Basically every prior interaction we've had with a Kislevite about the Tzar has taken the form of 'Well, he fights, but he doesn't do a whole lot else'.
We should set our coin to deceiver and deny everything. In fact we even tell Boris that his father just happened to die before we got there. Just a little white lie to make him feel better.
No voting for another 11 hours.
Problem with that is we don't get our reward.
Revolt and revolution?
The Tsar is in no way innocent lmao. If nothing else, Kislev has legal slavery. Of course, it's not like Boris is actually going to change that, but I don't really have a problem with replacing an evil man with an evil man who is more aligned with our interests, considering how many lives it's likely to save.
We could probably borrow something from the Dwarves if we need to, nothing special like a Brass Orb or a crystal blade like the Skaven Sorceror had but probably a standard warplock weapon or maybe a Jezzail, something that's been sitting in a vault either as a trophy, because they haven't gotten around to deciding exactly how to dispose of it yet, or preserved just in case it could be useful to have kept around in the future.
Show me where in quest they have actual slavery.
It's hard to be loyal toward a man you've never met, who rules a country that you have been on for maybe a cumulative week, and whose subjects and own son seem to agree is dangerously negligent in the face of what is probably the next Everchosen.
I refuse to get any sort of personal benefit from this, ethically. If it's a Kislev-as-a-whole boon then it should really be something that benefits the Empire as a whole. Better relations, or better trade, or something similar.
That or it's The Changeling. But there's never any point in worrying about that because it's true of literally everyone we talk to, and we'd never be able to prove it either way.
Isn't Erengrad a prominent slave trading port? If that isn't quest canon I apologize, but the fact of the matter remains that an innocent king is an oxymoron.
Boris's opinion on all of this is already known, so him switching gears would not be at all surprising. And Mathilde will not disappear for a month. If we do this right we won't be missed at all.
Mathilde flutters across the entire breadth of the old world at the drop of a hat. Nobody expects to have her undivided attention, and she wanders around at random. Nobody is going to connect an allies visit to discussion a known issue, with the tragic death of the Tzar months later. Thousands of influential people wander around Kislev weekly.
To be honest I forgot about that. And while I certainly won't pretend that as long as he just doesn't own any slaves himself—which I'm not even sure is the case—he's not at fault or something, but I do have to wonder if he even *could* change that if he wanted to. The way Boris made it sound the current Tsar couldn't even swing a political push to reduce Chaos corruption, let alone something less existentially threatening like slavery.
There's a single line in Realm of the Ice Queen where slaves is mentioned in a list of goods traded at Erengrad.
That's why the best way to do this is in a way that no one thinks it was an assassination at all.
