Keltham: That is respectable, though he doesn't understand it.

Keltham does have questions that he'd ask of a woman who could be a wizard.  In her estimation, how much gold ought to be conservatively offered to a woman, to generously compensate her for the harm of telling her that she's smart enough to be a wizard?

lintamande: Well, what's she going to do with the gold, hire a servant she can unhappily tell about how she could've been a wizard? It's not the hungry season, and the money won't last that long.

Keltham: Would fifty gold do it.

lintamande: Which girl is it.

Keltham: Her Intelligence score is her own private information which she has not particularly authorized Keltham to tell to anybody else.

lintamande: Well, she can't tell him how much to pay if she doesn't know who it is. If it's Mirna, he should tell her he put fifty gold in trust for her for lessons at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, and gave one to Nasim to watch the babies while she's at them; if it's Yamina, he should tell her mother and see if a match can be managed. 

She points them out. It's almost definitely one of the two of them; they're the bright ones.

Keltham: (And which one is it, actually?)

lintamande: Mirna, who has a baby strapped to her; Yamina's a 12.

Keltham: Keltham will remark back only that he didn't particularly say that it was any of the people here; he will also be talking to some women outside this courtyard, whose Intelligence scores he has already read.

So long as they're talking - what would this woman change about Osirion, had she the power to ask things of the government here?  Is there anything she'd say ought to change, about this country, before it should be made any mightier or richer than it is now?

lintamande: Well, anything that should be changed will change easier when Osirion's richer, that's how things go. But if anyone asked her, she'd tell the government to ban alcohol.

Keltham: ...that stuff.  Yeah, Keltham has heard of that stuff.  Keltham already found it pretty weird that anybody would drink that despite knowing what it does; do people's decisions to drink that stuff often not work out well for them?

lintamande: Well, lots more men beat their wives drunk than sober, and lots of men waste their family's money that way, and also if women drink too much the babies will come out wrong.

Keltham: Keltham is not usually a fan of declaring things illegal, but it sounds like this is way above the danger threshold for being illegal compared to several other things that Keltham has been told are or ought to be illegal without any exceptions or competence tests.  Is there a story about why this isn't already illegal without a competence test, given that, apparently, women owning their own stuff is illegal, which Keltham would have thought was much less dangerous than alcohol?

lintamande: There probably is, because the priests are very wise, but she doesn't know it. 

...women owning their own stuff isn't illegal, exactly, either, not that she could explain the difference to a priest of Abadar, but there is one; a wife isn't a slave.

Keltham: Say more.

lintamande: Well, she's never interacted with the government, herself. Part of being wise is knowing the limits of your wisdom, and that isn't hers.

But if she earns money, it's the family's money, and the family can spend it on clothes for whoever needs them most, or work boots for whoevers have a hole, or an expansion of the house. And it's her husband who'd go to the government, if something happened that involved the government, but that's never happened. He works the winter levy; they don't pay taxes. They give the church money towards a pilgrimage or an emergency. That's how it is in a healthy, harmonious household, and it doesn't sound right, saying that's it being illegal for a woman to have money. 

Of course, in some households, they all put their money in for the family and then the husband spends it on drink. And that's no good, and why she thinks drink should be banned. But husbands spending couldn't reasonably be banned, and it wouldn't be better if the wife could squander all the money on drink too; what you want is for no one to squander it.

Keltham: Suppose you've got a trio-relationship, three people forming a household.  One man and two women, say, so there's no paternity questions.  If they had to spend money by majority vote, no single one of them could spend all the money on alcohol.

Or, in duo relationships, why doesn't the person in the relationship with the higher Wisdom get to control the money?

lintamande: Well, there's an idea. Might work out well, except it's not as if people know what their Wisdom is.

Usually if a man has two wives he has two households, one with each wife. Trying to all live together doesn't work out well.

Keltham: Why not let women control their own incomes when they haven't yet married somebody?  If they're old enough to earn their own money in the first place?

lintamande: Well, children who haven't married yet - boys or girls - are part of their parents' households, and once they can work their money goes to supporting their family.

Keltham: Would the world be a better place if they were allowed to leave, and own themselves?  If they asked to leave?

If no, why not?

lintamande: Well, it'd be hard on a family, to go hungry and work themselves to the bone to feed and bring up a child who waltzed out the door and left their parents and younger siblings to starve as soon as they'd finished the education their parents put them through at great cost. Probably people'd invest less in their children's education, if their children were liable to do that. 

Keltham: Suppose there was a maximum buyout price, or you checked what people said under Abadar's Fairness for rich families that wanted to make a case for greater investments being justly due repayment.

lintamande: Well, that seems reasonable to her. Rather cold and economical but that's the church for you, and it's usually right, too.

Keltham: Or actually, to maybe simplify - what if the rules about girl-children leaving to start and own their own businesses were the same as for boy-children?  Is there anything different about the two cases?

lintamande: - well, girls marry at nineteen usually, and no boy-child is in a position to leave and start his own business at nineteen. 

