"Good to meet you! You're a delegate, right?"

"Yes, I'm Delegate Jaume Agramunt. They wanted native-born Abadarans for the religious seats and I think I am the only one who is both longstanding and not returned from abroad since the war... Do you prefer Cicerone or Conde?"

"Conde, when we're speaking Chelish."

Nod. "I booked this appointment because - I channel negative and have not been able to shift it, and have historically considered this a nearly inevitable product of my environment because it also eventually happened to every foreign Abadaran who rotated in to staff the bank in Corentyn during my time there, but my understanding is that you have a Good reading despite a Neutral prevailing ethos in Osirion, and so the analogous achievement must not be impossible."

"I believe I'm Lawful Good, yes. I do not know myself to be doing anything wildly different than everybody else - my adventuring party was mostly Neutral, despite doing most of the same things - but am happy to answer questions about my outlook and what I do with my resources and so on. I suppose I always thought of the fact that everyone who went to work in Cheliax came out Evil even without doing any particular Evil as an obvious product of - they were enabling a lot of Evil, and if they hadn't been the Asmodeans wouldn't have let them into the country, for all the reasons they barred almost every other priesthood. If you go do the accounts for an overseas slave-trading business I expect you'll end up Evil even if you're just doing the accounts, because the accounts matter to the success and downstream of that the scale of the business, or they wouldn't be hiring an Abadaran to do them."

"I manumitted my last slave the other day. It did not obviously help, though that wasn't why I was doing it.

"They wanted me for the Asmodean church and I would count myself adequately compensated merely to have avoided that but I would certainly still prefer not to go to Hell."

"I think most people would. I am sure you have encountered already the recommendation you could donate lots of money to Good causes. Unappealing, or just unaffordable?"

"I have considered it and will probably do it in the absence of less expensive options but my understanding - perhaps it is incorrect - is that this works less well and therefore at a worse exchange rate if done mechanically rather than out of some sincere Good intent, which I am unsure how to come by."

"I don't actually particularly think of myself as giving to charity at all. I think of it as spending on things I want, some of which are things like 'Pedraza being a good place for my children to grow up', and some of which are things like 'a rich peaceful world where it's worth investing in all your children as none of them are going to die young'. Those are Good things, but I don't want them particularly differently from how I want other things, and I don't buy them differently either."

"Do you think that's what produced your alignment?"

"Most likely? I have not noticed any obvious other places where I spend my resources very differently from my friends or from others in the Church."

"Do you think it likely that slavery in particular is a major source of Chelish Evil? I am on the committee about it and have been operating under the assumption that it is a grave risk to the economy to expropriate slaves when it's already delicate with the slow collapse of paper currency and the damage from the war - and then the port closure - and I did not succeed at pushing a policy of slowing the emancipation to something safer but I did attempt it -"

"I find all policy questions extremely difficult to think about and have been abstaining on most of them. For the most part I would really expect people working for themselves to produce much more value - though not necessarily more taxable value - than people whose work is chosen by others. I do think having a constitutional convention increases investment uncertainty a great deal and that's a bad thing. I don't know what to do about it. It's the uncertainty that's really fatal, though. If we knew what the law would be in five years we could just account for it, and even if it's a stupid law commerce finds ways to route around stupid laws.

What were you imagining would happen that would be good if emancipation were slower?"

"The policy I was trying to offer as a compromise was banning the sale of slaves to buyers other than manumission-inclined interests, with the idea that any business which was shuttering anyway would rid itself of slaves in that manner, any new business starting up would be unable to source slaves and would begin by relying on free labor, and meanwhile shipsful of steeply discounted halflings would stop departing for Katapesh. This would have been slow to exactly the extent that interests inclined to purchase and manumit slaves would take time to come up with the money to match that interest. Money is tight almost everywhere in Cheliax right now, and half of the money is Evil and many people are very confused about what to do about that, and I believe that it should be prioritized toward emancipation to the extent that someone voluntarily buys that with money of their own.

"I expect that with halfling slavery ended so abruptly instead, some concerns which were not financially or prognostically able to shift their employment practices in anticipation were ruined; and more generally anyone who imagined that the new regime would be disinclined to steal their possessions is now disabused of that trust and may well not expect the theft to stop with slaves - reasonably enough, since it might not - and therefore be disinclined to investment that relies on continued ownership of anything."

"The interests inclined to manumit slaves have no way to purchase it no matter how highly they value it because they are ...slaves. If you had a country with that policy where ninety percent of people were enslaved and despised their slavery but none of the free people cared much I think slavery would endure forever, with some loan arrangement springing right up to evade the sale prohibitions, not because there was no mass of value that people were voluntarily willing to dedicate to abolition but because that value was being ongoingly expropriated."

