The bells rang out, ending Seras de Valas’ time to speak or respond. Fourteen chairs scraped loudly against the stone floor. Their occupants would each file out and take the quarter-hour to gather themselves. Eric had to get to Aren within those 15 minutes. She and Quill disappeared around a corner.

  When Eric turned that corner just a few seconds later, the pair was nowhere to be seen.

  …

  “She has to be it!”, Quill exclaimed, “If we can just call her up later, then she can definitely help turn Mari or even Hothal or maybe even Aris!”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Aren replied, “We don’t know if she will be the same ace orator she was just now if she isn’t prepared for any given question. She might fall apart under the pressure, or give an obviously incorrect answer, or-”

  “Alright, I get it. She isn’t some magic cure-all. So, next speaker?”

  “Please don’t cut me off like that- and shouldn’t you know who they are?”

  “I know,” Quill answered, “They’re named Sydney Montas, no? An Iridawalin?”

  …

  Eric didn’t really know where Aren had stowed away to. He wasn’t quite out of options, though; brute force was always an option. He just had to check each and every room.

  He methodically moved down the hallway. Open, check, close, move on, repeat. He had an inkling of how long this might take.

  …

  “That’s right. She is monolingual, right?”

  “Yes,” Quill answered Aren, “She only speaks Qusi.”

  “That’s one of your languages, I believe?”, Aren asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s in Paula’s- Hothal’s translator- repertoire as well,” Quill informed her, “I can’t really twist her wording that badly; it is something that Paula would call me out on.”

  “She’s too honest for that?”, Aren rhetorically asked, “That’s too bad. We need every advantage here…”

  “Yeah. Do we have any plan of attack?”

  The door to their small side room suddenly opened.

  …

  “Hello… Eric?”, Aren started.

  “And hello to you as well,” Eric replied, “I’ve been looking for you two. We need to talk.” He had lost precious time looking for the pair; these remaining minutes had to be used carefully. And bluntly.

  “About what?”, questioned Quill.

  “Speaker Montas. And Speaker Macar, Speaker Maceles, and all the others,” Eric replied. He paused for a short moment before continuing. “Aren and I are the two diplomats most against a treaty. We’ve had our experiences with it. So,” he proposed, “Why not work together?”

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  …

  “Because you weren’t at Quill and my meeting with Trici this morning,” Aren wanted to reply. If their usually rival nations were willing to have their diplomats work together, even secretly, then there was some reason the Eric- and by extension Ferthusia- wasn’t included.

  Instead, Aren chose to answer his question more neutrally. “I’m not sure why we would want to. Why do you want to?”

  “Seras, Aren. I had a whole plan of attack drawn up with Tehran and Liara. We had researched her background, prepared questions, bribed someone to copy her speaker notes, timed ourselves responding to our own questions; we did pretty much everything you can think of,” Eric answered, “We made sure she’d- as the first speaker against a treaty- be able to do as well as possible as an orator. I didn’t use any of it. I only asked one basic introductory question. I let you use the fifteen minutes. There’s no doubt you’ve done the same as Tehran and Liara and I-”

  “I most certainly did not bribe anyone to copy her speaker notes,” Aren retorted.

  “Well, there’s no doubt we prepared for her similarly,” Eric said, “And I didn’t use any of my carefully prepared questions. I surrendered the time to you. If I didn’t, we would only hinder each other. We’re doing almost the same work twice. So at least for Sydney Montas’ speech, can we work out a plan of attack?”

  Eric clearly wasn’t going anywhere, so Aren relented. “Okay, what do you want me to do with you?”

  “I want to make sure that we won’t get in each other’s way. We should jointly plan for the questioning stage.”

  “That seems… mostly fine to me,” Aren replied. It wasn’t as invasive to Aren, Quill, and Trici’s tripartite alliance as she assumed it would be. “What are you planning to do?”

  “We didn’t really develop a highly-tuned plan of attack as we did for Seras de Valas,” Eric admitted. “Liara and I thought that we’d try to ask a complex or abstract question and whittle down any questioning time Speaker Montas has, especially since she’d be slowed down by translation,” he clarified, “That’s the most thought we put into her speech. It’s not like we had time to do a Seras-esque deep dive for each speaker.”

  “That’s unfortunate. I didn’t truly plan for Sydney Montas as I did for Seras either,” Aren replied, “I have a bit more of a plan than you, though; she is from the country’s far southeast, which is culturally Mexain. I thought that if she makes a talking point based on being a proponent for peace despite being Iridawalin, we could attack her credibility on that.”

  “That’s the most you came up with?”

  “Yeah…”

  “That’s still more than what I did.”

  “Aren, Eric?”, Quill, who had let the two discuss plans for quite a while as a bystander, piped up, “The bells will probably strike in a minute or two. We should get going.”

  “Okay,” replied Eric, “Your plan if it comes to be, then mine?”

  “That would work,” Aren responded, “We shouldn’t get in each other’s way like this.”

  “And we’re meeting up again after this, right?”

  “If you want, we can,” Aren said, “Are you good with that as well, Quill?”

  “It seems fine by me.”

  …

  Liara had surrendered in her search after ten minutes of fruitless door-checking. She had split off from Eric at the start of the period in between speakers so they’d cover more ground in their search for Aren and Quill, but luck had not been on her side.

  She strode back through the softly-lit stonewrought hallways. It took her only two or so minutes to return to where she’d left Eric. All of the room-checking had really slowed her down. It took her only a few seconds more to reach the grandiose doors that separated the hallway from the assembly floor. A pair of quietly conversing diplomats were already waiting there for the next speaker’s turn.

  Eric was neither.

  …

  He arrived with Aren and Quill. Good; even if Liara herself didn’t find them, he still did. He wasn’t quite the last of the ambassadors to reemerge from wherever they had stowed away to- that would be Rei Wathrel of Rathia- but he cut it close on time. The ever-anticipated bells tolled. The pair of diplomats who’d been talking pushed open the doors and the fourteen flooded into the chamber once again.

  Despite the small human deluge, Eric caught up to Liara. “I found them. Thank you for checking as well. We just might be able to work with that pair.”

  “Might?”

  “Aren’s being a bit oddly defensive- I don’t know why- about working with anyone besides Quill.”

  “Quill? He’s a good translator, but he’s far from the person you’d exclusively work with on geopolitical matters. That’s not exactly a translator’s purview.”

  “Says the translator. But I suppose that we should look a bit into that tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take notes. Neither I nor Aren nor you nor anyone else researched Sydney Montas thoroughly. She might throw us a screwball.”

  “Got it. Talk to you in seventy-five minutes, then.”

  Liara’s chair ground against a forming rut in the ground, followed by Eric’s a second or two later. Once all seven speakers and five translators- Paula and Quill would be translating for the Qusiphone, so they continued on past the table to greet Speaker Montas- settled into their seats. The jejune slate-grey-dressed woman got up to announce the recommencement of the hearings to the audience.