"The pool of people who want to harass some delegate and have access to scrying is certainly smaller than the pool of people who will be angry with some delegate about something they said," she agrees. "So where do we source 600 hats of disguise to distribute with our invitations?"

"You would need a Greater for any reliability, and I am not paying to give everyone even the simple version. I'm not immediately sure how to do this affordably, but it's not that."

"It might be the most cost-effective way to do it, though. Even if we could rely on them all to be able to use a wand of alter self, it wouldn't last long enough to hold an entire debate while under its effects, and I'm not coming up with anything else that would do it. I suppose I could keep the debate hall cloaked in deeper darkness and everyone could deliver their speeches in pitch black, but I imagine that would make moderating the discussion unduly difficult for the president." She furrows her brow. "I had assumed the crown would be covering expenses. Catherine, do you know the state of the royal treasury? What sort of budget allocation are we looking at for the entire convention?"

"The crown is effectively relying on me and Elie to bankroll most aspects of the rebuilding process. A million gold - and that's what it would take, to commission that many hats, to say nothing of the delay it would impose - is equivalent to freeing around ten thousand souls from hell, right now, and I'd rather the ten thousand souls."

" - can we just give everyone completely nonmagical masks to wear? Is that actually any more unreliable than illusions?"

"...right, nonmagical disguises exist and are probably sufficient for most purposes. If they have any other identifying features it won't help them, but it's definitely better than nothing."

"It's also not that expensive to announce that my office will be scrying delegates at random for the next few decades and intervening in the case of suspicious injury or death. The bigger question is if we ought to anoymize the elected delegates and nobles – I think not."

"Why not? Are they any less likely to be at risk of reprisal? And wouldn't it give the rest of the delegates better cover if all of them were equally anonymous?"

"The whole point of having sortition delegates is that the sort of people who become nobles or run for office in Cheliax got there because they're good at bending the Asmodean system in their favor – or because we personally appointed them. Either way, they're there voluntarily and understand the risks. If they want power, they can stand to bear scrutiny."

"I see your point, but I still feel like the immediate effect of only requiring masks for those not attending voluntarily is to make the rest of the delegates ignore anything spoken by someone wearing a mask."

"Well, they'll do that anyway, they'll be commoners. Many of the nobles will recognize one another even if they are wearing masks."

"I don't think there's a good solution to that. Even though the nobles won't all know each other because half of them are recently resurrected, they can probably tell from accents and mannerisms even if they're all disguised... In Galt it was an issue and I expect it to be worse here, both because the Galtan nobility were culturally less snobbish about their status and because the assemblymen who weren't nobles weren't commoners. I think the fact that they were selected by lot is going to count against them, in a lot of eyes, and I don't think we're going to be able to change that. Even polymorphing them all wouldn't do it."

"They're still one third of the assembly, though, if we do the numbers Elie's way. There's no way to get the other delegates to take them as seriously, but they'll have enough votes by the numbers that they're at least worth trying to convince of things."

"...and, thinking on it, it's entirely possible that different factions will be equally likely to dismiss the recently resurrected nobles, or the nobles who are left over from last year, or the clerics who don't know their own churches' theology. People won't have the luxury of completely dismissing everyone they don't respect."

"If it's structured such that each faction will need at least some delegates from each other faction on board, that ameliorates things somewhat. Is it just going to be "delegates submit articles and then whichever ones get more ayes than nays go in the constitution", or do you have something more complicated in mind? I've no idea how the one in Galt was structured."

"I'm not sure we ought to do exactly what we did in Galt, all things considered, but it wasn't like that. We had a smaller committee with representatives from each estate to write the thing – and then, if I remember correctly, there was something of general revolt, and then another committee – but they did manage to draw up a draft. Of course, we knew what the major debates were going to be from the beginning; the powers of the monarchy and who should have the franchise and so on."

"I hardly think we need to declare a particular structure up front, especially as most of us won't be participating. In Galt the convention chose to create a smaller draft committee. If our convention wants a different structure - proposing points in full session or having four committees each with their competing drafts or something else entirely - that seems fine to me? I think the only structural questions we have any business opining on are things like - what rules of order is Élie going to be enforcing, since he won't and shouldn't rule by decree."

"That sounds difficult and boring, although I recognize that as we've foisted the responsibility off on Élie we should probably have opinions if it's helpful to him. I suppose you'll at least be tasked with preventing them from interfering with one another. I'm more interested in opinions on transport logistics for delegates, although I don't know whether that needs to be decided in this meeting at all."

"Dear gods, you can't possibly expect me to have an opinion on rules of order. Old Cheliax had parliament. Unless it's egregious, we'll do what they did." 

"All right. In that case we go ahead with attempting a religious survey of limited parts of the Chelish population and assign cleric spots accordingly, we release instructions for how each county is to elect a representative, we send out invitations to the nobles, the hellknight orders, the colleges, and the druids, and I go over the Chelish school records, tax records, and records of enslaved persons to generate two hundred sortition candidates. I propose that Ione and I - and Elie, I suppose - personally collect the sortition delegates and teleport them to Westcrown, in order to prevent half of them from fleeing or being murdered on the roads. We can give both the delegates and the families fifty gold for the inconvenience, and assign someone to assist them with finding lodging in Westcrown."

"...and that Elie set a date for the convention, keeping in mind that it is already Neth and that the bulk of our sortition candidates will be concerned about missing the planting season if we draw this out into spring."

"I think we should do as much as we reasonably can to encourage their goodwill, which could mean trying to finish the elections in time to hold the convention before the planting, or more likely delaying the actual convention until summer." 

"Let's do summer, if no one minds. This is a horrible amount of record keeping to have assigned ourselves, and none of these people have ever run an election before. First of Sarenith?"

"I think we can manage that."