"There are manumitted slaves - I had no objection to it becoming legal to manumit halflings - and churches and Andorens and damned people casting about for Good to do. Your point about the loan arrangement is well taken, thoguh."

"I agree that in fact the interest that free people have in paying for abolition isn't zero, but I would not want to adopt a policy that would result in slavery forever except insofar as free people happened to altruistically want to end it, that amounts to presuming it's entirely fine to steal from people so long as you steal everything and they are left without any currency with which to register their preference to not be stolen from."

"There was a pamphlet put about that claimed to be a letter from the Archbanker of Molthune, did you see it -"

"I have been avoiding the pamphlets but I've met the Archbanker and think highly of her."

"It had some interesting arguments principally about hereditary slavery, which I should perhaps reflect on more... What I wound up doing with my slave is allowing him to earn money on the side toward his freedom but I wound up waiving almost all of it after a very short time. Something obliging owners to make this possible would have been less injurious to the premise that people own things they buy and which are not recent stolen goods but have been property for generations."

Have you met Chelish people? he wants to ask but firstly it would be rude and secondly Jaume is a Chelish person. 

"An important difference between buying people and buying things that are not people is that the people will frequently run away and engage in activities that would be self-defense if they were free including where they rise to killing. The present state has not in fact been paid any money at all for lifelong enforcement of this contract. The present state does not have immediate prospects of being paid for such enforcement. The church would charge an enormous amount if asked to provide lifelong enforcement of this contract in some place where the law did not provide for it as a default.

It seems to me that 'the new state of Cheliax inherits from the Asmodean state the obligation of lifelong enforcement of this specific contract' is on weaker grounds than the new state inheriting most of the old state's debts, and in fact I don't think it paid any of the old state's debts that weren't related to the Worldwound. The new state does not really have anything to gain by lifelong enforcement of this contract. The new state never represented that it would provide such enforcement. Conquest, in general, is injurious to the premise that people own things, but where ownership of a thing requires someone promising to track down and kill the thing for you if it runs away, if the someone who promised that is gone, I am not sure why you're entitled to a free replacement."

"Hhm.

"But of course people still own - goats, which are prone to escape, and their ownership of those goats is not premised on there being an arm of the state which recaptures goats, nor even on the operation of the still-dormant civil courts, but on the - hm.

"Thank you."

"I think that in Katapesh this specific line of argument would be on weak ground because the organizations that recapture slaves like the neighbors that recapture goats are indeed all private, and take bids. That is not how Asmodean Cheliax did things because it would in fact naturally bring about the end of slavery if it got too expensive to enforce, and I think Asmodean Cheliax wanted slavery independent of the costs of enforcement."

"I suppose it did."

"Also most of the ways to make enforcement cheaper are things like 'if you catch someone trying to leave, torture their whole family to death', which are definitely very Evil, and if you ban those enforcement costs get even higher."

Jaume nods.

"But in general I have no idea what the best thing to do about slavery would have been. Government has always seemed impossible to me. I listened once to a talk by a man who had managed the patent office in Osirion for sixty years. A sincere Abadaran, who had tried very hard to set Osirion's patent laws to encourage innovation. I asked him what was the best thing that had come out of the office's policies, in those sixty years, and he told me -

- originally patents were public with enough details to reproduce the technique. No one in Osirion could copy them, not legally, but someone could go somewhere else and copy it, so if you had a really secret technique you might prefer not to apply for a patent. Obviously people with secret techniques complained about this and they spent a couple of years arguing about how they wanted to adjust the laws, and ended up going with a more limited kind of patent you can get if you keep your technique secret.

But in the years before they changed the law a silversmith from Taldor got on the wrong end of some political dispute in Taldor and came to Osirion and started a company, and didn't apply for a patent as the secrecy matter hadn't been settled yet, and his apprentice ended up departing with all his trade secrets and starting a competitor which does a lot of work the guilds don't allow elsewhere, and then some of his apprentices did the same thing, and now Osirion has an enormously successful silversmithing industry. Now, even without patents, there are agreements the Taldane expatriate could have gotten that would have prevented this, but he was confused and didn't realize he'd need them. 

I find this very upsetting, in a sense. Everybody involved was diligently trying to do things that made sense, and in fact the thing that was most important was none of them. And I still don't really know what the takeaway is. Should you have patent law? Should you not have patent law? Should you have secret patents or transparent patents? Should you hope that your laws are confusing? Should we compensate the Taldane expatriate? I think the convention is probably enormously important but it's a rare circumstance where I even have a guess about in which direction."

