Keltham: Keltham will actually activate the glibness pin, for this, because while Fe-Anar probably doesn't count, Merenre and Ismat sound like people to whom Asmodia's last advice may apply.

Keltham: Here's Keltham, looking notably more neutral than yesterday.

Ismat Alnahhat: "Good morning! I'm Ismat, I believe you've met my husband and his father already though."

Keltham: "Keltham out of dath ilan.  Not my best morning, but any morning you walk away from is a good one, to pervert an old saying.  Salutations Ismat, greetings Merenre, hi Fe-Anar did you already tag them with Baseline?"

Prince Fe-Anar: "I did! They were not paralyzed, awed, and profoundly distracted by the magnitude of the design effort at all. Don't have children, they'll only disappoint you.[humorous]."

Merenre: "It's interesting, but I'll confess not really a priority, compared to other features of dath ilan like how it doesn't have the plague."

Keltham: "It'll be either a virus or a bacterium, and if you learn how to make vaccines you can plausibly shut it down.  Cheliax seemed to think that would cause a population explosion and cities would get more crowded until the level of epidemics went back into equilibrium, unless I could develop contraception, which would have to be usable by people of Intelligence 7, or I could develop better roads to enable fewer less-crowded cities."

"Aside Fe-Anar, that was Very Serious intonation, endaside."

Merenre: "It'll cause a population increase, but on a pretty long timescale, I'd think, relative to how fast a lot of things are going to change if spellsilver's lots cheaper. I think Cheliax may have been telling you that because they're Evil."

Keltham: "Possibly.  You'd think Cheliax would be interested in anything that made them stronger in the short-term, if they were thinking that short-term themselves... well, it's possible they'd have asked for anti-plague measures next, we were prioritizing spellsilver."

"You've called this meeting, have you got an agenda?"

Merenre: "I really just wanted to meet you, and to introduce you to Ismat, who may actually be the most important person here if spellsilver gets cheaper, as she's developed a method of magic item making which doesn't require the creator to be a spellcaster themselves."

Ismat Alnahhat: "Mm-hm! Cheliax has wizards but we've got me. Not many of me trained up yet though. I might have to pivot away from doing my own crafting if I need to be working on teaching a class of fifty."

Keltham: "And here I thought the plot was going to call for me somehow matching Cheliax despite their purportedly vastly greater number of wizards."

"My -"

"Carissa Sevar developed a method of speeding the production of +2 and +4 headbands, like an Armillary Amulet except 2-3 times as effective because specialized, made up of individual pieces speeding up individual stages of the process so that a dozen different wizards can work on them in parallel while trading the speed boosters amongst each other.  Now that she's developed those, presumably other wizards can make them too, though they'd need higher Spellcraft than the third-circle wizards she was boosting.  It roughly quadruples their working speed, as of the prototypes.  Carissa was fourth-circle but has Spellcraft at about seventh-circle or so, she can use spellsilver from seven feet away if that means anything to people who aren't me."

"Ismat, what's your method?  And is Carissa's boosting technology likely to apply to it, or do we just have to take a different route and scale it to hugely more people?"

Ismat Alnahhat: "I can only do jewelry, specifically, I studied the ways jewelry differs before and after being enchanted back when I did blanks for casters to have at. I - don't see an obvious reason why you couldn't divvy up the work on a pin or an earring like that? The items would take slots, but you could just have a specialized crafting getup, half what I'm wearing is crafting-aimed already." She's wearing quite a lot of jewelry.

Keltham: "With wizards doing it, Carissa thought it wasn't effective to have multiple wizards working on the same item, so a single wizard works on all stages of the item, but they trade off stage-assisting items among each other as they individually reach particular stages of their work on the headband.  Each wizard only uses one assisting item at a time."

"Does your method allow nonwizards to specialize in a single aspect of a headband and move from headband to headband in the process of assembly, so that they can master that single stage of item crafting?  How does speed compare to nonwizards, are there Intelligence requirements, are there math requirements, does the person have to go through a stage of learning to sense magic the same as if they were learning to construct a spell scaffold?"

Ismat Alnahhat: Ismat can go on about the process she uses and teaches! Her ability to scale up has been inconvenienced by moving into the Black Dome - she can craft in it, it didn't take that long to readjust, but it makes the commute between home and storefront awfully inconvenient for her or her employees, whoever's traveling. But she has a list of things that might be amenable to more optimization pressure, and can rattle off the story of how she started making blanks for casters and tried watching them when they started working on the blanks to see if there were any steps she could simplify for them, and so on and so forth.

Keltham: ...it probably beats trying to match Cheliax's number of wizards using Osirion's number of wizards.  The human-learning delay time on scaling this manufacturing process sounds nontrivial, but they can parallelize that with getting spellsilver manufacture set up in Osirion at all.

Merenre is the advisor to the Pharaoh on the Keltham situation.  If they don't mind Keltham asking, what is the Keltham situation?

Merenre: "The Pharaoh is intended to give Abadar what the once-mortal gods have - an aspect which can comprehend and communicate directly with mortals, when it's worth the cost. Theologically speaking, we teach that the Pharaoh is Abadar, as much as any facet of a god is that god - a very specialized facet, obviously, because this particular facet is run on a mortal mind, and sometimes it's more aspirational than concrete, but the idea is that Abadar having the capacities of the mortal gods is very valuable both to Him and to us. 

As such, we learned three months ago that a mortal in Chelish custody was a very new soul with impressive knowledge and comprehension of Abadar's domain and what He cares about, a comprehension Abadar didn't think He'd seen among mortals before, and that Abadar had paid Asmodeus to not mind control that mortal and to let that mortal leave freely, and very shortly after that that a godwar had started over that mortal. The Pharaoh was subject to the interdict, as an aspect of Abadar, and while we did run a small department which could in theory have learned of your presence in Osirion via a non-Abadar route and enabled us to try an extraction, they didn't get there through information that wasn't downstream of any divine communication.

