"So if travel became a lot cheaper - women move en masse to a small subset of regions, some men follow, others stay behind, and the entire current global order violently implodes in ways I can't visualize?"

" - probably. They'd deserve it, though."

"I don't - actually know how many people'd leave? They're - it's all they know. And they're not very smart, not on average. And they're told that the next life matters more than this one, that they'd be ruining their families, that they - maybe we could talk to some and ask. I met people from those countries, at the Worldwound, but - the men. For the obvious reason."

"I think - that in dath ilan - the other dath ilani would hesitate to say they deserve violent implosion, because they are - dumb enough to count as mostly children, from our perspective.  I don't know whether I feel that way about it.  I may not be Good enough to feel that way about it.  Does it seem to you like if we just threw an enormous amount more planetary wealth at this problem, things would be better a hundred years later, or is it going to be - more complicated than that?"

"Well, I'm not Good at all and if they violently implode I'll be cheerful about it. I ....probably if everybody were rich enough then it'd break all the bits that rely on 'and if your family kicks you out you starve'. I don't know if anything would be left, at that point. A lot less, certainly."

"We were about," how much productivity would dath ilan need to lose before people started to starve if their family kicked them out, "somewhere around twenty times that rich.  With no magic.  Just understanding mundane materials science.  If you think clearly, you can do more things."

"Well. Then you should - teach the bits that are teachable. And father some kids with the bits that aren't teachable, I guess, here in Cheliax where we know who all the smartest girls are because we train them into wizards."

"Is there - are things going to start to implode as soon as the regions who have their acts together at all, start to become richer - do the crazier factions just teleport a bomb into this whole facility as soon as they find out it exists, if there's no Forbiddance here - I don't understand this world's equilibrium between regions like that, at all, let alone what happens if it starts to enter a disequilibrium state -"

"There are probably a lot of factions who wouldn't want Cheliax to get there first and might assassinate you if they could, though it'd be hard, because Cheliax could just resurrect you, and getting close enough to steal your soul is much harder. Asmodeus will be negotiating with the Lawful ones. The Chaotic ones - there are equilibriums, made of who would win in a fight and how much your own nobles will tolerate your demands for troops or grain and for that matter how much they'll tolerate apparent weakness - I need to explain how government works, don't I - I think no one can win a war with Cheliax right now, and it won't be destabilizing for that to get more true, but I'm not really an expert."

"I am going to want to talk to somebody from one of the other factions and hear their side of things, at some point.  Are you okay with the rule that even the horrible Chaotic factions get to learn about experimentation, engineering, valid reasoning, et cetera, if they come looking for the knowledge?  Think ahead a hundred years?"

"I'm confused what it profits you to offer it to enemies but I don't expect it'd be much of a sticking point, if you do want it."

"I want to say that nobody in real life is in enough of a zero-sum relationship to you that you're better off if they don't learn the logical principles they need to negotiate with you, but - it is a different world, one I do not know.  One with an unreasonably basic factor the locals call 'Chaos' that, I'm starting to worry, isn't really individualism at all.  The five or six regions where women can get loans - are they the kind to go in on a collective industrialization project with Cheliax, send their own researchers here?  Are there any regions which would do that but the banks don't serve women?"

"Korvosa'd go in with us. Osirion's Abadaran and doesn't let women get loans but they'd definitely go in on something like this. I have only met a handful of people from Tian Xia, it's all the way on the other side of the world, but Minkai's Lawful Neutral, and doesn't let most people get loans including any women, and would probably send people...Lastwall's Lawful Good- Iomedae's country - and will probably refuse to work with us because they object to Evil but maybe not, for something this big.... Andoran's Neutral Good and will definitely refuse to work with us, there's bad blood there from when they drove all the Evil people out of their country - Irissen is ruled by the witch-queen descendants of Baba Yaga, I don't know more about them but if anything I think they discriminate against men, who can't inherit Baba Yaga's witch powers. Women can get loans in Absalom but I don't know who in Absalom would be deciding whether to partner with us, it's a big trade city, not very centrally ruled. Women can sometimes get loans in Galt but they permanently kill their entire government every few years and change all the rules and I dunno what the current ones are."

