"- can you bring that home? I've never seen anyone advertising souvenirs."

"No," he says sadly. "I gave serious consideration to petitioning for an audience to argue this point with Abadar but I decided against."

"Aw, why?"

"I don't understand it. It's stupid to start an argument when you don't understand something, you want to start an argument once you do understand it and can therefore be confident it's wrong. I've asked some people to look into it since then but I have a lot of other priorities and it might be something it makes more sense to do from the other side."

"Mm, makes sense, I suppose. Can you buy things and put them in safe deposit and collect them if you make it there later? If you don't have any heirs, or something."

"If you wanted to, yes, though it'd be a bit of an odd thing to do unless you found it motivational - you'll be richer then -"

"What, after I die? Not right away, surely?"

"No, not right away, but in short enough order. I think, having known you two days."

"Took me a bit. No one knocked on my door to offer me church investment when I was starting out."

"I think that's supposed to be character building. I confess I have this secondhand, though."

"It had some effects on my character. I don't know if I'd say it built it."

"That sounds like a fascinating story."

"We spent six months living in a two bedroom apartment with four other people. It had rats," says Isam. "It was better than living with our parents and I worked my way out of it and I don't know that it improved me."

- nod. "Starting out with nothing in Axis isn't like that."

"They issue the apartments for free, do they?"

"The districts that really want immigrants will pay you!"

"Ha! What do they want them for?"

"There's lots of benefits to more people! Economies of scale and a deeper talent pool and higher density which makes you a more desirable arrival point for further immigrants and so on."

"Huh. So why doesn't anyone do that around here?"

"Adverse selection, right, even if we'd be delighted to have the average immigrant from Taldor the more attractive we make immigration the less appealing the pool of people who want to immigrate for that reason. Axis pre-selects."

"Not all that hard, you and yours put out very promising statistics."

"You'd be much more excited about ten workers, guaranteed none of them to be criminals, than ten workers, statistically one or two of whom is a criminal, right? Because criminals can destroy a lot of value and the precautions against them eat more."

"Is that guaranteed, though? Does no one land in Axis and say, ah, finally, I'm in, I can run amok."

"I think not. Probably some people find a district with very relaxed laws and do nothing but have extramarital sex and drink for years - but there are places where that's legal, and they do go there."

"Huh. I dunno, though, I'd maybe rather have an employee who was a criminal in some way completely irrelevant to me than one who spent all day desperately restraining the impulse to pocket merchandise."