"Do your kids have this problem too."

"Not Olia, she's too young to talk."

"Does she have a milestone of some kind coming up that you can perhaps excitedly tell me about."

"When I was a kid I didn't even know Melkor existed. So when we did First Choice in church - my church was very liberal, it was more of a coming-of-age thing - and the words aren't even in our language - I was more focused on getting the pronunciation right with everyone watching me. Once the war started it got more serious and now children are taken away if they don't get a proper supervised First Choice."

oh fuck these poor fucking orcs

"Do you happen to know what the words mean?"

"I do now."

"Would it - affect anything - if you told me, does it obey the use-mention distinction..."

"Recently they had everyone swear not to share that kind of information with outsiders."

"Who counts as an outsider."

"Non-orcs?"

"You don't know that I'm not an orc."

"...it seems really unlikely you're an orc."

"Yes, I will grant that it must seem really unlikely."

...text of First Choice oath, all extant variants/translations/etc.?

There are lots of modern translations. The consensus one seems to be: "Melkor is my lord and protector. I will trust Melkor, and disbelieve the words of his enemies; I will serve Melkor, and seek to understand and do his will in the building of our world."

...eesh.

eeeeeeesh.

"Never mind, found it."

"Oh, good," he says. "I don't like the promises not to tell things, I understand security's important with the war but it's so absolute, what if someone needed to know it?"

"Are there lots of those?" Yes like what if an enemy of Melkor needed to know not to declare himself as such lest he have to start talking like it's Opposite Day in order to let you evaluate his statements then what. Cam needs a consult. Are the air raid sirens still going over Brithombar.

Nope; they stopped a while ago.

"Yeah. They asked for a lot of oaths when the war started. And some people - weren't even casually religious growing up, and if they didn't want to make First Choice they got kind of shunted out of positions that required trustworthiness, even though you can swear to trustworthiness without First Choice..."

Can Cam just find a standard collection of oaths somewhere -

He leaves the shuttleful of orcs in the air for now, circling, but he lands his and goes into the city. He's having the conversation through the translator, won't need to worry about ambient Elf voices. "How many of those are there, approximately?"

"Depends on what you wanted to do. If you just teach or deliver babies or something then it'd be different than if you wanted to serve in the war."

"Ballpark total," Cam asks, heading for the President's palaceything.

"Ten?"

"Did there use to be more?"

"Oh, you mean in the whole world? Before the war twelve percent of the population was nonreligious. Now - yeah, I know of a handful."

"Have they been getting harder to come by, or just - incentivized to convert?"