"Will answer later, I need to go off and cry for a bit in a corner where that won't bother anyone, hopefully quietly unless somebody can put a silence field around me."

Back!

"Sorry, it was just -"

"The Carissa Sevar I thought I knew - would have wanted - something that I just did.  The imaginary Carissa Sevar.  I, don't know, about the real one, if she would have wanted that too, but it doesn't matter, does it, she wasn't the one I was in love with."

"Do you want a hug? You look kind of like you want a hug, but it might just be the having recently been crying."

"I am not sure that I should, Fe-Anar.  I am not sure we should be hanging out together more.  I like you, you see, and I am not sure that I should be making any more friends, at this point.  Osirion is - maybe not an Evil place, but it is not, not necessarily looking like a place where I can belong, and the story I'm in seems to be one where emotional relationships I develop, just - just get torn away from me.  When and if it turns out that I can get Carissa back, if it turns out I'm in that sort of story, I will consider the possibility of developing new emotional relationships.  Until then, it is in my own interests not to be, that sort of character, any more, the sort who has friends and interesting relationships.  Not me threatening the tropes, see, just, what makes sense for me to do in my own best interests, given the way the story has been going."

"That sounds wildly unhealthy and ill-advised, but I'm not going to ignore you and hug you anyway since that seems liable to cause an international incident of some kind."

"Thanks.  Dath ilan - is all about self-determination, see.  In a world where people - can't decide for themselves, without hurting themselves - there's not - very much left, of what we are."

He doesn't like this, doesn't like what it's increasingly obvious is the thing he is going to end up deciding to do, from here, even if he hasn't decided it yet.

All he can do, maybe, is speedrun the Osirion arc, as much as he can, and get past, the unhappy part.

"I am not really, understanding, Osirion.  I think - I suspect, speculate - that I was supposed to be here with Korva Tallandria, that she was supposed to help me understand this, but I shit all over her character route by being stupid and thoughtless and now this part is just, fouled beyond repair."

"That is a really concerning thing for you to be saying, I don't think it's a good way to make predictions, and I sort of think we should pay Iomedae to talk to you again for longer or something."

"I'd rather She didn't.  I appreciate the first vision, it was very good for me, but - but I do not want anybody looking at my mind, at this point, not even gods, not even gods who used to be human, I want my privacy back and am seriously considering severing the cleric bond to Abadar in case he gets the contents of my thoughts every morning at dawn - how serious of a decision is that, is it hugely expensive for Abadar to cleric me again afterwards or is it much cheaper the second time."

"I think it is very expensive to re-cleric someone who rejected - I'm not actually entirely sure it's even possible - do you want me to just urgently ask Him that - and can someone get Keltham a glass of water, with a lemon in it -"

"I've got a Commune, I can ask directly, but if you've got a Commune anyways and have a spare binary question begging then sure go ahead and ask."

"I mean, people did claim to me that Abadar cannot easily read my mind especially about non-Abadaran things which - helps, and maybe Abadar is not a sort of thing who'd use info he read, against me, but - having to constantly think about which of your thoughts might be read out and used against you - is something I'd like to leave behind in Cheliax if at all possible.  I only did that for one day at the end of it all, didn't suspect before then that they were reading my mind, but it was very tiring, doing that.  It's a high cost to put on cleric powers and the main thing keeping me a cleric is that it gives me a stronger Will save against mortals running Detect Thoughts on me."

"Abadar's definitely not a sort of thing who'd use info he read against you."

He takes the water off one of the guards. "Did you hear all that? Put the question to the pharaoh."

        "Yes, your royal."

"I think you....might be underestimating what you would lose, if you broke with Abadar, even if you meant nothing about your intent to trade with Him, even if to you it's just a set of magic benefits. People would not have answered those questions from a random person. They know the church, they know its priests are fair, and say what they mean, and desire mutual benefit, and where they're strange they're strange pursuing Axis."

"There's the question of whether that trust is deserved if I'm going to be a horrible foreigner coming in from outside and wrecking things."

"Well, I think it is. You weren't coming in to wreck things, you were coming in to try to understand them. And most people are stupid and can't explain themselves and you can still trade fairly with them, that's the whole thing, right."

"I am not pursuing Axis, Fe-Anar.  It's not unlikely that I'm going to get an Atonement to Neutral Evil at some point soon, to make sure I have a way out of this reality at any time, if it turns out I don't want to live here, and I do not want people becoming friends with me and then feeling hurt about that and being a tie that keeps me here even if I don't want to be here."

"That surpasses the previous thing you said for concerningness, but I don't think that's because I'm your friend, I think it's because you're skipping steps all over the place in a way that really worries me! Are you under the impression people in Axis can't stop existing if they want to? Why would Axis work that way?"

"Hell works that way and I wasn't under the impression that any of these afterlives were designed by things that cared about human beings the way that human beings cared about themselves or each other.  But if people in Axis are allowed to leave reality, then that does change things, yes.  I'll have to decide if it changes things enough."

