The champion seat split at eleven minutes past the hour, and nobody in the gallery had asked it to.
Seven separate cities had suspended the execution-capable portion of their own grants. The seat still held a full mandate and had lost the ability to apply half of it.
A national instrument that cannot execute its own mandate looks for a way to finish the job. The champion architecture had a rule for that, written eleven years earlier by an office nobody remembered.
It went searching the national certification registry for a substitute holder instead.
Vasa caught the search off the residual console feed and did not understand it at first.
The seat was not being withdrawn from Marek Sol at any point. It was looking for a second body to carry the portion he could no longer apply.
That rule had been written for a champion who died in the middle of a calamity. Nothing in its drafting had contemplated a champion whose contributing cities had suspended half his function.
