Three sensible people, the countess, the sortition, and the idiot... Wait until the countess votes. Chair breaks ties so if she's in favor it's not going to work and better to go along with it.

"More clerics of good gods can only help!"

Damn. "Alright, I suppose it will."

Josep makes the same calculation, but he expects that the sortition might vote against, actually, and is disagreeably surprised when Texidor cannot be counted on. Ugh. No point in making an enemy pointlessly, that's two votes in favor without the sailor now.

"Yes, I suppose I will vote in favor."

"In favor." Ugh.

"Abstain."

"Welcome to the committee, Desnia!"

Fuck.

“My pleasure, thank you for having me.”

She’s unreasonably relieved about it, considering how many more risky evaluations she had passed. Not so unreasonably relieved that it would be readable off of her face.

It would have probably been fine if she wasn’t on, Jofre seemed reasonable enough and if something bad was going to come out of the committee she could hear about it from him early enough to prepare an actual speech for the floor maybe.

“Could someone say a bit more about where things stand on the travel passes?” 

"So we're leaning to abolish them but were trying to figure out exactly how to word the draft - there's ways you could say it that would make it sound like nobody's allowed to travel anywhere on the grounds that they don't have a pass because the passes don't exist, say - without making it really easy for bandits to operate, since apparently they're a major motivating force behind the passes existing."

"Are there any obvious problems with a wording like: 'Travel passes are no longer required for travel throughout Cheliax'? And how much are they helping against bandits right now anyway? My understanding is that it's pretty easy for bandits to dodge checkpoints, it's not like there's a guards all along the perimeter of every archduchy like there are around the Worldwound. Travel passes matter more for people who are less armed and less familiar with the terrain, but it's not like bandits are well-known for for only staying on major roads." 

She... almost doesn't want to discuss how to catch bandits better - she's had a pretty mixed bag of experiences with them, under the infernal regime, but overall more good than bad. They appreciated the channels and clean water, see, and mostly wouldn't be inclined to try to try to report her to anyone and were even less worried about her reporting them, either. But probably they should do better things now that obeying the law is more good than evil. 

"My guess would be that there could be more work catching them on the trade side, rather than the travel side: bandits are making money by stealing things from merchants, usually, and then they need to be reselling it. Or stealing coin directly, but people try to carry as little of that as they can. Again, I'm not sure how much travel passes help here: usually bandits are in areas where at least some of bandits have permission to be, and those are the bandits arranging all the resale or buying supplies for the rest of the bandits who make themselves scarce whenever someone would be checking papers. If we can find a way to keep stolen goods from being resold, or maybe ask for more documentation for certain kinds of purchases, that seems to get the bandits where the money is." 

"I like that! Might be a good angle on pirates too."

"Large bandit gangs cannot generally travel unnoticed around checkpoints, only small ones without significant plunder, and so must steal" or buy secondhand "travel passes to get their goods to fences and escape the search area from the local guards."

"How large of gangs are you thinking? Ten, twenty people can get around checkpoints with little difficulty if there's forests or hills, even with plunder. Little difficulty from the checkpoints, at least, more problems from monsters. I know less about bandit problems in the middle of the Heartlands where it's all flat and farms."

"The bands caught with fake papers were usually roughly that size, from ten to twenty." And if some of those papers were real but bought illegitimately nobody was being paid to admit that.

She thinks he might be lying, getting caught at checkpoints just seems dumb, but maybe there are just a lot of stupid bandits and she was just dealing with the cleverer ones, when she had reason to deal with them at all? Hard to say. It's not like she dealt with bandits everywhere she went. She'll push a bit further but she's not confident enough that she knows what she's talking about to call him a liar.  

"This is in the Heartlands? Or in the hills? And under infernal rule, or since the war? I think staffing on checkpoints has gotten worse since the war but I've also been doing less travel" and less of the kind of travel that was trying to avoid checkpoints even if she did have papers, sometimes people she was helping out didn't, "so I don't know as well as I would if I knew I was going to be trying to answer this question here." 

"I suppose it probably happens some of the time, but I'd wager against it being the main way they get caught. Does anyone know whether there's anyone at the convention we can ask about questions like 'how often are bandits caught due to not having the right travel passes versus being caught in the act or having their camp raided tracked down or someone noticing them reselling stolen goods?'"

"Western Longmarch, while there was a government. I'm sure petty bandits without any ambition but stealing bread can survive dodging roads but all the ones which are serious dangers to prepared caravans either had significant magic or illicit passes or both. You can't carry fenceable luxuries or herd stolen livestock, enough to fund a dozen men, through the backwoods, especially not if you want to get close enough to a town to sell them. Not even if it's the relatively tame forest near Corentyn."

She's seen some pretty ridiculous things carried through the woods in her day, but not the time for that conversation now. 

