He might think to himself something like "it'd mean they could sign letters 'yours'", but she's already doing that, and he's already Iomedae's.

(#8, in response to your 8th out of a received 8)

Venn,

I am somewhat lacking in a model of what precisely that would entail due to Examples in my environment being scarce and uninspiring. I suspect my guesses to be incorrect, impoverished, or both.

Please do not understand this as a rejection. I expect it is not. Rather I am finding that there are many steps to the process of executing on an Acceptance and I do not know how to perform all or perhaps any of them to an adequate Standard and must understand this before proceeding lest there be some kind of irreparable Error.

I await your return for a more complete Discussion being as this format is prone to loss, vulnerable to casual Espionage, and less fully featured in its Expressiveness.

- Blai

As she writes, Venn keeps moving.

She passes through the fort she'd been stationed out of, and catches up with Marit and Rowen and even has a bit of a heart-to-heart with Demonsbane, which is annoying and difficult but she's a third circle song-sorcerer and capable of doing difficult things. She tells Marit that she's asked Blai to marry her, and he congratulates her for having the courage to ask and says he hopes that it works out. (She'll tell Rowen on the way back.)

She learns that Tural and the twins are stationed there now, but they're currently helping repel a succubus-led assault on the Mendevian line. She leaves him a note with some tidbits and song fragments she wants his opinion on and telling him he'd better be here when she comes back through in two weeks.

It's warmer, down here. And the need for healing is much less, so she spends more of her song-magic lifting spirits and aiding with tiresome tasks.

And of course, she writes to Blai. 

She tells him stories from her life, when she was growing up in Absalom and lived with her mother, a bartender at one of the adventurer's pubs there. (Blai may form the impression, from several of these stories, that Venn has always had a certain propensity to find Events to observe and/or be a part of that predated her first song-sorcerer circle by years.)

She clearly loves Absalom, despite its many flaws, which she doesn't shy away from pointing out. She tells him she'd love to take him there, someday.

Venn reaches the end of Lastwall's section of the border having just sent her twelfth letter back. (She's not sure if it will make it to him before she will - she hasn't gotten any letters from him yet, but that could have happened if he took a while to write his reply, or one of their first letters just got lost or delayed, or something else.)

It's a bit of a relief, knowing she's more than halfway through her trip. (She misses him so badly.)

Blai's letters tend to be more or less strict replies to whatever he's most recently received from her, by default, but he branches out, sometimes: news about people-y stuff she would be tracking if she were around. A copy of a Law puzzle that's been going around regarding what inputs contribute to a regime's legitimacy including age, descent, various competence-at-governance benchmarks, etcetera. (It's a Law puzzle because there's prior art about when you have to cooperate with legitimate governments but they're trying to figure out how legitimate exactly. By this point in the correspondence there is no remaining hallmark of this having been started as deniable treason against either the present or previous Queen.)

And a strict reply to whatever he receives from her can feature, for example, biographical information in return for same. It's not exactly relevant to anything that he has sisters but she can have this information if it seems interesting to her. He doesn't say what happened to his physical chess set but he does mention having gotten one. He has no particular feelings about Dekarium but that's where he's from if it matters, and he's never been on a boat, and maybe she can piece something together from those facts in combination.

At Venn's first stop on the way back, she arrives at the fort as the sun is setting, and is greeted by the first letter.

She smiles with wet eyes, as she reads it. (She was sure he'd write to her! But she wasn't sure if maybe it'd gotten lost in the mail, or something had happened, or or or -)

...it's delightful how himself his written voice is. Not surprising, not at all, but delightful.

That night, she sleeps with the letter clutched against her chest, more soundly than she has in almost a month.

She gets the second letter. She laughs so hard she almost cries at "Apart from the Glabrezu..." 

(She misses him so much it hurts.)

Two forts over, the night before she'll (presumably) see Tural again, she gets the third letter, his response to her telling him she loved him. His response is so deeply him; her eyes water up.

(She touches the list of names, thinking about each of them, and prays to Shelyn.)

...there's suddenly a lot of gossip going around. She tucks the letter away and goes to Investigate.

"- mad Galtan nonsense."

"They ought to have asked Ser Cansellarion for help if they were that confused -"

"- the Inquisitor standing for it?"

"It might work out fine!"

"It's probably just a rumor, it's too outrageous and too soon."

...Galtan nonsense, huh? One of the archmages is Galtan. And his party has an Inquisitor...

She slides into a conversation. "So what are the archmages doing now?"

"You know how they tried, in Galt, to get people to vote on the law as though they were deciding what card game to play next, and then they all started killing each other and didn't stop till Cyprian stepped in? Cottonet wants to do the same thing to Cheliax and word has it he's got their new Queen going along with it."

"Is he not aware, that if you kill a Chelish person, they go to Hell -"

"I mean, some people think that's an adv- not me, some people though -"

She whistles. "I do assume that the archmages can probably babysit the Chelish people, if that's how they want to spend their year. But it's... certainly ambitious..."

From whence comes this news? Any salient details she can find?

"The outpost in Kenabres with all the diabolists in it got notice that its soldiers were subject to sor- sordid -"

"Sortition. Picking people at random. You can probably find a good Chelish person if you look all year but not like that."

"The notice said they were doing other things too, just, that's one of them."

"They shouldn't have that be one of them."

"Anyway, word got out, some diabolists are gossips."

...oh. Um.

Any word about the other ways they're picking people?

"There's nobles, obviously."

"Well that's not so bad, didn't they replace most of the nobles?"

"They're still nobles - no offense -"

"Oh, none taken, I don't count."

"And they're doing elections, because that'll work, diabolist popularity contest. And if there's a single one of those assholes in the whole benighted country who's managed to be a legitimate empowered Abadaran there's seats for those - they're not going to fill those, there were numbers and it is to laugh -"

"Abadar in particular? What, because of the inquisitor?"

"No, just, who else are they going to reach."

"That's not fair, I met an ex-Chelish Desnan once."

"The thing about those is that they would. Uh. Leave."

"...I'd expect you could get a Chelish Abadaran or two pretty straightforwardly, actually," Venn says, most of her brain offline at the moment. "They try and crush a lot of things out of the people there, sure, but it wasn't illegal, the way the worship of Chaotic or Good gods was, for a merchant to whisper a prayer to the god of trade. The kind of man who's deeply unpleasant and sees no problem with trading slaves, but considers it beneath him to deal unfairly? Abadar takes those, and Cheliax is big enough to sprout a few." 

(What is she doing. This isn't important.)

"Sure, but they're not going to get ten for Abadar. They've even got a money devil to stand in for him, I forget its name."

"Mammon."

"Thanks, now people are going to ask me why I know that forever. Why do you know that?"

"You're welcome."

Focus. "...They're picking empowered people by Gods with a quota? ...do we have the list?"  

"I think Sarge has it."

"Desnans were on the list, they might get some coming back over the border if they're self-sacrificing types."

"If they hear about it."

"There is that."

She goes looking for Sarge, somewhat less gracefully than usual. 

Sarge has the list! It's hand-copied, not Scrivened, with misspellings and "etceteras", like someone was given a couple of minutes to scratch down some notes about the original missive and they were in a hurry, but Venn can have a look at it. H.M. Aspexia III etc authorizes associates E. Cottonet etc to pull Chelish subjects incl. soldiers by sortition for the Constitutional Conv. being a gathering of these & & nobility, an elected each county, and -

- perhaps her eyes want to skip ahead to:

10 seats - Church of Iomedae

Blai...