"Sarei do you know who's working on Cyprian's code now that it's not Issa?"

        "Teo, I think. Why?"

"It sounds like maybe it should be ready pretty soon? Or someone'll beat us to it."

        "Well, then Issa shouldn't've been an idiot.It's long. I don't even think Teo's read all of it."

The Duchess returns at this point, wearing a sword for some reason and looking rather pleased with herself. "My apologies, Tallandria, I wasn't expecting the Lord Marshal for another hour. Is there anything coming up tomorrow of particular interest to you?"

"Uh, the dueling torture propositions are coming up and probably matter, and the Lord Mayor appointment seems important to all of us personally, but I don't know enough about it to have much of a stance. The things I'm most invested in are going to take a few more days to get off the ground, at least."

"And what are those? - actually let's go rejoin the Lord Marshal in the front parlor, I expect he has opinions about the dueling torture propositions, that sounds like something the Church would care about. Thank you, Sarei," and she collects the briefing sheet from her. 

You know, the brave and bold stance against wearing fancy or remotely decent clothes suddenly feels extremely stupid and humiliating if she's going to be hanging out in noble parlors giving reports to higher nobility (who, uh, specifically personally invaded her city) as opposed to just giving speeches on the floor. Score one for Jilia, she actually does need better clothes.

Oh well. She went to wizard middle school. She can handle a little bit of non-fatal abject humiliation.

"Alexeara, I invited Delegate Tallandria over tonight so we could all trade favors - I think we don't lose votes the Church and the liberal nobles and Tallandria are all aligned on, so we should take some care to make sure on important votes we're not at odds or at least are because of irreconciliable differences. Tallandria was going to tell us what her highest priorities are."

"I am glad to be formally introduced, though of course I've noticed your speaking on the floor. Please, do tell us."

Oh gods why is this so much more terrifying. Calm. Calm. She is an adult Chelish woman and she can give a pretty good impression of a calm person.

"Lord Marshal. I'm still in the process of figuring out what the other commoners are most concerned with, but I personally am most concerned with child abandonment and the orphanage crisis, and then with determining how much of a general education system we can afford. I think the answer is not much of one, but I'm working on a proposal to create a much cheaper public library system as an alternative. I'm hoping to do it by expanding the responsibilities of the postal service. My top priority is the orphanages, but that's a more complicated problem."

"I saw that Family is considering making it a crime to father a bastard."

"Among other things, yes. I'd initially suggested it as something that would solve a large chunk of the problem but would never pass the floor - it hasn't escaped me that the floor is significantly more men than women - but one of the noblemen on the committee actually thought that it would be workable if we made the penalty a pure fine, so that wealthy men can pay it easily and commoners are forced to actually change their behavior. Then I received some information about the state of the crown's finances, and discovered that the orphanages are currently costing more than half as much the entire military. That is, to be clear, after ending daycare services, which I expect a majority of women in the cities have relied on at one point or another, and after cutting staffing and other resources so much that the children are now quite literally dying in elevated numbers, suggesting that providing services that people could rely on was in fact significantly more expensive than the entire military. With that information I thought it might be possible to get a large chunk of the military officers in the room on board, on the grounds that things which free up the crown's second-largest expenditure free up money for military matters. I'd hoped to speak to Archduke Requena about it at some point, and see if he thought it was worth backing." Since she just goes around talking to all of the archdukes except the Menador one, these days, but she does think highly of Requena and does think that he's probably a great bellwether with regard to whether the proposal will unavoidably be laughed out of the room.

"It's a drastic solution, I don't dispute that, and itself only a partial one, but the current situation is a crisis, and will quickly become even more of one if people begin reliably sentencing infanticide as murder."

.....hopefully telling them this isn't a mistake, but, like, talking about her plans and so that Chelam will maybe back some of them is literally why she got this job.