At the same time, we got a spy report out of Cheliax that was, frankly, very confusing and that we assumed was mostly made up. The claim was made that if anyone in the Palace in Egorian had anything good happen to them, a girl with vivid pink hair would show up and offer them cake. - this was among many other claims, like that every devil in Hell knew the name of the Project Lawful girls, and that Project Lawful turned people into girls, and that Project Lawful was a time travel project to convert Taldor to Asmodeanism thousands of years ago, that were similarly not credible. But the cake one was cheap to test, so we tested it. Send someone whose wife was imminently expecting a baby to an inn just outside the palace, to celebrate. Cake Girl indeed showed up, at the appointed time. - we intended to kidnap her and offer her money to defect. She was a powerful spellcaster, and shrugged that off, and ate the cake with us, and left. 

At that point we gave all the rumors of Project Lawful substantially more credence. At the same time, bidding markets in Hell were sending a specific set of souls up to extraordinary prices. We looked into it. We pieced together much of what was going on - though the group that had no knowledge of Abadar's interests here did not have enough information to conclude this was worth provoking a war with Cheliax over, and recommended against.

Abadar communicates mostly with the pharaoh. He can do so more cheaply, and there are precisions to His visions which it's best for the pharaoh to have firsthand. But one thing Abadar can do relatively cheaply, and convey relatively cheaply, is see markets. So He's been keeping me updated with the bid-ask spreads from the project's public-to-you and secret-from-you prediction markets, and I've been responsible for figuring out everything happening on Project Lawful and preparing Osirion for the time when you'd learn the truth and leave."

Keltham: "...secret-from-me prediction markets?  I don't know whether to be proud or annoyed, and will maybe delay that decision pending hearing about what secret prediction markets."

Merenre: "The one that saw the most movement was about which girl would be the first whose mind or loyalty breaks."

Keltham: "Did it ever pay out?"

Merenre: "Twice. Pilar and Peranza."

Keltham: Keltham draws, heavily, on the glibness, and even so, knows it probably doesn't look quite right.

"I doubt it succeeds, especially since they'd know this was a very likely time window.  But I request a scry, regular version fine, on Peranza, at the government's convenience."

"Unless you already know what really happened to her."  She - did seem to - Peranza was together enough to tell Keltham goodbye, even if that was scripted for her - or was that another illusion?  Illusion according to this level of reality, that is.  Or Dominate Person - would there have been signs Keltham could see, if Dominate Person was being used on Peranza - according to this level of reality -

Merenre: "We've tried scrying her several times since the market resolved and have been unable to see anything. Our best guess is that she was executed and is in Hell; the other major possibility is that she was petrified and stashed in an unscryable location. Her soul changed hands in Dis for about a hundredth of what it was purchased for, which seems more consistent with 'she was in Hell and worth less than expected' than that much market movement off some communication from Golarion about the betrayal, but we don't know for sure, and can't rule out that Hell has noticed Abadar can see them when they try using markets and is trying to feed us false information."

Keltham: "Snack Service said not to - jump to conclusions, take actions, I haven't reviewed exact words - until I knew the real story about Peranza including a fact that only one person there knew enough to deduce. I check that this person was not an Osirian who promptly solved the riddle and reported to you."

Merenre: "It was not."

Keltham: His employees were being mindread, which mostly rules out only one of them having access to a key fact.  Unless Security read it from them and didn't propagate it to anyone else there, including Abrogail or Aspexia.  That's possible but a hit to probability.

Obvious candidates for the one person:  Abrogail, Aspexia Rugatonn, Pilar via Snack-Service-thought-protection, that monk of Irori.

"Does Osirion have plans, thoughts, about what happens from here?  I suppose as protagonist, 'protagonist', I could try to make all of those decisions myself, but I am still unfamiliar with nonfake 'geopolitics'," a word with no Baseline analogue.  "In a more realistic setting you'd've made your own plans about what to do after I arrived, if you've had three months to plan."

Merenre: "The impression of the away team that got you was that you're in pretty bad shape and we should plausibly give you weeks or months of recovery time, even in light of the stakes. Ione's agreed to teach some people Prestidigitation chemistry. We'll still end up behind Cheliax on that front, because we have many fewer wizards, but we can make the gap narrower, and I think Cheliax is in the long run going to run into some barriers to trying to develop themselves. This might change if our spies in Cheliax indicate they're making more progress than we thought they could. 

We're arranging to have groups of researchers from other countries immigrate to pick up the Prestidigitation techniques themselves, negotiating details with Ione now, so that the set of free people working on this is larger than Cheliax's, though we're trying to do that very quietly right now, so as not to provoke a countermove. 

Our best guess about what's going to happen is that Cheliax is going to be faster to start benefitting from very very cheap spellsilver, because they had three months' head start, and they'll have a tough call to make soon about whether to try to leverage an eroding initial advantage into some conquest or into being harder for the rest of the world to roll over. I don't know how they'll navigate that. Going to war with us is a reasonably likely possibility; so is withdrawing from the Worldwound so the rest of the world has to scramble to recommit forces we don't really have and logistics networks we haven't built there. Iomedae's been trying to prepare for that possibility; Her Church hasn't actually told us what specifically the plan is, but I think there are several of them and it's not a one-stroke winning move for Cheliax even if it'll be a very costly problem. 

In the longer run, once you've recovered, we want to pay you to improve our curriculum for teaching the principles of Law to the general public and to teach us on disease control and crop yields and textile manufacture and economics and whatever else people want to pay you the most to teach because it seems the most valuable."

