Tanya will try being polite at the stone-person and if that fails her she will try being Iomedae. The voice is hard to imitate but she can do an illusion if that helps?

She'll rent a room. With a sanctum but without a rope trick, this time, it's very expensive and wouldn't do anything when she's alone and sleeping. The Lodge is already (advertised to) protect against Teleports into her room, and someone who can get there the normal way won't be stopped by the rope trick. Or they can wait a few more nights and catch her sleeping in a regular apartment. Hiring a guard would be (presumably) much cheaper, but she'd need Nazir or someone to vet people.

Guns! Guns are a professional interest. What do these look like? She's carrying hers openly, so it's only fair to ogle theirs for a bit.

(She doesn't need a detailed map at the moment and she isn't entirely free to tell them what she's up to beyond 'settling in'.)

One man is armed with a sort of long-barreled pistol that has been painstakingly forged to resemble a monster with its mouth open. There are flecks of paint still clinging to the steel but for the most part the artwork has been sanded off. The bore diameter is ludicrously wide by the standards of infantry weapons, at least eight gauge, the kind of gun that can kill a building but will break your wrists in the process.

Another man, one of the unusually short ones with a spectacular beard, is armed with a late medieval warhammer which is also a musket. Unlike a bayonet attachment, the warhammer is clearly the primary component of this thing – the position of the trigger and the muzzle indicate that someone took a stock version of the melee weapon and hollowed out the shaft into a firearm for unclear reasons. The handle doesn't even have a stock!

There is also an armed woman in the Lodge, though her gun is the most unusual. It looks like a single-shot derringer cobbled together from smooth geometric shapes and chunks of quartz. There is no trigger inside the trigger guard. A soft green light shines from the muzzle.

Guns are a minority proposition, however, unless most of these people are concealed carrying.

...on second thoughts, she isn't sure these are guns by any ordinary meaning of the word? The last one might be a piece of modern art or something? They're definitely not something Tanya is equipped to evaluate in any way.

Tanya is going to leave her winter clothes and all military insignia in her room and go out to lunch in a normal civilian restaurant! While thinking determinedly civilian thoughts and not at all about alien weaponry! 

(While flying under an illusioned parasol and openly carrying her entirely ordinary submachine gun. Obviously. Nazir would have told her if she needed a license to open carry.)

The best place to get a meal in the middle of the day is another café, since they still have fresh food left over from breakfast. Most Osirians eat two meals a day, but three isn't unheard-of – just a minor luxury.

There are also left over newspapers from the morning rush. It looks like Sothis has four or five in circulation, all with relatively similar content but slightly different editorial slant. Reading them will inform Tanya about

TRADE

The prices of bulk goods moving through the city are listed on massive tables, along with the names of the producers and shipping companies. Extremely soporific material, if you're having trouble falling asleep. There are some interesting tidbits available for people reading between the lines, though. Osirion accepts trade (and immigration) from every country, which makes some people upset, particularly with respect to Cheliax and Andoran. Merchants are allowed to declare the price of their goods for the purpose of paying tariffs, but tax collectors have the right to buy their wares at that price on the spot. No new wars worth mentioning but no comment on older, ongoing wars.

POLITICS

The newspapers would have her believe Osirion operates on the least exciting government imaginable. Conflict resolution happens as follows:

1. The pharaoh gathers all of the important stakeholders.
2. ???
3. Everyone agrees to an equitable solution of some kind.

You might think this doesn't scale to the task of governing an entire country, but you would be wrong. Detractors mourn the state of rule by magically-enabled micromanager, while supporters point out that Osirion has been doing better across all metrics ever since they started keeping those metrics. Which was recently.

The newspapers would also like you to know that the spell Corpse Lanterns has been legal for public use for over a month; it does not actually involve any corpses and was only banned out of an abundance of caution. This is the last time the update will be repeated.

