"People inherit things from their teachers or spouses or friends, but it wouldn't snowball like that."

"Early in our history alliances between cities and countries would be secured by marrying your children to their children. I wonder if that has something to do with countries being smaller here."

"Occasionally a polity'll merge if the rulers get married..."

"Might be it, then, you just have fewer layers for those kinds of shenanigans to occur."

"Yep. Polities also merge by conquest and occasional mutual agreement, I assume you have that the same."

Nod. "Lot of conquest, back before population controls - you run out of space, people are hungry, the neighbors have farmland..."

"...that in particular we have less of, it's more greed or anger."

"That comes up too but the rate really did drop dramatically once we didn't have the population pressure. Conquest here might be less ugly, you'd have no reason to hurt most of the locals."

"Since we can't meaningfully displace them, yeah. Although the places that do slavery often do it via prisoners of war."

"I actually know quite a lot about the history of warfare but see no reason to introduce new technologies there - just make it deadlier -"

"A lot of it's done by servants."

"Makes sense. We have drones for a lot of things that used to require pilots."

"Drones?"

"Remotely piloted aircraft."

"Neat. I mean, apart from the war part."

"Yep. I haven't the faintest idea how to do airplanes - I can't even figure out how the storks fly, is that magic or are they much lighter than they look?"

"They flap really hard. They're also very light, which is impressive for a golem that complex, their instructions are all folded up."

"Airplanes do not flap but I really don't know nearly enough to teach anyone to make one. And it'd require metal - I really hope this world has enough metal in it."

"I don't think we're actually short. It exists, just not in huge amounts. I'll make the golems out of iron."

"It has to be cheap to get lots of nice things like trains that go everywhere."

"I'm working on it!"

"I will be so patient!" Slight bounce. "Mostly patient!"

"Do you want, like, regular progress reports or anything -"

"That doesn't really sound like the best use of your time, but I appreciate the thought."

"Hey, you're the patron, you get progress reports if you want 'em, but I'll skip it if you don't care."