"- many specific problems can be solved while money continues to have a valuable role in focusing attention and resources on the problems that are not yet solved and which you can get rich by solving."

"I can see that there is something going on but I don't understand where it is!"

"I think it is several things. One of them is that people do better work when they choose for themselves what work to do. One of them is that people have happier lives if they get to decide where to live and what things to buy, even if those choices are very constrained, because it is good for people to get to choose things, and it can motivate them to be inventive and find solutions no one thought of. One of them is that people take risks and invent new things because they expect to get rich, and if they won't get rich no matter what they do they won't take risks."

"Risks?"

"Well, say, I have an adventuring party, we go around the world risking our lives fighting demons and dinosaurs and so on, we are doing this because if we survive we will be very rich, and we want to be very rich, and if we couldn't be rich no matter what we'd have picked safer jobs."

"- dinosaurs?"

"...I mean, when we're in the area, we don't specifically trophy hunt or anything."

"Uh, dinosaurs are a sort of animal that's extinct on Earth, that's all."

"Huh. There are lots of kinds on Golarion and humans have mostly hunted the big ones to death in inhabited areas but there's still small ones."

"The Earth ones have been extinct for millions of years. - but this is probably not important."

"Probably not. Anyway, adventurers who make fifth circle can Teleport and Plane Shift and Break Enchantment and Raise Dead and Permanancy and those are very very economically valuable so people take lots of risks to make fifth circle. If they weren't allowed to get rich they mostly would just stay home."

"Being a soldier is dangerous and Ibyabek has an excellent military force."

"Does it? How would you know?"

"I was in it! Whatever your complaints about the state of my knowledge about paper mills I went through training and served on a ship. We have to police a three dimensional border against smugglers and spies from a planetful of hostile people right in our own system, and we do it."

"And how do you measure being good at it, in volume of smuggled goods impounded? Number of spies arrested? Do you have a comparison?"

"If our army weren't good Outer Sohaibek could have conquered us during one of the times we were more openly at daggers drawn!"

"Is that an objective of theirs? Are offensive and defensive wars about equally difficult to fight? Is that about your army or more about- in Golarion it often matters almost as much which side has a single powerful wizard, I don't know if there's anything analogous..."

"- we do have melters, but..."

"Melters?"

"There used to be three settled planets in the system, but Old Sohaibek was melted in the original war."

"Gods."

Kyeo is not sure how to respond to that.

He's not looking at Kyeo. He's kind of looking at Isavel, who looks very neutral. "Are they working something out?" he asks.

           "I think there's something ready. For if Asmodeus finds out, or for if, say, Lamashtu does and then we have to tell Asmodeus."

He nods.

"What is it that's ready?"

"An agreement to make sure none of those can be made or used here," Isavel says. "Among all the gods who want the world to keep existing, which is most of them."