Keltham: So whenever Keltham has tried to make a case like this to other Osirians who're allowed to have their own money, such as for example a palace concubine, or a man, they've usually had some elaborate clever reason why there just can't be any exceptions to the rules for anybody, or women will end up making bad decisions and then starving.  Also why it would be a terrible terrible thing if women and men had some sort of symmetrical rules along the lines of 'Agree to there being a single person controlling household finances, who is not necessarily the man' or 'boys and girls follow the same rules about when they're allowed to leave their families and own their own stuff'.

Can she predict what those people are likely to say when Keltham presents this proposal to them, about a maximum buyout price for girls and boys alike, and can she say in advance why it'll be wrong and what errors in reasoning the other person will be making to cause them to say this wrong thing?

lintamande: Well, the priests of Abadar are much wiser than her and if they think it's a bad plan then it probably is. ...she doesn't think they particularly pick the palace concubines for being wise. 

Keltham: Wait, what sort of target is Osirion's leadership breeding itself towards, such that they wouldn't be selecting concubines on Wisdom?  Are they going all in on Intelligence?  That doesn't seem like a good idea at all!  Keltham notices confusion here.

lintamande: Well, she doesn't really know anything about that, but she expects they pick girls who are pretty and graceful and well-behaved.

Keltham: Do the children of concubines just become a future generation of concubines, rather than - inheriting power, management, family wealth?

lintamande: ....well in principle one of those children becomes the pharaoh, right.

Keltham: And so long as the person who becomes Pharaoh is pretty, graceful, and well-behaved, Abadar can take him over and operate him like a puppet so he doesn’t need any Intelligence, Wisdom, or Splendour?

lintamande: .....she doesn't really understand how Abadar selecting the pharaoh works. Maybe.

Keltham: ...Keltham is going to ask Fe-Anar a quick Baseline question about this.  It's not grimdark but it's at least grim.

Prince Fe-Anar: " - no, the pharaoh needs to be very, very sharp. Abadar selects for something more complicated than intelligence, wisdom and charisma scores, but more of those is certainly better."

Keltham: "This does not square up with bringing in hundreds of attractive compliant women so you can have very tight selection pressures on breeding attractive compliant pharaohs."

Prince Fe-Anar: "Well, it's a pretty newfangled theory, that boys inherit traits from their mothers like that, but if they do it should work out all right: we've got an application process these days, to make sure the pharaoh's wives are very smart and capable. The girl you spoke to, Zakiya, is one of the girls Qadira gives us, though, so she got picked through whatever process Qadira uses, or whatever process they used twenty years ago, and I don't know what that is. 'attractive compliant women' probably isn't far off. 

I picked my wife because she was the smartest person I'd ever met. And Merenre picked the same way, so probably if that's what Abadar wants he'll select from that branch of the family tree."

Keltham: "...did this newfangled theory - which happens to be absolutely correct, children get half of their 'chromosomes', heredity packages, from each parent, and I'll show Osirion how to look at the 46 chromosomes by casting the Major Image of an 'optical-microscope', light-based tool-that-makes-small-things-look-bigger - did this theory by any chance show up in Golarion shortly after prophecy was shattered and the never-human gods could manage events less tightly?"

Prince Fe-Anar: "Oh, I think it's more recent than that, there's a fellow in Jalmaray who publishes essays about animal breeding and pretty recently he got on a tear about how he takes issue with the popular theory that boys inherit from their fathers and girls from their mothers.

It's not a theory without any logic behind it! If a man balds early, his sons will too and his daughters won't. If a woman has difficult childbirths, her daughters will too, but her daughters-in-law, not so much. If a man bleeds easily and can't heal, his sons will usually be all right for some reason but his grandsons will be like him. The girls will be fine."

Keltham: "Chromosomes are paired, one of the 23 pairs determines sex, two 'X' chromosomes is female and one-X one-'Y' is male, bleeding-easily would be carried on an X-chromosome, but suppressed by the other X-chromosome of the pair if there's two Xs, and express itself when there's one X and one Y, so it'll skip his sons and their sons and show up in half the daughter's grandsons - I'll explain this later, but it's not complicated once you know what's going on and can see it under a microscope."

Prince Fe-Anar: " - huh. Well, anyway, people sometimes study this sort of thing and come up with all kinds of results when they do. The Church has mostly focused on there being lots of potential heirs for Abadar to choose between, figuring if there are hundreds then whatever's going on with heredity Abadar will have good choices to work with."

Keltham: "There's seriously better ways once you have any idea what the ass you're doing, but I should be dumping this all out in front of people who can write it down and spread it.  At least that sounds like Abadar is being just as hampered as the other gods, by whatever the ass they're collectively doing, and doesn't get any exceptions when it's hurting his own interests."

Back to the senior woman.

"Sorry, was just checking how the concubines thing actually works and apparently this Pharaoh was the son of that one sane guy who selected the smartest woman he could find to be his wife, instead of all the hundreds of compliant graceful ones that got dragged in for apparently no reason.  Which sounds like people are being silly and inefficient and you might possibly want to decrease how much confidence you place in the existing management having a great idea of what they're doing, when it comes to matters of men and women particularly."

