Jordan quirks an eyebrow but doesn't ask what that was about before fetching and passing to Cam a compartmented sack with four golden pieces (which, should Cam check, seem to actually be brass on the outside), sixteen silver pieces (silver in color, nickel-copper in composition), and sixty-four copper pieces (legitimately copper).

"Do you not have paper money here?"

"Not in the Empire."

"Is there an Emperor, for the Empire, or is it just called that?"

"Used to be, but since the first female one they renamed the position 'Caesar'."

"Huh! Fancy that. Who is the current Caesar?"

"A Tetrinary seasonchange, acting outside his capacity as an Arbiter.  Not that you'd catch me saying there aren't good reasons for that.  - How much reading have you done; is there anything there I should elaborate on."

"I've done a fair amount but it was less about politics and more about your wild birthday thing and also cats."

"Cool.  The obvious reason Caesar shouldn't be an Arbiter is that it would risk privileging them as a group in Rome or privileging Rome on the international stage, and then what's the point of anything.  Even if it, ah, superficially would seem like that ruins the effect of having a Tetrinary seasonchange as Caesar in the first place."

"What is an Arbiter? Or for that matter a Tetrinary seasonchange."

"A seasonchange is another word for the 01s of even months, like solquinox is for the odd ones.  The Arbiters are a group made up of only people with that birthday who're really dedicated to providing impartial judgments on things.  Not in their personal lives or anything; you have to explicitly hire them for it."

"Huh. And they're - understood to be especially good at it?"

"As a group, yeah; they're supposed to be able to make the call when they can't personally handle something fairly and escalate it to someone else."

"Interesting. Do a lot of birthdays have characteristic jobs like that?"

"Less organized or less - public-facing, usually."

Cam nods. "I tried talking to a star," he mentions. "It was interesting."

"Oh?  Or I mean, yeah, it usually is, but I don't know what specifically would be for someone who doesn't know anything about it going in."

"It was interesting that it worked at all but the individual star I wound up talking to was not standout. I did have to buy the drugs, making it didn't work."

"Huh!  What'd you use to pick who to talk to?"

"Well, I at first naively tried to find whoever had most recently died but of course that did not work. Then I just went for a random lone star."

"You can actually do that; you just have to stop and then aim for one that already went past.  As long as you don't mind one from three seconds ago instead of zero, which, probably you don't since conversations don't happen instantaneously anyways.  Considered a bit rude though, dying is usually pretty overwhelming and people generally want a bit to collect themselves."

"I know the feeling."

"So I heard!  Pretty weird to think of dead people just walking around basically like normal except for being able to - "

"Huh.  Well.  There's an idea which I definitely can't tell you."