He'll buy a stuffed dessert pastry without haggling particularly hard, then ask the vendor what they think of the recent kerfluffle about conscription.

"Well," the vendor says, "I don't see why Cheliax would invade us, they can't possibly be that stupid. So I wonder what it's really about."

"Why would it be stupid for Cheliax to invade?  And what'd it be about, if not that?"

"Well, we're a Lawful country, and haven't given them any provocation, and weren't part of their empire even when they had an empire, and it'd be very disruptive to shipping, and we'd all rather go to Axis early than surrender to Cheliax, so I just think it'd be stupid, and I can't imagine they'd try it. I don't know what it's really about. Maybe some other country is trying something but we don't want to tip our hand that we're on to them. Or maybe it's just an initiative to get all the boys out of the streets and get them to grow up and be Lawfuller, halt the moral decay of the younger generations. I approve of that, but they shouldn't say it's about Cheliax, that's just insulting intelligent people."

Aside to Fe-Anar in Baseline:  "Is Governance holding in secret Cheliax's prospect of spellsilver-derived military advantage, and that Governance is hosting an alien Cheliax might want to kill, etcetera?"

(The loanwords 'Cheliax' and 'spellsilver' are clearly audible in there.)

"Yes. I don't know why, probably for some kind of politics reason."

"I'm not going to interfere with your standard information-propagation procedures on information affecting the price of widely traded assets without a Very Good Reason, but somebody needs to announce somehow that the price of spellsilver is liable to drop!  People are trading at bad prices!  Anybody who finds out early such as Cheliax has a market advantage!  Is anybody on that?"

"That sounds like the sort of thing there'd be a whole office of government dedicated to! Merenre will probably tell you who."

"I'm sort of new to the Inner Sea area," Keltham will say to the snack vendor, in Osirian again.  "Does the government here make a habit of conscripting people for bad reasons, do you know?"

"Osirion's government? Well I wouldn't say they've ever done it before except with a war threatening. What was that you were saying, about the Prince Merenre and Cheliax and spellsilver?"

"Think this one's for you," Keltham will say in Baseline.

"It's secret and you're not supposed to know about it," Fe-Anar says. 

"Oh."

"But it'll be public later and you can tell all your friends you knew before it was public."

"Well, all right then. It's not that there's going to be a war, is there? I have sons who're conscription age."

"There might be a war but Abadar wouldn't start one unless it was inevitable and waiting for it to start would just leave us disadvantaged when it did."

Okay that's less opsec than Keltham thought they were aiming for, there, but okay.  "It seems like the sort of thing where we should let the government make their own announcement, but I can tell them that if they haven't gotten around to it in a week I'll issue my own press release," Keltham will say, in the tone of somebody who apparently delivers ultimatums to national governments on a regular basis and doesn't think much of it.

That gets him a stare.

"You'll...tell Abadar to do a press release?"

"Does Abadar usually do those?  I was given to understand he had a lot of trouble communicating with humans, and had to like pay Iomedae to send people visions if he wanted to send one without giving them massive headaches."

"No, He, uh, rules Osirion from the Black Dome through His human aspect."

"Wasn't planning to tell that particular... aspect of Abadar... directly in person, no, I've heard that his Sense Motive is unreasonably high and I'm sort of tired of people reading my mind.  What's your opinion of how Abadar's been running Osirion?  Anything strike you as being, I don't know, nonhuman gods not really having much idea of how humans work?"

"Well, that's why He has the human aspect run Osirion," he says. "But if you ask me, they shouldn't let so many foreigners in."

"Huh.  Why?"

(Keltham is obviously a foreigner, but the potential reference of this sentence to himself seems unlikely to be the vendor's intent; obviously if the vendor meant that Keltham shouldn't have been let in, the vendor would've just said so.  Keltham also has no particular idea of why this would be a mistake that Abadar would be making, so he's of course going to ask.)

"Well, they drink too much and they're irreligious and lots of the foreign adventurers chew tobacco, which is a disgusting habit, and they've driven such an increase in the brothels and indecency. And even the decent ones -  it just bothers me, to think of Osirian women marrying foreign men, and having mixed children. I don't think that should be allowed."

"I keep stumbling over the idea that Osirion just invented prediction markets and they're not any better yet than Prince Merenre guessing things... what sort of bad thing happens when there's mixed children, and is there any, like, informal way for people to bet on that sort of thing?"