"I've spoken to at least one seventh-circle priest of Abadar out of Absalom, and he thought that Osirion was not a place he would want to raise a family, given Osirion's treatment of women.  It does not appear to be a subject on which the wise priests of Abadar are of uniform accord.  I'd be interested in what you think, as a woman of Osirion who must actually be subject to all these laws."

"A palace concubine advised me to ask women what they would want me to do, before I made any requests of Osirion's government.  Which does seem to me like wisdom, in fact, whatever palace concubines are ordinarily selected for.  So I'm asking."

lintamande: "Well, people in different places want different things for their daughters. I wouldn't say the things they want in Absalom seem sensible to me, but I would agree that they won't get those things here. If you raise your children in Osirion then unless they decide on purpose to ruin their lives they won't, and they'll make Axis, and enjoy the rewards of all their hard work. But they ought to ban drink, so things aren't quite as hard on the road."

Keltham: Is that really the only wish she'd have into the Future?  Has she never wished that this world was changed, was different from what it was?  Has she never wished that she or her daughters had other options, than the options that she had?  Has she never thought that one of the paths she wished to take, could have taken, should have taken, was being denied her?

Keltham comes from a world brighter than Golarion, where all people were richer and freer than this.  He is trying to decide what he ought to help or not help Golarion make of itself, now.

lintamande: "Well, son, I don't see what the point is, really, in wishing for things that didn't happen. The world is how it is; wishing doesn't make it different, only makes you bitter about it."

Keltham: "I am planning to fix Golarion.  Whatever went wrong in your life is something that I ought to change for your daughters and granddaughters.  Zon-Kuthon, at least, was sufficiently alarmed by the prospect of my doing that, that he tried for a decapitation strike on my person two days after I arrived in Golarion.  That's what the god-war was about, if you were wondering."

"I am here, talking to you, and not just getting started on that already, to check whether Osirion is a good place for things to begin, and because conventional wisdom says to talk to the people you are planning to fix before you try to fix them."

"There may not have been a point to wishing before, in all your life, but there is a point in wishing here and now, while talking to me."

lintamande: "Nearly all of my life is still ahead of me and I expect it to be good. I want that for my daughters, and my granddaughters. I want to see them again, someday, and hear their sorrows and meet their babies and wander the streets paved with glass, and ride horseless carriages through the air. 

It would be good, if they have kind husbands, and lots of money, and servants, and their eyesight doesn't fade, and their hearing remains good, and their husband doesn't drink too much, or beat them too often, or want strange things in bed he learned from prostitutes, and if their childbirth isn't too painful, and their babies don't get sick and die, and there's meat to eat even in the lean season.

But we suffer and we sacrifice for the better world to come, and so long as we get there, someday the suffering and the sacrifice will be a distant memory."

Keltham: "If other things go well, I can try to see about all of that except the servants.  Not everyone can have servants, at least not full-time servants, because the servants themselves would need servants, and that's logically difficult and not just logistically difficult."

"But you don't wish - that your granddaughters who rode the skies would have husbands who could not beat them, because women were also protected by the government, because they could just walk away if they wanted and had their own wealth and incomes to support them if they did?"

lintamande: "- well, I don't know how that'd work out. Maybe it'd work out as nice as it sounds, in which case I do want that. Or maybe it'd be a right mess that ends up pitching everyone into the Maelstrom, in which case I don't."

Keltham: "Is just the Maelstrom bad enough that - as you see it - it'd be better for somebody never to be, than for them to have a long happy life like the one you described - with husbands who didn't beat them, and carriages to ride the skies - if they went to the Maelstrom at the end of that, for having not been beaten into Lawfulness?"

lintamande: "I don't think I agree with all the things you're asking with that question, young man. I don't want my daughters and granddaughters to go to the Maelstrom because I'll never see them again. But if they didn't exist, I also wouldn't see them again, so that seems all the more terrible. I wouldn't say I wish I hadn't had babies because some of them died and I won't see them again."

Keltham: Again a note of confusion that a more ideal reasoner should perhaps have promoted to conscious attention; again Keltham is in the middle of asking another important question and one whose real meaning he'd rather not say plainly.  "I'm sorry for the awfulness of this hypothetical question, but if hypothetically at the end of your life, you found that you were not as Good or as Lawful as you thought, and you were judged Neutral Evil - would you choose then Abaddon, or Hell, or the Abyss?"

lintamande: "Well, I'm not Evil, and I don't really think that sort of thing is worth worrying about, if you haven't done terrible things, and anyway I don't really know very much about the Evil afterlives, so I couldn't say."

Keltham: ...sounds a bit like people would rather not think about it.  Sounds like thinking about Hell or any of the Evil afterlives would do so much damage to people that Osirion's government has decided it's an infohazard, not worth the benefit of educating people about what happens to them, if they get drunk and make the wrong decisions.

It's its own answer, in a way; anything too awful to think about without getting damaged is definitely too awful to be allowed to exist.

"Thank you for trading with me."

lintamande: "I hope your plans work out well, young man."

Keltham: She really should.