"It is a confusing enterprise. I'm not sure what the Queen intended to accomplish by it. Under most circumstances I believe myself to be operating by principles simple enough that they can steer me regardless, but..."

"It is very hard to have principles simple enough to steer by and also applicable to the kinds of matters that go before the Convention. I really dislike it. Hopefully it will be concluded soon. I have told the Inquisitor I'm leaving when clam season starts even if it's still going."

"Clam season?"

"Pedraza's near a clam field. Every summer for about a month they burst out of the fields and swarm the docks and the city, eating people, and attack boats with the same purpose. I hadn't heard of it when I lived in Osirion but apparently it's a terrible problem through the whole Longmarch. I've got to get home and fight an enormous number of man-eating clams and I can't say I'm not looking forward to it."

"Oh, the gigas clams, I thought you meant the small kind people eat. Yes, they are troublesome."

"It's just so much more straightforward than politics! I have never once shown up at their house to eat them, and when they show up at mine I can improve matters by stabbing them!"

"I don't recommend trying to eat a gigas clam, I don't think one remove is enough to eliminate the risk of turning into a ghoul."

"Good to keep in mind. But I mostly mean, if we were caught in a cycle of mutual raiding with the gigas clam civilization then I'd have to figure out if there was anything to be done about it. But as it stands we leave them alone and they try to eat us so there's no politics anywhere to be found."

"I hope the clam season goes as well as can be expected.

"You have given me a fair bit to think about but if there is anything else not related to slavery that might be responsible for my present alignment that you can think of I would like to hear about it."

"A lot of Chelish men treat women appallingly and possibly in a way that adds up to Evil over enough of it."

"I don't think that's it in my case though I suppose if it's something subtler than whoring, which I am not given to, I might not think of it. - I suppose I could be about to dig myself more of a hole in that fashion, I bought some debt and it was suggested to me one of the debtor families might wish to extinguish theirs by offering a young lady as a wife and I have sent for her, paying her travel expenses in both directions regardless of the outcome, to see how we get along, but she is not here yet."

"That seems potentially entirely fine but I am worried that the ambient damage that Hell has done to everyone's expectations of each other could still damage it. Paying her travel expenses in both directions regardless of the outcome seems like probably a good start on that. What would getting along well look like, to you?"

"Well, most people do not like me and I would find that wearing in a wife."

"That makes sense. Why do you suppose most people don't like you?"

"I'm not sure. ...The story my sister tells whenever she is trying to summarize me as a person to someone else is that once she tried to play poker with me and her husband and upon realizing that I was supposed to actively misinform the other players I threw my cards in my brother-in-law's face. I was nineteen at the time, and I'm not sure what exactly this illustrates but she seems to find it illustrative."

Not spectacularly good manners? He has had enough exposure to what Chelish people consider a disqualifying temper to be fairly sure it's not that. "I think it is a good thing to have a wife whose life you are aspiring to make better as she makes yours better, and to protect especially where she takes on great costs for you, like bearing you sons. I think a lot of Chelish people are doing each other Evil in this department but have no particular discouragement for you."

"Mm. Are there other things I might be missing?"

"Probably, but I do not have a good lead on guessing what they might be. Are there...things that you want other people to have, for their own sakes, in a way that feels motivating? I was poor as a child and feel strongly about the plight of poor children in the cities; my wife wants fatherless girls to find good marriages."

"I... well, I don't want people to have to become Asmodean priests but that does not seem to be a going concern any more. I suppose more expansively I do not want people to be - coerced into situations where they become incapable of adhering to any principles they would have liked to retain under better conditions? This was never a particularly achievable desire in the past and I am not sure how it could be implemented now, though there is probably more scope for it."

"I don't know a lot about how one could pursue that desire. ....you could try to get conscientious objection to conscription allowed?"

"I would like that, come to think. I'm not on the committee on the army but I could perhaps sit in or speak to its members. I'd want to see how it works elsewhere, if it does..."

"Osirion doesn't have it, though we also don't start wars. Lastwall has it but I don't know any details. I think Andoran has been experimenting with, uh, conscientious objection to many laws, to less success, but maybe they'd still have thoughts about where it does work."

"The Reclamation paladins probably know something about Lastwall's arrangement. I don't know anyone to be specifically Andoren but there is probably someone."

"It seems like a worthy project to work on, I hope something comes of it."

Nod nod. "Thank you very much, Conde."

"Of course. May Abadar go with you."

"And with you as well."