"Mmhmm."

"There's a bunch of bits to it or I woulda prioritized editing it out of my head. But like - I'm not specifically attached to the purchase bit of it where somebody's like hey lady nice guy you made what do you want for him. That's - it's not cosmetic but it's not the bit that stuck to me. It's knowing that within that one particularly - intimate and vulnerable scope, I don't just mean sex but the whole way married couples get when they don't hate each other - the situation's under control, the thing keeping the situation under control is me and I can trust it the way I trust myself, I can put my weight down there? Also like the 'because I'm so great or something' is operative, like, the being an exception to the rule that people belonging to other people is bad, due to my excellent personal qualities, specifically such that somebody wanted to be mine because they trusted me to be good to them and do good things with their help, would be - nice. And I don't want kids unless they can be demigods born into a paradise realm and I have noticed that this doesn't sit that well with guys in cultures that do not construe things this way. And I don't want to share. And I don't want somebody to be, like, ostensibly married to me but kind of checked out about it and I don't want to - in Osirion you hear wives who want more attention than they're getting and they're resorting to weird psychological engineering where they wear nicer outfits and serve oysters for dinner and that's stupid and I don't like it. And I don't like there being a threshold of commitment that makes somebody I'm theoretically trying to marry go 'wow, that is slightly too real and binding, I would prefer something less real and binding than that', like, why even get married."

Nod. "Lotta that makes sense. The - wanting something that can only break if you screw up, I think that's sort of related to how I feel about places that have divorce - and hating the - marriage as an adversarial game where you try to play your spouse into being whatever you need from them -"

"Yeah, some of this I'm not sure I'd want to compromise on at all but it specifically coming in the form of something ownership-shaped would probably budge if I worked on it."

"Worked on it?"

"You know how I write all the time? I like to kind of lay out my thoughts where they'll hold still and I can look at them and often then I can poke it around how I want."

"Huh. Does writing work like that for most people?"

"Nah, I'm weird."

"Oh good. Was going to feel worse about not learning it."

"I mean it's useful in other ways too but probably all ones you know about. Also I had to invent my own writing system to feel like it was adequately private. Counts as a code as long as nobody else is using it."

"Yeah, it being usefuller doesn't mean I could suddenly learn it."

"It's pretty impressive you can speak more than your native language like that, I can sort of model how you'd get along otherwise but I come up totally blank if I imagine trying to learn a language without taking any notes."

"I picked up most of them as a little kid. My father really likes languages and he thinks kids can learn them better, which might be true or it might just be that you can make kids do it and adults won't bother. Every day there was only one language you could speak, in a rotation."

"I guess that'd do it. We did soft immersion, basics for a few weeks and then the whole day at school it was nothing but the target language and asking how to say stuff and after the first two months you got swatted for asking instead of finding a way to get the word you wanted in the target language."

"It was the least a waste of time of everything I learned, really."

"What else did they load you up on?"

"Theology. History of Osirion, history of the pharaohs, impressive achievements of my grandfather's. Foreign affairs. Formal protocols. Various important people and how to greet them."

"...I guess it's not all useless but I wouldn't call it practical."

"Well, see, all of us who don't become the pharaoh are just failed bets."

"There's something so - tonally dissonant about it - like, it'd be one thing if you clearly weren't suitable and could be formally disinherited and packed off with a seed fund to go, like, start a business? That would be reasonably Osirian. But you're just born in this cage - not even a cage, you can see through the bars of a cage. And then you're supposed to stay there till you die."

"They used to kill the spares. When the succession was more uncertain and 'presses a claim on the throne themself' was more of a worry. - you won't find this in any Osirian history textbooks because it's very embarrassing. There was a different era when they assigned them all provincial governorships and promoted the best one, which was great for competence in office but terrible for succession wars, everyone with their own built-in power base. Now - I think they haven't had to figure anything out yet. My grandfather's family didn't survive the secession war."

"You aren't, like, twelve, they have had some time to consider replacement social technologies. Shouldn't succession wars no longer be a thing?"

"I know of no good reason to worry about them but I really don't pay attention to anything. - what it'd look like, if there was a worry, was someone getting backing from Katapesh or Qadira and trying to muddy the waters about who Abadar picked."

"He doesn't mind it being unambiguous in principle, he dumps a ton of levels on a guy about it, maybe he'd deign to clarify."

"Probably.

I think they might let us leave when the pharaoh has some heirs. Right now - it's still true that if he died in some irretrievable fashion tomorrow it'd be one of us."