Keltham will choose whichever of the people present at INT 12 or above is furthest to his right.  It's the potential wizard he most wants to talk to, next, but he will not use an algorithm that picks her out, nor one that avoids her.

lintamande: She's not up next, then; instead it's a middle-aged woman with pox scars, a toddler tied to her chair and playing in the dirt behind her, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with the top painted bright white.

Keltham: By Message, again:

What would she change about Osirion, if she was in a position to ask that from the government?  How would she want her daughters' lives, or her sons' lives for that matter, to be different from her own life or her husband's life?

lintamande: It should be illegal for a man to remarry if he has only living daughters, because he'll have sons by the second wife and treat her family better.

Keltham: Sounds possibly sensible, given Osirion's overall orientation, but... would she say that it ought, perhaps, to also be possible to have an exception to this rule, if the man paid over enough money escrowed to his previous daughters' dowries, say, so that they couldn't end up too neglected?

lintamande: - sure, that'd probably work.

Keltham: So this is sort of a complicated question and hopefully a gold piece - probably more than her daily earnings as Keltham understands those? - is enough to pay for a thoughtful answer, even if the gold piece just goes to her 'household'...

Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be the same for men and women, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here.  You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis.  You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.

She can also suppose things like that truthspells have become cheaper, a tenth of the current cost, say, if that helps her put Osirion back together.  If it's absolutely vital that a way exist to determine whether a child belongs to a particular parent, what used to be called a father, she can suppose that a way exists.

How would she repair Osirion's laws so that this dreadful meddling foreigner does as little damage as possible to Osirion, and as many people as possible end up in Axis or Elysium rather than Hell or the Maelstrom?

lintamande: ....can you make a law that talks about whether someone can bear children? Is currently pregnant?

Keltham: ...possibly, if she doesn't try to pull any Shenanigans with this, e.g. by talking about whether somebody has ever been pregnant, has the capability to get pregnant, etcetera.  If there's a law that's just about it being extra bad to murder somebody who's carrying a baby right now, for example, Keltham will let her get away with it.

lintamande: Well, she thinks that if the government had to do that then it should probably just not do anything except prosecute murder, and count it as murder if you abandon your children and they die. Because it wouldn't be able to do anything else useful, and that seems like it would at least serve the purpose of not letting men abandon their families.

Keltham: ...are there no measurable differences between men and women, other than anatomy, corresponding to all the ways in which it is so terribly terribly important to treat men and women differently?  Is there no externally visible quality of a woman, besides her ability to get pregnant, that corresponds to the fact that it's usually better if a man controls a household's spending money, rather than the woman being the one to control it?

Though, to be clear, she should feel very free to deny the premise that it's better for the man to control everyone's money than for everyone to have separate budgets; Keltham comes from a world where everybody has separate budgets, but people there are also smarter and richer and it's essentially impossible for a child to starve.

lintamande: ...usually a man inherits the household from his father when he is in his thirties or forties and his father dies. His wife married into the household somewhat recently and doesn't know nearly as much about it because of how she didn't grow up in it. You could maybe make a rule that the person who currently controls the household picks their successor?

Keltham: Sure, that's how it works where Keltham is from.  The person who owns something gets to pick the person who inherits it; though if it's something divisible like money, they usually give some of it to charity and not just their kids.

What else goes wrong, now that the law can't distinguish men and women?

lintamande: Well,  probably all the things that generally go wrong when you don't have a government? 

Keltham: Preventing theft doesn't seem like something that needs to distinguish men and women.

lintamande: Well, the government doesn't do that really? 

Keltham: Okay, so what does go wrong when you don't have a government, if you don't need a government for preventing thefts?

lintamande: ....she doesn't really know. Probably other countries invade you and sometimes there are blood feuds and you don't get any aqueducts or nice things like that.

Keltham: None of this appears to depend on legally treating men and women in any way differently?

lintamande: ....you can't have an army if you're not allowed to do conscription. She supposes they could conscript all the women but then everything would be completely horrible, probably worse than having no army.

Keltham: Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it.  Assuming you can't just pay people enough to have an army that way but that is a separate topic Keltham is Concerned about.

Or maybe there's a Detect Strength spell that goes with Bull's Strength, the way there's a Detect Thoughts spell that corresponds to Fox's Cunning, some way to detect Strength and not just augment it.  Strength is an externally visible and measurable quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises.  That's an example of the sort of idea Keltham was talking about when he asked how to put a country back together, after you stopped being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that.

He's particularly interested in what externally visible or measurable qualities of women make them supposedly unable to own property without everybody ending up in the Maelstrom, or which qualities enable men to own things when women allegedly shouldn't.  Maybe people could measure that as a qualification test of property ownership, instead of penis presence.

lintamande: ....but then strong women would be forced to join the army, which seems terrible!!! 

Keltham: ...yes, yes it is, but how is it more terrible than strong men being forced to join an army for less than their self-set wage for that?

lintamande: ....because they'll never be able to get married or have a normal life, whereas after the levy's dispersed the men will be completely fine?

