"It is, especially out in the countryside like that. The cities will be more of a problem that way - I have no idea what the traders are going to end up doing - but it'll also be easier to have a demon fill a warehouse with flour every so often, there, and just give it out to whoever asks."

"And like your gold market your wheat market can crash too. You might want people to move out of flour and into peanuts but you want that to happen slowly before there's a harvest it isn't cost-effective to reap."

"Mmhmm. I'm sure it's going to take at least a few years to get it all worked out, and I don't think we need to be in a rush about it mostly. I want to ask around about how they do things here, too - if it's all machines and no farmers at all, we'll want to think about what to do with the farmers, but we don't need to worry about making sure they're still willing to farm, they can just do it if they want to and not if they don't and we'll be fine either way."

"There are people who call themselves farmers but they're a tiny share of the population and a lot of their job is dealing with machines. Also hobby farms are a thing."

"Mmhmm. I'm sure we're going to have a lot of people whose families have been on the same patch of land for generations who want to stay, and I'd like to see that work for them, but making sure nobody starves comes first."

Nod nod. "Can birth control be a wizard invention too? I think I can teach a bunch of clerics to insert IUDs with tolerable magic-meliorable error rates given a few hours to show them a slideshow, if they aren't squeamish."

"Not easily - I might be able to figure out a way of talking about it that didn't make it immediately obvious that it was something completely new, but it'd still be suspicious and you'd get people wanting to meet the new prodigy."

"I mean, the new prodigy can just be like 'no I don't like people' or something."

"That might work, but I wouldn't want to trust lives to it - they'd be doing it because they wanted something, they wouldn't necessarily stop at a polite 'no thank you'. We might be able to figure out something if there's a way to do it with drugs, though - we already have some drugs, they're just not very effective ahead of time."

"There are drugs for it but they rely on continuous use and access. Taking a pill every day. And I'm less sure the clerics can fix their side effects."

"That's harder, yes." She ponders. "It might just have to wait, beyond getting pills to some of the girls if the side effects aren't too bad."

"Some people don't notice anything, some people have mild annoyances, some people actively like not having periods anymore and happen to get that one, some people find it totally intolerable but at least going off the pill generally makes it okay in short order. Uh, I do think this should be a very high priority because the costs of having more children than one chooses to have are high in ways that are hard to talk about so it's likely you don't know about them all. People probably don't come up to you and go 'yeah I have seven children but the last five weren't worth it' unless you have invented the seal of the confessional and even if you have it's pretty rough to formulate the thought when you still have to go home to those additional five children."

She blinks at him like something he just said is a new concept, and then after a moment shakes her head to clear it. "We do have abortifacients. There's some pressure not to use them but not so much that I'd expect to meet anyone with that many more children than they wanted."

"...if you're really sure about the availability and population comfort with abortion, okay."

"I'm not saying it's not a problem at all, just that risking starting a war with Revelation sounds like a worse one, at least if it's just going to be a year or two."

"Wow, who are we thinking wants to start a war?"

"I don't know that that specifically would happen, but it seems like about the right scale of disaster, if one of our bigger fiends gets loose here before you're prepared to deal with that, or a hostile dragon, or a zombie outbreak, or something along those lines."

"Revelation is surprisingly ready for a zombie apocalypse but I take your point."

She nods. "I don't want to wait either, but Pelor's got a point with this one. And we can still do things, we just need to be careful."

"Why exactly are fiends et al an ongoing problem?"

"Different reasons for different threats - the most powerful fiends are almost impossible to fight, and the afterlives they live in are dangerous to go to, especially for the sorts of people who'd be most interested in and effective at challenging them. Raising a zombie army is easy enough that any necromancer can figure out how to do it, with some research; we mostly manage that by restricting access to the reagents they need for it - I have no idea at all how that's going to work out here. Dragons we take more of a live and let live attitude toward when we can - plenty of chromatic dragons are just people; they're dangerous, but they won't go far out of their way to hurt anyone if they're not provoked."

"Have you considered encouraging cremation, regarding the zombies?"

"We do, especially in cities. That sort of necromancer isn't going to balk at a couple of murders to get themselves started, though."

Tomás reappears and gestures at Cam. "More on that later, I guess," he tells Kat, and resumes work on the binding with Tomás and his team.

Kat sits in until her translation spell wears off, and comes back a few hours later with more spells.