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Epilogue: Quirze (Omake)
Quirze starts a class action law suit
Permalink Mark Unread

After his untimely death, waking up back in Axis is disorienting.  Concepts previously censored from his very memory (in order to comply with intervention budget rules cheaply) come streaming back in.

Also, his plan of "dying heroically" to guarantee he didn't get sent to a lower plane but still escape his obligations has some deeply obvious holes now that he actually has longer than half a round to think about it.  If it was deemed "breaking his promises" he could have lost his Law.  If it was deemed "suicidal" it could have counted towards Evil.  He can't remember the court precedent on how previous life actions vs. after life actions vs. latest life actions count for long deceased people that have been resurrected.  But even if he had time to think before his little "heroic" suicide charge and had read enough trial transcripts to know the relevant case law... in hindsight it seems the censorship of his memory would have likely blurred out key details.

It's frustrating how thorough the censorship was.  You would think given what wizardry and magic items ought to be capable of, stuff like "ubiquitous instant communications" wouldn't even need to be secret, but somehow the long term societal effects and the low-magic usage make it a topic deserving of thorough intervention budget restrictions and thus censorship.

Permalink Mark Unread

Quirze isn't a very disciplined person, but he's at least heard of a few frameworks for trying to objectively consider past actions.

Trying to trace back through his decisions and mistakes... it seems quite a few of his mistakes could plausibly be traced back to "censorship of key memories".  His largest mistake... the way he tried to reach out to other nobility... it seems like he had the mental reflex of "instant completely reliable communication", but not the actual memory of it, and without the memory of it his ability to correct this mental reflex was disrupted, contributing to his failure to successfully get messages to his archduke or other neighboring nobility.  There are a few other missteps he made on the material plane that plausibly originated from censorship in his memory disrupting meta cognition in key ways...

Permalink Mark Unread

The operation of resurrections is probably partially mandated by divine treaty.  Likewise, intervention budgets and the rules surrounding them are set deeply in a way Axis law has to bend around.  But... that doesn't mean he doesn't have cause for complaint possibly even legal damages.  Just because intervention budget forces Axis's hand on some issues doesn't free them from all possible indemnity to Quirze.  Axis and its many cities and districts are pretty good at covering their own ass, but things were vastly shaken up by prophecy breaking, with many resolution, verification, and risk-management mechanisms deeply damaged.  It's possible he has a legal case.

He has enough money to get a preliminary consultation, and the law firm he talks to agree the case is probable enough to succeed to work on a contingency fee basis.  They collect copies of Quirze's memories and begin collecting other evidence.

Permalink Mark Unread

As it turns out, with the massive jump in resurrections from the Archhealer's work, there is plausibly a number of cases like Quirze's.  Prior to prophecy breaking, it was straight forward to predict who had any chance at resurrection and keep them from any major secrets as well as manage their access to more minor secrets.  After... Axis had made do with memory alterations and rarely (and expensively) denying resurrections.  A rush job with a few side effects when they only have 1 to 10 minutes to cover up the secrets in the resurrectee's memory is acceptable.  But the Archhealer gave unusually large advance notice.  In principle, various mechanisms should have triggered to enable Axis to use this information to provide a more nuanced memory alteration/suppression/sealing in keeping with intervention budget rules on information (which honestly don't even make sense to Quirze in the first place, but that's why he has a lawyer), but it seems they didn't in Quirze's case and likely some similar cases.

Permalink Mark Unread

It looks like he'll have a decent size settlement (plus a bounty for being the first to report this issue) coming through soon... he could afford to up his partying budget substantially for a decent stretch of time or make a moderate boost to his party budget for quite a long time.  But... lots of charities and Good causes that take donations have been funding constrained recently due to some massive expensive secretive thing taking up all the money of everyone and anyone who was even slightly Good leaning and willing to take Abadar's endorsement on faith.  And Quirze just got a recent reminder of how bad the material plane is.

So he'll put his settlement money (and bounty) towards several of those causes.  There's a recently started niche crowdfunding effort by another formerly Chelish person aimed at Cheliax he can get behind!  Yeah, they really could use sex advice, along with a lot of other advice.  Quirze is seriously annoyed (and again kind of confused) at just how broad the restrictions on sending information the material plane are.

And actually... he'll be cutting his party budget to the bare minimum for the near feature, at least the next several decades, maybe longer.  

Permalink Mark Unread

But the cost of living can get really cheap in Axis, and a lots of pleasures are available for much cheaper than they are on the material (including social costs).  So he is back to enjoying himself soon enough.

Permalink Mark Unread

He keeps an eye on various statistics for quality of life on the material plane.  He adjust his charity budget allocations downward over time.  Improving material plane conditions aren't the real driver of this downward trend (and he's honest enough with himself to track this explicitly).  The real driver is the decreasing emotional valence of his brief second life.  He could get mental modifications to alter this towards a more "logical" temporal discounting or emotional weighting, but he's giving himself at least a few centuries before even thinking about touching anything like that.  And within a century, his donation are down to the nominal token level they were prior to his second life.

Permalink Mark Unread