Keltham: ...why will they never be able to get married or have a normal life after the levy's dispersed.

lintamande: Because no man would marry a woman who was in the army and around lots of men. ....this conversation might work better if it weren't over Message and she could say longer things.

Keltham: He's fine with that, if she's willing to speak aloud and doesn't wish to guard her own privacy.

His reply to her last statement is that it sounds like - the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?  Actually Keltham is confused here, is Osirion familiar with the fact that it always takes roughly nine months to have a baby, and if you wait a year since a woman leaves the army, any baby she has after that is guaranteed to be with a father from after she left the army?  There's animals where the females take in male seed and retain it their whole lives, but humans are not one of those animals - is that misunderstanding possibly the root of Osirion's entire thing, here -

lintamande: ....no, they know that, but a woman who has had sex before is much less desirable as a wife, less likely to be faithful and also just...worse, why would you want something used when you could have something new. And a woman who has spent a year in an army, around lots of men, washing around men, living around men, is just going to come back different, and no one's going to want to marry her. 

It seems to her that - 

- so, men and women are very different in lots of ways. Some women are strong, but most men are stronger; some women are tall, but mostly men are taller; some women can fight, but even in Avistan adventurers are mostly men, because men have more of the nature for it. All of those things shape the world, and it'd be stupid to leave them out when making sense of it, but - if a woman is tall and strong and likes fighting, she's still a woman. It'd be awfully horrible to her, to make laws that only reference tallness and strongness because they're easy to measure, and that count her as a man, and ruin her life on that account.

Keltham: Yes, it is indeed an awful meddling foreigner, that they are discussing, and perhaps Osirion would be better off if he just solved some of their bigger problems and then left without trying to 'help' them any more than that.

But if that awful meddling foreigner told Osirion's government that they had no choice but to make symmetrical laws treating men and women, with respect to who has control of a household, or who can have incomes - how then would she minimize the harm done?  What's the next best alternative, from her perspective, to laws that treat men and women as the hugely different creatures they are with respect to owning things?

lintamande: Well, in villages like the one she grew up in, the government doesn't really do anything except stop bandits, and do truth spells for weddings, and impose a quarantine sometimes if there's an outbreak in Sothis. And the men leave for the winter levy.

And it seems to her that if you couldn't have any rules that were good, then it'd be best to just try not having any rules at all and see what went wrong with that. So the government could keep on stopping bandits and doing truth spells for weddings and imposing a quarantine, and stop it with the levy, and maybe that'd work out.

Keltham: ...Keltham can think of more probing questions to ask, here, but he's also getting the impression that, measured INT 12 or no, this person is lower-thinkoomph than the INT 10 vendor who asked why Keltham looked human-shaped if he wasn't from Golarion.

Thanks for trading.  Next in line, INT 14 potential-wizard girl whose name Keltham has of course already forgot, although this time he needs to remember it for All-Seeing-Eye wizard lessons purposes.

Message:  He's Keltham out of dath ilan; and if somebody needed to find him alone out of all the dath ilani named Keltham, his birth-order number would be these ten digits, he's that number of person born in dath ilan since the world started counting.

Herself?

lintamande: She's Mirna, and if you needed to find her alone out of all the people in the world she's not really sure what you'd do; if you wanted to get a letter to her in Axis once she'd died you'd say Mirna who was married to Gamal and lived south of the market in Sothis, and probably run into a false start or two. The numbers are clever.

Keltham: Yeah, very clever if you come from a planet which otherwise has planetwide instant communications, and can easily have a central count that goes up by one every time a doctor clicks a button about a newborn baby having its umbilical cord cut after it starts breathing.  Keltham wouldn't really blame Golarion on this one.

(He'll go Prestidigitate 'Mirna' and 'husband Gamal' onto the interior of his wrist jacket so he doesn't forget.)

Keltham is planning to help Osirion a lot, enough to let it face down Cheliax, to repair past mistakes he's made and because of a debt he owes to Abadar.  He doesn't want to make the world worse, in the course of doing that, and there's also the question of whether he should help Osirion a lot more than that minimum.

Countries like Cheliax and Absalom in Avistan - which continent underwent a different development history where a lot of men died out in wars, and there was more competition among women for the remaining men - Cheliax and Absalom both allow men and women alike to have their own incomes and own their own property.  Or so Keltham understands it.  Keltham's home planet of dath ilan didn't treat men and women any differently, in this regard, and would have regarded it as a very grave wrong akin to enslaving somebody, to not let them own their own property and hold for themselves what money they had earned; whether they were men, or women, or children old enough to earn money.

Keltham, when he arrived into Golarion and called out to a god of honesty and fair treatment who turned out to be Abadar, would not have thought that a god of fair trading would have countenanced women being treated as Osirion treats them; and a seventh-circle priest of Abadar out of Absalom, whom Keltham spoke to, didn't seem to feel much differently.

If Osirion increases in power and spreads its own culture across the world, a culture in which women are - as Keltham's world would see it - halfway enslaved, it is something Keltham would have thought a grave wrong to do to Golarion, in the course of an outsider trying to help it.

It's not nearly as grave a wrong as Cheliax spreading its culture and sending more people to Hell, and Keltham is indebted and obligated to help the non-Evil societies of the world at least enough to stop that whatever the cost.

