"Calistria is, in fact, the goddess of that. Calistria doesn't care who gets hurt as long as you took your revenge. If you want a god who will refuse to help you hurt innocents as splash damage from your revenge on someone you consider guilty, pray to Ragathiel or Milani and hope you haven't already done so much damage they'll reject you, Avenger."

Thea also doesn’t want this argument!  Any discussion that would drag down the reputation of any neutral God’s or their followers is obviously to be avoided!  She’s can’t think of a way to say this that doesn’t sound blatantly self-serving so she’ll wait it out.

Theopho got Victoria good with that line!  Considering he is an Erecura worshipper though, it would only take a sentence to point out the blatant hypocrisy.

None of her enjoyment of the argument shows on her face as she continues to wait off to the side behind Thea.

"You worship a power of Hell."

Sorry, what? Isn't that illegal?

"I'm still an atheist at heart. Erecura's willing to compromise with Evil when she's stuck with it, which is why she's Neutral, and why I've been willing to look past her circumstances. Calistria just commits Evil herself and defends the weak enough it sometimes balances out. I know what Good I've done, with excess precision; I'm Neutral too myself. You don't, and you can't, because you aren't even Neutral, you're Evil."

"I'm Chaotic Neutral," she snaps. Wow, that was a really terrible response. Can she think of a better one— "Not that I'd expect a servant of Hell to recognize that."

That was not actually a better response. When she's imagined this sort of argument she's always imagined herself being able to think of insults that actually hurt, only now that she's actually trying to have it all she can think of is variations on "you suck and so does your goddess."

He really doesn't want to get in the middle of this but he also really doesn't want to tell off the Calistrian or the Hell-worshipper. If he looks desperately at the woman who's supposed to be leading the meeting, or the soldier, or even the songbird, are any of them willing to set things back on track?

"I wonder if nobles get more done because they all spent their entire childhoods being forcefed etiquette. Could we not?" says Raimon, mostly at Theo.

"Yes, I'd like to second that. We don't have to like each other to realize that fighting each other is going to empower the nobles at the expense of everyone else."

“I’ll third that, I think we all have a common interest in making sure the nobility don’t pass anything stupid that only makes sense to a noble from Taldor or a century ago who doesn’t know how common Chelish people live.  And I think we have a common interest in not allowing nobility to gain leverage against any virtuous (or at least non-Evil) Churches by pitting us against each other.”

He started it though. She's not going to say that because it's kind of pathetic, but he totally started it.

Great. He's going to change the subject. "Does anyone have Good, honest Abadarans to recommend, who'd never have taken Hell's money, that they think we can trust not to side with dishonest lenders?"

"There's one from Osirion on the Family Committee, Delegate Fazil. He's, uh, kind of confusing, but he doesn't seem Evil or anything."

“An Osirion Abadaran might be good for formulating a proposal the Grand Inquisitor will approve of.”

Well that was awful. Thanks, Erastil guy.

"Conde Fazil is a noble, and is definitely foreign in his sensibilities, but I agree he doesn't seem evil. He's mostly spoken about teaching men to be good husbands, and whether marriage should legally require a man to provide for his wife. I don't know who he will side with, here, but I expect that he'll at least explain his reasoning if we talk to him."

Well, an Abadaran who cares about men being good husbands is probably the best Abadaran any of them could hope for.

"Did anyone have any other concerns they were hoping to discuss? Young lady, you said the Virtuous Churches committee was working on something?"

The way this meeting has been going, Thea wants to avoid giving this group anything solid to argue about or against.

“We have been developing ideas for helping virtuous churches to support the people of Cheliax.  A lot of our ideas are still in development… the most recent idea we discussed was figuring out if the convention could get access to spells like Lesser Planar Ally and Commune to consult the Gods for advice.   We have also been doing research to compile a list of less well known beneficent Gods to make sure they wouldn’t be left out of any listing in our eventual proposal.  Like Empyreal Lords and such.”

She's not clued in on this and not particularly inclined to cooperate on it even if she was, but fortunately for Thea there's also not a lot of detail they've finished.

"We've also been considering subjects like tithing structures but that's still a ways off from being ready to do anything with."

Enric stays silent. He's a bit disappointed by how little progress virtuous churches seems to have made, compared to the other committees. 

Talk to the gods...? ...She mentioned Lesser Planar Ally, probably she means something like Delegate Ardiaca or Lluïsa did, with calling an outsider.

Thea actually considers taking a few weeks to research and write laws that will potentially be in place years or decades a reasonable thing to do!  (At least as long as no other committees are going to try to racing them with overlapping laws.)

"Just so long as it's nothing like those money-grubbers who've been trying to vote to up their own stipends."

This is the commoner meeting isn’t it?  Thea had assumed this group was in favor of it.

“Is there any plans to placate or sideline those sorts of efforts?”

She’ll feel out the mood in the room before she proposes trying to side with and get the votes of the avaricious.

Yes, but she's not sure she wants to give everyone else ammunition to attack the scheduling committee, after the way the floor session went today. Of course, this might be the only opportunity to arm them, if she wants to try to change anything about the scheduling committee.

.... actually that might be secret information? Ugh.

"I think the best we can do is ensure that binding resolutions have to go through extra sets of eyes before the floor votes on them, or maybe figure out a way to increase the amount of information people get about floor proposals? We've been told we can't vote to increase the stipends because the money isn't the government's, and I don't think most people would vote against taxes if they understood what it meant." Although come to think of it, Count Cansellarion did? She should really ask the Duchess whether Iomedae is opposed to... taxes. Governments having money. "Since all of the nobles are delegates, I think voting to exempt delegates from taxes is basically a vote that nobles should still be allowed to collect taxes, but none of those taxes can be given to the Queen, who uses almost all of them to fund orphanages and the army. The nobility would collect the same amount from everyone but us, but all of the money would go to whatever they wanted to spend it on - feasts, fancy clothing, and I am sure the occasional monster-slaying expense. I think the archdukes are against it because this situation would in fairly short order destroy the country, and whatever else they are, I think they are attached to having a country.

Probably, for that reason, the Queen won't agree to it, but we really ought to avoid the convention passing anything that the Queen won't agree to. I strongly think we'll have more latitude to pass things if we haven't tried to pass anything incredibly stupid. Once we do, everything is much more a suggestion, you know? An advisor who habitually offers obviously bad ideas will very quickly become no advisor at all. So we want to make sure that the convention is only voting on proposals that have been examined soberly and had the extremely obvious problems hammered out of them. We can't expect the convention not to vote for things that half the people genuinely want, but we can probably come up with procedures that make them less likely to pass things that will actually be disastrous, just because they weren't explained very well and weren't thought about for long enough."