THE WORLDWOUND

This is apparently a massive patch of land occupied by demons on the continent north of Garund. The border around it has been fortified by marcher lords with soldiers from all over the world, an expensive state of affairs that nobody is happy with. The lines haven't been redrawn in five years, ever since the end of the last crusade. An interview with one of the surviving captains of the Fourth Crusade paints a bleak picture of a forever war. People want to know whether anyone other than Iomedae has a long-term plan for dealing with the Worldwound, but it's been over a century and the newspapers are not optimistic.

MONSTER ATTACKS

The desert is full of things that want to kill and eat you! Some of them have unfamiliar names with impenetrable descriptions (what is a behir? it has how many legs?) while others are refreshingly straightforward (death worm). Monsters usually attack lone travelers but occasionally go after armed convoys, which are the primary source for these reports. Attacks by intelligent creatures that fancy themselves monsters are technically banditry but occasionally make their way into this section, particularly when the attacker is not humanoid. Anyone leaving the beaten path is advised to know what they're doing.

CLASSIFIEDS

There are masters looking for apprentices and apprentices looking for masters; there are tradesmen looking for employers and employers looking for tradesmen; there are brides looking for grooms and grooms looking for brides. All of these are transactional. There are professional tutors in here as well, if Tanya wants to hire one. There are remarkably few mages advertising their services: a midwife who advertises herself as a Pharasmin here, an Abadaran curio broker there. The exception is the list of locations with channels, if you happen to be moderately injured. All channels will heal most people of all their physical injuries in one go, so if you need something fixed in a hurry, here's a schedule for a channeler near you.

This method of levying tariffs is ingenious! Possibly too ingenious? Tanya's immediate response is 'that's brilliant and obvious in retrospect', followed closely by 'wait a minute...'

This can work for fungible goods intended for sale on the open market. Grain, oil, minerals, all kinds of things that have multiple importers as well as internal production. If anything happens to any one supplier or shipment, others can substitute at a higher price, and the importer doesn't much care if the inspector buys their wares. However, those are exactly the markets where this system is needed least; everyone already knows the price of grain.

But what about imports of smaller-scale or non-fungible goods? Inputs to specific production lines, parts made to order, anything someone has already committed to buy for a certain price because if they hadn't nobody would import it. They depend on their shipments arriving on time to build their products or to fulfill their own orders. If something happens to a shipment they can't pay twenty percent more to a competing importer; the only other firm that makes competing widgets uses a different socket for their handles and anyway all of their importer's stock of handles is already spoken for. In one sense, the true price of the handles is however much they paid their importer, but in another and equally true sense if the handles stop arriving they'll go out of business because their customers like having a reliable widget supplier. The importer can show the government receipts for the price he sells at to the factory, but they can't prove the price isn't 'too low' (cheating the government out of tariff revenue). After all, there are many reasons the price might be unexpectedly low (or high!), ranging from discounts to long-term customers and prices locked in by long-ago contracts to production costs abroad to outright business secrets. The tariff authority isn't equipped to evaluate those and, in fact, no-one is. Are you really going to fine importers for buying the product at a discount before selling at a profit? Is below-cost dumping illegal to begin with?

She'd love to hear how this is working out for them but apparently they only started keeping metrics at the same time as changing various laws and policies, which, no?? Why???? That way you can't tell if you've made something worse! Surely you need to start by measuring? Well, some interventions are presumably very clearly an improvement, but optimal taxation policy is rather famously a difficult problem!

...or, well, that's the Earth perspective. Tanya doesn't even know how they keep track of teleports for tariffing purposes! She probably shouldn't be trying to analyze economic policy by reading the newspapers.

(Why are people upset about trade? Or is it just the immigration?)

Politics: are apparently completely autocratic! This can end very well or well badly, depending on whether the pharaoh is competent (and also actually means well), but in the long run it will definitely end badly. With an inherited lifetime position, or even if he adopts his successor like the Roman emperors did, you only need to fail badly enough once to completely ruin a formerly prosperous state.

The pharaoh's management style makes it even worse. If he personally intervenes in as many decisions as he has time for, and delegates the least amount he can get away with, that means there's no system to take over in case of sudden illness or death. Even if a future successor doesn't want to run it like that he won't have any choice! This is a classic antipattern in management as well as in rulership!