But if Keltham is to give Osirion more help than that - would she, Mirna, a woman of Osirion, who wasn't allowed by Osirion to follow her own path, if she had to pass judgment on Osirion - what would she tell Keltham should be their fate?  Or how would Mirna say that Osirion must change how it will treat her daughters and granddaughters, if Osirion is to be made greater and more powerful than this, and given a louder voice in shaping Golarion's Future?

lintamande: "....I don't actually know if Osirion does want to spread the Osirian way of doing things. I don't think that'd work. The way they talk about it in church is, there's two balancing points, one where everyone's out for themselves and men leave women and women have to be financially independent and there's lots of abortion and infanticide, and one where everyone has to make their marriage work whether they like it or not. There aren't any in between balancing points; every in between strategy can be exploited.

And you can't get Cheliax to be like Osirion, and if they'd rather go to Hell, well, Abadar isn't about making people do things they don't want to do for their own good. 

Osirion doesn't do wars of conquest. We don't have colonies. I think if Osirion got richer, more people'd come here, but - that seems different than Osirion spreading, at least to me. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know politics, but - maybe you could solve the puzzle just by assuring yourself that we don't believe in spreading." 

Keltham: "Maybe.  Common wisdom out of dath ilan is that people tend to instinctively imitate success, including the incidental characteristics of success if you don't think about them carefully, and I'd expect that effect to be much much stronger in Golarion where nobody gets training in thinking about which qualities are incidental or not."

"Some people in my world would say that the solution is to make travel cheaper and then let all the women in Osirion who don't want to be there leave for Absalom; let the men compete over the fewer and fewer women who would remain, if women saw their sisters who left looking more - instinctively what a person feels is successful."

"It's just - the way people talk about other people, including themselves, it seems like this remedy, that would be the first thought in my own world's mind - that was my first thought when I heard about Osirion - it doesn't make sense, in a place where women will marry terrible husbands because their shirt has a ruffle, or men will drink alcohol even though that makes them violent and stupid, and people in Cheliax say they want to go to Hell.  It seems like - it isn't helping people at all, to offer them more choices - in a world like that - and I don't know people enough to just, optimize their lives for them, I don't want to do that, to be that sort of dangerously Good person, if it's not just, Evil, that I don't want to."

"What do I do, Mirna?"

lintamande: "Well, sir, I don't know why you're asking me, but I think, you know, Axis is pretty good. And in Axis there's no men or women, and they wouldn't have to change their laws at all, to play by the strange rules you were talking about with Azra. And Osirion getting richer means Osirion getting more like Axis. I don't know how it'll happen, exactly, but the thing we're imitating is there, and it's beautiful, and with more strength we would lift ourselves closer to it."

Keltham: "I've seen Axis, yeah, or what I think was Axis.  Early Judgment.  It looked a bit like dath ilan.  Nicer aircraft, smaller buildings, more aliens, and - closer, in spirit, to the person who I was, used to be, back when I arrived in Golarion and thought that selfish people trading honestly was enough to support a world -"

Keltham realizes he's possibly about to burst into tears and cuts off that line of thinking before his eyes can do more than slightly water.

"But, something like that has to begin with people in this world making their own choices, about where to go, about what they want."

"What would you like Osirion to be, to become, as it became richer?  How would you have it move towards Axis, step by step?"

lintamande: "Oh. Well, once we're a bit richer, we can send girls to school as well as boys. Then they can read and do figures, and they'll make more money, probably. And if they're making more money, they can hold out for better marriages. Or not get married, I suppose, if they aren't suited to it, without being burdens on their families. And maybe we can hire more city guards, so the streets are safe for women at night, I'm sure in Axis the streets are safe for women at night."

Someone else chimes in. "You could have a cleric on hand for every childbirth so women didn't die of it."

"You could have it easier for a newlywed couple to go off and set up their own household, if they weren't getting along with the husband's parents, if rents weren't so high and men weren't in debt from apprenticeships."

"You could have minimums for marriage jewelry, or require husbands to add to it every year."

"Or let a woman add her own income to her marriage jewelry, if she wanted, maybe only if she could convince the church she wasn't just being selfish."

Keltham: "Is there ever a point where it would make sense in Abadar's country for women to just - trade freely, own their own things, trade their own work for things that they owned - is there an amount of wealth that would clearly be enough for that, and what amount, and how, and why?  Or should all the women who want that - just be offered a ticket to Absalom, once it's affordable, and that's the most you can do for them?"

lintamande: "Are you asking about unmarried women," Mirna says, "or married ones, or widowed ones, or all of those?"