Keltham: "Taking weeks or months to finish updating would lack dignity... that word doesn't have any Taldane translation but maybe 'pride', 'dignity', the part of your self-image where you think you're not completely unskilled at Law-aspiring thought and you want to live up to the expectations you have of yourself.  I'll be aiming for tomorrow.  Maybe day after tomorrow since I also have to orient to Golarion as it appears on this layer of reality."  Part of Keltham is tired, now, and would just as soon speedrun whatever part of the game this is.

Ismat Alnahhat: "If you don't wake up the day after tomorrow all better are you going to have a fit about that?"

Keltham: "That, too, would lack dignity.  If I'm still not functional the day after tomorrow I will accept that situation, assess that situation, and figure out what to do with that situation."

Merenre: "Well, I'm not going to try to talk you into taking longer than you need, but I don't think your help's going to be that much less valuable to us in a month compared to the day after tomorrow."

Keltham: "I would not assume that to be the case.  Cheliax is making an assembly line - outside-item-assisted way of rapidly producing - intelligence headbands, currently at the +4 level, because that is how they turn spellsilver into having even more and better wizards.  If they can master enough Law to get started on the invention of science and technology in general, ways of understanding and manipulating the world, then, no, you may not really have a month."

"I do not think, at this point, that you move quietly for fear of provoking a countermove.  I think you call together every Lawful or Good country in the world, have them send all of their brightest people here or to a facility located in neutral ground - possibly inside the Ostenso nonintervention zone, if the god who originally set that up can force Cheliax to agree to that.  Intelligence 19 teenagers wearing +6 intelligence headbands, brilliant accomplished researchers who are not past their useful working lifespans."

"Cheliax didn't allocate +6 intelligence headbands, I think, because that level of resource commitment would've tipped me off that I had the political pull to demand - scries on other countries, Greater Teleports - as I eventually did.  Though, to be clear, that was mostly me being stupid.  What I should've done shortly after the supposed godwar was demand that Cheliax fill a bag of holding with the unfiltered contents of a Chelish library.  I mean, I did not know, fundamentally, that I was facing a Conspiracy on a level where it would be defeated by a test like that, but - it would have ruled out some Conspiracies and that is what I should have -"

"Anyways.  I do not need to be fully functional to do politics, 'politics'.  That does not require my full intellect the same way as teaching epistemology, Law-inspired skill of figuring out what's true.  If you're not the one making decisions like these, I should talk to whoever is, and get things rolling on the criticalpath, today.  Uh, criticalpath, the path through the graph, connected lines, with the greatest minimum time to complete, such that the time to complete the criticalpath is the time to complete the whole project."

Merenre: "Until we've learned how to make spellsilver cheaply, we cannot afford to give anyone a +6 intelligence headband. We certainly can ask countries to send talented researchers here to learn from Ione, which is what I just explained we have done, though none of them have native intelligence 19, obviously."

Keltham: "This is not really a situation where you get to scrape up whatever resources you can 'afford' and hope you win with those.  'Reality doesn't care what you afford.'"  (It rhymes and scans perfectly in Baseline, in the way of Central Cheating Poetry.)

"Asmodia gained her first apprehension of the Law by borrowing Aspexia Rugatonn's headband for two hours while Rugatonn was getting two hours of sleep, if I'm not - mixing up those stories the wrong way, I haven't checked transcripts - anyways, do you have any artifact headbands of your own that you can let people borrow for two hours, to see if they can gain a first apprehension that way?"

"Though - now that I say it - Asmodia must have been a unique success case who they could never duplicate again.  I can't imagine that one experiment working out great for them, and then they never try it on anybody else?  Though Asmodia also said she was disloyal and they knew that, so maybe it does work and they didn't try it again for that reason -"

"Anyways, do you have an artifact headband that people can borrow for two hours while the usual owner is sleeping?"

Merenre: "Nefreti might. I'll ask her, though I'd expect her to have already volunteered any help she feels like offering. I do think that drinking her wine ought to be helpful to people for this; it doesn't do precisely the same thing as a headband, but it improves performance on tasks that require Intelligence and Wisdom."

Ismat Alnahhat: "The wine works for me, I usually have some every day."

Keltham: "How long does it last?  How much does it cost?  Does it stack with headbands or the spellform enhancements?  Is there any quantitative way of comparing the effect to headbands?"

Ismat Alnahhat: "Nefreti's lasts more than three hours, it stacks with headbands - or whatever other enhancement, mine are the earrings - but I wouldn't expect it to stack with something that just made you better at a particular skill unless it did it indirectly like my jeweler's loupe."

Merenre: "It's one gold for a drink, if I recall. The general principle is that two things that enhance Intelligence won't stack with each other, but something that enhances Intelligence and something that enhances an intangible nearby thing, like the wine does, or enhances - luck, ease, like Ismat's loupe -- do. Of course, Cheliax has access to the wine too, this isn't a relative advantage, though I think it'd be much more inconvenient for them to send people to Osirion to buy it and if they have their own casters make it it'll be weaker. The spell isn't hard to cast but the effects are tiny if it's not someone as powerful as Nefreti casting it. 

The obvious way to compare to a headband would be to ask people drinking the wine how much more they'd pay if it worked like a headband, but I don't know anyone to have tried that."

Keltham: "Not really cheap, but yes, that sounds like potentially the sort of thing we should be stacking for everyone.  Except possibly myself, because Nefreti Clepati is not allowed to help me in any way, theoretically, so I'm not going to be drinking her wine, she might stop making it."

"I'll push again on talking with the planners and decisionmakers on this, today.  Looking back, my behavior in Cheliax did not make sense, even on its own terms, because I felt embarrassed about pushing harder on issues like that.  And there's aspects of this that you may or may not have thought about, for example, that it will probably be to our advantage to buy a large number of intelligence headbands from Cheliax."