"Perhaps he'll be here tonight and you can get his input on it. I think it's a good idea. Though a woman absolutely shouldn't be the one to introduce it on the floor. Is the Duke de Lestdemarc willing to? Or maybe Fraga would, if Alexeara asks him. Line up a dozen men to speak in favor of it and then the first one who wants to oppose it looks like a scoundrel."

"I think those men without bastards will gladly support it, and we can probably arrange for enough of them to speak early in the debate. I can get you half a dozen myself, but I think you would not actually want a majority of those speakers to be paladins..."

"Yes, I think that's no good tactically. Everyone already knows the church disapproves of their liaisons, and they're doing it anyway. I have no idea how many noblemen without bastards who aren't paladins there are, but there's... probably one or two of them, and more who think you at least ought to support your bastards."

Oh man they think it's doable!!

"That is the intent, yes. Initially we had the fine as compensation paid to the mother, but we're also discussing some system of awarding payment to whoever is actually raising the child, whether that's a family member or an orphanage or someone else, and not sure what produces the best results. I do think it lives or dies on whether people can see that a large number of respected and reasonable men in the convention support it. It's not ready to be proposed yet, though. My intent is that a man can get out of the fine by marrying the woman in question before she gives birth, if she'll agree to have him. For that, and for the law to make sense in general, we need some definition of what a legal marriage is, and what responsibilities to the children it confers. For that we need a civil court system, which we also currently don't have. And there are some awkward edge cases to be worked out."

"Could marriages be performed and recognized by the church of Erastil? I don't see that a civil court system is necessary... for this, it's clearly very necessary in general."

Narikpolus walks in, quietly takes notice of the Duchess's new sword and of Cansellarion, and spends a moment trying to read the two of them. He has heard a bit about Lastwall engagement norms.

Carlota looks radiantly happy and like she has never worn a sword in her life and has no idea how to avoid constantly banging the furniture with it.

Alex looks happy, if less radiantly so, and slightly off-balance as if he's not instinctively sure how he'd defend everyone present if the Tarrasque were to suddenly burst through the mansion door.

....yeah, okay, he can offer congratulations in a moment.

"We in fact discussed allowing recognized members of all the organized churches to perform them, but others on the committee pointed out that without any mechanism of determining what promises were made and whether they have been broken, an option to marry a man who gets a woman pregnant isn't much more than an option to forgive the debt with no penalty, and no assurance of support. Many Chelish people do marry without contracts, in the sense of having weddings and in the sense of moving in together. But a wedding doesn't stop abandonment, or confer any legal responsibility towards the children."

Also holy shit that's the last remaining Archduke. What is he doing here. What.

"Well, that's why I suggested the church of Erastil in particular. I think they have an interest in performing genuine marriages and not fake ones."

But what's the - what?

"I think very highly of the Erastilian on the committee, but he says he comes from a region of the country where nobody is currently observing weddings or making explicit promises, they simply move in together and then informally try to stick it out. And I know several people personally who, ah, disagreed on what it meant, that they were getting married. I'm not really comfortable with using that as a framework for something that has criminal penalties, so I've been hoping to hash out a default set of promises that people can be required to make and can then be legally held to, in the absence of another different contract, but I don't know much about how marriage works in most other places." Other than, uh, the Thanelands, circa several hundred years ago.

"It seems to me that the local Erastilians are in a good position to ensure that everyone has the same understanding about the marriage they're getting into, and to ensure that it's a marriage that is proper and good for them and for the community, and that a court of law is - less so, in Cheliax. What would a court do, if a man is unfaithful? Have him pay a fine? Give him half a dozen lashes? Those don't seem like they - address the problem at all, in any way."

And now is when another Archduke arrives! He will come in a carriage and not on a gryphon, because gryphons eat horses, but he will come nonetheless. One needs to attend all the relevant parties or one will be out in the cold, diplomatically speaking.

He'll be announced at the door of the parlor, where there is a very happy Carlota, wearing a sword for some reason. "Archduke! Delegate Tallandria was hoping to run her unorthodox proposal to fund the army by you, I think."