"I could wear a seal necklace."

"Show me some and I can work with that all right."

"What does it do?"

Isaiah tucks the earring in Aaron's ear.

" - huh. Cool. How expensive are they -"

"You want units of 'unskilled labor' or 'gold' or 'skilled labor' or 'bread' or some basket of those - at home 'slaves' are a reasonable unit to denominate things in in some cases since their price is related to the surplus value of a laborer over the cost of supporting them, but apparently we had better stop that -"

"Is it not intuitively obvious you had better stop that."

" - no. We enslave people for crimes, or for debt, and in the debt case I'm working on figuring out what sorts of people would be better off without the option but it's not going to turn out to be 'all of them'."

"We have a ceiling on how much of a controlling share in yourself you can sell that matches what you can do with a dependent child. Stops anybody from getting too cute about whose interest a right or restriction is potentially in if they move together, comes with a term limit we know people pop out of all right because they do it when they grow up."

" - might work fine. The case of criminals is harder but if we were richer we could have more monasteries. - does that qualify as slavery, it's forced work but for their own good not for anyone else's financial benefit -"

"You're gonna have more leeway if it's a criminal punishment and not, like, torture."

"Then that'd be workable if we were rich."

"Monasteries? Like the thing Michael seduced Rebecca out of?"

"Yup, like that, though hers was technically a convent."

"They are tightly constrained living environments that let people focus on their lawfulness and/or goodness. They're the usual criminal sentence for young people, people who'd otherwise be executed but seem able to cooperate, or people with family that can afford to send them."

"I believe that is arguably what Rebecca's family was trying to do."

"It's important!"

"I think it might be less important when the gods and afterlife are fictional."

"Are they? How odd."

"Well, that's my understanding, there's disagreement on the matter."

"We'll be able to check that for all of you. - don't know whether to hope you get our afterlife, it's probably net bad if you don't know what to do with it."

"It does sound like it has some problems and anyway Finis is working on immortality."

"Huh. Best of luck to him."

"If he's ever at a point where luck will make a difference we'll grab some of Pelape's stash for him, probably."

"Why do you use gold to buy things?"