Ismat Alnahhat: "Can't you just ask if you drinking the wine will make her stop making it or not? - I don't think you can get an etiquette waiver for the pharaoh."

Keltham: "Sure, I could try asking if I'm visiting Ione anyways, which is also something I was thinking of trying to do today."

"I've been advised that the pharaoh has sufficiently good augmented reading-people skills that it verges on Detect Thoughts.  If that's true, it sounds like I should in any case not be meeting him in person and just - working through the equivalent of whatever you have for a text channel around here, like transcribing words that get sent back and forth after a short time delay."

Ismat Alnahhat: "I'm not sure why you don't want him to get a look at you, but sure, I guess writing's sort of like an etiquette waiver, you could go through - hm, not his wives, his husband maybe or one of the advisors."

Merenre: "I actually think it'd be really valuable for you to meet and speak to the Pharaoh. The fact a Chelish person tried to warn you off it makes me think more strongly it's a good idea, honestly. Do you have a price in mind to be comfortable speaking to him directly?"

Keltham: "Asmodia stated under Osirion-supervised truthspell that she wasn't loyal to Cheliax.  And I do not want my mind read anymore.  I am happy to communicate with people in ways that don't result in my private state of mind being revealed.  We can pass each other notes under a doorframe."

Merenre: "I don't know what Asmodia's deal is but I do not think she was acting in your sincere best interests when she claimed to you that the Pharaoh has 'sufficiently good augmented reading-people skills that it verges on Detect Thoughts'. He's hard to lie to even without Abadar's Truthtelling up, but I think there's a pretty dramatic difference, morally and pragmatically, between 'can generally notice being lied to/misled' and 'has effectively Detect Thoughts'. Lots of people in Cheliax also have spectacular Sense Motive. 

If not for my concern that Cheliax told Asmodia this for some reason, or that whatever actor she serves in this drama doesn't share our interests, I wouldn't really have any concerns about you communicating with the pharaoh only in writing, though, so we can start with that."

Keltham: "All right.  And I probably should get started on talking to people."

"I did not really have this situation in mind when I built my contract with Cheliax but I did put in provisions related to us parting ways.  They need to account for the spellsilver they refine as income to the Project, they need to account for the headbands they build as if they were being sold to the Chelish government, and the defense against them understating that price is that I can buy those same goods from them at the price they state.  Modulo various other provisions, they can always keep at least half of it for themselves, they can package up goods and price the package to prevent me from adversarially sniping fairly priced goods that were key to a larger supply chain, etcetera etcetera."

"The point being, unless there's provisions in there with effects I do not understand, as your own legal experts might know about, either Cheliax has to cause a lot of income to accrue to the Project in terms of selling themselves spellsilver and headbands, some of which I can withdraw for myself via the Project repurchasing some of my shares, or they may try underpricing them, and in that case we come in and buy half of it from them.  I'm trying to think of whether I'm sufficiently mad at them that we'd come in and buy half of their production even if they do fairly price it to the Project, just to deny those resources to Cheliax.  But I'd just as soon let them make the first asshole move on Project contract treatment, so that I can tear into them using other provisions with a clear conscience."

"Assuming, of course, that Carissa Sevar does not successfully model my thinking that way."

"It doesn't really seem like the sort of thing that can wait or that requires me to be at full brainpower."

Merenre: "That makes sense. We can get you some lawyers with expertise with Cheliax to look at the contract in more detail now that they can ask you questions, and figure out how they might try cheating you."

Keltham: "How did you already have a copy of - because Abadar.  Right.  Well, if your lawyers didn't catch anything on a first pass that substantially ups my probability that we can get some mileage here."

"Merenre, I'm sorry to keep pushing on this, but I need to know my next step for being with people in a specific place and time to plot the next iteration of... Project Lawful Neutral?  If I'm not supposed to talk to you about that, then I need to know who to talk to and where to find them.  I didn't push like this in some conversations in Cheliax, and that, in retrospect, was an error."

Merenre: "The next step is asking Ione, Nefreti's representatives, and the representatives of the allied countries that are sending people here to learn from Ione when they can make it here for an emergency meeting. Many of them will need to arrange a teleport, but I'd expect we can plan something for tomorrow."

Keltham: "Are all of those allied representatives just - putting themselves into the presence of the Pharaoh's Sense Motive?  Do they have reading-blocking skills or do they just not care?"

Ismat Alnahhat: "He mostly just uses this ability to give people good presents. And I'm pretty sure it's still my brother and not the pharaoh coaching Merenre on what to get me for my birthday, so he doesn't even do that obsessively."

Keltham: "Sorry, I still have trouble reading Osirian intonations.  Fe-Anar, that was a joke not a literally true statement right?"

Prince Fe-Anar: "No, that's true, measuring by instances of use he mostly uses his uncanny people skill to give out presents.  And matchmake. See, if you have a reputation for being impossible to lie to, then people mostly don't try."

Keltham: "...that's really not what I would expect to be true about somebody running a country, the way that countries work in Golarion.  I would expect the Pharaoh to be meeting with representatives of foreign countries and determining their intentions.  Or is the Pharaoh just not - the analogue of the Chief Executive of Civilization, but more like - the old retired executive who serves as an advisor to somebody else?"

Merenre: "There's a ruling council for day to day management of the country, but He absolutely does receive representatives of foreign countries, and use His impressive sensibilities to pick out thoughtful and sometimes pointed presents for them."

Prince Fe-Anar: "I too think he should get a real job.[Kind of serious but not at all reflecting a consensus position.]"