Keltham: "In my homeworld, it would have been - people.  Anybody who could pass a competence test about understanding what money was, how it was used, the fact that if you spent money now that meant you didn't have it to spend later, and only very very disabled people wouldn't have been able to pass that test by age thirteen; I passed it at age seven."

lintamande: "Well, if I take this gold coin and I go and buy something with it, no one's going to say 'she's a woman, she's not allowed to be spending money'. But it'd be selfish of me, to spend it all on a silk shawl or something. If my husband earned a gold coin somehow, he'd take it home and show me and show his mother and we'd all decide together what to do with it. And since that's what my husband'd do, that's what I'd do, and I know we fall short of comprehending Abadar all the time but - I don't see where He'd see us in error, there -"

Keltham: "It's the part where somebody who wants out of the system, to just be themselves, and earn their own money and spend their own money, is not allowed to do that, especially if they're a woman.  If that part was misrepresented to me, then I've been worrying over nothing."

lintamande: " - well, if she's a spellcaster or something and can support herself, then she can get declared the head of her household."

Keltham: "I am imagining myself in the shoes of a girl growing up inside this system and not, for example, being able to assemble the fifty gold pieces required to get started on Spellcraft lessons, or nobody giving me a loan for that even if I detect as having 14 Intelligence, or maybe I only detect as 13 Intelligence and can't be a wizard but my husband only has 12 Intelligence so why should he keep all the money I earn?  I do not get the impression that there are banks with offices in the port cities offering to make loans to any woman who wants to take herself to Absalom.  It does not seem to me that in practice this system has been reasonably set up to let people who understand money, and want to make and keep their money, just do that.  It is set up very nicely if you want to be a boy who lives with his parents until he's twenty-five and done with his carpenter apprenticeship and then find a wife so he can own his own business and his wife and all of the income that she makes, and dispense however much of that to her he finds convenient.  It is not set up to be a girl who wants to be treated as owning herself."

"People can be owned, can be treated like this, can be hit by their husbands even, if that's what they want."

"The system needs to be set up to handle the exceptions who don't want that, or the system does not, in my eyes, have a right to exist for the sake of those people who do want it, even if they are a majority."

lintamande: ...they will listen attentively, looking confused.

Keltham: "...maybe all of this is meaningless because people in Golarion don't think - like that - and my own system needs to be set up to handle that exception."

"...so what is Abadar even doing here, then?  How are there enough people - to pray to him, to become clerics?  What to you is Abadar, if not the god of voluntary coordination?  In Osirion women are slaves to men, in Cheliax both men and women are slaves to the government.  They both quite approve of men hitting women under the right circumstances, and the right circumstances are not that the woman chose it.  I had thought, hoped - that Abadar - was something more different from Asmodeus than, a difference of who owns who."

lintamande: "We're not slaves," Mirna says. "I don't know what point you think you're making, saying that, but it's not true. 

Abadar is the god of working hard, and dealing fairly, and prospering through your own labor and determination, and building cities, and building a world where your children are richer than you, and your grandchildren richer than them, and not just because you were on the right side or made the right friends, but because you planted trees that are now bearing fruit for them."

Keltham: "Fruit which your granddaughters and grandsons pluck, and then your grandsons keep all of that, and dole it out to the granddaughters.  Unless the granddaughters can somehow, in a country where they can't earn and keep money, scrape up enough money to go to wizard school."

"Cheliax also seems to have a philosophy of building for future generations, it's just that Asmodeus owns it all, instead of the people who built it.  Do you see the symmetry here?  The god of prospering through your own labor and determination should not be, like, the same god as the god of your husband prospering through your own labor and determination, and then, so far as the government is concerned, he has the legal right to spend all his money on alcohol and hit you, and whatever kindness you receive from him instead of that is just him being gracious -"

"I don't even understand how these men aren't ending up in Hell, and maybe I should, while I'm still a fifth-circle cleric, be trying to scry one of them to see which afterlife they actually went to.  Though maybe the actual answer is just 'Pharasma is an ancient alien thing far stranger than the inhuman gods, who never cared about making her system make sense to the tiny helpless creatures she trapped inside it.'"

lintamande: "- I mean, bad husbands sometimes go to Hell, which is why the church spends so much time warning men not to be bad husbands. Most men aren't bad husbands! Most men are sort of middling husbands, doing their best, and they don't spend all your money on alcohol and hit you.

And, I mean, if you'd be better off without your husband around, and you moved in with your parents or out on your own or something, it's not like anyone'd make you move back in with him. Make sure he could see his children, yes, but not you, if you've decided you want nothing to do with him. It's just that even most women with drunk husbands don't do that, because it'd be worse."

"Or because they worry about the children," one of the other women objects. "I'd probably have gone to my parents', when Hatem was being an ass, if I wasn't worried for the baby. - I don't think he's going to go to Hell, though. He never did anything really bad."

Keltham: "I don't understand, but, for whatever it's worth, I am - listening, and learning, even if the main thing I am learning is that - this world may not be something that I belong in enough to help it.  Maybe Abadar doesn't think any differently, since he must be more alien still, and is looking at this mess in equal horror, thinking that all he can do is try to help you become richer, until you find your own way.  I only wish - that I had confidence - that you would - find your way - and not, as a people, choose to do the civilizational equivalent of drinking more alcohol when you became richer."

lintamande: "I think being rich - it's not quite that being rich just is being free. But it's pretty close. Everyone in Axis is freer than anyone but a king, here. And if we get that rich, then - then no one will put up with anything a king wouldn't put up with. And a king wouldn't put up with Hatem."

