"If you give enough money to charity, and that's counted in absolute terms, you can get a Good afterlife, if you want to figure on worrying about it at all."

<Well then. Maybe if it's convenient I'll buy up a lot of synthetic diamonds with all my Andalite money first, I don't know if that'll be feasible.>

He is taking more notes. "We should try to determine whether our afterlives affect people who aren't from our universe but die in it, and conversely what happens to our people when they die elsewhere."

"I'm sure there are dead examples of all the populations you can try resurrecting as a first pass."

"Yep. Are Amentans all one national government -"

"No. Nor are you, right -"

"We have lots of countries. Osirion keeps the best statistics but I don't know if we're the best."

"Best at, what, specifically the afterlife thing -"

"Yeah. We do also care about being wealthy and a pleasant place to live but we mostly measure ourselves by the afterlife statistics."

"Well, how are you doing at wealthy and pleasant, that'd give any idea of how good you are at accomplishing things in general from another angle besides how good you are at getting stats that say what you want to hear."

"We're a lot richer than we were under colonial rule but it's mostly been eaten up by the population growth, which is why the church is interested in encouraging smaller families. I don't know how you'd measure pleasant. Foreigners usually hate the weather."

"Too cold or too hot?"

"Too hot. Osirion is almost entirely desert."

"Amentans aren't mostly picky about temperature but we won't care for the place if it's equatorial. - even if it is, you need to either tightly control immigration or have a population control plan."

"Pelape -"

"Pelape deserves every honor in the world on down to an honorary degree in astrophysics. She hasn't erased nationalism from the Amentan heart and I think we could get to be a bit of a strain on a place before it was enough that enough people would leave of their own accord, unless there were population controls of some kind."

"Not a huge fan of racially specific laws but we could make Amentans buy the right to have more children than everyone else is having."

"Something like that would probably be fine, given Pelape's activities, just have anything laid down in advance and mind you're ready to tighten it up."

"We can do that."

"I guess absolute monarchies have some advantages."

"Absolute monarchies with a decent deity unequivocally managing the succession are great. Otherwise they're very bad.  - also, what is Pelape doing exactly -"

"...Pelape's my alt. She -

There's a potion called Felix Felicis. It does luck. It does really good luck.

You're not supposed to take it in more than one day's dose at a time, because it's insanely addictive. Starts mostly concentrating on how to get you to take more. The comedown's supposedly survivable, if you, say, take all the Felix on the planet and no more is brewed before it's out of your system. But it's also supposedly awful; we don't have a lot of details.

Pelape knows how to fly spaceships, and she is on a lot of Felix and relying on us to pay her bills so she can collect more after more is brewed, so she can use it to find more planets so the Amentans can - relax at all - with how they've been colonizing Earth. She could show up any time in the next few days, she has that much supply before she needs to come back and get more."

- nod. "I don't know if we change the calculus for any of that."

"You probably do, but it doesn't seem like she is likely to have seen you coming in advance so it'll be warp speed at fastest that she could show up and interact with all this, and we don't know how far away she went except that its turnaround has to fit inside her stash."

Outside, he makes a heroic effort to sit up. It does not quite work. He tries again.