Merenre: "Many people in Golarion have good Sense Motive. It is very usual to go out of your way to avoid being around them if you are a random person who doesn't want to be caught up in important doings, but no one would send a diplomatic representative who felt uncomfortable being seen by someone with particularly good Sense Motive."

Keltham: "Problem being, I am not a 'diplomatic' representative, and I have not learned whatever defenses they have."

"Is the trans-regional meeting to pull together a new Project a matter for the management committee, or one where I need to worry about staying out of totally-not-mindreading range of the Pharaoh?"

Merenre: "If you think this is a matter of such overriding importance that never mind whether we'll default on our debts in six months we should pour everything we have into it, then the Pharaoh will need to be present."

Keltham: "I hadn't particularly modeled that as a live option for clerics of Abadar.  Does Abadar not just immediately decleric you if you borrow money you're not planning to pay back?"

Merenre: "I imagine He would. Also it'd cause immense longlasting harm to the financial system and to Osirion, and a lot of people would starve to death. That's why the Pharaoh needs to be in the room for discussions about taking emergency measures - because no one else has the right to weigh those tradeoffs."

Keltham: "I will see what I can do about avoiding tradeoffs like that, and would mostly expect to succeed if other countries in Golarion are also taking this at all seriously.  Though it won't particularly help credibility, or so I imagine, if I have to hide behind a door and pass notes around - are the representatives likely to have high Sense Motive?  Is there no standard defense against this thing?"

Merenre: "The standard defense against people having good Sense Motive is to be good at concealing your facial expressions. The pharaoh could promise not to take any actions based off inferences He makes from looking at you?"

Keltham: "I'd buy that from Iomedae.  I'd buy that from a Keeper.  If the Pharaoh is such that he has that for sale, I'm frankly impressed."

Merenre: "He's an aspect of Abadar. That's the whole point of everything we're doing, as this country, to be able to wield Law like the gods do while not being subject to the constraints the gods are."

Keltham: "How does the aspect thing work, exactly?  Did Abadar overwrite part of the pharaoh with better math the way Nethys is said to accidentally overwrite people?  Because I thought that the whole point of this was that my Civilization knew things about Law that Abadar otherwise had no way of communicating.  Is the pharaoh, like, 10% made out of Abadar, 1%, does he have a particular new brain organ that does a thing..."

Merenre: "None of those, he's just selected based on having the best grasp of how to align Himself with Abadar, and then communicates with other shards of Abadar as much as that's permitted, and it's permitted more as He becomes more shaped like part of Abadar. ....I would also have confidence in Aspexia Rugatonn with this commitment, if that's a helpful comparison."

Keltham: "Not as much as one might hope.  I would not feel particularly comfortable right now with Aspexia Rugatonn using a Detect Thoughts item on me but promising not to use the knowledge for anything, even assuming that she otherwise keeps her compacts.  There would be, for example, the question of what happens if Abrogail turns around and reads her, or Asmodeus, for that matter."

"But I'll take it under advisement.  If there was some way for him to not read me in the first place it would be a lot more helpful."

Merenre: "You could....wear a veil?"

Keltham: "Body language.  Tone of voice."

"Separate topic.  How do you think I am on safely leaving the Black Dome, for example to visit the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye?"

Merenre: "We can send you with security that ought to be adequate to get you to safety from most possible attackers. There's nothing we can do if Achaekek shows up or something. In combination with an augury, I think we can be looking at less than a one in a hundred chance of something horrible happening, but it's hard to get it down much lower than that."

Keltham: "Achaekek?"

Merenre: "A powerful servant of the gods which kills those who aspire to divinity, supposedly. It was much scarier before prophecy broke, because it'd just occasionally show up, eat a helpless child who apparently had a great destiny."

Keltham: Was he that obvious?  Probably yes.  There's all kinds of possible reasons why somebody in a palace library would ask a bunch of questions about the Starstone, but possibility isn't the same as probability.

"And people wonder why I don't want anyone reading my mind," Keltham doesn't say, because maybe it's a bluff.

"I suppose that could be part of the reason why Aroden put up defenses around the Starstone, though it'd be pretty impressive if that could keep a god out," Keltham says instead.  "I probably want to visit Ione today, I don't actually see the danger diminishing with time, as other countries hear about my being here.  How do I set that up?"

He's also been advised to visit Sothis's slave markets quickly before they can clean them up.  But it doesn't seem a wise thing to do to his brain, and - it does not necessarily - it may not, at this point, affect any of Keltham's other decisions, what kind of slavery exists in Osirion.

Merenre: "Let me speak to the Palace guard. I expect they can escort you any time starting twenty minutes from now."

Keltham: "...if I asked for the ability to wander around Sothis, stop in at a bookseller or two, would the Palace guard consider that also feasible?"

Merenre: "I don't think that adds much to the risk, and it is of course your risk to take."

Keltham: "I'll probably do that then.  But I should maybe get an explanation of the whole weird treatment of women thing, before I set out, in case I accidentally end up married to Nefreti Clepati."

"I apologize, but something about this conversation seems to be very not good for me.  Not sure why.  I'll go - look over the list of people who volunteered to answer questions for money, and pick, I don't know, one of the palace concubines maybe.  Then set out for the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye after that... no, poke around Sothis first, being seen going to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye might alert somebody and then it'd be more dangerous to wander the city."

"I would also suggest having me talk to a Very Serious - to somebody on the regional management committee about the Project v2, before the international representatives all get there tomorrow, but it's your administrative region."

Merenre: "I can send someone this afternoon to explain to you who to expect, what their interests are, and so on." He is very concerned about Keltham and not particularly concealing it.

Keltham: Keltham isn't going to say anything reassuring, or even misleadingly reassuring-sounding.  He doesn't lie, and defeasibly prefers not to deceive; if he must deceive he prefers smaller deceptions to larger ones.