Ah, but he has Abadar('s organization) as an advisor. And Abadar isn't going anywhere (because alghollthu individuals are all alike). So the state is being run and micromanaged by Abadar. Tanya wonders how much of that is by preference, and how much is because Abadar feels he has to keep a close watch and a tight rein on humans. Well, at least this way there's no danger of the pharaoh doing something Abadar disapproves of about the portal, so the alghollthu won't have a stage an intervention later.

Something else is bothering her and after a few minutes she works it out. When they were discussing the Commune question, Tanya wondered how Abadar could say whether she should go buy something without knowing if she could buy it, or at what price. Nazir (or was it Iomedae) said something about Abadar knowing about all market activities. Another piece of the puzzle now falls into place: Abadar is using the pharaoh to run a command economy.

Which, on the one hand, no, that's a guaranteed way to ruin a state while also trampling on everyone's personal freedoms! The military does it because it doesn't care about personal freedoms and isn't a profit-making organization; firms do it because they're not run for the benefit of the workers (and are allowed to do it because the workers freely agreed to a contract); but for a whole country to do it, well. Sufficiently impressive results can justify most things, so, uh, good luck with those newfangled measures of economic progress!

...possibly Tanya also shouldn't analyze government economic policy through newspapers? They might be actually written to paint the government in a bad light!

Nazir mentioned the Worldwound! It sounds pretty bad.

...Iomedae has a long-term plan to solve it? Tanya had no idea she was associating with someone locally famous! The plan was presumably not approved by Abadar and his fellows (what is their policy on the Worldwound anyway, why can't they close it?). Tanya can't tell whether the local news editor is disgruntled that the plan wasn't adopted or is having a laugh at Iomedae's expense because it was a really bad plan, so she'll avoid asking Iomedae what it was.

Terrifying predators impeding civilian travel outside of settled areas is a very odd problem to have but, again, that's from an Earth perspective. Earth hasn't exactly solved all its wildlife-related problems yet. If there was, say, a locust swarm except of poisonous scorpions, or a kind of wasp that could kill with a sting, she really isn't sure how Germania would handle it. And that's without the locusts/scorpions growing to the size of a horse and requiring a good rifle shot to put down! The scariest beasts on Earth are tigers and elephants and wolf-packs but it's not hard to imagine there being something worse.

(Having many legs might sound scary but millipedes, unlike centipedes, are completely inoffensive.)

Their magical healing can quickly fix all physical injuries without (presumably) personalized attention from a medical professional? That's honestly incredible. It makes sense, if you project even Earth's so-far limited development of the field forward for a thousand years, that this should be possible. And... it's presumably not problematic from the alghollthu's point of view to let Golarion have advanced healing magic. Still, that's really impressive! Tanya is happy that such a thing exists here! Cheap and quick healing and other goods like that can make up for a lot of command economy if they're related somehow (possibly in alghollthu politics)!

What are the tutors offering tutoring in? Are there any ads by language tutors? What are they charging?

Trade is also bad! No it's not, trade makes everyone better off, ask anyone! No one says that unless they hear it from Abadar first, and who are you going to believe, the Abadarans or your lying eyes? Even the Abadaran's don't believe that. Yes they do, that's the one thing they all agree on. No, see, the Manual of City Building says "raise a wall around your city to have a walled city" and then you do that and you have a walled city. The Book of Numbers starts with a story about a man with blue eyes who doesn't know his own name and a thousand pages later the sages can't agree whether it's arguing laws are good or laws should be abolished. Anyone who thinks that is too stupid to understand the wonder of trade. This perspective on commerce policy is unserious.

(Immigration is good because Osirion is the greatest country in the world, but immigrants from Andoran are bad because they think abandoning babies is acceptable. Immigrants from Cheliax are worse because they think killing babies to avoid abandoning them is acceptable. Everywhere else in the world is on thin ice. One editor takes the remarkably progressive stance that anyone willing to uproot their lives and move to another country has demonstrated superlative grit to the point that they are obviously going to be a net positive for any community they end up joining, but this is the most nuanced view of the situation in the newspapers.)

