"...but in Absalom, sir, that number is bought with tons of dead children, and abortions, and in Osirion it isn't, and that seems much better."

"Osirion's population is actually growing, and has been since independence. It's three, close to four surviving children per woman."

Keltham did not understand why woman-whose-name-he-forgot was mentioning 'abortions' in the same breath as 'dead children', unless Fe-Anar has a contagious misapprehension about the Baseline meaning of the term and she is trying to say 'dead infants', since neither fetuses nor infants have qualia.  Or maybe she was expressing 'abortions' to include dead infants, and distinguishing dead children?  That would make sense, but why is abortion even a bad thing on these relative scales?

Keltham is in the middle of expressing a different important-seeming thought, and fails to chase down this slight note of confusion because he does not know exactly which slight notes of confusion are important and he has been feeling them almost constantly throughout this conversation!

"I'd say 'good for Osirion' except for the part where that's not actually a figure of merit, Civilization could easily have ten kids per couple if we wanted there to be five billion people in twenty years, but that is not in fact a desideratum."

"So I can guess where the next arc of the story is going at this point.  Turns out, everywhere on Golarion is awful in different ways, 'Lawful' is not, careful reasoning, and 'Good' is not Light, Golarion probably doesn't have a concept for that, and somehow I'm supposed to build Civilization out of that from scratch rather than being given an overly convenient existing base to build on anywhere.  The gol ilani need their own territory, aren't able to fit into any existing system, they're recruited from the misfits of all the existing regions -"

"What's horribly wrong with Lastwall?  Iomedae seemed cool.  For that matter, the god I prayed to is not a god who would countenance anyone not being allowed to keep stuff they make and trade it with others."

" - what's He supposed to do about bad husbands, sir, smite them with lightning? So then their families starve?"

"Let people escape.  Consider that your personal favorite system does not work for everyone.  There are always weirdos and they need to have a right to exist.  Build an exception handler - a way for weird things to not be total errors inside the system - into your region's clever regulations.  That's step one.  Any woman who wants it can go get herself registered as Not In The System, and maybe that means she can never have a husband inside Osirion, any man who wants to date her maybe has to go get registered as Not In The System and can never have a wife from inside the system, fine.  You can protect your closed system of people for whom that system works, they have a right not to be around people who aren't part of their favorite system.  But if someone doesn't want to be inside the system, let them out."

"You can petition to be the head of your own household, including as a woman, though you have to actually be financially independent, you can't do it if someone else is feeding and sheltering you. And you can get on a ship to Absalom, if you want, it's not illegal to leave."

"No.  No rules like that.  Just let them out of the system.  In dath ilan, yes, this is as simple as just getting on a vehicle to a different city.  If the nearest different cities were on the Moon, meaning, even in Civilization most people couldn't afford a ticket there without a lot of saving, you'd need an escape option that people can actually reasonably take before regions could be allowed to pass fun clever regional regulations about perverted marriage arrangements where the women can't have money."

"Well, sir, I expect you'll get what you want, but I don't really expect anyone'll thank you for it."

"If nobody would thank me for it then nobody would invoke the newly installed Exception Handler and everything would be exactly the same - am I missing another Golarion doomfact here?"

"I don't know, sir, but it wouldn't surprise me, if we follow all the people who get declared the heads of households they have no means to support, if almost all of them regretted it immensely ten years later, and if they mostly didn't make Axis, and if their children mostly died."

"Doesn't Osirion have - no it recently developed predictionmarkets, 'prediction markets', and there's still one guy Merenre whose guesses are just better than the markets."

"Are you running experiments.  Has anyone at any point said, 'I'd like to set up a tiny piece of Avistan inside Osirion and collect a bunch of men and women who strongly want out of the current system and see what happens with them, and we'll run Early Judgment on all of them in ten years, and we'll pay to turn the ones who aren't heading towards an acceptable afterlife into statues pending Keltham and/or Iomedae doing something about the Evil afterlives.'  That sort of thing."

" - can't afford that, but we do household and population surveys, and then scry a sample after they die to see where they ended up, to try to have a better understanding of what laws and social conditions work best to get people to Axis."

