They are fascinated, if not totally admiring.

"Also I've been meaning to ask," Rúmil says, "why has everyone including you been saying things like, ah, 'lawful neutral', like it's a well-known categorization scheme -"

"- oh. Uh, there are spells that can detect at very low granularity some things about how you live your life. Those things don't map perfectly onto the independently interesting concepts of the same names, but they have some magical effects, and here more than in my original plane they sort people into afterlives. It's good versus evil and law versus chaos and you can also be neutral on either or both scale so there's nine ways to be. This country is trying very hard to get everyone into the lawful neutral afterlife, Axis, which sounds pretty nice and is apparently easier to get people into at scale than the good afterlives, and this has a lot of, I want to say distortionary but I'm not sure they'd see it that way, effects on their policy and behavior."

"Huh. 

What do you suppose happens to you and to us, if we die here?"

"I probably wind up in an afterlife - last time anyone checked I pinged neutral good, I don't think I've done anything evil since then, I'll be fine - and you can lean on Fe-Anar for money to resurrect me. You guys might be the same - alignment checks aren't out of my price range if you're nervous but I'd expect you'd both be fine - or your souls might not make the trip and just kind of hang around, but probably either a resurrection spell will still work, or one I spend a couple weeks on adjusting will."

"That's not so worrying, then. I think I'm all right staying here until we find something really good, if it looks like Valinor won't let us go back and forth."

"That was my thinking, yeah."

"I don't understand why they're so cruel if they want to avoid doing evil things, though."

"Like I said, it doesn't map perfectly onto the independently interesting concepts of the same names. They're going for Law, and they're not just individually going for Law, they're trying to be socially conducive to Law, and that means both that they need to deter people from committing crimes for those peoples' sake on top of their victims, and that they need to follow their own laws which specify punishments for things and may or may not be freely changeable since they're theocratic and Abadar's a god, not a regular person."

"Well if he thinks slavery is okay then he sucks."

"I was going to put it a bit more carefully," says Rúmil in a tone of agreement.

"I don't disagree. It's just probably more useful to think of his mortal followers as doing the best they can under very unreasonable threat."

He nods. A vendor's cart catches his eye and he stops to pick up and consider a little silver mirror.

"Stuff is not free, if you want a thing I have some cash but not an unlimited amount, I sold a couple jewelry pieces when I landed."

"- huh. How do you decide how much to give them for it?"

"Some places set fixed prices, others will let you argue about it but they still want enough to cover their costs and then some and if you don't know how much similar things usually cost you can get ripped off for more than it's worth."

He puts it back. "Sounds kind of stressful."

"It is but everyone's too used to it to really notice."

"I wish Valinor hadn't -"

"- hadn't -?"

"Screwed up so badly. Not had any principles to start with. Had been - up for this."

"Yeah. I miss it."

Fëanáro would like to buy these books!

How many books and how expensive are they?

All the books and, uh, he's not sure.

"I don't have enough gold - not even just on me, even if we go to my apartment - for all the books. You can have..." She looks at the prices. "Two now and you have to get your mysterious duplicate to buy you the rest of all the books."