"I barely put up with Hatem," says Hatem's wife. "If I were a king I'd keep him at my country villa where there wasn't any alcohol, and see him when I pleased, and if he hit me I'd have my guards drag him off."

Keltham: "Okay, so, that's been helpful, which I especially appreciate from everyone who wasn't paid for it, but - I need to go back to one-on-one conversation, now."

Message to Mirna:  I have a relatively surprising thing to say to you, that you might not want to look visibly shocked about; prepare to control your expression?

lintamande: Her expression: skeptical.

Keltham: Your Intelligence is at least 14, which I've heard is considered the threshold for where it's worth trying to become a wizard.

I asked the elder adult here what to do about that, if I wanted to do something about that.  She thought I should give the Temple of the All-Seeing-Eye fifty gold pieces to pay for initial wizard lessons, and an additional gold to have - somebody, I think maybe your neighbor, watch your children.

If I did that, and you did successfully become a wizard, I'd want you to pay that on to three other women, in time, when and if you'd earned say at least 1000gp total of your own from being a wizard; and ask those three for that same promise.

Is that something you'd want?

lintamande: Well, sir, I'll have to talk to my husband, but I'd expect we'd want that, if you think I can do it. Do I have to repay you if it turns out I can't?

Keltham: No.  And the same with those to whom you make this offer.

lintamande: Well, then. She's very grateful and she'll study very hard, if her husband thinks it makes sense and they end up trying it.

Keltham: He'll be visiting the Temple of the All-Seeing-Eye later today, if nothing goes wrong, and he'll set it up then.  If Mirna, whose husband is (checks cuff) Gamal, turns out not to wish it, he'll tell the Temple of the All-Seeing-Eye to put it towards some other woman's education.

And if his well-meaning attempt to help goes horribly wrong, somehow, send a message about it to Keltham via the Black Dome, if he's still alive then within Golarion, and the Black Dome knows how to get a message to him.  Keltham cannot promise that he'll be able to fix things, but he will at least want to know.

lintamande: Mirna nods, a bit tightly. Does not try to make herself whisper something back.

Keltham: "Need to take a short break, now," Keltham will say out loud, "but I'll be back in a bit to talk to the others whose time I purchased."

Prince Fe-Anar: "Did that go well? It was somewhat hard to tell in any given moment whether you were abandoning Osirion as a cosmic error of some kind or coming to comprehend it."

Keltham: "Will answer later, I need to go off and cry for a bit in a corner where that won't bother anyone, hopefully quietly unless somebody can put a silence field around me."

Keltham: Back!

"Sorry, it was just -"

"The Carissa Sevar I thought I knew - would have wanted - something that I just did.  The imaginary Carissa Sevar.  I, don't know, about the real one, if she would have wanted that too, but it doesn't matter, does it, she wasn't the one I was in love with."

Prince Fe-Anar: "Do you want a hug? You look kind of like you want a hug, but it might just be the having recently been crying."

Keltham: "I am not sure that I should, Fe-Anar.  I am not sure we should be hanging out together more.  I like you, you see, and I am not sure that I should be making any more friends, at this point.  Osirion is - maybe not an Evil place, but it is not, not necessarily looking like a place where I can belong, and the story I'm in seems to be one where emotional relationships I develop, just - just get torn away from me.  When and if it turns out that I can get Carissa back, if it turns out I'm in that sort of story, I will consider the possibility of developing new emotional relationships.  Until then, it is in my own interests not to be, that sort of character, any more, the sort who has friends and interesting relationships.  Not me threatening the tropes, see, just, what makes sense for me to do in my own best interests, given the way the story has been going."

Prince Fe-Anar: "That sounds wildly unhealthy and ill-advised, but I'm not going to ignore you and hug you anyway since that seems liable to cause an international incident of some kind."

Keltham: "Thanks.  Dath ilan - is all about self-determination, see.  In a world where people - can't decide for themselves, without hurting themselves - there's not - very much left, of what we are."

He doesn't like this, doesn't like what it's increasingly obvious is the thing he is going to end up deciding to do, from here, even if he hasn't decided it yet.

All he can do, maybe, is speedrun the Osirion arc, as much as he can, and get past, the unhappy part.

"I am not really, understanding, Osirion.  I think - I suspect, speculate - that I was supposed to be here with Korva Tallandria, that she was supposed to help me understand this, but I shit all over her character route by being stupid and thoughtless and now this part is just, fouled beyond repair."

Prince Fe-Anar: "That is a really concerning thing for you to be saying, I don't think it's a good way to make predictions, and I sort of think we should pay Iomedae to talk to you again for longer or something."

Keltham: "I'd rather She didn't.  I appreciate the first vision, it was very good for me, but - but I do not want anybody looking at my mind, at this point, not even gods, not even gods who used to be human, I want my privacy back and am seriously considering severing the cleric bond to Abadar in case he gets the contents of my thoughts every morning at dawn - how serious of a decision is that, is it hugely expensive for Abadar to cleric me again afterwards or is it much cheaper the second time."