"She had some really neat ideas about how a society could work! I don't know if it really will work but maybe if you have the right starting resources."

"Huh. Like what?"

"Apparently they have community leaders who sort of govern everybody, and intervene if parents are mistreating their children or something, and they do nearly all their moral and historical and theological education through storytelling, which ends up meaning it's mostly done by women because storytelling doesn't require free hands, and everyone knows a signed language so literacy's really easy and they can tolerate living together as closely as they apparently do."

"Huh. That is really neat."

"It's a bit disorienting to have slaves pitying you your deprived childhood!"

"You totally had a deprived childhood, though."

"Sure, but there's no slave I'd trade with."

"Wonder what the slavery's like."

"The people she works with mostly fix spaceships, she said. I don't know anything else."

"I assume anything they put a paralysis device in you for probably isn't much for providing metaphorical carrots."

"And interspecies slavery tends to be worse, as a rule, moreso when the two species are very different."

"I'll buy that. I will refrain from feeling smug about most of her concerns being directed at Osirion, on the grounds that I did not tell her about the halflings. Or the devil worship."

"Or the prohibition on primarily following other gods!"

"Or the number of executions. In my defense, fixing Cheliax is already on the list."

"The means to prevent pregnancy will change policy in Osirion and solve most of the problems. I - assume?" He looks questioningly at Hagan.

"I...think so? Slowly, though. Like, over a hundred years while they test whether people get less lawful."

"Well, that's reasonable."

Shrug.

"Most of your problems do seem like the kind that can't be solved overnight."

"I guess. But you could change the legal stuff overnight and the rest might change in a generation rather than three."

"Only if you thought we should basically be aspiring to be like Andoran with less child abandonment? And I - don't know that we should, actually."

"I would say that if the rest of the world were less of a mess it'd matter less, since people would have anywhere to leave to, but - if you marry all your women off at twenty I'm not really sure that matters."

"There's probably technology that could change that calculus too. Or cheaper, more widespread, access to magic."

"Anti-aging magic. So men don't have to tolerate a twenty-five year old on their wedding night, which they are of course too shallow to handle."

"I think it's more about being less tempted to remarry a decade down the line."