Tutors are the primary form of education for anyone wealthy enough to afford one for their children. There are the usual suspects: mathematics, the arts, philosophy, religion, law, nature, geography, languages. Mathematics is a big one, it's foundational to wizardry and anyone can learn to be a wizard if they can master the math, so there are a lot of people offering that subject. Language tutors are the third most common, after the arts, but they are all listed with the names of the foreign languages that they feel qualified to teach. The most common by far is Taldane, the first trade tongue of the Inner Sea, to which Osiriani is second. Other frequent options are Kelesh, Vudrani, Tien, and Mwangi. A lot of mathematics tutors also offer Draconic (presumably a dragon language?) as a sort of package deal.

Most tutors charge less than one silver for a single lesson, but the prices go up to as much as ten times that number for particularly impressive ones. The cheapest rate is one copper piece, for a language tutor who claims to be able to teach any language, and who does not make house calls so if you want to hire him you need to be approved to visit the royal palace. The most expensive rate is for a woman who claims to speak a whopping 37 languages, and is also a wizard who can offer her clients any of several language-learning spells.

Point taken, Tanya will do her best to forget everything she learned about trade and government policy from this newspaper!!!

...immigrants abandon their babies to come here (because Osirion won't take in babies, only adults can get a work/immigration visa?) and they don't send home enough remittances (or, more likely, people don't know or care that they do). And so 'coming to work here, so they can earn more money and have better lives' becomes 'abandoning their families, whom they should support, which is literally(*) killing their own babies'. Maybe someone published a human-interest story once about a Chelish immigrant whose child back home died and it became national news and stuck in the collective consciousness. People usually find reasons to hate immigrant labor, just as they usually find reasons for their other irrational hatreds. Tanya is a great optimist and believer in the human potential for building a better civilization, which means she's very aware of all the reasons to want to build a better civilization.

The lack of tutors catering to immigrants may be related. Well, Tanya can make do with a language tutor who occasionally answers general-knowledge questions. Most good tutors who can teach another language can presumably teach Osirian even if they haven't done it before, the skill ought to transfer, and she can interview them and judge for herself. Nobody advertising tutoring in Osirian for foreigners might be just an accident of today's newspapers, she only has a small sample. Language tutors ought to be easy to evaluate and switch as long as they agree to a few test lessons before committing to anything longer. She'll cut out and save the relevant ads.

Next: visit the bank again to see if she wants to read any of the books in Nazir's room. She probably won't have the necessary context for any books kept to entertain the guests of a senior bank employee / PMC contractor / state official (?), but he offered, so she should check. (Yes, fine, it's because she hopes he's come back or left a message.)

(*) Metaphorically.

Virtually all of the bank employees have seen Tanya by this point, and switching to local clothing doesn't make her any less recognizable. The office is unlocked, anyone can walk in – but no one has. Tanya is welcome to make herself at home here.

There is a (small) barrister bookcase behind the desk, the precious contents protected by glass doors. Available for guests who need to pass the time are a five-volume annotated set of the Order of Numbers, Abadar's treatise on commerce and economics; the Manual of City Building, a less philosophical work by the same; the Florilegium of the Golden Road, a scientific work of botany; the Encyclopædia Monstrorum, a guide for people interested in fighting the wildlife disguised as a zoology textbook; and a folio of artwork assembled by someone in the royal family.

On the desk is a scrap of paper where someone has tried to transcreate "Degurechaff" into Osiriani a few different ways. The best attempt, at the bottom, is "Dje-go-haf", which means something like "eternal and perceptive".

That's certainly a flattering rendering of her name! (Her best guess at the actual origin of 'Degurechaff' is someone mangling a Russy name beyond all recognition.) ...Is Nazir's name written down somewhere here for her magical-language-knowledge to tell her what the characters mean?