"Is this entire planet some kind of ass-forsaken moral homily about how the only important thing in life is money because without that you're too poor to do things?"

"I really think you'd do better, sir, if you stopped trying to look for morals and the next arc of the story and tried asking people what would make their lives better if you want to help them."

"Yes, and the answer I got back from you is that somebody who says, 'Keltham, please stop helping the Osirian government until they let me earn and spend wealth, like the god you thought you were addressing would have wanted' is making a terrible mistake and if I help them they'll end up in Hell or the Maelstrom."

"No, sir, that's not at all what I'm saying. If you find that person and do what that person asks you'll be doing much better than you are now."

"Fair enough.  If you tell me to go collect evidence first I'm not going to not go collect it."

"Fe-Anar or - can you actually just tell me your name again - do either of you know what I'd be liable to find horribly wrong about Lastwall or Mendev?  Like, what's their own variant of horribly perverted gender relations that can't be altered because something very bad will happen if anybody tries?"

"Zakiya, sir."

"There are some paladins here to see you if you want and you could ask them about Lastwall."

"I think Lastwall just tries to encourage everyone to be celibate, is that objectionable?"

"Depends on how they do the encouraging, and what happens to anyone who defies the system, and if there's any realistic way out for people who don't fit."

"Iomedae seems cool, but I would have thought the same about the god I tried contacting, and look at Osirion.  And now I'm wondering if Asmodeus is nicer than Cheliax... imaginable but improbable, since you'd expect afterlives to move in the direction of gods' preferences compared to their influenced Golarion regions, eg the putatively Axis city I saw in Early Judgment seemed like a brighter place than Osirion, and putative Hell in my vision did not look nicer than Cheliax."

"I'm about to head into Sothis.  Do you have recommendations on evidence I should gather while I'm out, according to you, in order to understand things better?  Do I just randomly sample women on the street and ask them if they'd prefer to be able to own property, get uniformly 'no', maybe try verifying one case with a truthspell to make sure they're not being forced to lie, and then that proves your point?"

"What I would do, sir, is tell them you're a priest of Abadar collecting information on how women in Sothis engage in commerce and trade, because then they won't be bothered you're talking to them, and they won't be as tempted to lie to you. And then I'd ask them, in your household, who does the finances? Why? Would you want your daughters to do the finances in their marriage?  Do you earn money? Does your husband spend your money on drink? If you'd had the right to form your own household and be independent, before you got married, would you've done that? Do you think that would've worked out well? If you had the right to all the money you earned, and your husband had the right to all the money he earned, do you think that'd make things better or worse? If you could change one thing about your husband, what would it be?"

"I'll have to think about whether I consider that introduction true and also not misleading."

"I'm also going to have to do that at one remove, like have Fe-Anar ask or something, if you don't want it to be really obvious that I am a priest of Abadar from another dimension.  Because otherwise that's going to be pretty obvious, there's no way I look native even with Glibness running.  I suppose I could say I'm not from anywhere near Garund and have that be true."

"That also brings up another topic, though I suspect it's more of a Fe-Anar topic.  I intend to pay back what Abadar invested in me in all good faith, but do arrangements fall apart in Osirion if I'm no longer a cleric of Abadar?  I'd still be happy to take any number of truthspells if that brings my continuing reliability into question."

" - you don't have to stop being a cleric of Abadar if you think we're fixing Osirion too slowly. Many clerics of Abadar think that, and they write papers arguing for how to fix it faster. If you declare you want nothing to do with the church because it's insufficiently committed to fairness and trade, then Abadar will keep giving you cleric spells, that's - breaking from the church in rather the right direction.

I would try to keep in mind that - Osirion is a much, much better place to live than it was a hundred years ago, for everybody, and it's a hard problem we're trying to solve, and everyone has been so excited for your arrival here because you can help us fix it faster."

"And I will help you fix it faster, regardless of whether it looks like the ancient inhuman god-thing is something I should go on trading with."

"But the story sure seems to be heading in a direction where I end up having to do all of this while being very alone."