He'll give them the brief dath ilani departure courtesies, and then depart to check over his list of question-answerers.

lintamande: The most generous bids are all from priests of Abadar, but not all of the bids that offer to pay him are; there are some smaller-sum offers to pay him ten gold, from a palace concubine, or six silver, from a palace cook, or a baby dinosaur, from a palace three-year-old.

Keltham: ...he will check later on this word that translates as 'dinosaur' to make sure that's not an actual dinosaur.

Keltham will select a concubine who wants to be paid five silvers.  He does not want to be paid himself, and worry about whether he's delivering what the other person thought and hoped they were buying.

lintamande: Someone will send for her! ...Keltham will be meeting with her on one of these beautiful balconies overlooking a courtyard full of fountains and overlooked by some other balconies, if that's all right.

Prince Fe-Anar: "If I'm tagging along for this too then we could do it privately as that counts as chaperoned."

Keltham: A sensible person might worry that they'd get less straight answers from a palace concubine if there was a prince standing nearby.

This would rely on the person in question having grasped the concept of 'power distance' on any intuitive level whatsoever.

Narrator's voiceover:  Keltham hasn't.

"...you know what, sure.  It seems like a waste of your valuable time, but I guess it's more of me speaking Baseline, if you haven't run out of Share Language yet."

Prince Fe-Anar: "I haven't!!!"

Zakiya: - if Keltham has still not grasped the concept of power distance at all, then he might be slightly confused when the woman whose bid was accepted walks into the room, takes in Fe-Anar, and immediately and gracefully kneels. 

Prince Fe-Anar: "I'm going to give you Share Language (Baseline) so I can pick up Baseline vocabulary while Keltham talks to you," he says cheerfully, and taps her through her sleeve. "It's a very good language! They invented it themselves!"

Keltham: "Keltham out of dath ilan.  Why'd you suddenly kneel, 'kneel'?  If all women have to do that every time they enter a room, I'm giving up on Osirion and moving this operation to Rahadoum."

Zakiya: " - it's because that's the Prince Fe-Anar, uh," she struggles for an honorific and isn't turning up any, "powerful-person. Men would kneel too."

Keltham: "I really hadn't read Fe-Anar as the type."

Zakiya: " - as a prince? You can tell from the robes, they're more expensive than other peoples' and not standardized like the priests."

Keltham: "Wait, so people are also supposed to do that with, like, Merenre?  What do people have to do when the Pharaoh walks by, flop all the way onto the floor?"

Zakiya: "...well, yes, powerful-person."

Keltham: "You don't have to speak Baseline.  The spell is that so I can speak Baseline to you, and Fe-Anar can listen and pick up my intonations, and signal me any time I use a vocabulary word he doesn't recognize so I can define it and add it to his set."

"Would I be correct if I conjectured that Fe-Anar has multiple times tried to get people to stop doing this to him, and been shot down every time?  'Shot down', ignored / counterargued / dismissed."

Zakiya: She'll switch back to Osiriani. "I don't know, sir."

Prince Fe-Anar: "It's bad for everyone's Law, if they stop following all the rules just because the rules are arbitrary and stupid. So it's a bit rude to tell them to and I only do it when it's really, really wasting a lot of time."

Keltham: "Law is exactly not doing stuff that's arbitrary and stupid, unless you like really want to or something.  I'd ask if Pharasma has a way to submit bug reports - that's stories about an error in the system and what you were doing when you got the error - for her alignment system, but I'd guess going on the general tenor of Golarion that the answer is no."

"But, not the primary topic!  I have, at this point, gotten somewhat different stories on women getting some sort of weird treatment in Osirion, from sources that included my Chelish girlfriend, a seventh-circle priest of Abadar who was actually an illusion being operated by my Chelish girlfriend, a couple of books that were secretly edited by people acting under the orders of my Chelish girlfriend, and some brief confusing conversations in actual Osirion suggesting that a lot of what my Chelish girlfriend said was actually true."

"So, like, what the actual ass is going on here?  What are they doing, what's their stated reasons for doing it, and why do women put up with it?"

Zakiya: "Women can become pregnant, and men can't. I assume you knew that and it's not the answer that you're looking for, but it'd be an unkind abuse of your time, if trying to sound clever I neglected to say that part first."

Keltham: "Oh, we definitely want to start with the basics here, yes.  My home dimension has pregnancies, they take nine months and afterwards you want to breastfeed the kid for a couple of years."

"It doesn't have involuntary pregnancies, because everybody has constant contraception running and two people need to deliberately turn it off in order for anybody to get pregnant."

"I do not think, however, that removing all the contraception from my home dimension would cause women to stop being able to own property."

"If we then further reduced everyone's income by a factor of 100, women would still be able to own property."

"If we reduced everybody's Intelligence by 7, and deleted everybody's knowledge of math, I'd still expect that women would end up able to own property, because, like, why wouldn't they."

"So I'm guessing that it has something to do with magic and gods and afterlives, somehow."

Zakiya: "I'm actually not sure it does, sir. Say you have a farm, and in that farm, they live off grain that grows by the river, and only men are strong enough to pull the plow and plant the grain. Boy children are valuable, as they'll grow up to be able to work the farm; girl children aren't valuable, because they need to eat and they can't grow grain. If that family has twins in a year when there's not enough grain, they'll expose the girl, and raise the boy. He's a better investment. Right?"

Keltham: "Why not take the same logic further?  By hypothesis, girl children have less value than boy children; so kill all the girl children all the time."

"Seems like a more sustainable long-term strategy if boys could, in fact, get pregnant."

