"Did you get kidnapped-- sorry, sortitioned-- or are you a priest? Or, I guess, were you elected in a county with a very unusual take on whom exactly should steal the election?"

"Pharasmin cleric."

"I'm assuming from your general attitude that you're not going to be able to clarify for me what exactly Pharasma teaches."

"Even the Asmodeans couldn't sideline Her completely. She created the bloody universe and a few more besides and it's down to Her where you go when you get along to your ever after! But I haven't got much in the way of finer points. Babies should be alive, dead people should be dead, in between don't be a terrible nuisance."

"I figured. A lot of people think that if you could get Pharasma to tell us what we ought to be doing then we would have this whole axiology thing squared up, since she created the universe and presumably knows what we should be doing with it. But as far as any Pharasmin clerics are concerned the teachings of Pharasma are (a) don't kill babies (b) don't be undead (c) sort everything in the universe into one of nine boxes. Ethical philosophers on the Pharasmin line tend to go into either fighting undead or astrology."

"Astro-what?"

"Predicting the future from the stars. It doesn't work, but it does offer infinite scope for classifying everything into one of nine boxes."

"Can't predict the future any more. My gran said she used to be able to do it but not after Arodidn't*."

*It is really easy to construct puns like this in English and I am declaring it is similar in Taldane.

"Well, it didn't work even before that, although Aroden's death has definitely increased the popularity of the activity."

"I believe she was using magic but if you told me the stars used to help somehow I wouldn't have any way to say different."

"Anyway, in countries where constitutions make sense as a governing structure, you have multiple powerful groups. Like in Absalom, the government's powerful but so are the university and the guilds and the merchants. And so the constitution makes sure everyone is on the same page about what the government ought to be doing and at what point the merchants are entitled to rebel. I suppose our archmage friends would like a government where the queen is as powerful as the churches, the nobility, the merchants, and... random peasants... I really don't get sortition... anyway. And so they're drawing circles on the ground and hoping the demon will show up.*"

*Common Taldane proverb that means "cargo culting."

"I'm not half sure that I've much in common with any of the other clerics. Maybe the other Pharasmins, I suppose they may all be cranky old midwives just like me, but me and a paladin or some wasp-whisperer only just about breathe the same air."

"Well, I imagine the Pharasmins' collective contribution to the constitution will be that babies should live and undead should not."

"If it's so obvious as that we could have stayed home."

"You might need to persuade people to pay attention. The pamphlets inform me there's a vampire count."

"A what! What did she replace half the nobles for to leave a vampire lying around? I've heard she killed the bleeding Tarrasque!"

"Well, people writing the pamphlets do seem to make things up a lot. But if this is a problem, you see why you might have to tell the Queen not to do that."

"I suppose if she's done such a ridiculous thing I can tell her otherwise, yes, if only there's a way to get a word in edgewise around all those hundreds of other folks."

"Do you have any more questions for me about philosophy?"

"I don't actually know what philosophy is neither."

"--you know that's a very good question. To me, philosophy is the study of everything we don't understand well enough to put in a different category. Magic isn't philosophy because we have some idea of how magic works. Same for history. But where life came from or how gods work or how we know anything at all, those are philosophy."

"Are you trying to tell me you don't understand how you know things?"

"It turns out to be a surprisingly complicated question."

"I was half-tempted to ask how one goes about learning to read if they didn't when school-aged but I think perhaps you're right about it causing derangement." She snorts and walks away.

A gnome! From Brastlewark! That's practically just two counties over. And he wants to sell her cheap facts about Cheliax, and he is probably gnomish enough for these not to be lies!

She will stop at Levrolurment's table. "Hello. I was raised in an isolated location by people hiding from Asmodeus, and now I'm a noble and don't really know much about Cheliax. How interesting is telling me what the moral and philosophical principles preached and practices pre-liberation actually were?" She hopes that the question of what is up with her will be interesting enough that it is free or cheap.