(He'll repeat that for the Dwarves). "Your world doesn't have any?"

<No.>

"Ours either," says Ana.

"Do you have afterlives?"

"Our kind of wizard can turn into ghosts but they're not very high quality ghosts, so no, not really."

"We don't know. Braids say they do, but braids say lots of things."

<What reason do you have to think anyone has an afterlife?>

"I visit it every couple of weeks."

"Is it that often? What, if people aren't escorted they'll pull a smash and grab in downtown Aktun?"

"We're trying to optimize the touring routes! Figure out what speaks to people most, what if anything produces persistent lifestyle changes..."

"One of these days you need to take me and I'll put something by for Khalil, I'll probably outlive him and I don't think dying is liable to fix him."

"Of course."

" - so when you die, you just ...go to this other place...and it's exactly like not having died?"

"Not exactly. People get sorted, when they die, based on how they lived their lives, and Axis is the most like still being alive but not perfectly like it. Magic works differently for petitioners and they're harder to kill but if they do die they can't be brought back, and many of the afterlives have some subtle psychological effects that eventually accumulate into a completely new personality. Axis doesn't have that."

"Plus you can't have more kids. People have all different opinions on that one."

"Why... would it work like that. Who set it up."

"The gods. By some accounts the material plane is primarily a system with buy-in from enough gods for sorting souls into afterlives fairly."

"Fairly?"

"Well, many people argue that the typical citizen doesn't have access to enough information to be an informed participant in it and also astonishing numbers of people get tortured eternally, so there's a reasonable case that it's not fair if you include any of that in your fairness criteria. It is fair specifically with respect to the interests of the gods who set it up."

"...what interests?"

"Some of them wanted to get to torture people eternally and some of them wanted to get to build cool cities and some of them wanted to get to fight evil and some of them wanted vast wilderness never to be touched by civilization and some wanted to eat people."

"...and the ones who wanted to fight evil were like 'okay, you guys can eat some of the people'...?"

"Yes."

"That doesn't seem like particularly quality evil-fighting."

"I don't really know that much about their bargaining position but certainly it'd be nice if they'd done better."