"Yeah, I dunno what process different churches might have about sensitive Commune questions. They're also probably really expensive, though you'd only need to buy a fraction of the spell and you're not in a hurry."

Of course in a world where churches have exclusive spells they will pretend (or pretend to pretend) to have an oracular spell for literally submitting questions to their god. (And of course it would be a very expensive one.) 

"I understand." Tanya should stick to reinventing politically unproblematic technology. She just needs to think of one that can be sold on the strength of a technical demonstration without requiring much in the way of professional credentials (i.e. not medicine).

What is the next town on their route like? (Are the towns growing bigger as they approach the cities?)

Most people appear to live in little hamlets but they do eventually get on a fairly major route that has a string of medium to large ones.

Are these bigger towns any more welcoming / cosmopolitan / technologically advanced / richer / beset by bandits or monsters? Do they show any evidence of a State existing? ...usefully so?

Bigger towns that aren't actual serious port cities are more cosmopolitan in the sense that they can spot a couple free halflings in this one, a surface elf in that one (looks like Belmarniss but with human coloring), here a gnome, there a dwarf - not in the sense that they're colorblind about Belmarniss being purple. They are richer in the sense of having more wealth inequality that leads to greater peak wealth such that some people look and act noticeably wealthy and have servants. The technology is not more advanced - except whatever that nonsense the gnome's fussing with, maybe. There's a bulletin board in one town advertising a bounty for each bugbear head brought in but Belmarniss thinks it's a lowball and even if they encountered a bugbear at random and killed it of their own accord it would only barely be worth beheading it and bringing it in. ("But that's because we're operating at a high enough level that anything denominated in silver is small potatoes; this is the sort of thing that might see a fresh party organize out of people who are not already adventurers especially if they have their own reasons to tangle with bugbears anyway.") One town shows recent fire damage from a wandering kyrana and it sounds like the local Pharasmin and a bunch of guys with spears took it down with some casualties. The substantial towns have dedicated post offices, and manors associated with feudal nobles (though some of them are out at their country estates at any given time), and churchy-looking buildings that used to be temples of Aroden and are now various government functions in a pretty architectural wrapper except where the Arodenite temples have been converted to Iomedaeanism.

The amount of humanoid-but-not-human intelligent species continues to be puzzling. Tanya was under the impression that Earth's scientists believed it would be unlikely for two intelligent, tool-using species to happen to evolve at the same time, and if they did then one would probably exterminate the other as humans did the neanderthals. Here there are dozens. She could accept it if it was an utopia of mutual understanding, but apparently most of these races kill or enslave each other on sight!

"Considering the many intelligent species around and the apparent enmity between most of them, have many other intelligent species have been driven extinct? And how long is the historical record on Golarion?"

Also: bugbears are people! However justified their grievance with some particular bugbears, offering a bounty on all members of the race is both wrong and (Tanya assumes) counterproductive. Bugbears will be incentivized to attack any humans on sight; bounty hunters will be incentivized to go after the weakest and most peace-abiding ones, and the ones that were actually (hypothetically) guilty of some crime will probably keep benefiting at everyone's expense. They could put the bounty money towards a town guard instead, or gather a posse to go after the specific bugbears who caused trouble, if they weren't willing to accept random bugbear heads as a token of revenge or whatever it is they value here. Ethnic hatreds are the second most pernicious motive for wars.

Kyrana are one of the thankfully few critters that are immune to Tanya fire. Luckily they didn't encounter any while they were still underground; Tanya would have hated to waste some of her precious bullets on (non-flying, non-people) lizards. Good on the Pharasmin for being useful and not just a priest, though. (Also good that at least some former temples have been converted to civic buildings! May more faiths go Aroden's way with time.)

"I'm surprised they sent spearmen up against a kyrana, that seems like it calls for archers instead? I know they have bows and crossbows around here. Maybe no-one spotted it coming into the town?" 

Tanya would like to ask the locals whether their feudal noble is helping deal with the bugbears or the kyrana, or whether the town organizing the spearmen and bounties from its own budget? How much does the post cost for letters and small parcels and how often does it run? And how often do they, uh, lose postmen, given the general situation?

"I'm not aware of any species that've been driven totally extinct. There's a bit of a discontinuity in the history seven thousand ish years back from when there was a thousand year age of darkness, which is what drove my ancestors underground, that did a number on everybody; perhaps there were more before that."

The kyrana showed up at night and the nearby people who were able to show up to help before it was all over had spears not bows, go the tavern retellings. The baron threw the surviving combatants a party. Mail is possible to afford for a normal person if you're not doing it all the time but it's slow and, yeah, your postman might die if they try to go without a big group headed the same way for much of a distance.

"Was the age of darkness metaphorical or, uh, real somehow?"

...what are the postmen paid if that's the case? If everyone pays for some letters, is that enough to make a private messenger risk his life or is it an additionally government-sponsored institution?

"I mean, it was thousands of years ago so feel free to assume everything I've read is bullshit, but: real, lotta rocks hit the planet and kicked up stuff that blocked the sun."

It does not look like the government is heavily involved in the mail system though there are some hints that the church of Abadar features in the process somewhere.

"That does sound like something that could have happened," unlike most myths about ancient history.

Being paid an amount that's probably not enough to retire on after ten or even fifteen years will make some men (it's always young men, isn't it) seriously risk their lives? While working far from home, family and friends in presumably often unpleasant conditions? Many jobs are dangerous, but all the other ones have coworkers to watch your back and help you if you're wounded! This society is seriously problematic. Not entirely because they're poor or technologically backward; they seem to have a really inefficient state and also weird individual priorities or something. Tanya keeps feeling like a single competent manager could run any one of these towns much better to everyone's mutual satisfaction.