"A few too many weird names and weird properties, too fast, when it's not written down, and everything is so absolutely alien and I don't see how it forms an equilibrium at all - I might need to think through all this with the benefit of Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom at some point.  What does the entry for Cheliax look like, if I'd landed anywhere but here, and they were listing off all the ways that other factions were horrible?"

"They'd say that nearly everyone goes to Hell, which is true, and that that's terrible because some other afterlife is nicer, which we disagree on but it's not outrageous, the ways Hell is better are mostly once you've been there a couple centuries and been perfected and I absolutely believe some other afterlives are more fun to start out in. - but the long term matters to me more. - And they'd say we kill a lot of babies, which is true though we're trying to make it really frictionless for people to keep them, and they'd say we don't value marriage and family which is - pretty much true because other countries run all their norm enforcement off those things and in Cheliax they're kind of things people do if they happen to feel like it. Andoran would additionally accuse us of doing awful things during the war, and maybe be right about some of them, when you have lots of angry scared adventurers running around some of them do awful things and as the saying goes Geb's got the only army that doesn't rape and pillage. I think we do less awful things during war than other countries because I've seen lots of armies at the Worldwound and ours had better discipline."

Having your army not rape and pillage should not be such a high bar that only one country passes it.  "Based on what you know of me, is there anywhere on this planet that I would not think was... a mess?"

"I am pretty sure you'd be upset about everywhere. And probably about a bunch of things I haven't even thought to explain yet."

"If I hopefully asked about Geb, the place that doesn't rape and pillage..."

"Their army's zombies. Corpses, controlled by necromancy."

"I'll be frank with you, I was expecting to hear something surprisingly depressing, but that was a little more depressing than I was expecting even so.  So there is, basically, on my plan, going to be a project to make this planet richer as a whole and maybe less of a giant mess, which, if it doesn't happen, I would not be the least bit surprised if you all died to the Worldwound while all y'all were futzing around with being a giant mess.  Are we going to see basic buy-in to this basic philosophy, do you think, from the sort of factions that are not bugass entropic?"

"You have Asmodeus. You have - whoever your god is. I suspect you'll have more buy-in than that, but if you don't, that'll be enough."

"I am trying to ask whether there's a group of factions that can collectively set aside their 'everyone hates someone' tangled web and collectively get rich and collectively not all die to the Worldwound.  I am not entirely on board with taking the first faction I ran across and appointing them The Winners, even taking into account that my appearance on Golarion may not have been in a completely random location.  If there's a whole interfactional collective of everybody who's not bugass entropic, it's straightforward to work with them - every faction who manages to fight at the Worldwound is an obvious candidate for that.  If it's not like that, then I should actually talk to a lot of factions and figure out what's going on before deciding who is probably going to make the least mess of the planet a hundred years later.  If I'm being cosmically stupid for thinking like this because I am a stranger to this planet, just let me know."

"There isn't really that. Everyone who fights at the Worldwound would...probably be the closest thing, but I think some of them won't be on board with your project necessarily, it's not as simple as 'the world should go on not being eaten by demons'. The advantage of talking to a lot of factions would be that you'd know more about who you wanted to help the most and the disadvantage is that there are a dozen more opportunities for what you're doing to leak to people who want to stop you, or kidnap you, and Cheliax can protect you against most such efforts but not everything anyone in the world could come up with if they all had it called to their attention that they ought to try. I think personally in your situation I'd work from the first place I found that could supply and assist me enough to not be slowing me down, unless my god told me otherwise, and until I was powerful enough to be very hard to kill."

"Yeah.  I want to talk to my god about it, but they are, it sounds like, being blocked somehow."  And Asmodeus is an obvious candidate for who could possibly be doing that, if god control goes by region.  "How about if I suggested that fundamental noncopyrighted info be covered by a contract saying it gets, at minimum, shared to all the factions that send troops to the Worldwound, but any info-sharing provisions don't come into effect for a month and the contract can be renegotiated by mutual consent before then?"

"I don't know much about contract law but that sounds good to me. Maybe shared in a way that makes it harder to figure out who produced it."