She doesn't expect to get far with a treatise of advanced economics (let alone philosophy) without being familiar with the local basics, but it might be interesting to read at least the introduction of each. And she's curious to see what kinds of books Abadar signs his name to. (Possibly the answer is 'all advanced courses of study', with Abadar being a shared pen name of the group of Alghollthu in charge of this part of Golarion?)

If she wants to sort through the other papers left on the desk (they're all letters that have to do with moving money around, stacked in a pile) then yes, she can find his name. It's a single character that means "protector" or in some contexts "spark". There's a special initial character that indicates it's a proper noun, when used as a name.

The Order of Numbers is absolutely massive. The introduction helpfully explains that reading through the Order of Numbers on its own is extremely confusing for everyone, so there are explications written by the many sages who have studied it included in the margins for every passage. For beginners it is recommended not to read the books straight through, since they are ordered chronologically rather than pedagogically, but there are a few indicated passages for people who've heard the good news about Abadar but aren't sure of where to start that are easy to appreciate. The author of the introduction (not Abadar) is pleased that you, the reader, are here reading this, and if the Order of Numbers is to your liking, they hope that you find success in your chosen ventures, as a good Abadaran should.

The recommended passages in question are the Gateless Gate, the Island of Grapes and Olives, and the Call of the Field.

Why bother writing (and keeping around) a book people can't read and which needs sages to study? ...is this about the export control treaties? Surely Abadar can figure out what information he's willing to give out and then do so in an easily understandable form? She'd heard number theory was an abstruse field, but presumably Osirians aren't keeping the truth of irrational numbers hidden inside a mystery cult?

What does the first page have to say for itself? Does it at least mention what the book is about?

THE GATELESS GATE

The format takes her a few minutes to puzzle out, but once the reading order is established the contents don't seem so mysterious?

Additional inputs tend to have diminishing returns (hence, falling asking prices) due to the existence of multiple inputs. Prices are set at the margin because trade and consumption happen at the margin. Eating too much bread will make your stomach hurt. Many things are true in the limit of infinity which are hard to observe in everyday growth. Philosophers dislike revealed preferences but can't formalize any better alternative, just as on Earth.

This is all straightforward. (Well, it is the first page.) But the introduction warned that the book was extremely confusing. Is Tanya extremely confused? Is the Gateless Gate using the (ordinary, everyday) language of the law of demand and marginal costs to make a point about something else entirely? There's certainly no need to write in this way and invite layers of commentary to state logical-mathematical truths, and at the same time they are supported with examples rather than proofs. Drawing on the everyday experience of bread and water, which everyone is familiar with, indicates this is a parable whose true subject is very different.

She'll try another page.

THE ISLAND OF GRAPES AND OLIVES

People have finite time and can't do everything themselves, so they must hire subordinates and trade with others. People specialize, usually in whatever they are already good at, to maximize the returns from their limited time. Trade happens only when both sides benefit, minus the transaction costs...

Is Abadar saying he can't do everything himself, and that is why he employs humans to run states and grants them magic? Or that people must precisely measure their productivity at different tasks to be able to profit from it? Those also seem like pretty obvious implications, honestly.

Whatever deeper allegory is hidden in this wordy and many-layered page of commentaries, it is beyond Tanya's wisdom.

She does wonder what the sixth wonder of the market is, that indicates a specific price within the band of what is profitable. Unless they just mean contracts set prices? That might be a wonder to someone used to a command economy.

THE CALL OF THE FIELD

The tragedy of the commons is very easy to explain and very difficult to solve. Indeed, it can be fairly said that all of law and government is the solution to the class of problems that involve cooperation for mutual benefit but with individual incentives to free-ride or defect.

This page denies the concern outright. 'Everyone should police everyone else', it says dismissively, in blatant contravention of the earlier point about relative advantage. How do you fairly value and reward policing? Who do you trust with the monopoly on violence? How do you resolve the disagreements that will inevitably arise regarding your grazing-rights project? How should one balance the private increase with the public good? Crickets.