Zakiya: "They'd rather not kill their girl children, because people don't like killing their children and also it's Evil, so they won't do it unless it's a year where there's not enough grain. But yes, if there's been a famine, then when those boys grow up they'll have trouble finding wives, and that'll make having girls more appealing, and that balances out, though where it balances out depends on how much women can contribute to the production of food, and it's different in different places. 

...anyway, what you can do with girl children, if there's more than one farm in this story of ours, is marry them out. Girls are a luxury; farms that are producing an excess of grain, because they've got better land, or better luck, or a smidge of magic, can afford them. They're not very much of a luxury, they come close to earning their keep, and of course people do want wives, and heirs, so if they're running a little bit of margin, on the grain, they'll look to take a wife. In places where a woman is an economic liability, her parents will pay her husband to take her from them. There are also places where a woman is an economic asset, and her husband pays her parents for her, but we're not talking about those."

Keltham: "So if I can improve ironforging and steelmaking techniques and produce sharper plows that can cut the land easily enough for a woman to push them, the entire current system of gender relations is upset?"

Carissa would like that not thinking that.

Zakiya: "Yes, sir. There are other things going on, but they are all things that built up around the fact that women are weaker than men, and that they're frequently pregnant, and that under normal conditions at least where I grew up, it's less in a family's interests to keep a daughter alive than a son."

Keltham: "Where I come from, people with -1sd thinkoomph, sd is square root of the average squared deviation from average, thinkoomph is a broader metric that includes Intelligence and Wisdom and some other things, tended to usually be less economically productive and earn lower salaries than people with +1sd thinkoomph.  We didn't, like, exclude the -1s from owning property.  In your terms that'd be Intelligence 14s or 15s, who are less productive than Intelligence 18s and 19s."

Zakiya: "- so our farm hasn't gotten around to 'owning property' yet, sir. It's got a man, and his wife, and their children, only they married out the daughters, so their sons, and their sons' wives. In most places, the land is actually owned by a noble far away, who everyone pays tribute to, and no one in this story can own property.

But perhaps the Pharaoh has come to Sothis, and declared independence from the Keleshites and told all their nobles to go back to Qadira, and told the farmers, that land you work, now it is not owned by distant nobles, but every farm is owned by the family that works it, and the head of each family can go to the temple of Abadar, and get documents of ownership of their land."

Keltham: "Back up.  'Property' doesn't just mean land, it means - the clothes you wear, the food your land produces, some of which you trade for shoes - shoes, foot-clothes - can women own that or is it just that they can't own land?  Or did the faraway 'nobles' also own all the food crops and shoes produced, and if so, how did anybody get shoes?"

Zakiya: "The nobles own the food-crops, sir, though if they have any sense they leave you enough to survive on. They own the livestock, I think, in most places that have nobles.

The house makes or trades for clothes to wear and those I don't think the nobles usually take. If they're reasonably well off, the woman has shoes, though there's certainly no court she could go to, if her husband for some strange reason took her shoes from her. Even if they're poor, she has her wedding jewelry he gave her when he took her as his wife, and that's hers; if he steals it from her or makes her sell it all their friends would condemn him, and warn him he might not make Axis, conducting himself like that. In modern Osirion she could go to a court if he took her wedding jewelry. 

When people say that women can't own property in Osirion, they don't mean that she does not wear clothes, and they mostly don't know about the wedding jewelry, that's not a custom in other places. They mean that the land and the foodcrops are legally owned by the household, as are any profits they've saved from last year's foodcrops, and that the household is headed by her husband, except in cases where she's been widowed without adult sons or something."

Keltham: "Because the men are physically stronger and formed a collective faction that violently subjugated the women, and women here are not well-coordinated enough to stab all the men like that in their sleep?  I guess that's harder if you literally don't own knives... no, you've got plows, you should have other sharp objects?"

Zakiya: "If we stabbed all the men we'd starve, sir. Because of the thing where grain farming requires male strength levels."

Keltham: "Okay, I'm not seeing a way out of that one.  The last time I had this conversation I was under the impression that, okay, you just went to the afterlife, but if killing people is Evil and then you go to Hell, that's not much of an option either, is it."

"I'd say, see, it reduces to afterlives after all, except that in dath ilan where afterlives don't exist... no, in dath ilan, if you're this far back in technological time, you know you're dying the True Death at the end of your life no matter what.  So you might as well stab the man exploiting you and die immediately instead of living a little longer while being exploited."

"Okay, it is about the afterlives and the alignment system.  That checks."

Zakiya: "Women often also don't want to kill their husband because their children need a father, and they don't want their children to starve and then to never see them again. The afterlives are important, but it would be a hard thing, to say goodbye to your children forever even if you know they'll go to the Boneyard and won't be tortured there or anything.

Even if I were sure of Axis I wouldn't kill my husband unless he was a danger to me or the children, and I'd probably try other things first."

Keltham: "Does your husband have the power to grant you the ability to own property?  Or if not, does he track that - your shoes are yours, within the larger property system that says they're his?  There's such a thing as the right choice for a man to make, even in a situation like that.  And if he's doing his best, or trying to a reasonable degree, you stab the people who do maintain the system, not your husband who's doing the best he can."

"Actually, I think you could probably get pretty far just stabbing the worst quarter of men every fifteen years?"

Calistria: Usually when clerics of Abadar have plans to tackle sexism they are incredibly annoying plans that presume that everyone involved is just being a rational economic agent and not hurting people for their own benefit because they want to.

This one has unusually interesting plans to tackle sexism! That seems promising!

Otolmens: Do not do ANYTHING with the anomaly.

Do not ADD CLERIC LEVELS to it.

Do not make anyone AROUND it a cleric.

Do not drop FOUR ORACLE LEVELS on anyone especially if they are going to CONTINUE hanging around the anomaly.

