"- no? Uh, only humans can be Osirian royalty, and most universities won't take halflings but that's not because it's the law, they're just kind of racist."

"Oh, has no one explained that yet? We've got a half a dozen castes and you're only allowed to do jobs that are your own caste. It's patrilineal inheritance so the girls're green even though I'm purple."

"That sounds like a bad idea but maybe there's a reason for it I'm not thinking of."

"It's pretty much just a bad idea."

"Weren't you being all humble about that for a while?"

"For a while we didn't know of any civilizations without a caste system and it was unclear if it'd work even though on paper it looked like it would. In practice, works fine."

"There are countries with caste systems but not because it's more economically efficient, it's transparently not that."

"I like being green," says Hala.

"I like being royalty! But there's not much of an economic efficiency argument for it. People say that it makes sense to make sure all the people Abadar might pick have a really thorough geopolitical education and so on, and that we can't afford to do that for the whole country, but you could screen people for wisdom at a young age or Abadar could give us a shortlist in advance or something."

"How does he select new rulers?"

"More magic powers."

"I guess that avoids the classic problem with monarchies."

"It does! And we're very proud of it."

"We'd like to get rid of the government," says Isun. "Even the government would like that. We just don't know enough to make it all insurance all the way down yet."

"- gosh. That'd be amazing, if you ever do figure it out."

"I mean, there are anarchies. They mostly aren't great. Run by warlords and so on."

"We're not going to do it till we can make it work without warlords - why would warlords be the problem, we're worried about food labeling and things like that -"

"Well, uh, someone starts doing whatever they want and people can't coordinate to stop them except by giving someone else a lot of power and then that person fights the first one and the winner keeps doing whatever they want. Approximately."

"That's what dispute resolution services are for."

"In practice the places with warlords don't have those. I don't know if they could be introduced or if for some reason they tend to collapse into there being warlords. - you have different magic, that seems like it might affect the - distribution of ability to do violence - in an important way."

"Somebody clanking around in magic armor with a magic sword can do a fair amount of damage..."

"Well if someone wants to come and try to introduce dispute resolution services in Katapesh we'll pay them."

"Your country will? Why?"

"Warlords make bad neighbors. And they make slavery reforms hard."

"You still have slavery?"