"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!

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!

Tap the wizard with a truthspell afterwards to check if they crossed over into reading minds instead of Detecting Intelligence.

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

Could require some sort of recognizable individualized outer mask, so long as it didn't reveal sex, and then somebody with an unfamiliar mask could raise as many alarm bells as an unfamiliar face.

...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. 

Osirion's probably going to get some new factories soon.  Keltham will push this, if it's what the women of Osirion actually want of him and Osirion, and think is worth trying.

Yeah, they all know someone who'd probably go for that if it existed. ...and it reduces the marriage competition for everyone else.

...and when he's done in the courtyard he'll just pay over a gold piece to everyone there, that he hasn't paid already, since they were also speaking, and a further gold to the oldest woman.

It's not the Good effectivelyaltruistic thing to do, but money in that quantity is meaningless to him now and he may as well use it any time it cheers himself up at least a little, to make people happier for having traded with him.  Besides, it's not impossible that people in this world are being run with more realityfluid when they're in his presence, and it's maybe an altruistically well-leveraged use of money to make their lives relatively happier while he's in the middle of passing through them.

- well he'll certainly make them very happy! And also very confused!

Any significantly different ideas from the women not in the courtyard, who were vending rather than spinning?

They seem a bit wealthier, on average, but that doesn't change too much; it means they worry less about feeding their children and more about jealous relatives. One woman says she does the accounting because her husband doesn't have any head for numbers, and gives him spending money. Another says cheerfully that she slips a bit of the stand proceeds aside for herself, and her marriage is happier for it, "and don't tell me I'll lose Axis about it, I've got four kids in the Boneyard and don't mind if I do have to spend a while trying to find them."

Keltham briefly considers asking at what age children start showing up in the Boneyard, decides against it.  It's not going to be the decisive question about anything.  If there'd be a decisive question of that kind, it would be the age at which children start showing up in Hell.  And Keltham - would rather not learn that right here and now, in case subsequent thoughts shatter his connection to Abadar immediately, while he's outside and his security team is not prepared for that.

And he'll start heading to the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye.

"Fe-Anar, continuing from an earlier conversation, the thought occurred to me, after that, that killing myself is supposedly Evil and then I end up in Hell, that's why - people go on being slaves, that they can't kill themselves without going to an Evil afterlife, that's how Pharasma locked the little tiny helpless things she didn't care about into having to endure what she puts them through - in which case I'm back to wanting an Atonement to Neutral Evil so I have a way out of this."

" - murder is Evil but self-murder isn't very Evil, you could...donate 1000gp to an orphanage or something and you'd be more than clear, the problem is just for people who haven't done much of anything impactful with their lives and so killing themselves is one of the only things they're judged by. And obviously if you want to die we can handle that in some way that isn't you killing yourself.

I...think you should wait a couple of weeks before making major decisions about being a priest of Abadar or becoming Neutral Evil or killing yourself."

"Not necessarily an option I have, based on what I've read about how clerics work.  If my psychology drifts too far away from - believing my purpose aligned to Abadar's - the bond just breaks whether I like it or not, as I understand it, and I'm not sure that it lasts past my next serious library visit at this rate."

"But I can wait a couple of weeks on the Atonement, sure, if that's even something I want to do, to be clear, I am not failing to hear the part where you can supposedly buy a safe suicide for 1000gp, though I'd worry about reliability.  And I'm obviously not going to kill myself until I've repaid my debt to Abadar, which, even with a Ring of Sustenance and spamming Lesser Restorations and a Splendour headband, is going to take more than a couple of weeks.  There were things much worse than death that could've happened to me, and I acknowledge in full the debt I owe to Abadar for that."

"This seems like a social emergency nonetheless. I hate that kind. I don't suppose I can convince you to talk to anyone who doesn't hate that kind?"

"Planning to talk to Ione Sala, who I thought was our Nethysian Safety Officer and dating me, and was actually oracle of Nethys."

"Great. Please do proceed with that. ....why would anyone ever have a Nethysian Safety Officer."

"Asmodeans, is what Ione would've said, but - I don't know, now, what was real.  I'll ask her, I guess."