Otolmens is TRYING to get the anomaly back in the anomaly containment zone and MEANWHILE all of the gods should LEAVE IT ALONE even if it is NOT IN THE ZONE RIGHT THIS TIME-UNIT.

Calistria: If Otolmens murders the worst quarter of men in the world, then there'd be no need to try to convince this random Abadaran to do it.

Otolmens: Otolmens will CONSIDER it if Calistria can arrange for the anomaly to go BACK IN THE ANOMALY CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Otolmens can figure out whether a mortal is a 'men' without TOO much effort.  Can Calistria define for Otolmens which quarter of men are the WORST ones?

Zakiya: "- well, I can't speak for anyone else, sir, but if people figured out who the 'worst quarter' of men were and came to my house to kill my husband and sons, I'd stab them."

Keltham: "A very reasonable attitude, if your husband is not, like, making you work, keeping the stuff you make, and then not letting you trade it for things that you are then allowed to keep.  If your husband is like that -"

"Oh wait.  Is this a perverted thing?  Uh, perversion, making sex more complicated.  Like, the Osirian equivalent of 'masochism'?"

Zakiya: ".....no, sir. I mean, obviously while you're trying to make your marriage work you can end up in lots of weird places, but a normal young woman is not thinking, 'oh, I hope my husband's cruel to me', she's hoping he's reasonable and hardworking and makes her rich and doesn't hit her without provocation."

Keltham: "Okay, I was about to ask if I was coming at this the wrong way and the whole system was voluntary and maybe you could just opt out by cutting your hair in a locally stereotypically masculine hairstyle and then you'd be allowed to have your own money.  But that is again sounding like the women are being forced by violence into a system where they're not having fun and they'd prefer a different system."

Zakiya: "Well, it depends on the different system. Sarenrae's church fights for women's concerns in Garund and Casmaron. They say things like that we should raise the minimum age of marriage, and if a man was poor when he married but is rich ten years later he should be obliged to buy his wife more wedding jewelry, and that a man shouldn't be allowed to take a second wife if his first one says he's lousy. Those would all be popular, if you asked women.

If you ask whether we want things to be like they are in Avistan, where everyone's a whore - no. I've talked to women who want that, but - only two of them, and I've done orientation for hundreds of new concubines."

Keltham: "I wish everyone in Avistan was a sex worker.  I had one girlfriend who'd name a price for anything in either direction and the rest were like 'oh no if we're ever financially legible to Keltham we'll be in the same referenceclass, "category", as women who get pregnant and die in the street even though we are all at least second-circle wizards who know Alter Self!'.  Though I suppose that all could have been a lie, and if it was I will be annoyed even considering everything else they lied to me about.  I'd just arrived from another dimension and had barely any idea what a gold piece was worth and nobody in Cheliax would tell me whether sex here was valued at like one copper or a thousand gold pieces or what!"

"Sorry, none of that is your problem.  But I'm not getting what the connection is between 'can own things' and 'is sex worker'.  Is the idea that if women own things, they will inevitably realize they can trade sex for money?"

"Sidenote Fe-Anar, most men and women in dath ilan have both paid for and sold sex at some point, the word 'sex worker' actually means a professional good enough to make a living at it, but I'm repurposing it to mean 'has ever been paid for sex' since Baseline doesn't have a native word for 'whore', end sidenote Fe-Anar."

Zakiya: "So, in Osirion, most women will only lie with a man if he's married her. There are prostitutes, they're not illegal, but there's not many, and you certainly can't bring them to parties, and they're not a very appealing substitute for a long-term romantic relationship. So if a man wants a serious relationship, and regular access to a woman's bed, he'd better make himself a good candidate for marriage and then go persuade someone to marry him. 

Marriage is a lifelong commitment. A man promises to provide for his wife and for any children she bears him, to pay for treatment if she's sick within whatever his abilities are, to provide her with a home and protect her and her children from danger, and to greet her with love. In return, a woman promises to obey her husband, to steward his money wisely and raise his children well, to be faithful to him and to greet him with love. 

Some marriages break down, and the couple ends up living separately or barely speaking to each other. But still, they are bound by these promises; and a woman can go to the Osirian state if her husband isn't providing for her family, and get money drawn out of his bank account if he has one, and get him prevented from remarrying. 

Because of all this, it's actually very rare, for even a girl-child to be left outside to die of exposure when she's born. You marry someone who can provide for your children, and then your children don't starve; that is the whole promise, here, that if you refrain from recklessly having sex without the safety of marriage then you won't have to watch your children starve.

In Avistan they don't do any of that very much. Some girls will have sex with you even when you haven't married them. Because some girls can do that, no girls can hold out for a lifelong promise to provide for them; why would a man offer them that, when he could just go have sex with all the girls who'll offer it for free? No one would get married, so they made a sort of fake marriage that you can break at any time, and they all do that. Women are, in a sense, freer. They aren't chaperoned. Because no man will provide for them, it's more important for their families to figure out how they'll provide for themselves, so more of them are financially independent, though also many, many more of them starve, or are killed by a man they trusted and shouldn't have, or die of an abortion. Many of them feel that there's something wrong, something missing, that things shouldn't be like this, but those ones simply don't lie with anyone at all; they can't find any men who'd be worth trusting. 

Our society demands virtue of men and virtue of women, and constrains them so that they can't do whatever they like but they won't go hungry. Avistan demands no virtue of anyone, and they do as they like, and they kill the babies that result and then they go to Hell, or Abaddon, or the Abyss, and it just doesn't sound like a very good trade, really. If you say the wrong things about women's liberation people think you're proposing they raise their girls into Avistani whores -- by which I don't even mean they pay for sex, just that they offer it outside of marriage -- and they'll hate that idea and stop listening to you."