Alright, so this is blatantly not talking about the tragedy of the commons and the establishment of government for public benefit. What is it about instead? She was just told that sheep aren't raised for wool in Osirion; they have to import it. In a desert, arable land is presumably too valuable to leave fallow for sheep to graze. The text demonstrates an everyday problem with a case foreign to the local experience. This might be to prompt the reader to consider it in the abstract, ignoring whatever solution is customary in dealing with local cases. Or...

Ah, she thinks she has it now. In Osirion, the equivalent of grazing rights disputes aren't solved by men agreeing on a deal for mutual benefit, they are solved by apealing to the Pharaoh! The text is deliberately raising the problem she identified as an argument. Behold how you have no idea whatsoever how to actually enforce such an agreement! Contemplate how terrifyingly hard and unknown the project of establishing a government is! Aren't you glad to live in Osirion and not in some benighted country like Cheliax or Andoran whose citizens must face the terrifying problem of governance without an alghollthu government 'advisor' (also employer of the head of state)?

Tanya has no idea if she's right or wrong, but she's pretty sure she isn't going to get any more out of it. Frankly, this argumentative style doesn't suit her; she'd much prefer a text that laid out its argument plainly.

What about the Manual of City-Building? Is it by chance a text on civil engineering? Right now, Tanya would appreciate an argument whose sophistication level is 'if you build a wall around a city, it will be a walled city'.

(She is very curious about their pollution laws! That's a hard problem to get right, involving measurements and forecasts as well as state power and competence. But she would prefer to read a summary of the actual laws and not a parable. ...she dearly hopes their laws aren't written as parables, that would be terrible!)

The Manual of City Building is the polar opposite of the Order of Numbers. It's a remarkably dry treatise that covers the practical considerations of founding, expanding, and governing a city. Its advice on handling water distribution is the most noteworthy divergent detail – it assumes water reservoirs can be located at any location convenient for the city, regardless of geographic realities, and repeats some specifications for grading channels to handle sewage with different wording an exhausting number of times, as though the reader might not understand why having waste water flow downstream and away might be desirable to begin with.

The passage on erecting city walls is not quite as tautological as the newspapers imply. The book has recipes for mixing mortar, techniques for estimating the strength of wooden beams, maps for digging canals, and pages of geometric formulae for arches, bridges, roads, and freestanding structures. It's no civil engineering textbook – it's missing the tables of material properties, and it doesn't have detailed instructions for tasks like building foundations – but both of those the book excuses by saying that local conditions and building materials will obviously vary, so the reader must confer with their master craftsmen to find out what concrete should endure when it's made from the nearest available supply of cement and aggregate, or how deep to sink foundations in a particular area. More importantly than all that: why does your city need a wall? Is it defending against wandering monsters, foreign invaders, rebellions, or some combination of the above? Is the wall garrisoned with the understanding that some creatures are not inconvenienced by walls? Can the walls be repurposed as the city expands and fresh walls are erected at the new borders? These questions are addressed at length from an architectural and financial perspective.

There are a few ways of handling pollution under various regimes, but the Manual of City Building suggests that if the city has a guild for the offending profession (undesirable but hard to avoid in practice) the prudent ruler has the guild post bond for pollution offenders so they are incentivized to police their own. A recurring theme for recommended laws is that they should be easy to understand, simple to obey, and convey with a high degree of certainty that criminals will eventually be caught. Vague, confusing, and unenforceable rules are anathema even if they ostensibly serve the Good. The ruler who (commendably) wishes his subjects to rise to a supererogatory moral standard should always seek to make it easy for them to choose the righteous path, as forcing them to take Good actions is extremely fraught and rarely has the intended outcome.

It is mostly written agnostically of how many mages the city will have on its payroll, but for the convenience of anyone who aspires to public service, two spells developed and distributed by Abadar are specialized first-circle versions of other spells that have been adapted to make them more useful for the city watch. One is a spell for making warriors more effective that has the duration extended by a factor of sixty (only works in the city in question) and the other is a truth spell that notifies witnesses if the target successfully resists it (disclaimer: extremely handy but not entirely foolproof). For a complete list of Abadar's spells, please consult the Order of Numbers. The appendix that supposedly details the two spells described here is several pages of unreadable gibberish.