...which can't be true, obviously, or someone would. People are irrational about killing random innocent bugbears, but they're not (normally) irrational about braving bandits and kyrana to move the post. Well, young men with cultural license probably are if it's a glamorous job (which probably the young women's fault...), but restraining them is what older people are for! Sometimes young people run off looking for 'adventures', and you can maybe build a mercenary outfit out of it, but can you really build something as everyday and humdrum and crucially in need of reliability as the post?

Tanya doesn't understand these people and them being (mostly) humans isn't helping.

Maybe the big city will be better.

Maybe! It'll take them a while to get there.

Only a few more days.

Does anything of note happen on the way?

They pass a town that is in the middle of publicly executing someone by impalement!

Ugh. This is barbarous. Presumably it is legal, but.

"I should offer him a merciful death. But I - don't understand the local laws and the incentives they create or even what his crime was, and it might be a mistake? Besides that breaking the law and making yourself an enemy of the state is usually a very big mistake that harms everyone, and we shouldn't act differently just because we think we can get away with it." Tanya is genuinely torn about this! Germania would encourage her to put the man out of his misery, but that is meant for a different situation, one where she encountered a lawful execution by impalement as a Germanian soldier in some poor benighted country. Tanya doesn't (yet) want to adopt the attitude towards Taldor that would come with treating it as a poor benighted country whose laws and customs don't deserve to be followed and which might benefit from being colonized by somebody about it.

"If we want to make some enemies we could pull him off and give him a potion, but it looks like they chopped off his hands and we don't have a place to put him even if he wouldn't slow us down and even if he isn't a piece of work, so that'd be a whole thing."

...her healing can fix that? Something to ask about later.

"He might have done something deserving of death but - I was going to say Earth decided there's no reason for tortuous death but that's not a rational statement, it's just that enough people were kind and empathetic that we managed to agree to stop doing it. I want to shoot him from far away where they can't know for sure it was us, but I'm worried I might be - harming something important by doing so." Laws exist for a reason. Sometimes it's a very bad reason and the law should be changed, but individuals breaking it rarely ends well. Tanya doesn't want this nearly enough to volunteer to be arrested and stand trial for taking a principled stand. Although they're not locals or even citizens of Taldor, so arguably they won't be harming the local cooperation equilibrium much?

"Something important other than whether we do our grocery shopping here or in the next town?"

"...it's important for there to be laws, that people agree on and see reliably executed. It's usually much more important to maintain that, and to go about changing laws according to established procedure, than to break even a bad law in order to stop what you think is an injustice. If everyone did that, there would be no rule of law, and everyone would be worse off. I don't know what the relevant law is, or the procedure to change it, or what he's being punished for. Just because I think, because Earth and Germania in particular think, that torturous execution is barbarous and cruel and not even helpful in deterring crime doesn't mean I wouldn't be damaging the local equilibrium, the trust in law and everything built on that, by killing that man. I'd just be - treating Germania's laws as more important than Taldor's, and that probably serves nobody in the long run."

"But it would be a very minor harm, because they won't know who did it and how and they will know it wasn't one of them, so their trust in each other won't be damaged. And so I'm - tempted."

Tanya maneuvers them into position to snipe at the poor man on the stake. She really hates making life-and-death legal decisions that don't come with orders from above. (Which is unsurprising! There's something wrong with you if you don't hate that kind of thing!)

Is this going to be her experience of being a civilian in a foreign country? It's much worse than being a soldier in a foreign country who is there to conquer it.

"I'll do it if you don't wanna."

"You'd have to walk in there and then they'd know it was us and that seems strictly worse." Also, Tanya is a veteran soldier and won't be harmed or haunted by taking a life, so she definitely shouldn't be putting this on Belmarniss's shoulders.

She makes the poor man's head explode, and flies them the other way.

"Unless this was an aberration, there are going to be more such executions in Cassomir. We should at least have a... consistent policy for handling them. Instead of feeling put on the spot every time."

Tanya doesn't like Belmarniss needing to deal with it. She'd still have to do it without Tanya there, though, she'd just have fewer options. Most people find it much more painful to see someone suffering in front of them than to know abstractly it's happening in another country, even if they could easily take a plane and be there the next day. They even find it worse if it happens on the other side of the city in a specific place they've been and will visit in the future, rather than in some unspecified location within the same city. (That's probably part of why governments schedule public executions to begin with.) Belmarniss would have had a bad time of it when she reached the city, so better to think it out in advance while it's not right in front of them and have a response ready.

"Well, we don't actually have to have the same policy between us, but it's worth thinking about before it comes up again."

"...as long as we're together and expect to help and defend each other as the need arises, we should each at least know whether the other one is planning to break any laws in ways that will draw scrutiny. We could have walked into that square and killed that man in plain sight; probably no-one would have been able to harm us before I flew us out, and probably they wouldn't have sent our descriptions to Cassomir's police because of it. Neither will be true once we're in the city, assuming we don't want to leave it right away. And it's always best to plan for the worst. The worst being, in this case, that we arrive in Cassomir to find out that they publicly execute a man every day in the biggest city square. So we should resolve now whether in that case we'll ignore it and if not, what we'll do about it. ...not that I think we can do much."

Or can they? Tanya's mind is too well-trained by her time in the army. "I could if I was operating alone mercy-kill people from two miles up behind an illusion. I assume someone would notice eventually unless I keep my abilities a secret and don't deal with anyone who'd wonder why I'm always absent when public executions take place. And I'm not sure what I'd be accomplishing because I can't anticipate the authorities' reaction even if they can't catch me. Not that I would take that risk; they'd probably set a trap for me after the first few times." (Wasn't there a manga or something about this?) "Also, they could just start doing it indoors."