"Presumably your 'gods' don't disagree on questions of fact, they just have different utilityfunctions, things-they-want.  That's not a disagreement, it's just having different utilityfunctions."

"We're not 'gods' but we try not to fall too far short of 'godhood'."

"Disagreeing about whether 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't make you a cognitively-diverse nonconformist, it makes you bad at math."  (This scans but in the way of a real rhyme, not Central Cheating Poetry.)

"Yes, that is the word I was looking for. People on Golarion have different utilityfunctions so you would never get them to agree on screening off history, even if you made them all into gods."

"Apparently some people in Golarion will go to Elysium, get Hell scried to them, and willingly return when resurrected, to serve Asmodeus in Golarion, and then in Hell.  Pilar said that under truthspell supervised by Osirion."  (Keltham says this in Taldane, it'd be too weird to try to use all the loanwords in Baseline.)

"Dath ilan is just straight up legitimately not that cognitively diverse.  You want to brag about having more cognitive diversity here?  You win.  I'm not sure it's been good for your planet, but you win."

"I actually don't know if Asmodeans count. They are all lied to until the part of their brain that notices lies is ignored like a boy who always cries wolf. If you raised them somewhere else they would not be like that."

"I really would have thought I'd given some of them enough training in noticing self-deception to snap them out of that.  Pilar noticed that she didn't want her family to go to Hell so her curse very sensibly arranged for them to get kidnapped by Osirion, atoned to Lawful Neutral, and killed so they'd be in Axis.  So she was seeing things but - she herself, whether she wanted to go to Hell - and Carissa -"

"Can you leave the room until I come out again to say it's okay?  I need to have a brief crying fit and the last one lasted five minutes, this one will probably be less."

"I can do that." Probably there is some weird alien thing where it is fine to say "I'm going to have a crying fit" but not to cry??

It seems perfectly straightforward from a dath ilani perspective.  Keltham is not trying to conceal the fact that he's in emotional distress.  He's trying to not expose Fe-Anar's wordless perceptions to the sight of somebody in distress that Fe-Anar can't help except by leaving him alone; and, yes, maintain his masculine gendertrope's pride against the wordless update that Fe-Anar couldn't avoid making if seeing Keltham directly.  Also Fe-Anar is not Keltham's girlfriend.

"Back."

Osirian men would in fact be far more reluctant to weep in front of their wife than in front of a stranger, but it does seem like the kind of thing where aliens might be different. 

When Keltham comes out, Fe-Anar has cornered a servant and cast Tongues on them and is chattering at them in Baseline.

"You know, theoretically your time's up, but I'm not going to stop because I'd rather not think about other things, and also I just can't resist at this point seeing how far you can get on sounding like a native."

Keltham will start repeating everything Fe-Anar says the exact way a native speaker would say it, if they had Fe-Anar's general personality instead of Keltham's.

(A dath ilani can totally tell the difference between these two personalities!  They're very distinct!)

Keltham is GREAT and Baseline is BEAUTIFUL. He also thinks this about Osirian and Taldane and Kelish and Hallit and Tien and Adlet and Sylvan and Protean, to be clear, it is not really specifically a compliment to the designers of Baseline, but today they have filled his life with delight for which he wishes he could repay them.

(The servant will anxiously scuttle away.)

"...why did that person run away?  I wouldn't run away if I'd suddenly found myself near an alien, for much the same reason I actually would look inside a Preserved City if that was costless."

"Because he's worried he'll do something wrong and offend the alien and get into trouble, probably. I think you're actually moderately difficult to offend but people aren't going to assume that."

"'Actually moderately difficult', not 'actually moderately difficult'."  (Correction towards more colloquial word choice and intonation, with no simple mapping onto distinct Taldane phrases.)

"Are women here going to pretend they like me, because otherwise they're afraid they'll get into trouble?"

"- if you marry them I guess they're reasonably likely to do that? Honestly you strike me as too young to get married and I would not recommend it."

"'Frankly you strike me', not 'honestly you strike me'.  Dath ilani don't lie often enough that they need to say when they're being honest, but they conceal things often enough to say when they're being frank."

"People here are immune to concerns about other people getting upset with them, or won't try to hide or alter their apparent feelings around people, unless married to them?  That sounds like the literal opposite of how I think things should work."

"Women will lose standing and respect from their peers and superiors if they're being friendly with you, so they'll probably only do it if they are strongly motivated to by internal concerns and not by fear of getting in trouble. The one context in which social pressure points in the direction of more friendliness for women is towards their husbands, if they are married, so if you married a woman here then you might reasonably worry she was subject to social pressure to pretend she liked you. You can of course avoid this pretty easily by not marrying anyone until you are older and wiser."

"Definitely not marrying anybody from Osirion until I'm at least older and wiser enough to understand the gendertropes, which is the standard library of terms that can compress descriptions of gender, which is the thing that people's personalities make of their sex, which is the axis along which almost everyone in dath ilan is born either male, which is what I am, or female, which is the shape males match."

"Yes, that seems like definitely one prerequisite! Also you'll need a stable income, which shouldn't be that hard but me paying you to teach languages won't count to most families, and many women will have concerns about the harem in Cheliax. I'd generally say having a harem in Cheliax is outright disqualifying for marriage but you're going to be very rich and that compensates for most disadvantages."

"Wow, you're tactless.  It's not clear that I still should see myself as having a harem in Cheliax, Abrogail was all like 'everything you value here will be waiting when you return to us reading Lawful Evil' but she was not under a truthspell when she said it."

"Well, formerly having had a harem in Cheliax is still fairly disqualifying for most people because what if one of the girls turns up here with your child, that's a complicated situation for a marriage to navigate if you're the kind who'd take her back. [high uncertainty] I'm really not a good person to give marital advice, I only have one wife myself."

"Signed a contract requiring them to use Alter Self, which Lrilatha said was effective in preventing pregnancy, having a child, so that should work if they're actually bound by contracts and Lrilatha couldn't lie - does that match your understanding?  I mostly don't want to talk about this, but should check that part."  He needs to send back a message requiring them to use Alter Self one final time - Carissa was so happy, when he - he's just had a crying fit, Keltham is not really okay with himself having another one so soon after, so he won't, this time.

"Cheliax will obey their contracts, unless there's something sneaky in the wording. I.....don't know what to make of the idea of having women shapeshift until they aren't women but I think my objections are not that it wouldn't work."

"I'm confused.  They weren't shifting during sex - well, Meritxell, but she was shifting into other women, it was her thing - they were shifting male afterwards to prevent pregnancy."

"- in the Osirian conception, the core thing that makes someone a woman is the capacity to bear children, and the core thing that makes someone a man is the capacity to sire them. There are also differences in personality traits and virtues and aptitudes and so on, but in Axis - where no one can bear children and no one can sire them - those are smaller than, say, the differences between different species, and it certainly wouldn't make very much sense to have laws about them. So in the Osirian conception, a person who shapeshifts frequently enough to ensure they cannot bear children isn't - exactly meaningfully a woman. They have departed from womanhood to be something else."