On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 10:30, charles_sumner at harvard.edu wrote: > It's important to remember that in all of > the books we've never seen a "normal" transition of the Orb from one ruler > to the next. We've seen, or seen close to two handing offs of the Orb, where one Emperor(ess) willingly stepped down and handed it off to the next House. This happened shortly before the beginning of FHYA, and we also know Zerika hands the Orb off to Norathar sometime before Paarfi publishes. And we sorta saw a 'normal' transition after the death of an Emperor(ess). After Tortaalik's death, the Orb did stop and process for a moment to determine who the next Emperor should be, and settled on Andron. It was only because Andron happened to be running a spell to rip the Orb away from the emperor (which became Andron) and give it to Andron that the transition became something other than normal. But before the explosive loop occured, we did see the Orb actually decide who the next Emperor should be. And based off of what we saw in _Yendi_, we do know that the considerations of the Dragon Council went into how the Orb chose.