We do this lazily, so the client predicts the topic slug. We have no way of predicting the internal discourse topic id.
So we have to get the topic solely based on the slug.
If we change the slug to be region-1-123 instead and that works I guess thats a solution. To clarify, the numbers 1 and 123 here has nothing to do with discourse and are generated elsewhere.
Or, if there is a way to get topic id by topic slug only that would be great in our case.