A parade of wind-up clockwork puffins tottered precariously through the streets of RhyDin, bearing tiny rolled-up letters in their beaks. Fourteen were destroyed en route to their destination by carriages, automobiles, clumsy humanoid feet, and one rabid wyvern; sixteen went to the Red Dragon Inn, each of those letters explicitly marked For Ms. Shylah Vulpecula, leaving most of the copies out in the open, and tucking a few away inside full ale casks, while one of the puffins perished depositing its letter in the Stew; and two hundred and seventeen of them descended on the neighborhood of Elfhame, leaving the letters on guest room pillows at the grand hotel called The Empress, pasted to the inside of all the wine glasses at Beyond the Veil, and pinned with dinosaur-themed magnets to the steel doors of the Royal Rabble Club.
An additional forty-four puffins distributed the letters in locations throughout the city so incredibly varied they would best be described as "miscellaneous," one example being the inside of a tea bag behind the counter at Teas 'N Tomes.
The letters read as follows:
Dear Ms. Vulpecula,
Thank you for your concise yet incisive question!
This may make me sound like a descriptivist, but I believe the most important job of a governor can be extrapolated from the language: it is a governor's job to govern, and to govern is to serve the needs of the people who have formed the government and fall under its jurisdiction — in this case, anyone who resides in RhyDin.
But people's needs are sundry and they vary. I cannot pick one as the most important, at least not without frequent analysis and reconsideration, performed accurately but also quickly so that the most important matters do not change by the time a governor has determined the preceding priority. The most important job of the governor, then, is to be considerate in how they govern, serving the needs of the people, evaluating the most pressing concerns and giving them the attention they deserve, yet without neglecting other needs that are important in their own right and may change without warning.
You might be saying to yourself that such a job must require quite a lot of cleverness. You might also be asking yourself (if you do not know me very well) if I have the cleverness required for the job. The easiest way to reassure you would be to demonstrate how I have matched my wits against a known quantity. Considering her appetite for the spotlight, I believe Jewell Ravenlock qualifies as "known," and her various titles and holdings might qualify her as "clever" under an exceedingly liberal definition of the term.
Did you know that Jewell is an accomplished duelist' And yet armed only with a pair of water guns, I stole an industrial-strength focusing crystal under heavy guard from the G.A.M.E. workshop, defeated Jewell in single combat, and successfully made my escape. How could I manage such a feat against such an accomplished fighter? The only logical conclusion is that I outwitted her!
I also punched her in the face.
Jewell was clever enough to recognize the limitless potential I possess, though not clever enough to realize the perfectly legitimate and safe scientific experiment I was running posed no significant danger to anyone, and joined a band of Luddites in attempting to disrupt it. (As governor, I promise to be considerate about the fact that bright lights and non-monosyllabic words may confuse certain people, as evidenced in this particular situation.) While she and her fellow loom-smashing lummoxes clapped me in irons for the sin of demonstrating cleverness too far beyond their own, I designed my experiment to complete itself without my constant presence, and the valuable knowledge gained is being put to good use to this day.
To her credit, Jewell was smart enough to imprison me in the Tower of Gulshan, which was explicitly designed to hold people who are extraordinarily clever, often having mastery over magic and other powers suppressed by the prison's various internal and external defenses. However, I have no magical talent to suppress, and my true talent — my mind — was free to devise an escape plan, which I successfully enacted with an incredible level of collateral damage to the prison. Jewell, who is less clever and had previously sided with Luddites, must have assumed that all things that escaped her commendable (in a way) but overall rudimentary intellect must have been "magic," and failed to account for any of the many devious means of escape available to me.
But do not judge her too harshly for her simple performance in the presence of a superior mind. It is clear she at least acknowledges she has been bested and is not up to many of the great things I am capable of: after all, only one of our names is on the ballot.
Though we must account for the possibility that she was frightened away by the prospect of the ballot machines.
Your civic servant,
Evelyn Augusta Bell, Ph.D.