"So it sounds like - requiring travel passes just for those traveling with substantial luxuries or livestock would work for catching out the type of bandit that they're currently useful for while not hindering everyone else?"

"If everyone gets stopped and had cargos inspected that might work, but it's going to slow things down significantly relative to just checking passes."

"How is checking everyone faster than checking a few people?"

"Checking everyone for passes is faster than checking everyone for passes or cargo that needs passes. If everyone has passes anyway I suppose it's no slower."

"Isn't it obvious if somebody's walking around with a flock of geese? I guess 'luxuries' includes stuff that doesn't walk around and might be small."

"The central thing that intelligent bandits want to steal, other than goods that move themselves, is things that are small - in weight and volume - but expensive. Much like a merchant looking for longer routes or teleport trade, and for the same reasons; more value per trip."

"But the people who have the kind of cargo that needs a check are - obvious? Because we're trying to check people who have the kinds of things that they can't just carry off the road. We don't need to search cargo to tell whether it's the kind of thing that you could carry off the road, you can tell that just by looking. If bandits are carrying small luxuries then they can just dodge the road to go around the checkpoints like I was saying earlier." 

This conversation is making her feel unpleasantly turned around and she does not like it.

"So if we abolish travel passes and then institute cargo passes, we don't need to check all of the cargo, we just check the person with the cargo for a cargo pass the same way we would check them for a travel pass." 

"What would be the cost of having cargo passes? All those inspection stations costs large amounts of money. If we could remove them, we'd save a bunch! That might be more than what we lose to bandits."

"Oh, so much the better, I keep hearing people talk about how the government doesn't have enough money."

"Is that an agreement with me that the cargo inspection would be cheaper than travel pass inspection, or suggesting that we go further and get rid of inspections altogether to save money? I would if anything prefer getting rid of them altogether, I was only suggesting cargo inspection as a compromise position to not lose the limited benefits of the current setup at a lower cost."

"I'd be fine with doing away with them altogether."

"In order to prevent banditry cargo checks would be needed on everyone with a wagon, and scarcely cheaper than the old system, if at all; depending on fees for passes, possibly significantly more expensive net of revenue. The cost of banditry is high enough as it is and would be much higher without any such checks."

"Would it? Like - walk me through how a check shortens a bandit hunt. Are they often just trying to walk right through a checkpoint like they don't know it's there?"

"Bandits have to fight a visible battle to get through a checkpoint," he says very slowly and condescendingly, "so if they have not fought a visible battle, they are either in the last area they attacked, or they have abandoned everything they stole."

Gods save him from idiot children who think they're qualified to talk about laws.

"Nope, that was a bad explanation and I'm not going to vote with you about it, do you want to try again with more steps in there or something?"

"What do you think a bandit hunt looks like, if that isn't adequate to explain why hunting bandits is vastly easier if you know they haven't passed checkpoints?"

"I have spent more time on land since the convention started than I did in the twenty years before that. If for some reason hunting land bandits were my job I'd probably do something wacky like ask a druid if the birds have seen any sketchy characters lately because a druid might talk to a Gozrehn. It sounds like you're saying that if you're looking at some bandits you can tell how far they came to get to where you and the bandits both are. But in that situation you're looking at the bandits. How did you get to be looking at the bandits? That seems like the important thing."

"Then perhaps you should abstain from everything affecting life on land, which is virtually all our business, and hand the committee to someone else who is qualified."

"Wow, okay, this guy can't answer a very basic question, anyone else want to have a shot or should we just vote on ending all enforcement of travel passes now?"

Ohhh no.

"In favor, myself." They're bad for business.

"In favor." 

"Sure, why not."

"In favor."

"I am in favor in principle but I should like a particular phrasing to bring to the floor." Which was in theory what they were doing here.

"This committee calls for a prompt end to all attempts to consult or check travel passes for movement within the borders of Cheliax, enabling free visitation and migration for all its people and saving the state the associated costs of staffing checkpoints."

Josep carefully writes this down. 

"In favor."

"So now anyone looking for bandits will need to search the entire country, and the army will never have any time to spare on anything else. Against, and I would be happy to explain why to anyone who is endowed with the capacity to reason."

"That's a pass! I'll take it to the floor tomorrow unless somebody who can read wants to do it."

The money that gets saved on paying off the guards at every checkpoint and border, and making sure their baron or lord does not get offended by getting offered less than his neighbors, is more than sufficient to hire guards. Which you have to do anyway, since the checkpoints can in fact be bribed by the bandits just as well as by honest merchants. 

The sailor is being insufferable though. "I will do it if you wish. It would not be well for the version we present to the floor to differ from the version we voted on."

"I'm also willing to do it." 

Though Jofre seemed better at actually making things happen. She guesses she was being too unwilling to be rude to the one person who was talking in circles? 

He was not talking in circles at all and he is offended by these idiots who couldn't understand the basic concept that small areas are smaller than big ones.