...the people here are, caring, and friendly, and Keltham is trying to make them stop trying to be friendly trading partners with him, but it is not especially surprising that they are being slow to accept that.  Dath ilani would be slow to accept that too, if they didn't recognize what Keltham was doing and why.

"I should - go finish up, this set of conversations, because I find that, I want to visit the All-Seeing-Eye, and see somebody, who, it's, too late, for me to not be friends with, and ask her whether we, outside of the Conspiracy, have the sort of relationship where I'm allowed to cry in front of her."

"Okay. People in Axis can destroy themselves if they want to, because Axis doesn't lay claim to them, because we're actually very different from Hell, which is the horrible Evil dimension run by the Evil god. People in the Good afterlives can also destroy themselves if they want to. It's true that Abaddon has a survival rate that's close enough to zero but the fact daemons will eat your soul does not mean they'll do it quickly or in a manner you would like. If you decide to give up on existing, please go to a non-Evil afterlife about it.

...also please drink the water. Sometimes people think they're having one problem when actually the problem they're having is that they aren't drinking enough water for Sothis in midday."

He'll drink the water.  Dath ilani don't just ignore advice about self-care like that!

...and back to interview his remaining interview subjects.

The women of Osirion have suggestions for how the lot of women could be improved: that gambling should be banned, that women (but not men) should be allowed to divorce, and that women should be allowed to marry without their father's approval if they could convince a court their father was being unreasonable. They have complaints about their lives: Jana's mother-in-law barely gives Jana money for clothes, and saves her the worst portions of food. Jana thinks it's because she's a jealous old hag. Hanifa's husband keeps investing in business ventures he says will pay off one day but have shown no signs of that so far; she's still pleased she married him, because he's very cosmopolitan and hardly demands anything of her, but she's worried they'll be ruined in their old age.

Zaynab's first husband was lost at sea and second husband died last year, of old age; she's too old to marry again, she says, and wouldn't want to anyway, though she is lonely sometimes. She did petition for, and get granted, acknowledgement as the head of her second husband's household, since her only sons were by her first husband. It wasn't very complicated. She told a priest she knew how to do figuring and had a good reputation with their neighbors and never missed church and had deposited savings 40 of the last 50 weeks, and she didn't think there was anyone better for the family until the little children grew up, and he gave her a paper for it.

Jana thinks that men should be told in church to want sex less often, as it's burdensome for their wives. Lamiya thinks that the schools should feed boys; otherwise she can't afford to send them.

All of them think that if Osirion were richer, then things would be better. None of them have problems they'd still have if they were rich, as they see it.

Zaynab argues, in response to hypotheticals about neutral-gender laws, that if Cheliax kills half of all Osirion's men the country will bounce right back in a generation, but if it kills half of all Osirion's women that can't really be recovered from, and so a country that sent women off to war will gradually be conquered by places that didn't. 

Keltham will offer up galaxy-brained ideas... they don't have that idiom, sorry, over-clever ideas... including that:

- Any woman should be allowed to legally get declared to be a man, if a panel of three judges looking only at written answers can't tell the difference between her answers, and the answers of three actual men, to a set of questions intended to probe whatever capabilities or personality characteristics men supposedly have that women don't;

- Setting up villages composed entirely of women where women can go as refugees if they want to be outside the system, maybe doing some sort of factory work if farming requires Strength that's too high;

- Having there be a kind of face-concealing robes people can wear, and then it's illegal to ask or check whether anybody under the face-concealing robe is a man or a woman, in case some men would also like to resign from this gender system;

- Running the second-circle area-effect spell Detect Thoughts all over the place, so everybody with Intelligence at least 14 can get wizard lessons at least up to Prestidigitation.

Any woman should be allowed to legally get declared to be a man, if a panel of three judges looking only at written answers can't tell the difference between her answers, and the answers of three actual men to a set of questions intended to probe whatever capabilities or personality characteristics men supposedly have that women don't

...and then she cuts out her womb? Like, being like a man psychologically doesn't make her a man. If you fed a man a sex-change potion then he'd be a woman, despite having all the male traits he had before.

Setting up villages composed entirely of women where women can go as refugees if they want to be outside the system, maybe doing some sort of factory work if farming requires Strength that's too high;

...that sounds neat, actually. Some women would really like that, ones who don't want to marry or are terrified of childbearing or whatever. It'd be expensive to set up but maybe self-sustaining once it was set up. The church of Sarenrae might agree to administer it. 

 Having there be a kind of face-concealing robes people can wear and then it's illegal to ask or check whether anybody under the face-concealing robes is a man or a woman, in case some men would also like to resign from this gender system;

Seems like it would be used by assassins, and convicts on the run, and so on. 

Running the second-circle area-effect spell Detect Thoughts all over the place, so everybody with Intelligence at least 14 can get wizard lessons at least up to Prestidigitation.

People mostly know who their bright children are, the problem is that they can't afford to train them to be wizards, or that it's more straightforward to train them in some other trade where clever people can prosper, or that they're needed in the family business. If wizard training was much cheaper that might be good but knowing which children are officially clever wouldn't help really. ...also isn't that illegal? Because of how it's a mindreading spell? It's kind of like invisibly spying on women in the bath!